Art: Pursuit of the Square

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 Courrèges dresses, from cigarette packs to apartment façades.

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 (1909-10), 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 (1943-44). The ethical and mystical concerns that underlie Mondrian’s abstracts had become apparent earlier still in such paintings as Passion Flower (1901). 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.

True Art. A few years later, Mondrian became an enthusiastic convert to Theosophy; he was very much struck by Philosopher Rudolf Steiner’s belief that ”occult influences . . . can be awakened by devotional religious feelings, true art, music.” But what was “true” art? Mondrian was sure that art got truer to the extent that it provoked meditation and devotion. “In aesthetic contemplation,” he wrote, “the individual is pushed to the background, and the universal appears. The deepest purpose of painting has always been to give concrete existence, through color and line, to this universal which appears in contemplation.”

Hindsight makes it seem inevitable that Mondrian, believing this, should move away from objects. But in its period, Mondrian’s road toward total abstraction was as audacious as it was lonely. In 1911, he first saw some cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque at a show in Holland. His pictorial intelligence could not resist the challenge. But the concrete, specific nature of cubist painting hindered him. Thus Mondrian’s paintings after 1911 show him wrestling to keep the integrated pattern of Cubism while dispensing with solid form. Tree (1912), with its sober tones of gray, green and brown, preserves the rhythm of branches in its arabesque of lines but remains as flat as a stained-glass window.

In 1912, Mondrian moved to Paris, where he changed his life and his art. The “real” image gradually sank. Composition #7 (1913), still kept a few legible clues of the facades and city roofs; but by Composition (1916), even these had vanished, and a fully abstract dance of signs and patches replaced them. Not even these were stable enough; Mondrian wanted to achieve a Platonic essence of structure. He now pushed reduction almost to the limit—nothing but right angles and primary color. This lean scaffolding was to occupy him from the ’20s until his death. His geometric abstracts are the most systematic investigation of flat pattern in all modern art, and they have the clarity and finality of laboratory proof. No print can do justice to paintings like Composition with Red and Blue (1939-41), for one of the startling characteristics of such work is its traditionalism as painting. Within the radical statement it makes, the warm, silky glow of the layered paint held in its finely adjusted grid is almost Vermeer-like.

Rich Gravity. Had it not produced such interactions, Mondrian’s austerity would have had its comic side. He hated green because it reminded him of nature. In restaurants, he would sit with his back to the window to avoid seeing any trees. His main pleasure was ballroom dancing, but, according to one of his friends, “he carried out his steps in such a personally stylized fashion that the results were frequently awkward.” His solitary rooms in Paris, and later in New York, were kept with fussy precision, down to the exact placement of ashtrays. His life was a masterpiece of sublimation in art’s interest.

Mondrian’s intellectual tenacity remains startling. After the volte-face toward abstraction in 1911, there were no sudden switches in his work—only the steady, undistracted pursuit of the mathematical harmony that he glimpsed at the end of his experiences. Mondrian had fled to New York in 1940 to avoid the war and he was nearly 72 when he died there. But his great unfinished picture, Victory Boogie-Woogie, gathered all the dynamism and modernity that fascinated him in Manhattan into one comprehensive image. The blips of red, yellow and blue shuttling along the avenues of the grid, the slow blocks of gray, the orchestration of scale and pace —these constitute Mondrian’s final answer to the critics who rebuked him for pushing art into “sterility.” They were, of course, wrong: for Mondrian’s work possessed that rich and exemplary gravity which only the puritan passions can release.