Abstract painting “Composition No. II, with Red and Blue” by Piet Mondrian, limited edition reproduction

It's hard to imagine that Piet Mondrian's strictly geometric compositions originated in painterly, delicate landscape studies. At the age of 20, as a student at the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts, he felt drawn to Impressionism. In the neutral Netherlands, he remained largely untouched by the turmoil of the First World War, allowing him to pursue his inspiration and his theosophical studies. Early Fauvist and Neo-Impressionist elements began to appear in his paintings. In Paris, which he first visited in 1912, he participated in several Salons des Indépendants, where he was influenced by the Cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Mondrian gradually reduced a tree, for example, to horizontal and vertical lines until black, orthogonal bars divided the picture plane, and he filled the spaces between them with white and primary colors.