President and Fellows of Harvard College

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

Surface as Psyche: A Progress Report

Author(s): Harry Cooper
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 36, Factura (Autumn, 1999), pp. 253-262
Published by: President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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 Surface as psyche
A progress report
HARRY COOPER
Let us picture a living organism in its most simplified
possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance
that is susceptible to stimulation. ... It would be easy to
suppose, then, that as a result of the ceaseless impact of
external stimuli on the surface of the vesicle, its substance
to a certain depth may have become permanently
modified, so that excitatory processes run a different
course in it from what they run in the deeper layers. A
crust would thus be formed which would at last have been
so thoroughly "baked through" by stimulation that it would
present the most favorable possible conditions for the
reception of stimuli. . . .
But we have more to say of the living vesicle with its
receptive cortical layer. This little fragment of living
substance is suspended in the middle of an external world
charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be
killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not
provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires
the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have
the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some
degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special
envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. . . .
This sensitive cortex, however, . . . also receives
excitations from within. . . . Towards the outside it is
shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation
impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the
inside there can be no such shield; the excitations in the
deeper layers extend into the system directly and in
undiminished amount, in so far as certain of their
characteristics give rise to feelings in the pleasure
unpleasure series.
Sigmund Freud1
It is almost impossible to break the flow of argument,
to interrupt the figure and the stream of subfigures
(vesicle, crust, cortex, shield, envelope, membrane) by
which Freud elaborates the development and
functioning of the ego in its relation to the external
My thanks to Yve-Alain Bois, Sarah Boxer, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth,
James Cuno, Henry Lie, and (for his tireless dedication to this project)
Ron Spronk.
1. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans, and ed.
James Strachey (1920; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp.
28-32.
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world, on the one hand, and to the id (introduced, with
Freud's emphasis, by the word "within"), on the other?
almost impossible to bring to an end the writing lesson
constituted by the mere act of transcribing Freud's prose
from chapter four of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
But let us break off the fascination with Freud's
"picture," or suspend it, and cast our minds onto
another surface of pleasure and pain, that of a real
picture, a painted canvas. If Freud had spent his early
years studying the conservation of pictures rather than
biology, he might have seized on an entirely different
metaphorics for mental functioning and its
stratifications, or at least added another figure to his
arsenal. For whatever else it does, a picture, like an
organism, must protect itself both from the world and
from itself: the traditional ways of applying oil paint to
canvas, from the sizing of the canvas with glue to the
application of lean (less oily) paint before fat paint to the
final varnish, have as their goal the protection of the
painting from stimuli both external and internal.
This technology worked too well for painting to have
suggested itself to Freud as a model for the riven and
conflicted workings of the psyche. The inherent
problems of the medium?for example, the
simultaneous necessity that paint adhere to the canvas
and the canvas be protected from the paint?had been
solved, and if one followed correct procedures, the
package would stay sealed for hundreds of years,
presenting an unbroken surface to the play of light and
its reception by the eye. Of course, the periodic
introduction of untried materials, for example, the use of
bitumen in the nineteenth century, occasionally led to
intractable problems. But it was in the twentieth
century?when painters who had shrugged off the
burdens of depiction began to demand new things of the
painting as a material object, to make ends of the old
means of impasto and smoothness, opacity and
transparency, matteness and gloss?that the most serious
cracks began to appear in the technology of oil painting.
Piet Mondrian had been traditionally trained at the
Amsterdam academy before he went to Paris to become
a modernist, and he remained deeply concerned with
254 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999
