Nationality: Dutch

Birthdate: 7 March 1872

Date of Death: 1 February 1944

GMC Ranking: 8

Pieter Cornelis Mondrian, known after 1906 as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.

Mondrian's art was highly utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: "Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."

While Mondrian's theories of abstraction have been his enduring legacy, he was also a painter of flowers. He began to paint flowers at the turn of the century, creating portraits of individual blooms that blended his strict artistic training and powers of observation to his spiritual and romantic yearnings. Mondrian continued to paint flowers in a secretive manner into the 1920s, claiming to friends that he did so for commercial reasons alone.

The Mondrian flowers contribute to a broader view of the life and work of Mondrian – a view that diverges sharply from the traditional reading of his artistic evolution.