In the spring of 1926, Katherine Dreier, artist and art patron, visited Piet Mondrian in Paris and bought him a painting.

She was the co founder of the Society of Independant Artists (with Marcel Duchamp among others) and she inaugurated the first major exhibition of modern art in America since the Armory Show, in the Brooklyn Museum in November 1926. 

She stated in the catalogue that "Holland has produced three great painters who, though a logical expression of their own country, rose above it through the vigor of their personality - the first was Rembrandt, the second was Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian."

 

Sources:

Mondrian, 2004, Grange books