Art: Purist

The meticulous grilles of Piet Mondrian look as if anyone with a ruler and a paintbox could have done them. The delight they inspire as design has strongly influenced architecture and graphic advertising. If. upon familiarity, they now seem somewhat sterile, they were no mere gimmickry but the deadly serious result of a lifetime of intellectual search for the truth beyond the surface of reality. Seldom has an artist traveled a more complex route to achieve such striking simplicity.

Last week Manhattan’s Sidney Janis Gallery had on view a small retrospective show that traces some of the steps along that route. It begins with the year 1903 when Mondrian, then 31, was painting the common sights of his native Holland —houses and windmills, rivers and canals. As the years passed, Mondrian began to strip awyay the outer layers of nature to reveal its skeletal geometry. A tree was not made up of a trunk and branches but of horizontals and verticals. When Mondrian painted a flower, he was primarily interested in its “plastic structure.”

To Find the Constant. Though Mondrian admired the impressionists, he had no desire to follow in their steps. Nor did the cubists go far enough. “Instinctively,” he wrote, “I felt that painting had to find a new way to express the beauty of nature.” He decided that the colors of nature could not be reproduced on canvas, so he gave up “natural color” for “pure color”—the primaries, red, yellow and blue. He also gave up all effort to reproduce natural forms, for these, he said, were at the mercy of the artist’s subjective feelings. What Mondrian was looking for was the “constant elements of form,” the “pure reality” in nature that was forever immune to emotion.

The curved line gradually disappeared from Mondrian’s paintings, and his verticals and horizontals inevitably created rectangles. Eager to scourge any suggestion of form from his work, Mondrian insisted that these were not rectangles, for in his definition a rectangle could exist only beside another form that contrasted with it. He argued, for example, that a rectangle placed next to a circle would take on an individual identity; when compared only with other rectangles it loses its individuality and becomes a universal. Mondrian was determined to destroy everything that shackled his painting to outer appearances or confused the face of nature for its inner reality.

To Catch the Rhythm. The process of destruction—or liberation, as Mondrian saw it—continued. For many years he filled some of his rectangles with primary color. But in time Mondrian came to feel that these rectangular planes were too dominating and would somehow have to be destroyed. His solution was to drain the color from the rectangle and pour it into the lines. The unhampered play between the verticals and horizontals then seemed to produce a kind of rhythm, a “dynamic equilibrium” that was like the pulse of life.

Mondrian did not begin experimenting with his colored lines until after he came to Manhattan during World War II. He loved the city with a passion that was exceeded only by his love of boogie-woogie. Like the music, the city had its rhythm, and this Mondrian tried to reproduce in his painting of New York, one of the last things he did before his death of pneumonia in 1944. In the Janis show, two unfinished paintings reveal the struggle that went into such a work. Mondrian used plastic tapes while trying to find the right design; he would lay them out, remove them, lay them out again. Where must this line cross that? How far should this color be from another? In any painting these are important decisions; in a Mondrian they are crucial.