Piet Mondrian didn’t start out drawing squares.
He actually began with soft Dutch landscapes — windmills by the river, trees reflected on still waters, fields stretching into the horizon. Peaceful. Familiar.
But little by little, he stripped all of that away.
The trees turned into lines.
Colors were separated into bold, pure blocks.
Eventually, what was left were grids of black lines filled with red, yellow, and blue.
People looked at it and said, “Wait… this is art?”
To some, it seemed too simple. Too clean. Too abstract.
But to Mondrian, it was never about painting what we see — it was about painting what is.
He wasn’t trying to show you a landscape.
He was chasing the invisible: the balance, the order, the structure behind everything.
From trees to lines — a radical shift
Mondrian trained as a traditional painter, working in the Dutch landscape tradition.
But everything changed when he moved to Paris in the early 1900s and encountered Cubism.
The shapes broke down. The subjects disappeared. And Mondrian?
He went even further. He turned everything into vertical and horizontal lines.
This approach became known as Neoplasticism — the idea that pure abstraction, using only lines and primary colors, could express a universal harmony.
Static but alive
At first glance, his paintings look almost mathematical.
Red, yellow, and blue rectangles carefully placed within a black grid.
But the more you look, the more they move.
The spacing of the lines, the uneven blocks, the asymmetry —
they give the work a rhythm, like a song without sound.
It’s precise, but not robotic. It breathes.
Boogie Woogie on canvas
When Mondrian moved to New York in the 1940s, everything changed again.
He discovered jazz — especially boogie-woogie — and was instantly obsessed.
The energy, the syncopation, the chaos-within-structure — it was exactly what he was looking for.
His Broadway Boogie Woogie is like a love letter to the city.
It pulses with motion, packed with tiny colorful blocks and buzzing grids.
It’s a visual translation of rhythm — pure joy, structured chaos.
From gallery walls to daily life
Mondrian’s work didn’t just stay in the art world.
It jumped into fashion, furniture, and even phone cases.
One of the most iconic examples?
Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Mondrian dress’ in the 1960s.
A white dress with blocks of red, yellow, and blue — it became a fashion legend.
His clean, abstract style is timeless.
It works on a canvas, but also on a building, a poster, a pair of sneakers.
That’s the power of universal design.
The endless search for balance
Mondrian passed away in 1944, but right up until his final days,
he was still experimenting — still trying to find that perfect balance of line, space, and color.
It might look simple — one line here, one red square there —
but that’s exactly the point. In those few shapes,
he poured in nature, logic, harmony, and even emotion.
He once said:
“I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.”
His works are now in major museums around the world,
like MoMA in New York and the Mondrian House in The Hague.
But more importantly, they’ve become a visual language we see everywhere — a quiet reminder that less can truly be more.
Because maybe that’s what we’re all chasing —
a little more balance, clarity, and simplicity in a complicated world.