In the photographs that survive from his last years, Piet Mondrian's own
head began to verge on geometrical abstraction. The domed skull had its
remaining hair brushed flat, each strand meticulously parallel to its
neighbor; the two neat creases on the pale forehead; the paired circles
of his spectacle frames, and the thin mouth joined with utmost
precision to his beak of a nose by two engraved lines. It was the face
of no compromise—austere and possessed by a forbidding moral
rectitude. No artist ever looked more like his own work. Mondrian was one of the great lawgivers of modern art. He was born just
short of 100 years ago, at Utrecht in 1872; he died in New York in
1944. To mark his centenary, the Guggenheim Museum has assembled a
retrospective which later goes to Bern's Kunstmuseum in Switzerland.
The show is a reminder of what “high seriousness”—a quality notably
absent from most recent art—can mean in the hands of a master. Mondrian's influence on art and design in the past 50 years has been so
huge that it tends, if anything, to obscure his own work. He is the
father of asymmetrical design, and his progeny are legion. Bastard
Mondrians, with their printed grids of black lines and their rectangles
of primary blue, red and yellow, turned up on every flat surface that
industry made—from tea towels to Courrges dresses, from cigarette
packs to apartment faades. Blocks and Dabs. Art needs stamina to survive that kind of diffusion.
Mondrian survived triumphantly, though at some cost. The
characteristics of industrial reproduction—flatness, harshness, gloss
and repetition—became wrongly linked to his work. The idea that
Mondrian was a kind of machine painter, all sensuousness barred, is one
of the many illusions that the Guggenheim's exhibition will dispel. The son of a strict Calvinist schoolteacher, Mondrian began his art
studies in Holland. In the Guggenheim show, we first meet him around
1890, painting talented but not remarkable brown Netherlands landscapes
and still lifes. Though Mondrian came to detest nature, the flat
horizons punctuated by vertical poplars and crisscross windmills gave
him a set of predilections about form which survived through his
career—immeasurably refined and philosophized. The blocks and dabs of red and blue pigment that pulsate across the
surface of an early figurative Mondrian like Church at Zoutelande
, record the same reflective delight in the rhythm and energy
of particles that he must have felt when painting his last, unfinished
canvas, Victory Boogie-Woogie . The ethical and mystical
concerns that underlie Mondrian's abstracts had become apparent earlier
still in such paintings as Passion Flower . This Art
Nouveau-flavored image had a curiously mundane origin: Mondrian
suspected that his model had VD, and painted her face contorted into a
St. Teresa-like trance of meditation and repentance.
