Styles: Squares over Curves

Piet Mondrian’s life was dedicated to style. He was the leader, in fact, of the Dutch-centered De Stijl movement that began during World War I. For Mondrian, the ascetic ideal of De Stijl was renunciation of the physical representation of things. His art was right-angular, asymmetrical, and colored only in the primaries of red, blue and yellow. All lines were straight—for the sake of the spirit. Wrote he: “Natural roundness, in a word, corporeality, gives a purely materialist version of objects.” Followers of De Stijl designed furniture, built architecture and patterned typography, industrial and household items after its Mondrianesque rules of severity. This year Mondrian’s rigid purism has been stretched over shapes more curvilinear than picture frames by Paris Fashion Designers Andre Courreges and Yves St. Laurent, with Seventh Avenue copyists tagging along.

The result, however fetching, would probably have turned Mondrian an unprimary shade of purple. Few artists enjoy seeing their paintings turned directly into dresses, let alone Mondrian. A sturdy Dutchman of strict Calvinist origins, he lived like a loner in his

Montparnasse studio, where he could rearrange the pure white walls by moving panels about, colored exactly like his art. “To denaturalize is to deepen,” he wrote in 1926, and turned his back on nature.

In his quest for the underlying graphs that to him expressed reality, Mondrian became fascinated with the functional artificiality of the machine esthetic. In human terms, this translated into the Charleston; Mondrian so furiously loved the dance that when the Dutch government banned it he refused to return home. He moved to New York, where the gridlike streets matched the syncopated rhythms of his art in paintings that he titled Boogie-Woogie. In 1944 he died there of pneumonia.

Last spring Mondrian’s chief descendant in threads was engineering-trained Courrèges. This fall it is St. Laurent, who got the idea from a book of paintings that his mother gave to him. Of course, a St. Laurent original of a copied Mondrian costs $800; the highest price that the artist ever got during his lifetime for one of his paintings was $450.