the stability and resilience of his paintings. But his
practice of building a painting gradually from rather
thick, opaque layers or couches (the French word, with
its associations of going to bed and giving birth, best
conveys the care involved) got him into trouble.
Traditional practice prescribes a basic choice: either
paint quickly enough that one application does not
begin to dry before the next one is applied (and scrape
the first layer away if it has begun to dry), or make sure
one layer is completely dry before the next one is
applied lest the shrinking of the underlying layer as it
dries cause cracks in the layers already on top.
Mondrian made the mistake of painting slowly but not
slowly enough: he did not realize how long it took thick
paint to dry fully, and so most of his paintings have
large cracks. (They have other kinds of cracks, too, due
to normal drying, aging, changes in canvas tension,
climatic factors, handling accidents, and so on.)
These cracks developed soon enough that Mondrian
noticed them (as we know from his letters) and
sometimes touched them up himself. And he came to
believe that a thicker painting would be more resilient?
precisely the wrong conclusion, given his technique.
Mondrian's last completed painting, Broadway Boogie
Woogie, exemplifies the result of his too-hasty layering.
It recently required restoration to hide red paint, still not
dry after fifty years, slowly oozing up through cracks in
the surface layer of yellow paint. What kept the particles
of red paint wet was the fact that they had been covered
by yellow before they were dry. "Their burial was their
preservation," as Freud wrote in 1909 of the childhood
traumas of the "Rat Man."2
Of course, to suggest that the layers of a painting
correspond to the layers of the psyche, that the red "id"
of Broadway Boogie Woogie is emerging in its yellow
"ego" as a symptom, would be silly?as silly as
suggesting that the conservation problems of the
paintings might be susceptible to the talking cure. But is
it so far-fetched to suppose that a picture might reflect
the psyche of its maker, not just in the aesthetic choices
of color, composition, and so on (an uncontroversial
position) but in the smallest matters of its making?
It is at the level of construction, not composition, in
details normally hidden from view because of either
2. Sigmund Freud, "Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis"
(1909), in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York:
Macmillan, 1963), p. 36.
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their tiny size or their occlusion by other layers of paint
or both, that a psychoanalysis of the specific act of
painting (as distinct from the psychoanalysis of art) can
begin. For if the construction of a painting presents, in a
different register, structural problems remarkably similar
to those that the ego faces in its internal and external
relations, then perhaps the painter cannot help but
symbolically repeat his or her wonted psychological
maneuvers, symptoms, and reaction formations in
constructing the picture. Perhaps this is where the string
of Freud's metaphors finally touches down, on a painted
surface that is at once an analogy of the psyche and its
material trace?a real allegory, to borrow the subtitle of
Courbet's painting "The Artist's Studio."
But how would a psychoanalysis of pictorial
construction proceed? The tools of technical analysis (X
radiography, infrared photography and reflectography,
ultraviolet illumination, and so on) have typically been
used to authenticate and date Old Master pictures and
to study working methods, but not for any deeper
interpretation. Might the microscopic view and cross
sectional sample have a hermeneutic value of their
own, without or before being understood simply as part
of the whole picture or oeuvre or workshop? Could
something seen from so close nonetheless yield an
interpretive perspective?
Mondrian's so-called transatlantic pictures?the
seventeen canvases he sent to New York when he
moved there from London in 1940 and revised for an
exhibition in early 1942?present a ready-made
challenge to technical analysis. For about half of them,
there is a black-and-white photograph of part or all of
the earlier, European state of the picture, whether
propped in the studio or hanging in an exhibition. But
what did the rest of the pictures look like in Europe?
The question has special importance insofar as the
pictures are not just revised but about revision. By
inscribing two dates (for example, 37/42, an
exceptional thing for a painter to do, though not for a
novelist) rather than recording just the year of final
completion, Mondrian suggested that temporality was
crucial to these pictures. In effect, he announced, to
anyone who knew the basic facts of his biography, their
relation to his condition of exile.
Meyer Schapiro is one of the few commentators to
have done anything more than note that Mondrian
added bars of color not entirely bounded by black lines
to register the excitement of Manhattan and boogie
 Cooper: Surface as psyche 255

