Mondriaan

Piet Mondrian, original name Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan   (born March 7, 1872, Amersfoort, Neth.—died Feb. 1, 1944, New York, U.S.), painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings, Mondrian used the simplest combinations of straight lines, right angles, primary colours, and black, white, and gray. The resulting works possess an extreme formal purity that embodies the artist’s spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos.Encyclopædia Britannica

The consistent development of Mondrian’s art toward complete abstraction was an outstanding feat in the history of modern art, and his work foreshadowed the rise of abstract art in the 1940s and ’50s. But his art goes beyond merely aesthetic considerations: his search for harmony through his painting has an ethical significance. Rooted in a strict puritan tradition of Dutch Calvinism and inspired by his theosophical beliefs, he continually strove for purity during his long career, a purity best explained by the double meaning of the Dutch word schoon, which means both “clean” and “beautiful.” Mondrian chose the strict and rigid language of straight line and pure colour to produce first of all an extreme purity, and on another level, a Utopia of superb clarity and force. When, in 1920, Mondrian dedicated Le Néo-plasticisme to “future men,” his dedication implied that art can be a guide to humanity, that it can move beyond depicting the casual, arbitrary facts of everyday appearance and substitute in its place a new, harmonious view of life.Encyclopædia Britannica