In his book, The New Art -- The New Life, Mondrian, expressed that the world of nature has kept viewers from seeing reality as it exists. Instead, he said, reality lies behind the naturalistic environment. As a result, he refused to paint anything that appeared life-like, realistic, and representational. This led him into a entirely new form of abstraction, only allowing the essence to remain, that was revealed in either horizontal or vertical lines, primary colors of red, yellow, and

Alvar Aalto was born in 1898 in the village of Kuortane, situated in central Finland. He was the eldest of three children of a middle-class. His father was a surveyor. Over his lifetime, after getting his degree in architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology, he designed 70 buildings in his country. Aalto made his international breakthrough as a furniture designer. Aalto wished to learn "the language of wood fibres" and believed that there is a positive effect when our skin comes into contact with natural materials.

Aalto, similar to Mondrian and Rieveld, says Schultze, "produced profoundly modern buildings that are unique combinations of reductive abstraction and expressive elements." He is manifestly a modernist, whose work reflects the leanings toward reductivist abstraction associated with much of 20th-century design. However, his uniqueness consists in his ability to combine such abilities with what appear to be their opposites, or the organic, the sensual, the additive. In the process, he blends them into a highly personal union of intention and effect.

According to the article "Painter's Canvas Was Limitless; Follow Your Vision: Mondrian's dedication to his art was no abstraction," much of his success was due to his continual desire to show the harmony of the universe to others. It was a daunting goal, but he never gave up. Instead, he toiled in poverty for decades until hitting on the perfect pictorial language for his vision. As a result, says Alejandro Anreus, an art history professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey, "Mondrian's impact on modern art is extraordinary. He opened up avenues of art that are still being explored today."

"I learned -- at the age of 4, I believe -- the philosophy of pencil and paper," Aalto said in his Own Words. I can still remember that the hard, sharp, brown pencils were called Eagle. The soft ones were Koh-i-noor."

However, architecture was not his only forte. He also used his expertise to design furniture. For example, he created the Paimio chair, an object best known as an example of a marriage of form and function. It was composed bent plywood, bent laminated birch and solid birch from Finland. It was sinuously curved to comfort the body and enthrall the formalist eye. Later, he once again created in wood a cantilevered chair, which had a form that fascinated furniture designers of the 1920s (Schultze).

The Dutch De Stijl movement envisioned that art and architecture could be reduced to art forms that were simultaneously universal to all, inexpensively made for the public, and yet arranged in a variety of ways to accommodate the desires and preferences of the individual.  Philosophically, they hoped to uplift society from the recent past of World War I and improve conventional living through designs that were functional, highly attractive, and constructed with the modern person's lifestyle in mind.  From an aesthetic standpoint, this meant that art was not just to be looked at, but instead utilized as an integral aspect of one's environment.  Flat geometric planes, bold vertical and horizontal lines, and space coupled with the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow and the shades of grey, black and white transformed Rietveld's furniture as they did Mond

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Approximate Word count = 2198
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)