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Figure 1. Installation photograph, "Cubism and Abstract Art" exhibition, The Museum of Modern Art, New York,
1936. ?2000 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

woogie music. Writing in 1978, Schapiro observed that
the changes made to a vertical-format painting (first
shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 [fig. 1]
and now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
[fig. 2]) have the effect of bringing the two "bays" into
greater balance by implying a rough continuation of
elements across the central white divide of the
composition.3 It occurred to me that this could be
interpreted as Mondrian's attempt to bridge the
disruption of his exile while acknowledging the
necessary imperfection of any such bridge. Mondrian's
obsession with the problems of temporal continuity and
progress, which had been fed by his reading of Hegelian
philosophy, became personal and immediate in New
York. I found support for this quasi-biographical view in
a photograph by Arnold Newman showing Mondrian
posing in his New York studio next to this very painting
in such a way as to force a comparison between his
3. Meyer Schapiro, "Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract
Painting," in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers
(New York: George Braziller, 1978), p. 243.
own body, held rigidly within a rectangle, and the
picture's central divide.
In the other transatlantic pictures, Mondrian used
color to bridge black lines as well as white spaces. For
instance, in Composition with Yellow, Blue, and Red
(1937-1942) at the T?te Gallery, the blue bar at lower
left bridges four black lines, tying the one that was
added in New York (at left) to the other three, while the
blue and red bars, taken together, bridge the white
spaces in between them by implying a line of latitude
across the gap. But in the last three pictures Mondrian
revised, for a 1943 exhibition, he added color elements
to subvert rather than support the black-line structure,
emphasizing the doubleness and discontinuity of the
works rather than their integrity. In Place de la
Concorde, for example, the colored blocks and bars
snake along the bottom and up and down the left side
of the image, confusing the ranks of the black lines,
offering false extensions and sprung rhythms. A dialectic
of the fractured whole or interrupted continuum was
increasingly at play in the series of pictures, as it was in
Mondrian's contemporaneous writings. And that

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256 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999

HhH'^&&*^*&yM\?:

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Figure 2. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1935
1942. Oil on canvas, 101 x 51 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. ?2000 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Beeldrecht, Amsterdam.

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dialectic was resolved, or unresolved, in the radical
deconstruction effected by Victory Boogie Woogie,
Mondrian's unfinished last painting.
This was the state of my thinking in the spring of
1998, when I published an article on the subject.4 At
the same time, my Harvard colleague Ron Spronk, a
historian of early Netherlandish painting with a strong
interest in the interpretation of technical data, suggested
we collaborate on a research project and exhibition
involving the analysis of paintings by Mondrian, and I
proposed the transatlantic paintings.5 To prepare the
exhibition, for the spring of 2001, we traveled to ten
cities in Europe and America to analyze pictures in the
conservation laboratories of their respective museums.
My initial hope?that our detective work would
reveal first states for all the paintings, thereby allowing
me to test my theory about Mondrian's revisions against
the whole series?proved vain. At best, we arrived at a
small universe of possible first states for any given
picture. A variety of factors muddied the waters. In these
pictures, Mondrian almost always removed old paint
rather than painting over it, thus leaving negative rather
than positive traces for our detection. When he did
overpaint, he did it thickly, creating a surface difficult
for infrared light to penetrate; and his intuitive, on
canvas mode of composition (the number of charcoal
contours in unfinished paintings recalls the most
pondered sketches by C?zanne) made it hard to
disentangle one campaign of revisions from another. In
many cases, such conservation treatments as lining,
mounting, retouching, and varnishing further obscured
the object of our desire.
But some analytical techniques were surprisingly
successful. Despite Mondrian's habit of removing paint
instead of overpainting, microscopic inspection often
revealed traces of earlier colors along the edges of black
lines. (In scraping away a field of color, Mondrian was
apparently wary of damaging its bordering black line, so
his scraping stopped just short of the field's edge.) And
the exact superimposition of X-radiographs with
infrared, ultraviolet, and ordinary light photographs on
the computer, using a technique developed at Harvard's
Straus Center for Conservation, gave a kind of
4. Harry Cooper, "Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie," October 84
(1998):119-142.
5. "Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings" will be shown at the
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, April
28-July 22, 2001.
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Cooper: Surface as psyche 25 7
transparency to Mondrian's process, revealing slight
changes in structure that would otherwise have escaped
the closest observation. (These findings will be
presented in detail in the exhibition catalogue and a
computer kiosk near the gallery.)
In some cases, the changes we found supported my
hunches. Our discovery that Mondrian took pains to
widen slightly the central divide of the San Francisco
picture suggests (if in fact this revision was done in New
York, not before) that he wished to emphasize the
difficulty of bridging the gap that had come to represent
his exile, even as his marginal additions on either side
visually narrowed it. There were other confirming
observations as well; but the process of evaluating new
data against an old theory did not seem to do justice to
the data itself or, for that matter, to the strangeness of
the experience of looking at pictures so closely. The new
observations were so different in kind from those that
had gone into my existing thinking about the series as to
require a new outlook altogether. My first hypothesis
had been based on one angle of vision, the usual
perspective of a viewer scanning pictures from a
comfortable distance. But now our project had us
looking down cracks and interfaces to discover hidden
layers. And it had us studying that other thickness of a
painting, never visible in reproductions?its profile or
"tacking margin," which Mondrian's idiosyncratic frames
left partly visible. In short, we were peering vertically,
not gazing laterally.
This angle of vision revealed a striking constant in the
pictures belonging to the transatlantic series. Their black
lines went right around the edge, as if wrapping the
surface tightly, and this impression was heightened by
the fact that, on the surface, they lay deeper than the
fields of white and colored paint surrounding them.
Such thoughts, compounded of technical observations
and figurative impressions, demanded to be pursued.
Our original goal had been to use the "vertical" data to
help develop a complete picture of the first state of each
painting; why not also attend to what the vertical
dimension might reveal on its own? Why rush to
normalize that unusual gaze, to return the vertical to the
lateral, the detail to the whole?
This question occurred to me not in front of a
painting but afterwards, while looking at color slides we
had taken through the microscope to record our
observations (fig. 3). These uncanny topographies
presented a veritable playing field for free association,
especially when isolated and framed by the camera; and
258 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999

