22

  ROMANCE OF THE GRID

 
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow

 

 

 

 

  Piet Mondrian, one of the heroes of modern art, lived as simply as a

  monk, with few possessions or needs aside from his work, to which he

  was passionately devoted. Modest and reserved, he never sought

  material success and was sometimes destitute. Pursuing his creative

  experiments with the methodical persistence of a scientist, he

  developed a unique style of radical abstraction that is now known
around the world.

 
Mondrian was born in 1872 into a pious Dutch Calvinist family.

  His father, an authoritarian schoolmaster, opposed his desire to

  become an artist and refused to finance his training. At age thirty-

  seven in Amsterdam, Mondrian joined the Theosophical Society, a

  mystical movement that fused Eastern and Western religions. His

  departure from his father’s strict Calvinism, with its ceaseless battle of

  good and evil, can be sensed in this euphoric passage from

  Mondrian’s notebooks: “Each man, every thing, everything in this

  world has its reason for being. Everything is beautiful, everything is
good, everything is necessary…”

 
At the start, Mondrian was heavily influenced by his countryman

  Vincent van Gogh, as well as by the Barbizon school of French

  landscape painters. Mondrian’s subjects, treated in somber hues, were

  everyday Dutch scenes like farmhouses, fields, and windmills. Over

  the following decades, Mondrian

  Piet
 Mondrian,
 Composition
 with
  would undergo one of the most
Red,
 Blue,
 and
 Yellow.
 1930.
 Oil
 

  on
 canvas.
 20
 in.
 x
 20
 in.
 
