“Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls” (1). This description of Piet Mondrian’s New York studio sheds light on the man who went beyond all efforts of his generation to achieve abstraction in search of absolute reality. Mondrian’s incongruous appearance and even his name (changed from Mondriaan) reflected his transformation during an artistic career that spanned two world wars. Over the 20 years during which he studied abstraction, he steadily moved toward simplicity and purity. He abandoned all that was representational, turning himself from a painter of landscapes and flowers to one that tolerated only horizontal and vertical lines, flat surfaces, and primary colors. Forging a style that was in its essence mathematical, he selected single motifs and worked on them until they were completely stripped of form and reduced to lines or grids: “I saw the ocean as a series of pluses and minuses” (2).
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