Grids That Changed Everything

Mondrian's rigid grids look simple, but their influence runs through modern life:

• They helped inspire the International Style of glass-and-steel architecture
• Yves Saint Laurent's 1965 Mondrian dress carried the grids onto the runway
• Today's UI design — website and app layouts — leans on the same grid-based order
• His late Broadway Boogie Woogie turned New York jazz rhythms into colored squares, proof that rigidity could swing

Strip away curves, diagonals, and every color but three, Mondrian believed, and you find the truth beneath appearance. Whether he did is debatable. But he changed what a painting could be.