Tableau I

1921 is the year Piet Mondrian arrived at the style everyone now pictures when they hear his name. He had spent the First World War stuck in the neutral Netherlands, unable to get back to Paris, working out a theory with a circle of Dutch artists who called their journal De Stijl. When he returned to Paris he began painting grids like this one, a white ground crossed by black lines with a few blocks of pure red, yellow and blue. Look closely and the lines here stop just short of the canvas edge, so the design holds together as its own small world rather than spilling outward. Mondrian believed straight lines and primary colours could carry a calm that pictures of real things could not. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague, near where he was born, now holds more of his work than anywhere else.