Piet Mondrian’s Composition III — a watershed moment in the history of art

In the summer of 1914, Piet Mondrian returned to the Netherlands from Paris to visit his sick father. The plan was to stay in his homeland only for a few weeks. The outbreak of the First World War, however, meant that he ended up staying for five years.

Mondrian arrived back in Paris by train on 22 June 1919 — happy, he said, to feel ‘the seriousness of the big city’ again. He had continued to pay rent on his old studio, on the Rue du Départ, and was delighted to reopen its doors.

Back in the French capital, now in his late forties, Mondrian would produce a cluster of paintings that represented a remarkable leap forward not just in his own practice, but in Western art as a whole. Adhering to the rules of Neo-Plasticism, an abstract language he pioneered, Mondrian reduced painting to what he deemed were its fundamentals: pure colour and line.

‘It’s not easy to be an original,’ he said. ‘It takes a lot of experience and serious introspection.’

The artist completed eight paintings in the pivotal year of 1920, as he began to test and explore the visual possibilities of Neo-Plasticism. Five of these works are in major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Tate in London, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Another work from that year, Composition III, is about to be offered at auction for the first time, as a highlight of the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026 at Christie’s in London.

Composition III consists of a sequence of coloured planes set within a grid of straight lines. These planes are either square or rectangular, and the interplay between them draws the viewer in.

More or less at the centre of the canvas is a large, squarish panel, painted yellow, to which one’s gaze is attracted first. Above and below it are two rectangles painted different shades of grey. At the top of the central column is a slender passage of red, which connects the eye to panels of the same striking colour in the painting’s top left and centre right.

Striking, too, are three passages of black, one of which anchors the whole composition at the bottom of the central column. To these, Mondrian added a layer of varnish, which simultaneously gives them a sense of depth and a shiny surface.

Having lived in Paris initially for two years — in the run-up to the First World War —Mondrian settled in the city for much longer the second time around, remaining there for nearly all of the 1920s and 1930s. He spent these decades dedicating himself tirelessly to the Neo-Plastic pursuit of balance, rhythm and economy.

Mondrian’s paintings in this vein are acknowledged as landmarks of geometric abstraction. They are all composed of a grid created by a set of horizontal and vertical lines, and filled with panels of red, blue, yellow, grey, white or black.

Each work features variations in the choice and shade of the colours, the thickness of the lines and the size and shape of the panels. (Part of what makes Neo-Plastic paintings so compelling is the tension between their apparent sense of order and control, and the fact that the grids are never actually symmetrical.)

His friend and fellow artist Theo van Doesburg suggested — not at all unreasonably — that ‘Mondrian’s leaving for Paris [after the war] was necessary to give him new possibilities in his work’. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that paintings such as Composition III didn’t represent a complete break with what he had produced in the Netherlands.

Grids were already a part of his repertoire when he stepped off the train in 1919. These tended to be modular, however, which is to say, grids — such as the one in Composition with Grid 9: Checkerboard Composition with Bright Colours (1919) — with a more even, repetitive structure than those he painted in Paris.

Other differences between the ‘Dutch’ paintings and those that followed are the softer colour gradations in the former. Their panels are also greater in number and smaller in size.

What Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic works represented, then, was a daring evolution of his practice. As the 1920s dawned, he told Van Doesburg in a letter that he had begun to create ‘painting that pleases me more than all my previous work’, adding: ‘It has been a long quest.’

The artist spent months on each of his new paintings, making numerous adjustments along the way, in a bid to achieve the optimum configuration.

He worked on Composition III between roughly December 1919 and May 1920, his adjustments including the addition of tiny traces of blue pigment to the three planes of yellow — which helped achieve a cool, almost acidic colour.

Also noteworthy are the dark lines that create the grid. These are the product of layers of delicate repainting. Many stop slightly short of the canvas’s limits. They are soft-edged rather than crisp, gradually tapering off.

As was his wont, Mondrian relied upon what he called his ‘intuition’ to determine when the painting was complete. There was no systematic approach to his decision-making, no specific measurements that he carefully abided by. He stopped only when he intuited that ‘the proper harmony of rhythm’ had been achieved. The typical result was a diligently worked, highly refined composition.

With Composition III and his other paintings from 1920, Mondrian provided a watershed moment in the history of art: the ultimate rejection of traditional representation in favour of pure geometric abstraction.

In 1952, the work entered the esteemed collection of the American architect Armand P. Bartos and his wife Celeste. Armand had known Mondrian personally, thanks to an introduction from the art dealer Sidney Janis during the artist’s final years, when he lived in New York.

The Bartoses’ Manhattan home was filled with impressive works of modern and contemporary art, from paintings by Joan Miró and Mark Rothko to sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Calder. The couple also owned several canvases by Mondrian, including Composition with Red and Blue, which the artist completed shortly after his arrival in New York and which they acquired directly from him. (That painting, having been offered from the Bartos collection at Christie’s in London in 1983, fetched $23 million when it was offered once more at Christie’s in New York in 2025.)

Composition III remained in the Bartos collection until the mid-1970s.

For Mondrian, the painting stood as an expression of artistic intent and a newly crystallised vision. He had started out his career as a figurative painter. However, he now came to believe that ‘every true artist [was] inspired more by the beauty of lines and colour, and the relationships between them, than by the concrete subject of a picture’.

With these words, and with his paintings of 1920, Mondrian produced some of most significant works in 20th-century art.

Composition III will tour to Christie’s in New York (17-20 September 2026) and Hong Kong (24-29 September)

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale is on view from 8 October at Christie’s in London