Mondrian Essays - Art Movements, Modern Art, Painting,

Mondrian 'Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and said: I've arranged these to make it more cheerful.' Thus Charmion von Wiegand on Mondrian's New York studio. In his Paris studio he had used flowers to make it more cheerful. One tulip in a vase, an artificial one, its leaves painted white. As Mondrian was probably incapable of irony, the tulip was unlikely to be a wry joke about his having had to produce flowerpieces between 1922 and 1925 when he no longer wanted to because there were no buyers for his abstracts. It could, of course, have been a revenge for the agony a compromise of that sort must have cost him. More likely, it was simply a part of the general revulsion against green and growth which made him, when seated at a table beside a window through which trees were visible to him, persuade someone to change places. The artificial tulip fitted in, of course, with the legend of the studio as laboratory or cell, the artist as scientist or anchorite. Mondrian felt it mattered that an artist should present himself in a manner appropriate to his artistic aims. A photograph of him taken in 1908 shows a bearded floppy-haired Victorian man of sensibility. A photograph of 1911 shows a twentieth-century technologist, cleanshaven with centre parting and brilliantined hair; the spectacles were an inevitable accessory. Soft and hairy becomes hard and smooth; one of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green fields intolerable. The loneliness of the artificial tulip with its painted leaves might seem to suggest that flora were admitted grudgingly, one plant being the next best thing to none. But it probably meant the opposite of that - was probably a sign, not of Mondrian's having become a different person, but of his having remained the same. When Mondrian had painted flowers, he almost invariably painted one chrysanthemum, one amaryllis, one tiger lily. His most personal paintings of trees are paintings of one tree; of architecture, are paintings of a lighthouse or a single windmill or an isolated church - a solitary tower, often with its entrances as if blocked, like a fortress, refusing disruption of its monolithic intactness, its immaculate otherness, its self-sufficient singularity. Likewise the early romantic landscapes are rarely at all panoramic: they usually take in something like a couple of cows and a tree, three or four trees in a row, a group of farmhouses. And the tendency to concentrate attention inwards persists into the paintings and drawings of the sea Of 1914-15: half of them are of a Pier and Ocean. The ocean is not oceanic, consuming, illimitable: it radiates from a vertical motif representing a man-made projection - like the towers jutting into the sky. Only the composition is no longer centripetal. The pluses and minuses of the sea don't converge upon the pier: they do radiate outwards, are then checked by the containing oval within the rectangle of the page or canvas. These works are, of course, among the key transitional pieces between figuration and non-figuration in Mondrian. In the tensions they exhibit between centripetal and centrifugal, they are also representative of his transition from centripetal to centrifugal design. In Mondrian fi guration is equated with the centripetal, nonfiguration with the centrifugal. (It is interesting that an artist so exceptionally given to symmetry in his early days should so rigorously exclude it in his maturity.) Focusing inwards is rejected by Mondrian when the object is rejected. Focusing inwards is involvement. Involvement with objects entails suffering. In the paintings of chrysanthemums - that most centripetal of flowers - there is a sense of concentration that is agonising. It is as if the artist were trying to hypnotise himself by gazing into this flower and as if he were trying to hypnotise the flower into suspending its process