This volume presents Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). His earliest landscapes are rendered in an Impressionistic style but, possess the marked vertical and horizontal tendencies that foreshadow his mature paintings. Mondrian's work began to show the influences of Cubism, and in 1912, the artist moved to Paris where he continued to refine his style, continually exploring increasingly sophisticated compositions. In his paintings, Mondrian strove to achieve a universal form of expression by reducing form and color to their simplest components. The artist termed his work "Neo-Plasticism". Mondrian's most well-known works consisted of white ground, upon which was painted a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines and the three primary colors.

The extraordinary and surprising life of Piet Mondrian, whose unprecedented geometric art revolutionized modern painting, architecture, graphic art, fashion design, and more—from acclaimed cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber In the early 1920s, surrounded by the roaring streets of avant-garde Paris, Piet Mondrian began creating what would become some of the most recognizable abstract paintings of the 20th century. With rectangles of primary colors against a dazzling white background, this was geometric abstraction in its purest form. These revolutionary compositions exhilarated, intoxicated, confused, and enraged the international public—and changed the course of modern art forever. Now, for the first time, Mondrian emerges alongside his thrilling art. Here is the life of an elusive modern master: from his youth in a religious household in the Netherlands where he first began painting Dutch farmhouses and sand dunes, to his move to Paris where he embraced the work of Pablo Picasso, Georges Seurat, and Cézanne, to the 1920s and onward where, surviving the turmoil of two world wars and embracing a rapidly shifting culture, Mondrian challenged the concept of art and invented a new world of undiluted colors and rhythmic straight lines. His work would go on to affect painting, architecture, fashion, and design in decades to come. Here is also an intimate portrait of a complex artist, his solitude and avoidance of intimacy, his eccentricities and his philosophy, his passion for ballroom dancing, and his unwavering belief in art as a vehicle to reveal universal truths.

Theatrical Gestures of Belgian Modernism assembles a series of brilliant dramatic works issuing from a remarkably fecund modern period of artistic creation in Belgium. It includes dadaists like Clément Pansaers and Paul Joostens; surrealists like Paul Nougé, René Magritte, Paul Colinet, Fernand Dumont, and Marcel Mariën; expressionists like Michel De Ghelderode and Norge; and futurists like Georges Linze. In an introduction of great historical accuracy and detail, editor David Willinger guides the reader through the maze of modernist tendencies that blossomed, intersected, and combated throughout the first part of the twentieth century in Belgium. Many of these works, whose extraordinary iconoclasm defy presentation on a conventional stage, herald some of the more radical experiments in theatrical and dramatic craft later in the century.