Composition B (No.II) with Red
Piet Mondrian (1872 to 1944) · 1935
Black lines cross a white field, thick and even, dividing the canvas into rectangles of unequal size. One small rectangle at the bottom is filled with red; the rest is white. That is the whole picture, and yet it holds the eye for a long time, because every line and every interval has been adjusted until nothing could move without unbalancing the whole. Mondrian called this Neo-Plasticism, the new plastic art, and he believed it expressed a universal harmony beneath the disorder of the world.
Look at the surface. The white is not one white but several, painted in slightly different directions in each compartment, so that the rectangles have subtly different textures. The black lines vary in width and some stop short of the edge. The red is placed low and to the right, off centre, so that it pulls against the heavier black grid at the top. Mondrian worked out these relationships with tape and paper strips over months, and the paint often shows where a line was moved a few millimetres.
The picture was painted in Paris in nineteen thirty five, when Mondrian was in his sixties and had followed this austere path for fifteen years. He moved to London in nineteen thirty eight, living near Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in Hampstead, and then to New York, where the lines began to dance to boogie woogie. Tate's painting therefore shows the classic, most rigorous phase of his art, just before the move. It usually hangs in the rooms devoted to early abstraction, where the jazz of Kandinsky and the flight of Malevich set off its stillness.
Did You Know? Mondrian disliked green so much that he is said to have sat with his back to the window in restaurants so he would not see trees.
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