Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was a Dutch painter and art theoretician, recognized as one of the most important artists of the 20th century. He started by painting naturalistic and Impressionist landscapes, later adopting Pointillism and Fauvism, before becoming a pioneer of abstract art. In Paris from 1912, he absorbed Cubist influence, then developed a purely non-representational style he called Neoplasticism.

Co-founder of the De Stijl movement, he restricted his visual language to horizontal and vertical lines, the primary colors (red, blue, yellow), and the non-colors (black, white, gray). Driven by Theosophical ideas, he sought to create universal beauty through geometric harmony, believing art should transcend reality.

Mondrian painted in an abstract geometric style called Neoplasticism, using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular planes filled with the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) and non-colors (black, white, gray). He aimed to express universal beauty through balanced compositions on a flat surface, eliminating all reference to the natural world.