Mondrian grew up in strict Calvinist surroundings in the small town of Winterswijk, near the German border, where his father was a schoolmaster. At the age of nineteen he was briefly torn between religion and art as a career. After that it took some thirty years for his style to change from somber realism to pure abstraction. The style that made him famous, which is shown in this 1921 painting, had been born in Paris the previous year, when he published a manifesto entitled Le Néo-Plasticisme. Its sole practitioner, Mondrian went on perfecting it for more than twenty years, until his death in New York.

Composition is one of the artist's earliest Neoplastic works. First he sectioned off the square canvas into eleven rectangles. Some he filled with primary colors—here, red and blue. Other hues he obtained by mixing primaries with white, which resulted in areas tinted light blue and light yellow. The pale colors mark this as a transitional work, because from 1922 on he used pure white and primary colors almost exclusively.