Episode Details

Piet Mondrian's paintings look like pure mathematical order — grids of black lines with rectangles of red, yellow, and blue. But the man who made them was a theosophist mystic who believed his paintings channeled universal spiritual truths, a jazz obsessive who danced alone in his studio to boogie-woogie records, and an eccentric who painted his studio walls in the same primary colors as his canvases and rearranged the furniture constantly to achieve visual harmony.

This episode traces Mondrian from his Dutch Reformed childhood through the gradual abstraction of his tree paintings, the De Stijl movement, and the New York years where Broadway Boogie Woogie merged his two obsessions — geometric purity and American jazz.

• Mondrian's Dutch Calvinist upbringing and the theosophy that replaced it as his spiritual framework
• The gradual abstraction from realistic landscapes to the iconic grid paintings
• The De Stijl movement, the rules he imposed on himself, and the art world's initial bafflement
• The New York exile, the jazz obsession, and Broadway Boogie Woogie as his final masterpiece