Figure 3. Micrograph (25x) of Piet Mondrian, Trafalgar Square, 1939-1943. Oil on canvas, 145.2 x
120 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William A. M. Burden.
Micrograph ?2000 The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

the voice I heard in my ear was that of Freud, in
particular, the passage I quoted as an epigraph, with its
memorable figure of a baked crust barely containing its
own body. This text, it seemed to me, gave voice to the
seductive play of paint under the microscope, the frozen
struggle of layer against layer. But was there more to it
than that? Did the relationship of text and surface go
beyond a poetic kinship?
To mediate between the painted surface seen with
instruments and a scientifically minded psychoanalysis,
I took a concept that "run[s] through the whole of
Freud's writings,"6 from his earliest scientistic models to
his last philosophical speculations, that of "binding."
Drawing on his early work with Josef Breuer, Freud
theorized that the psyche's prime directive was to
neutralize the charge of dynamic energy within it,
whether by releasing the energy immediately in pleasure
or binding it in anxiety, repression, symptom formation,
repetition compulsion, ego interests, sublimation?the
"anti-cathexes" that return the psyche to a state of
relative stability. This is the idea that Freud was referring
to when he wrote (in a passage I omitted from the first
paragraph of the epigraph), "This picture [of the ego as a
stratified membrane] can be brought into relation with
Breuer's distinction between quiescent (or bound) and
mobile cathectic energy in the elements of the psychical
systems. . . ."7 But brought into relation how?
The answer, which Freud does not explicitly provide,
is cell biology. Freud's governing figure in the epigraph
is a "living organism in its most simplified possible
form," a single cell; and the model behind his concept
of the ego as a manager of stimuli is the nerve cell,
which must dispose of excitations across its membrane.
It was the neurological turn of mind, then, that allowed
Freud to reconcile or "bring into relation" the figures of
the membrane and binding in chapter four of Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, to move, so to speak, from a

6. As James Stratchey writes in a footnote to Beyond the Pleasure

Principle (see note 1 ), p. 4 n. 2. 7. Freud (see note 1), pp. 29-30.

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 Cooper: Surface as psyche 259

Figure 4. Detail photograph (canvas edge) of Piet Mondrian, Composition No.

