Piet Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, the Dutch painter famous for his severe grids of primary colors, was a man of startling contradictions. On the canvas, he was all about universal harmony and spiritual purity, meticulously hand-painting those ruler-straight lines without a ruler. Off the canvas, this supposedly austere figure was a jazz-loving fiend who adored dancing the Charleston and the Boogie Woogie. Rumors, likely the stuff of legend, paint an even stranger picture. Some say he was so obsessive he'd stack dirty dishes in neat piles for days. One of the more colorful, and almost certainly untrue, whispers is that he sometimes shaved only half of his face, creating a bizarre vertical divide. This master of balance apparently enjoyed a little personal asymmetry. He even turned his apartments into immersive, three-dimensional versions of his artwork.