Piet Mondrian was the founder of De Stijl and one of the most rigorous abstract painters of the 20th century. Beginning as a naturalistic landscape painter, he moved through Symbolism, Fauvism, and Cubism before arriving at his mature style of vertical and horizontal black lines dividing fields of primary colors — red, blue, and yellow — and neutrals. He called this 'Neoplasticism' and believed it expressed universal harmony beneath the accidents of nature. He fled Nazi-occupied Paris for London, then New York in 1940, where the energy of the city and jazz music inspired his most exuberant late work, Broadway Boogie Woogie.
