Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, co-founder of the De Stijl group, was born in Amersfoort, Netherlands, in 1872. He was an influential artist in the evolution of painting from figuration into abstraction. His early work is characterized by Dutch landscape and symbolist paintings. Later his paintings became more expressive and colourful. It was not until he moved to Paris in 1912 that he encountered Cubism, which inspired a series of cubist paintings. After spending First World War in the Netherlands, he returns to Paris where he turns to abstract compositions of only rectangles, black lines and the primary colors yellow, red and blue. In 1940 he moved to New York, where he began to use coloured lines in his work.