R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Pang

‘Summer Night’ (1906-7)

Piet Mondrian​ liked to claim that his life had been a straight line. ‘I started off as a naturalist,’ he told a journalist who visited his studio in Paris in 1922. ‘I soon felt a need for a more severe reduction and limitation of my means, and gradually became more abstract.’ He had an album of reproductions of his work on hand to show. ‘Things have slowed down in the last year and a half, but I am sure if my development hasn’t ceased, it will carry on in the same direction and not go backwards.’ At the age of 71, in 1943, he told a version of the same story to the writer Ella Winter in New York, bringing out pictures of chrysanthemums and trees, ‘old pencil and ink drawings of decades ago’, to demonstrate how far he had come. In the essays he wrote about the theoretical underpinnings of his art and its place in modern culture, he made it seem as if it would be impossible for anyone to go back and make naturalistic paintings. (‘Logically the new art can never return to form – or to natural colour.’) Michel Seuphor, a friend and disciple who became his first biographer in 1956, stuck to this line. ‘Mondrian always moved towards an ideal perfection,’ Seuphor wrote. ‘He started from a sure foundation, which implied, in its very premises, its supreme conclusion.’

This is Mondrian as the dream modernist: decisive, uncompromising, single-minded in his pursuit of a purer and purer abstraction. It slots him into a ‘cookie-cutter modernist narrative of marching styles’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it. But the appearance of relentless progress in Mondrian’s art sometimes disguised uncertain forward leaps and backtrackings, like the careful deletions and proof marks he made on the letters he wrote in English. His reinventions involved trial and error, repetition; he moved around but did not leave himself behind.

In Piet Mondrian: A Life (2022), the first full-length biography to appear in English since Seuphor’s, the Dutch art historian Hans Janssen gives us the non-linear Mondrian. ‘The early and late paintings were not only made by the same artist, but were also created with the same motives,’ he writes. ‘The Mondrian who lived and worked in Paris in the 1920s was very similar, in terms of method, ideas and – above all – attitude, to the much more shadowy artist who lived and worked in Amsterdam.’ Janssen approaches his subject experimentally, veering between early and late periods to dodge what he calls the ‘and then, and then’ quality of much writing on Mondrian. Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography is more of an ‘and then, and then’ book, rooted in careful archival work and oral history. But it is also interested in tracing continuities and foreshadowings of subject and technique. Mondrian’s interest in the natural world, Weber points out, was always the fundamental basis for his art; the qualities of dynamism, tension and structural contrast that characterise the compositions of thick black lines and coloured rectangles are there in the early pictures of windmills, farmhouses and church towers. In Summer Night (1906-7), a landscape painted in Oele before Mondrian left the Netherlands, the composition is sparse, the line where the flat land meets the sky a long horizontal, bisected by the shadowy verticals of trees. In Woods near Oele (1908), the trunks and branches, sliced off by the top of the canvas as if they might go on forever, are super-elongated strokes; the daubed lines and visible paint drips that represent their reflections are sometimes visible over, sometimes under, the looser horizontals of the water below.

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born in 1872 in Amersfoort, a small, devoutly religious city at the centre of the Netherlands. (He dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname in 1909 at the insistence of his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, also a painter, who was ashamed of his nephew’s ‘depraved’ art.) His father, the first Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, was a headteacher, an important local figure in the arch-conservative Orthodox Protestant sect. Mondrian was given his father’s name because he was the eldest son; the eldest daughter, Johanna Christina, was named after their mother, presumably for convenience. In 1878, when he was six, the family moved to rural Winterswijk near the German border. Their life was regimented: on Sundays the children were taken ‘in a prearranged order in walks through the village’ while Johanna senior stayed at home, in line with the recommendations of a neo-Calvinist tract, Anti-Revolutionary also in Your Own Family (1880), by a friend of their father’s. Mondrian learned to paint as a teenager with his uncle out in the fields, outings for which Frits Mondriaan dressed in a double-breasted suit, starched white shirt and silk necktie. When he decided he wanted to become an art teacher – his father wouldn’t let him train to be an artist, on the grounds that it wasn’t a real job – Mondrian studied in the playroom at home, faithfully copying plaster heads and composing still lifes using a bucket and broom.

