In the early 1900s many artists tried various abstract ways of representing reality. In his final compositions he avoided any suggestion of reproducing the material world. Instead using horizontal and vertical black lines that outline blocks of pure white, red, blue or yellow, he expressed his conception of ultimate harmony and equilibrium. Mondrian was born on March 7, 1872 in Amersfoort, The Netherlands. He studied at the Amsterdam Academy from 1892 to 1895 then began painting on his own. Most of his early works were landscapes. In 1909 he began a series of paintings of trees in which he developed an increasingly abstract style. He moved to Paris, about 1912, where he was influenced by the cubist painters. During World War I, Mondrian painted in The Netherlands. There he helped found De Stijl a magazine of the arts that influenced European painting, architecture, and design. He also began to formulate his own aesthetic theories. His style, and its underlying artistic principles, he called neoplasticism. The later paintings, which date from 1920 until his death, have simple titles, such as 'Composition in Red, Yellow and Blue" painted in 1926, and 'Composition in White, Black and Red" (1936). .

             Piet Mondrian, among the most prominent of the 20th century's geometric painters, evolved an austere art of black lines and colored rectangles placed against white backgrounds. Mondrian wished to create not only a new art but also a new perception of life. In his view, the contradictions of the modern world--for example, the discipline imposed by technology versus the freedom of the individual--were more apparent than real. By rising above the particular or the tradition of representational art to the general or abstract art, humanity could achieve a new metaphysical synthesis. This belief is implicit in paintings that to some people look like nothing more than highly refined adventures in aesthetics.