The purity and austerity of the work of Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) radically changed painting and attitudes towards it, and also had a profound influence on architecture and design. Here, Susie Hodge traces the artist's life and the development of his art in an illustrated essay accompanying a gallery of 90 reproductions of works, arranged chronologically from the naturalist paintings of the 1890s to Victory Boogie Woogie, left unfinished at Mondrian's death in New York in 1944.