Making art was a way for Mondrian to escape family life in this deeply traditional corner of the country. Amsterdam represented freedom: when he went to study at the Rijksakademie in 1892 (the teaching plan was abandoned when it became clear that he ‘cared neither about children nor about teaching’), he mingled with fellow artists and anarchists and encountered the work of van Gogh and the Impressionists George Breitner and Isaac Israëls. His own art, initially, played by the rules. He painted and exhibited conventional still lifes of herrings and apples; when the royal stipend he had received to cover the first year of his tuition wasn’t renewed, he took commissions to stay afloat, painting decorative tiles, illustrating Calvinist literature, making copies of Rijksmuseum masterpieces, designing a pastel rococo scheme for a dining-room ceiling. At the age of thirty, in 1902, he was so poor that he had to eat in a church soup kitchen. He seemed committed to none of the art movements around him, neither the traditional Hague School nor the edgier Symbolist group.

Around 1898, he was drawn into Amsterdam’s Theosophical circles. After the doctrinaire strictness of his childhood, he liked Theosophy’s spiritualism, its non-sectarian quest for the ‘finer regions’ of experience. Some of his work of the early 1900s shows its influence directly. In 1908, shortly before he joined the Dutch Theosophical Society, he sketched a series of self-portraits in which his eyes, enlarged and penetrating, looming right up against the picture plane, seem points of connection between the soul and material body. But his spiritualism also bled into his still lifes and landscapes in ways that were connected to his increasingly experimental approach to technique. Since 1899, he had been making elongated portraits of carefully selected single flowers. The sunflowers, amaryllises and chrysanthemums that he painted in 1907 and 1908 – in wild, unnatural shades of blue, red, purple and yellow – are less renderings of particular forms than expressions of cosmic process and energy. In Dying Chrysanthemum (1908), the swirling upward and downward strokes around the drooping head, in colours that lift and lighten towards the top of the canvas, make the flower’s death rhythmic, purposeful. In a series of pictures of a lighthouse at the seaside resort of Domburg of the same period, pointillist marks suggest a thinness or luminousness in the tower’s structure. Flecked in pale pink, purple and sunlit yellow, its form seems to scatter and dematerialise in the light.

Sensible Dutch realism it was not. In 1909, Mondrian showed recent work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam alongside the Fauvist Jan Sluijters. The Red Cloud (1907), The Red Tree (1908), Woods near Oele (1908) and Molen: Mill in Sunlight (1908), with their harsh, contrasting colours, baffled the critics. ‘I understand nothing of … a red, blue and yellow windmill,’ one wrote plaintively. Why was the mill ‘dripping with blood’, ‘against a yellow sky with holes like Swiss cheese’? To the critic and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, it was all mindless, unhinged, degenerate: ‘a painful orgy of the rawest, most barbaric and lurid colours’, the daubings of ‘a sick, rebellious child with a few pots of paint to hand’. Two years later, appearing alongside Picasso and Braque at the first Moderne Kunstkring exhibition, Mondrian’s flat, geometric, concentrated images of another windmill and the Domburg church tower fared no better. But he was less and less interested in the opinions of those who couldn’t see, as he could, that ‘pure’ art had nothing to do with the faithful representation of natural forms. ‘The artist’s inner vision is other than visual,’ he wrote a few years later. ‘The work of art is so distinctly other than nature.’

He was pushing towards Paris. In 1911, he made a short trip to see one of his pictures hanging at the Salon des Indépendants and to study new Cubist work. ‘It’s good for me to be here,’ he told the artist Simon Maris. ‘Everything big and grand, eh?’ By the beginning of 1912, he had sold some old paintings for cash and found a tiny room in Montparnasse. Not that it was a straightforward exit. In Amsterdam he left behind him a string of much younger women, one of whom, Greta Heijbroek, a wealthy merchant’s daughter, he had proposed marriage to a few months before. ‘I expect you heard that I nearly got married last autumn, but fortunately I realised just in time that it was nothing but an illusion,’ he wrote in his informative, practical way to a friend, Aletta de Iongh. He had cultivated the relationship with Heijbroek concurrently with a dalliance with another Amsterdam heiress, Eva de Beneditty, who knew nothing about her rival. De Beneditty recalled his freakishly extended kisses – ‘an unbroken twenty minutes was the norm’ – and habit of dropping her when he needed to paint. (Nothing changed: in the last years of his life he was explaining to a devoted admirer, Charmion von Wiegand, that ‘I like to retake my lonely life as it was before I knew you.’)

