Piet Mondrian

In 1912 Mondrian left Holland for Paris, then the capital of the new art, and walked straight into Cubism. Picasso and Braque were breaking objects into flat planes, and Mondrian took their grid of straight lines but pushed it further than either of them wanted to go. He kept flattening his trees and church facades until the subject fell away entirely and only horizontals, verticals, and blocks of colour were left.

By the early 1920s he had cut his palette down to three colours, red, yellow, and blue, plus black, white, and grey, and to two directions, upright and level. He called it Neoplasticism and built a whole philosophy around it with the Dutch group De Stijl, believing these bare elements could carry a universal harmony that pictures of real things could not. For 20 years he painted little else, adjusting the weight of a black line or the size of a red square across a white field.

Then the war chased him out. He spent two years in London and, in 1940, with the bombing closing in, sailed for New York at the age of 67. The city undid the severity: he fell for boogie-woogie jazz and the traffic-light rhythm of Manhattan, and replaced his heavy black grid with running chains of little coloured squares. He was still reworking that late style, on a canvas he called Victory Boogie Woogie, when he died of pneumonia in early 1944.