12, 1937-1942. Oil on canvas, 62 x 60.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa, purchased 1970. Photo: ?2000 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

noun (membrane) to a verb (binding)?from what he
called, at the start of the book, a topographic model of
the psyche to a dynamic one. So that by the end of the
chapter in question, the wonderfully concrete model of
the psyche as a stratified membrane has given way
entirely to the more abstract and flexible one of energy,
bound and unbound.
What Mondrian's transatlantic pictures do with Freud
is to make the figure of binding concrete again, to
return it to the membrane or surface. This is clear in a
close-up photograph of the picture at the National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, showing the lower edge of
the work seen at a sharp angle (fig. 4), which reveals
something characteristic of all the paintings in the series
(except those in which invasive conservation treatment
has damaged the edges). The black lines wrap around
the edge of the surface, as if pulling it tight, and are
then wrapped themselves by a piece of white-painted
tape going around the tacking margin of the painting.
The ostensible purpose of this tape (imperfectly
achieved) is to hide the nails that secure the canvas to
the stretcher, but the deeper function is to complete a
visual binding of the surface.
Mondrian's concern to preserve the physical well
being of his pictures, to tie them up in a package that
would not (as I said earlier in discussing the technology
of oil painting) come unbound in hundreds of years, is
thus inseparable from his production of the compelling
illusion of a bound surface. Mondrian worked hard to
strengthen that illusion, reworking the white fields to
give them a higher, more textured relief (fig. 5), thus
throwing the black lines into nonrelief, making them
seem, by contrast, tautly incised, set into the image as if
by their own tension. And this appearance is
compounded by the way the black lines read as a
single, slick stroke, unlike the rough, frictional surfaces
of the adjacent whites.
This means that in order to add black lines to these
pictures in New York or to extend existing ones,
Mondrian had to scrape away the area of old white
paint where the black line was going to go?an arduous
task that sometimes resulted in the thinning of the

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 260 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999

Figure 5. Detail photograph (raking light) of Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 12, 1937-1942. Oil on
canvas, 62 x 60.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1970. Photo: ?2000 National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

canvas itself. His obsession with achieving a specific
topography extended to the color areas as well. A
microscopic photograph of the picture in the Munson
Williams-Proctor Institute at Utica (fig. 6) shows that
the white paint has been removed, its vertical
brushstrokes sharply cut off to expose a layer of primed
canvas, and that the red field has been cautiously inset
in the cleared area, so as not to touch, let alone
overlap, the field of white. As my colleague and I
looked even closer (this would be much clearer in a
color photograph), we could see a graphite line drawn
on the priming ground between the two fields?an
unnecessary boundary (given the sharply defined white
edge) whose presence only testifies further to
Mondrian's attempt to control the red field in both its
elevation, because going into the dry white paint would
also mean lying above it, and its extent.
But Mondrian made rules to break them, and in the
other red field he added to the painting in Utica, this is
exactly what he did (fig. 7). Apparently, here he was not
satisfied with the extent of the area he had cleared for
this red, and so he let it overflow its white banks. This
can be seen as a case of lateral, compositional
requirements taking priority over vertical, constructional
ones. But it can also be seen, together with the
contrasting case of the other red field, as embodying a
conflict between the damming and overflow, or the
binding and release, of pictorial
***
energies.
I had already been thinking of these pictures in
neurological terms before the laboratory work began. In
the October article, I saw the full-length red lines that
first appear in New York (1941-1942) as "a faster firing
nerve cell on the surface of Mondrian's art," and I saw
the added color bars in the T?te painting not just as
"bridges" but as "binders."8 If I had been unconsciously
applying Freud's figures for the psyche to the surface of
paintings all along, why not now take the hint and
connect surface and psyche directly? And what better
basis than the concept of binding, where Freud's
topographical and dynamic models meet? Such would
8. Cooper (see note 4), pp. 131, 137.

