Composição XIV

This does not look like the Mondrian of red, yellow and blue rectangles, and that is the point. In 1912 he left the Netherlands for Paris, where Picasso and Braque had just pulled painting apart into facets and grids, and he threw himself at their Cubism. Works like this one, from 1913, take a real subject, often a tree or a building facade, and break it into a scaffold of short black lines and muted planes of ochre and grey. He pushed it further toward flatness than the French Cubists ever did. Within a couple of years the last traces of the object would fall away entirely. When war broke out in 1914 he was caught on a visit home to Holland and could not return to Paris, and it was there that his painting turned fully abstract.