Piet Mondrian

Born Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan in the Netherlands in 1872, he started as a figurative painter before something shifted. In 1912 he moved to Paris, encountered Cubism, dropped an 'a' from his surname, and began stripping away everything he considered tied to the material world. By 1914 he'd declared that art must stand above reality to approach the spiritual, and he meant it literally. He co-founded De Stijl with Theo van Doesburg and developed what he called Neoplasticism - a formal system reduced to three primary colors, black, white, gray, and only horizontal and vertical lines. He believed this sparse grammar was the only way to create universal beauty, and he spent the rest of his life proving the point. He died in New York in 1944, having turned reduction into a religion.