Mondrian: His Life, His Art, and the Quest of the Absolute

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.

NICHOLAS FOX WEBER has been the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation for four decades. He is the author of IBauhaus, Le Corbusier, Balthus: A Biography, and Patron Saints. He lives in Connecticut, Paris, and Ireland.