Although Piet Mondrian is best known today for his abstract compositions featuring rectangles of primary colours, neutrals of white, black and grey and thick black horizontal and vertical lines, he began by painting representational pictures of landscapes and trees. It was not until after the First World War, when he was in his 40s, that Mondrian rejected naturalistic painting to develop the highly distilled pictoral language which he called Neo-Plasticism. ‘Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and colour and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture,’ he once said. Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930) brilliantly illustrates Mondrian’s pioneering aesthetic of balance, order and purity, which later influenced celebrated artists, architects and fashion designers including Lola Prusac and Yves Saint Laurent.

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