Art by Piet Mondrian

Mondrian spent the first half of his career painting fairly conventional Dutch landscapes, windmills, trees, church towers, before a slow, deliberate progression through Cubism stripped his work down, year by year, into the grid of black lines and primary-colored rectangles most people now associate with his name. He was a committed follower of Theosophy, a spiritual movement that shaped how he thought about abstraction as a search for universal, underlying order rather than pure decoration. His late New York paintings, made after fleeing Europe during World War II, loosened that rigid grid into something closer to the syncopated rhythm of the jazz he'd discovered there, most directly in "Broadway Boogie Woogie."