Композиция с решёткой 1

When the First World War broke out, Mondrian happened to be back in the Netherlands, and being neutral ground it kept him there, cut off from Paris for the duration. In those years he and a few others founded De Stijl, the movement that wanted to strip painting down to straight lines and flat colour. This is from 1918, one of his grid pictures. It looks like a loose scatter of grey and ochre squares, but X-rays tell another story. Underneath, Mondrian first ruled a perfectly even grid across the canvas, then thickened some lines and tinted some cells to break the regularity by hand. The order you sense but cannot quite see is really there, drawn first and then disguised.