Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch painter who pushed abstraction to a famous extreme of grids, straight lines, and blocks of primary color. Born in the Netherlands in 1872, he started out painting fairly realistic landscapes before working his way step by step toward pure abstraction. By the 1920s he had arrived at his signature style, white canvases divided by black lines into rectangles filled with red, blue, and yellow.

He believed this stripped-down language could express a deep, universal harmony beneath the messy surface of the world, an idea tied to his spiritual beliefs. He helped found the movement known as De Stijl, and his ideas rippled out into architecture, fashion, and design far beyond painting. His clean grids look simple, but they were the result of decades of careful searching.