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 Cooper: Surface as psyche 261

Figure 6. Micrograph (16x) of Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 7, 1937-1942. Oil on canvas, 80.5 x
62.2 cm. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York. Micrograph: ?2000
Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University Art Museums.

have been my train of thought anyway, if it had
proceeded clearly and consciously.
The impulse toward compositional binding I had
observed in the series before our project started turned
out to be grounded in the literal construction of the
pictures, and this was no great coincidence. Why
shouldn't a painter construct as he composes, compose
as he constructs? Indeed, because these are still pictures,
no matter how abstract and concrete, it is impossible to
separate the literal from the figurative, construction from
composition. Every constructive act, we have seen, has
its figurative or illusionistic effect, or rather, is always
already an illusion. An interpretation of facture is thus
not necessarily any nearer to some ultimate truth or
ground than is one based on composition; it simply
responds to a new angle of vision.
That angle, in turn, suggests a new way of viewing
the psychic and biographical deposits in the pictures.
The concept of exile I had applied to Mondrian's
compositional bridging never quite seemed to me to fit
his case. Although it took a world war to propel him
there, Mondrian had always dreamed of going to New
York, for him the ultimate metropolis and the seat of
what he called "the new life." He left little behind in the
way of family or friends or (being a staunch
internationalist) patriotic ties. In short, the typical
problems of the exile?displacement, nostalgia, trauma,
various kinds of loss?were not Mondrian's. He was less
an exile than simply an immigrant. And the task he
faced was roughly the same one that had prompted him
to learn a new language and change the spelling of his
last name (dropping the double a) when he moved from
Amsterdam to Paris in 1912. He wanted to assimilate.
But by the time he reached Manhattan, he was nearly
seventy and set in his ways. Rather than assimilate
himself to a new environment, he attempted to
assimilate it to himself, to bind its energies into the
fabric of his work.
Mondrian's reaction to the rhythmic densities of
boogie-woogie music ("enormous, enormous," he called
it) was to absorb this destabilizing excitation into his art,
even if it meant destabilizing his art in the end. He
added unbounded color planes to the transatlantic
pictures to give them "more boogie woogie," as he

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262 RES 36 AUTUMN 1999

Figure 7. Micrograph (27x) of Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 7, 1937-1942. Oil on canvas, 80.5 x
62.2 cm. Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York. Micrograph: ?2000
Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University Art Museums.

said.9 And his addition of black lines exacerbated the
optical illusion of a flicker at their intersections, a
neurological effect (appropriately enough) caused by the
mutual inhibition of horizontal- and vertical-sensing
cells in the visual cortex. It was this effect that Mondrian
forestalled in Broadway Boogie Woogie by breaking the
solid lines into a mosaic of small blocks, which only
opened the picture to another dimension of visual
complexity and stimulation.
A photograph taken by Fritz Glarner of Mondrian
placing needle on turntable to play one of his boogie
woogie records captures, in all its glancing angles,
Mondrian's excitement about this music. If we put this
photograph next to Newman's highly contained and
framed image taken only a year before, the contrast
between them can stand for the problem of assimilation,
or counter-assimilation, that I have been trying to
9. Mondrian's comment is reported by Sidney Janis, "School of
Paris Comes to U.S.," Decision 2 (November-December 1941);
reprinted in Mondrian in the Sidney Janis Family Collections, New
York, exh. cat. (Haags Gemeentemuseum, 1988), p. 10.
describe. To put it simply, one photo shows the artist
binding energy, the other shows him (as the needle
drops) releasing it.
To move from a psychoanalysis of the surface back to
a psychoanalysis of the artist, however, is not easy. In
Freud's model, the challenge to the psyche was not
primarily external but internal. Freud (as he himself put
it) turned the old, naive shock theory of neurosis inside
out. So to understand Mondrian's counter-assimilation of
New York in fully psychoanalytic terms, one would need
to show what inner needs were triggered by the
experience of the city, what drives seized on boogie
woogie as their excuse for expression. But the paucity of
biographical information about Mondrian makes such
analysis even harder than usual. So perhaps it is best to
stop, or pause, where Freud began his fourth chapter:
"What follows is speculation, often far-fetched
speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss
according to his individual predilection."10
10. Freud (see note 1), p. 26.

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