astonishing transformations of style in

  Kunsthaus,
 Zurich,
 Switzerland.
  the history of art. Because so much of
his work survives, we can follow his thrilling trajectory point by point
from realism to abstraction. Under the impact of Cubism, when he
was already in his forties, his trees turned into spindly networks,
mirrored in water. His colors lightened, and recognizable objects
gradually vanished. His design became a mathematical spread of dots
and dashes, until his famous signature style suddenly appeared: a grid
of color blocks and black lines, intersecting at right angles.
Mondrian’s evolution never stopped; even when he died at age
seventy-one in New York, his black lines had become shimmering
segments of festive color.
Mondrian belonged to a group of avant-garde Dutch artists and
architects called De Stijl (The Style), after the name of their magazine.
De Stijl had no meetings, and some members hardly knew each other.
Their 1918 manifesto was printed in four languages to dramatize their
vision of an “international unity in life, art, and culture,” opposing the
bankrupt nationalism that had led to World War I. De Stijl called for
a marriage of the fine arts with the applied arts, a progressive goal of
the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, which sought to
return quality workmanship to industrialized Britain…
Mondrian’s classic work embodies De Stijl’s major principals:
primary colors; asymmetry; geometric form; and horizontals and
verticals, banishing the curve. De Stijl’s minimalist and utopian
doctrine had great impact across Europe, notably in Germany, where
the Bauhaus school published Mondrian’s writings. De Stijl’s
influence could be seen in Walter Gropius’s efficient, cube-like
designs for student and worker housing as well as in grand monuments
of the International Style, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and
Philip Johnson’s glass-walled Seagram Building office tower in
Manhattan. Mies coined the motto of minimalism: “Less is more.”
Gerrit Rietveld’s starkly structural De Stijl furniture inspired Marcel
Breuer’s chrome-plated steel-tube chairs, which are still marketed.
Rietveld’s idea for cheap “crate” furniture, boxed for home assembly
with nuts and bolts, has been popularized globally by IKEA, a Swedish
firm reflecting De Stijl’s massive success in Scandinavia…
In a long essay in the first issue of De Stijl, Mondrian set forth his
creed of “new image creation” (nieuwe beelding). Awkwardly
translated into French as néo-plasticisme, the term ended up in
English as the ugly and much-parodied “neoplasticism.” This became
Mondrian’s third religion, supplanting Theosophy. He broke with De
Stijl in the mid-1920s when a colleague dared paint a diagonal – which
Mondrian regarded as heresy. His faith in the power of art to
transform character and society sustained him through years of
rejection and poverty. When his abstract paintings were first
exhibited, reviewers called him “mad,” “a sick, abnormal man.”
Mondrian’s abstraction, reinforced by his neutral titles, has
sometimes been dismissed as mere engineering, cold and clinical.
The smooth adoption of his look by high fashion (as in Yves Saint
Laurent’s epochal shift dresses of 1965) raised further questions about
his stature and significance. At the same time, many fervent
proponents of abstraction have reduced Mondrian’s paintings to
exercises in pure form and denied there is any symbolism or higher
meaning in his mature style. But in his copious essays and letters,
Mondrian explicitly identified his horizontal lines with repose, the sea,
and the feminine principle and his vertical lines with action,
spirituality, and the masculine principle…
Mondrian’s abstract period began in 1918 with a checkerboard of
sixteen by sixteen squares. Although he tried oval and diamond-
shaped canvases, he settled on squares and rectangles, encouraging a
dialogue between his outer edge and the inset blocks. He kept
altering the size and position of his color planes until he achieved one
of the great breakthroughs of modern art – balanced asymmetry,
which he identified with freedom. Since antiquity, most Western art
and architecture had been centrally focused and symmetrical,
symbolizing order and perfection. The Impressionists, inspired by
Japanese art and candid photography, had broken from that.
Mondrian’s more systematic asymmetry would heavily influence
modern interior design and typography, already in flux with Futurism,
Dada, and Russian Constructivism.
 At first, Mondrian used blended colors against a gray background;
then he shifted to bold primary colors against white. For the rest of
his career, his only colors were red, blue, and yellow. He scrapped
chiaroscuro, the shading by which Renaissance and Baroque painters
created volume. Despite his root as a nature painter, Mondrian came
to hate green: he pulled the shade down on trains and demanded to
switch chairs at cafes to avoid seeing trees. He built up his white areas
so that they did not recede, falsely implying depth. Everything for him
had to operate on and across the surface. What reproductions cannot
catch is the texture of Mondrian’s brushstrokes, grooving his whites in
contrasting directions.
Mondrian’s black lines became more prominent in the 1920s, with
horizontals usually thicker than verticals. He said his black lines were
“deadly” until he glossed them with shiny varnish. Structure always
came first: he sketched lines in charcoal on paper or canvas and added
color later. Mondrian’s lines hypothetically shoot out into infinite
space, creating a charged new relationship between a painting and its
surroundings. Hence his revolutionary step of discarding the frame,
that heavy, ornate golden rim of traditional portable paintings.
Thanks to Mondrian’s innovation, every department store today sells
narrow black frames and frameless blocks for mounting art and
photographs.
Clarity of edge was crucial to Mondrian’s aesthetic. He used a
ruler and strips of transparent paper tape but mainly relied on his own
eye and “intuition.” He made constant minute adjustments,
sometimes no bigger than a half centimeter. In the 1930s, he
decreased the size of his color planes and increased the number of
black lines, producing an animated rhythm. But his primary goal was
always alignment and balance, as typified by Composition with Red,
Blue, and Yellow, dating from 1930, midway through his abstract
period. The painting consists of seven rectangles of varied sizes evenly
threaded by uniform black lines, except for two short, fat horizontals.
The vivid area of red is unusually large, looking forward to Mark
Rothko’s hovering color-field paintings, which the artist too described
in spiritual terms. While Mondrian’s painting is square, the red patch
deceptively is not: it’s very slightly wider than it is tall. In a letter to the
patron who commissioned this painting, Mondrian identified his reds
with the “real,” the earthly realm. Red here is a glorious blast, filling
its broad plane, while touches of cerebral blue and vital yellow
discreetly comment from the margins.
Despite their sharp lines, Mondrian’s geometries are never rigid or
oppressive. His paintings have a serene, contemplative stillness.
Motion is supplied by the eye, which roves from point to point and
finds refreshment in the intricate pathways and juxtapositions. Despite
the apparent simplicity of his pictures, it has proved virtually
impossible to fake a Mondrian. Working out the finest details of
proportion and transition, he applied up to seven layers of pigment,
shaved lines off at the outer edge, and faded out his colors near the
lines, producing a subtle flickering at the crossings, like a mirage.
Mondrian’s rectilinear paintings have been compared to the Dutch
landscape, with its flatlands and canals; to medieval stained-glass
windows; to Dutch tiling and brickwork; and to blueprints and floor
plans, in keeping with de Stijl’s enthusiasm for architecture and town
planning. Mondrian’s reduction of content and elimination of the
figure have also been seen as a modernist version of the iconoclastic
Protestant “plain style.” Was the purity of Mondrian’s grid a strategy
to control emotion and desire in his austere studio? His work was a
process of discovery where color and form were explored for their
own sake – a step toward painting that is “about” painting. But
Mondrian’s floating, weightless images vibrate with an internal drama.
Do his black lines define and limit his colors? Or is color, like a
divine spark, an autonomous force pushing its way toward life?
Paglia, Camille. Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. Pantheon
Books. New York: 2012