Piet MondrIan

Mondrian really emphasized on his cubist practice when he decided to move to Paris, the capital of art at the time, where he really starting moving away from trying to depict such things as evolution by painting people in some type of way, and started getting influenced more by artists such as Picasso. But unlike the typical cubist, Mondrian would attempt in reconciling his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. He would construct lines and color combinations on flat surfaces, in order to express some type of beauty with in the utmost awareness. He was a man who was deeply inspired by nature, as one can see from his earlier works when he was working with trees. “Nature puts me in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation, I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.” One can perfectly see this within his paintings of his trees as the negative space between the subject starts coming out of the background and starts becoming more of mid or foreground, expressing that everything ca be a part of something, not only does the tree have to be the subject in the painting. He was a man who really expressed dialogue on the “new plastic,” the ideal of something otherwise than representation. He believed that the people who viewed paintings had just as much responsibility as the painters did for the actual painting, this could relate to music with out harmony for example. As he fell further and further from realism through out the years, he even broke one of his closest relationships because of diagonals versus straight lines. He was a man who fell deeply into his beliefs, and did so by changing his entire life from the way he painted to the way he dressed.