Often thoughtless about other people, Mondrian was also thoughtless about – or uninterested in – himself. His ego was as stripped back as his style. He wore a business suit in public and disliked artists he thought looked like artists. In Paris, he regarded his exposure to the Cubism of Picasso, Braque and Léger as an opportunity to learn. ‘I find it better to be open to improvement than to remain satisfied with an imperfection one has achieved and to think that that makes one so much more original!’ he wrote to the connoisseur H.P. Bremmer in 1914, adding: ‘As many painters do.’ In Cubism’s anti-perspectivalism, the totality of its vision, he found a means of expressing what he called in the letter to Bremmer ‘universality’, or, in one of his Paris sketchbooks, ‘the great generalities’. The bepaald (‘definite’, ‘specific’) and menschelijk (‘human’) in art were to him the same thing: limitations to be avoided. ‘By wanting to say or relate nothing human, by completely ignoring oneself, a work of art appears that is a monument of beauty … and yet most absolutely human in its depth and universality!’

In 1913, he turned to the scaffolded façades and half-demolished walls of Paris as motifs for his compositions. The metropolis, he wrote, was ‘abstract life given form’, orderly, impersonal, a step away already from nature’s organic contours. The paintings from these motifs are pure shape and relationship, devoid of volume. In their lightness and openness, they look back to the etherised pointillist lighthouses and church towers of a few years earlier. The black lines that form horizontal and vertical supports in Composition No. II (1913) and Composition No. VI (1914) barely hold the rough passages of colour inside, which bloom over the edges or fade to nothing before they can touch.

Mondrian did not mean to spend the war years in the Netherlands. He returned in July 1914 to see the first solo show of his work at a gallery in The Hague; then, in August, the German invasion of Belgium cut off his route back. The painter Mies Elout-Drabbe, who found him a spare room in her house in Domburg, remembered watching him ‘standing bolt upright’ in front of a sheet of paper, ‘so engrossed in his work that he was completely unaware of the Belgian refugees who flooded the isle of Walcheren’. The only painting he seems to have made in 1915, as he flitted between any cheap or free studio space he could find, so strapped for cash that he had to go back to making copies of Old Masters, was Composition 10 in Black and White. It was based on sketches of the breakwaters in Domburg, but abstracted and exploded into bisected and T-shaped linear forms. It had about it, according to Bremmer, who bought it, a ‘clear, pure atmosphere’, a kind of ‘Christmas Eve atmosphere’.

Stranded in a neutral country, Mondrian was comparatively unaffected by the war. He was writing as much as or more than he was drawing and painting: a ‘book’, or series of articles, on the theory of pure art he had been developing since Paris; endless letters back and forth with a younger Dutch artist, Theo van Doesburg, who venerated his work and saw him as a kind of spiritual leader of the new abstraction. Mondrian wrote for two reasons. He wanted to explain the meaning behind a painting style that he knew had become so abstract as to be taken for decorative; and he wanted to create the ‘consciousness’ among the art-viewing public that would allow it to be understood. In the first issue of De Stijl, the journal that van Doesburg founded in 1917 to provide a platform for new abstract work, the editorial noted that ‘authentically modern artists’ were required not only to ‘produce the plastically pure work of art’ (that is, art purged of any reference to objects in nature), but also to undertake the harder task of making ‘the public capable of experiencing this pure art’.

Reading​ Mondrian’s first articles, published as ‘The New Plastic in Painting’ in monthly instalments in De Stijl, is hard going. As a stylist he was both emphatic and unclear. He was given to strange uses of terminology and italics: ‘The abstract plastic of relationship expresses this basic relationship determinately – by the duality of position, the perpendicular,’ for instance, translates roughly as ‘abstract art uses perpendicular lines to convey opposition.’ As here, he is often saying something very practical about artistic means, form and colour. He wrote about form in this way because he believed it to be of fundamental importance: it was the tool artists had to manifest the profounder sense of reality they grasped. Formal matters mattered. Corresponding back and forth with van Doesburg and other enlightened painters such as their friend Bart van der Leck, he grappled with what to him were questions of life and death:

Could other colours besides the primary ones be used? Must the line be made explicit … ? Were directions other than horizontal and vertical permissible for the position of the various elements? Should the image be concentrated within the surface of the picture, or was it better to suggest that it extended beyond the outer edges? Were the shape and placement of lines and areas of colour a question of intuition, or should they be governed by mathematical principles?

