Composizione n. IV / Composizione 6

Mondrian painted this in Paris in 1914, deep in the Cubist experiments that were pulling his work apart. It started from something solid, the facade of a church he had drawn in the Dutch seaside town of Domburg, and he broke its arches and windows down into short black lines and soft planes hovering on the canvas, the building almost gone but not quite. That same summer he crossed to the Netherlands to visit his father, the First World War broke out, and he was stranded at home for its duration. In those years he pushed past every last trace of the church toward the pure grids of red, blue and yellow he is known for. The painting stayed in the Netherlands and now belongs to the Kunstmuseum Den Haag.