His father was a qualified drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Frits Mondriaan (a pupil of Willem Maris of the Hague School of artists), the younger Piet often painted and drew along the river Gein.

[6] On display in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such Post-Impressionist works as The Red Mill and Trees in Moonrise.

Mondrian's earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of indistinct trees and houses reflected in still water.

He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he also believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger, ecumenical spirituality.

While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a "port of call" on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination.

[17]Over the next two decades, Mondrian methodically developed his signature style embracing the Classical, Platonic, Euclidean worldview where he simply focused on his, now iconic, horizontal and vertical black lines forming squares and rectangles filled with primary hues.

Immersed in post-war Paris culture of artistic innovation, he flourished and fully embraced the art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life.

In the 1921 paintings, many, though not all, of the black lines stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas, although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact.

In 1926, Katherine Dreier, co-founder of New York City's Society of Independent Artists (along with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), visited Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris and acquired one of his diamond compositions, Painting I.

She stated in the catalog that "Holland has produced three great painters who, though a logical expression of their own country, rose above it through the vigor of their personality – the first was Rembrandt, the second was Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian.

Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London and only completed months or years later in Manhattan.

10, 1939–1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined Mondrian's radical but classical approach to the rectangle.

[citation needed] On 23 September 1940 Mondrian left Europe for New York aboard the Cunard White Star Line ship RMS Samaria (1920), departing from Liverpool.

New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works.

[26] An unfinished 1941 version of this work, titled New York City I, uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs.

While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.

The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.

When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the Netherlands for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of neoplasticism about which he had been writing for two years.

To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue.

At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art.

He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates.

He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records.

Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful.

Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components.

He began to paint flowers at the turn of the century, creating portraits of individual blooms that blended his strict artistic training and powers of observation to his spiritual and romantic yearnings.

[31] In a review of a 2024 biography of Mondrian, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner described him as a "deeply eccentric man" who "lived like an ambassador from the kingdom of ridiculous notions" and who "had no sense of humor and rarely smiled".

[32] According to Nick Weber, author of a 2018 biography of Mondrian, the artist was so deeply afraid of eye injuries that he refused to play with his brothers as a child.

"[39] Likewise in his television documentaries of The Shock of the New, Hughes referred to Mondrian considered again as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century (...) who was one of the last painters who believed that the conditions of human life could be changed by making pictures".

[40] Dutch art historian Carel Blotkamp, an authority on De Stijl, reaffirmed the same belief that he was "one of the great artists of the twentieth century".

Charles Darwent, in The Guardian, wrote: "With its black floor and white walls hung with moveable panels of red, yellow and blue, the studio at Rue du Départ was not just a place for making Mondrians.