And so on. In dialogue with other artists who painted like him, Mondrian’s work underwent a series of rapid changes. In 1917, following van der Leck, he tried widening his linear forms into blockier rectangles, then rendering them in colour against a uniform white background. Then, perhaps because their language had become too similar, he changed tack and began modulating the white with grey tones and experimenting with grid-like networks of grey lines. Within the lines, colour and non-colour areas alike became captured planes, eradicating the old distinction between figure and background. In 1918, he discovered that he could tilt square canvases 45 degrees so that they became diamonds, balanced finely on their points. His progress was uncertain. ‘I have completely reworked the big black and white, which I now regret because I should have left it as it was and made a new thing,’ he wrote to Bremmer in 1917, explaining his decision to paint over a finished work and begin it again from scratch. (In letters, he always called his compositions dingen, ‘things’, as if they had a semi-automatic quality.) ‘But in searching one does not know in advance how.’

In 1919, Mondrian returned to Paris. He told van Doesburg that the art scene was disappointing: the Cubists had gone backwards, their recent work so traditional it could be ‘hung directly in the Louvre’. Even Picasso had returned to figuration, ‘to demonstrate his versatility’, he wrote snippily. It made him determined not to follow. In his new studio on the rue de Coulmiers, which he made into a sort of three-dimensional artwork by hanging brightly painted cardboard rectangles on the walls, he began to produce the pictures for which he would become known. Their planes of primary colour are saturated; the non-colour planes, in shades of white and grey, are tonally various, switching up and flickering as you look at them. The lines running in between are thick and emphatic, a shiny black, like grooves in a record. In Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue (1921), small rectangles wheel around the dominant red plane on the upper left. Framed on two sides by lines that don’t quite touch the edges, it appears to drift upwards and outwards.

Irregularity is what makes this happen. Mondrian associated regularity of form – symmetry, repetition, correspondence – with the shapes visible in nature: repetition, he said, was ‘nature’s rhythm’. To get at what he called ‘reality as it intrinsically is’ (meaning what wasn’t visible to the eye, the ‘universal’), he believed that artists had to resist regularity in their work. In the 1921 Composition, the interactions that happen between the painted elements are unpredictable. Looking for patterns is frustrating. Dimensions that appear to be the same turn out not to be; lines that are cut short at one edge disappear off the top of the canvas at the other. Elements that seem to resolve themselves into shape are opposed or undercut by others. Everything is in some way perturbed. The result, as you look, is an unfamiliar kind of rhythmic interaction: reciprocal, fluid, involving all elements acting on one another at once. This in a sense is what the composition is about. It’s not that it begins with ‘real’ forms drawn from nature – a tree, a lighthouse, a woman – and encodes them as abstract lines and colours, such that you can read them back into it. Rather, it is its own system of relationships, horizontal acting on vertical and vertical acting on horizontal, enacting in miniature the grand ‘cosmic rhythm’ that Mondrian sought to represent.

Painting this way required intensity of thought and much trial and error. What would happen if this line or that moved a centimetre or two up or down? There were many times when he thought he would have to give it all up. In the years after the war, fewer people were buying art in general, let alone art that refused to compromise. A show organised by the gallerist Léonce Rosenberg in 1921 yielded no sales; Mondrian had to take nine paintings back. ‘I think it’s the influence of this damned stupid society. It is simply not possible to exist as an artist,’ he told van Doesburg. (It was some consolation that the renegade Cubists and naturalists weren’t selling either.) The harder things got, the more his sense of spiritual mission intensified. ‘His loathing for the opponents of pure abstraction began to consume him,’ Weber writes. Not even the Theosophists could be trusted to get it. ‘The dumbos won’t listen,’ he wrote to van Doesburg. ‘I sent [Rudolf] Steiner my brochure with a letter, which may not have reached him personally, in any case there was no reply! I have been busy for a long time writing an article against all that, and hope to do some serious fulminating one of these days.’

It wasn’t that he needed much: Mondrian lived alone, survived largely on lentils and coffee, built his own furniture out of fruit crates and avoided romantic relationships on the grounds that they obstructed his work and led to obligations. All the same, he struggled to keep going. Once, he contemplated getting a part-time job in a cinema; then he applied to be a bank clerk and was told he was overqualified. Several times during the 1920s he had to return to painting naturalistic flower pieces for old Dutch clients, ‘as if I were an artisan’. (‘They think I could learn to paint “normally” if I tried,’ he told a journalist.) He often claimed to be on the verge of throwing in the towel and disappearing to the South of France to plant vegetables or pick olives. His health, never robust, suffered during the winters when he couldn’t afford to heat his studio.

