ABSTRACT
The leap into abstraction that occurred in European painting around the year 1913—the exact date and the little matter of who was first are still in dispute—was an event of enormous artistic consequence. Of the painters who were among the first to bring the leap into abstraction to a successful artistic realization, Piet Mondrian was certainly the greatest. In the logic and consistency of its development, his oeuvre is virtually a work of art in itself. In his extraordinary clarity and tenacity of purpose, Mondrian set a standard of moral probity in art that few of his successors have equaled, and none has exceeded. Mondrian's career poses the question of the artist's sublimation in a particularly acute form. His appetite for life was evident enough to everyone who knew him, but so was his studied suppression of it. The extreme asceticism of Mondrian's art had its counterpart in the extreme asceticism of his life.
