Mondrian (Basic Art Series 2.0)

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and a leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term “neoplasticism,” he pursued a style devoted to painting only primary colors against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines on a white background. Mondrian maintained that this essential painting would help achieve a society in which art as such has no place, but rather existed for the total realization of beauty.

With stints in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York, he drew on the modern metropolis and modern music, especially jazz, as points of inspiration. In 1917, he cofounded De Stijl, originally a publication and subsequently a circle of practitioners committed to a strictly geometrical art of horizontals and verticals. With key works and succinct texts, this introductory book presents Mondrian's distinctive and pioneering oeuvre, an abiding inspiration for fashion, art, architecture, and design—from White Stripes album covers to Yves Saint Laurent dresses