As the 1800s came to an end, a group of forward-looking artists, architects and designers broke away from the Victorian constraints and developed a new style that encouraged an interdisciplinary approach fostering a sharing of contemporary thought and ideology until the post-modern period in the 1970s. It was a means for the artists and artisans to express themselves about the world that was quickly becoming increasingly high tech and advanced. The object was to go beyond the status quo and emphasize freedom of expression, progressive concepts and nontraditional methodology. Some of the most influential modernist artists' work included the geometrics of Piet Mondrian, the striking furniture of Gerrit Rietveld and the architecture of Alvar Aalto. .

             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 blue, and the three different tones of white, gray, and black. The style was based, he explained, on a complete harmony of straight lines and pure colors underlying the visible world.

             Pieter Cornelis Mondrian, Jr. was born on March 7, 1872, in the Netherlands. After studying art, his first work was naturalistic with landscapes, still-lifes, Dutch impressionism and symbolism. By 1910, after seeing work by Pablo Picasso and George Braque, he began experimenting considerably with the cubist modality. Within a few years, he had started to develop his own personal abstract style, neo-plastic, a translation of nieuwe beelding, which also means "new form" or "new image.