Wassily Kandinsky worked in an expressionist style during his stay in Murnau. His paintings contained more and more unclear elements. In 1910 he discovered abstract painting when seeing one of his paintings in an upside-down position. He could not discover anything figurative in it. “…I unexpectedly found myself in front of a painting of an indescribably overwhelming beauty. Astonished, I stood still, fascinated by this work … The painting had no subject, it did not represent any recognisable object, it was composed solely of glowing patches of colour …”
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Piet Mondrian evolved from 1911 onwards from depicting landscapes to abstraction by omitting the details and the suggestion of depth, and by making the colours light up so that they became unnatural. From 1920 until his death in 1944, Mondrian painted according to the same scheme: black horizontal and vertical lines filled in with planes in black, grey, white and yellow, red and blue, in an asymmetrical composition, so that the relationships and tensions between the lines and the planes are fully brought to their right.
In 1916 Mondrian became acquainted with visual artist and theorist Van Doesburg. Together they founded the magazine De Stijl in 1917, and in doing so influenced not only the visual arts, but also European architecture.
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