No artist has changed the face of modern art, design and architecture more fundamentally than the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. During his career Mondrian slowly but surely evolved from a traditional 19th century realist painter to the prime pioneer of pure abstraction.
Post-war art historians and critics have always depicted Mondrian as an odd hermit, socially shy and introverted, with a frame of thinking as rectilinear as his art and his Calvinist upbringing.
But how true to his life is this image really?
This book is about Mondrian’s true passions: how painting, the struggle with outward appearance and painterly substance, becomes the inner expression of a view on life; how writing about painting evaluates ideas and development; and the cultivation an extensive social network to reach out to the world.
Mondrian’s message can be condensed into the magical amount of seven words: Art is passion, and passion is life.

This book contains a selection of seminal essays on Mondrian, published in international exhibition catalogues and books between 1994 and 2014, in various languages.