If he had been less sociable, he might not have managed. Friends bought his work or made down payments of what they could afford. In 1922, on his fiftieth birthday, a ‘committee’ banded together to buy a picture so that he could pay that year’s rent in advance. A group of artists including Walter Gropius, Hans Arp and László Moholy-Nagy organised a charitable raffle. One of the myths about Mondrian is that he was a recluse, uninterested in any scene. In fact, though he squirrelled himself away during working hours (there was no casual showing up at his studio), in the evenings it was a different story. His favourite thing to do, from his days in Amsterdam onwards, was to go out dancing. He was a regular at the glitzy Hotel Hamdorff in Laren, where he danced waltzes and tangos ‘very slowly’, keeping his body almost totally rigid. In Paris, he discovered jazz and the Charleston and took women friends to the Jungle Bar and Le Petit Teddy. (In 1926, there was a rumour that the Dutch were planning to ban the Charleston on moral grounds; if true, Mondrian warned the readers of De Telegraaf, it would be a reason for him ‘never to return’.) In 1939, living in North London, he would stroll down to Camden Town to dance at the Camden Palace or the Bedford. The year before his seventieth birthday, he marked his ‘emergence from a long bout of rheumatism’ with a wild night out at Café Society in New York.

One of his great beliefs was that a freer, more spiritual culture was on the horizon for everyone. Painting was the future today; why not dance or music or fashion tomorrow? Jazz bars, he wrote in an essay in 1927, already embodied the ‘new culture’: they were open, uninhibited, a haven ‘for those who would be free of form’ in all senses. They were humanity’s new cathedrals. (Pieter Mondriaan senior would have been horrified.) Music was the future so long as it dispensed with the bourgeois encumbrance of melody. The only time Mondrian crossed to the Rive Droite to go the theatre in twenty years of living in Paris, according to Weber, was to hear a performance of the Futurist Luigi Russolo’s unforgiving noise-music: ‘Screeching, creaking, rustling, buzzing, crackling, scraping’. The city itself, fast-moving, unpredictable, anonymous, was a crucible of futurity. A piece Mondrian wrote describing the sounds of Paris in 1920 (reportedly, it gave the editor of De Nieuwe Amsterdammer ‘bad dreams’) reads like Joyce, if Joyce had been mashed into one of Russolo’s noise machines: ‘Ru-h ru-h-h-h-h-h. Poeoeoe. Tik-tik-tik-tik. Pre. R-r-r-r-r-uh-h. Huh! Pang. Su-su-su-su-ur. Boe-a-ah. R-r-r-r. Foeh.’

Paris was less interested in him. In two decades, Mondrian had only one solo show there, at L’Esthétique in Montparnasse, an avant-garde bookshop whose owner hung sixteen of his canvases on panels above the shelves. Recognition came from elsewhere: first Germany, where he exhibited in Dresden and Hanover; then, via a series of influential curators and buyers, the US. In 1926, the first of his canvases to leave Europe appeared in Katherine Dreier’s International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. (Dreier included ‘all the important artists in Paris at that time’ but missed out van Doesburg; Mondrian, who had fallen out with his old comrade, was thrilled.) In 1935, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford bought Composition No. IV White and Blue (1934-35), featuring thin double lines that were like the old heavy ones split in two. The following year, Cubism and Abstract Art opened at MoMA with nine of Mondrian’s paintings. A Chrysler heir bought his monumental Composition Blanc et Bleu (1936), which was dramatically plain, oblong-shaped and more than a metre tall, structured by two full-length verticals like iron rods.

When he sold a picture and was ‘in funds’, the painter Winifred Nicholson recalled, they would sit together in his studio and drink a ‘tisane made of cherry stones and stalks’. (Nothing too crazy: Mondrian’s idea of a cocktail was V8 vegetable juice, served at room temperature.) Both the sums of money involved and the risks that buyers felt they were taking seem extraordinary now. In 1936, the art historian Nicolete Gray organised an exhibition of international modernism, Abstract and Concrete, at the Oxford Arts Club. She persuaded a collector, Helen Sutherland, to buy one of Mondrian’s canvases for £76; Sutherland complained that it was ‘a great deal’ of money. Perhaps this was true, given that the moving company Gray had hired to deliver Mondrian’s three works from Paris put a total value on them of £80.

