It was the destiny of a modest magazine published during the Great War in the neutral Netherlands to revolutionize the visual arts with its abstractions, straight lines, and primary colors. And although Piet Mondrian was one of the ideologists of the ‘new plasticity’ that De Stijl promoted on its pages, he devoted as many as twenty years to painting figurative landscapes before his contact with the cubists of Paris and his flirtations with theosophical ideas finally led him to the discovery of beauty on the surface, in the structure, and in the composition of colors and lines. This coming month of March the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid inaugurates a retrospective show that takes stock of the Dutch master’s pictorial evolution in pursuit of an ever freer art.