In September​ 1938, Mondrian left Paris with Nicholson, having packed up his minimal possessions. He was alarmed by the international situation and feared finding himself in a warzone and being unable to get out. He went first to London, where Nicholson’s estranged husband, Ben Nicholson, found him a room in a house opposite the studios he shared with Barbara Hepworth. (Mondrian wrote blithely to Winifred about life with ‘Ben and Barbara’: having cut out complicated romantic relationships himself, he had forgotten that other people still had them.) The way he lived in London belied the theory of separateness in human life that he had been incubating since the 1920s. ‘Mutual separation is necessary for man’s evolution, in life as in art,’ he had argued in an essay of 1931. ‘We all have a tendency to lean on one another … But man is born alone and dies alone.’ The sculptor Naum Gabo remembered him arriving in London looking very thin, managing ‘mostly on currants and vegetable stew’. Gabo found him a cot bed, a pair of warm pyjamas and a woollen dressing gown; Miriam Gabo was permitted to cook for him because she agreed to observe the bizarre provisions of the Hay Diet, an experimental programme Mondrian had stuck to since his rheumatism had worsened in 1935. When the bombs began falling in 1940, Hepworth encouraged him to use the air raid shelter in their back garden. Mondrian, in his turn, could be protective, fond, inconsistent – all the things his theories of art and life said he ought not to be. For Nicholson, who wanted to buy his Composition 1932 – Yellow Rectangle (c.1934), he deliberately kept the price low: 1500 francs, he told her, was ‘an enormous amount for an artist bringing up three children’.

London was a stopping point on the way to New York, which he had long thought of as his ultimate destination. He arrived in October 1940, frail and exhausted, his house having been bombed (‘I was in bed but had only dust in an eye. Lucky!’). His passage over had been arranged by Harry Holtzman, a wealthy young devotee of his work; Holtzman also found him an apartment in Midtown and took him shopping at Bloomingdale’s for furniture. The futuristic city – steel, glass, electricity – suited him. He had written in London of his fear of the ‘tyrannic influence’ of the past, how it went on living in you after you thought you had left it behind. ‘The worst is that there is always something of the past within us. We have memories, dreams – we hear the old carillons; enter the old museums and churches; we see old buildings everywhere.’ Now, the past seemed to have less power. The trick, he told the painter Carl Holty, was ‘to refuse to extend it through remembrance’. On his first night in New York, Holtzman played him boogie-woogie: syncopated, improvisatory, unsentimental. Mondrian clapped his hands and cried: ‘Enormous! Enormous!’

‘Victory Boogie Woogie’ (1942-44)

The future entered his paintings as colour. In 1941, he discovered that he could use brightly coloured electrical tape to plot and replot the placement of his lines. Before, each line alteration had been a slow process of overpainting, drying and repainting; now he could find new rhythmic interactions effortlessly. He began experimenting with colour in his painted lines, laying out long strips to test the way his three primary shades weaved over and under one another. Black, he felt, was solemn, ‘classical’, ‘tragic’: ‘with black only, I never could get out of what I not wanted but painted,’ he explained to Holtzman in his uncertain written English. In the unfinished New York City I (1941), you can see the black in the process of being excluded, peeking out beneath the glued layers of red, yellow and blue. Soon, other barriers fell away. In Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), colour creeps inside colour, small blocks lodging off-centre in larger contrasting ones – grey in yellow, yellow in red.

The distinction between line and plane, for so long the tension at the heart of his work, disappeared. Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-44), which he worked on up until his death, is a diamond-shaped canvas threaded upwards and downwards by small painted squares strung together like beads. On one side, there is a form composed of many smaller squares and rectangles, like a chequerboard; at the extremities, there are wicked little coloured triangles, formed by the diagonal sides of the diamond. (Once upon a time, Mondrian had been against even rhombuses: triangles would have been unspeakable.) In places, the tape, formerly an aid to composition, has become part of the work. Little snipped-up pieces run along the lines, sometimes thickly layered on top of one another, so that the canvas seems to bulge and extrude. In the white sections, you can see up close that the brushstrokes are heavy, lateral, undulating. They look like the waves of the sea.