piet mondrian by spencer finch
Georges Duthuit: “ Why is he obliged to paint?”
Samuel Beckett: “I don’t know.”
GD: “Why is he helpless to paint?”
SB: “Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.”
GD: “And the result, you say, is art of a new order?”A friend of mine recounts the story of his college art history professor who introduced the work of Piet Mondrian by projecting a slide of the Dutch countryside near the Hague, where topography approaches zero. The implication, of course, is that Mondrian’s extreme rectolinephilia was a function of his environment—his paintings, in spite of their putative abstraction, are inevitably informed by History. I am by nature skeptical of this stripe of historical determinism. In fact, until I learned recently that Jackson Pollock grew up next door to a spaghetti factory, I tended to agree with Dr. Freud, who argued that what comes out is more than likely to be the opposite of what goes in. That is to say, I would not be surprised to learn little Piet spent his formative years in the Himalayas.
Regardless of which bearded nineteenth-century über-thinker you wish to side with on this matter, the work of Mondrian provides a rich opportunity for thinking about abstract art and its relationship to history. Mondrian serves as the perfect test case, since Kandinsky inspires only ennui (pardon my French) and Malevich eventually chickened out, or read Tolstoy, and began painting peasants. And certainly in terms of his impact on popular culture, Mondrian is to abstract painting what Henry Ford is to the automobile. (“Any color you want, as long as it’s black.”)
Mondrian’s early representational works reveal their historical context in two distinct ways: through their obvious positioning within the historical styles of Post-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism; and through their depiction of actual places in history—windmills, Parisian facades, and such. As Mondrian moved increasingly toward pure abstraction, the second of these, the depictive connection to the world (the subject), faded, and we are left with only the style to serve as a historical marker. Among some of the proto-neo-plastic works, there is a different second element of history: the optical blinking effect of the “flickering” pictures (e.g. #84 checkerboard with light colors), which exist in the real time of the viewer in the way that Reinhardt’s black paintings do. By the time Mondrian reaches cruising altitude with neo-plasticism, however, we are left only with the “timelessness of Modernism.”
It is peculiar that today we view high “timeless” modernism, whether it be the work of T.S. Eliot or Piet Mondrian, as completely estranged from society and history, when in fact these artists made enormous claims for art’s impact on both. Their beliefs, in retrospect, reveal incredible naiveté about the power of art as well as about the ways society permits art to exist. As such, Mondrian serves as an object lesson in the intentional fallacy: anyone who thinks that Mondrian’s dreamy utopian claims have anything to do with his paintings’ meaning is surely deluded. More than any other case that I can think of, here the artist’s intention is largely irrelevant. To understand these works we need only heed Wittgenstein’s dictum: “The meaning is the use.”
The “use” of Mondrian’s neo-plastic paintings is to create a visual harmony. In this way, they aspire to the condition of music, which alone among the arts exists in a purely abstract place, outside space, and to a certain degree, outside time. It is a desirable place to go, of course, but an absurd destination for visual art. I remember once in art school a classmate of mine displayed an abstract ceramic object that looked vaguely like a yam and played gospel music during the critique. He explained that his goal as a sculptor was to create a three-dimensional equivalent of music. Of course this failed, as all abstract art fails in this regard, because art, like human beings, has a mortal coil, which traps it in time and space. This is not to say that art can not convey musicality. Mondrian’s little islands of neo-plastic harmony do in fact achieve a balance, a rhythm, a spacing that seem musical in some way. But these painting are not symphonies, or even jingles; they are simply illustrations of a theory of harmony. The charming classicism of Mondrian’s neo-plastic pictures goes nowhere and leaves the viewer bored and rather unsated. Fortunately, the old Dutchman wheels out a whopper of a dessert cart in the last gallery.
While I’m blathering on about history, I might as well yank out that old hobbyhorse of historical materialism–the dialectic–since for the moment it serves my purpose. If we view Mondrian’s early representational work as thesis, and the purely abstract neo-plastic work as antithesis, the final New York work (behold: spirit and matter are one!) makes a pretty compelling synthesis. The final paintings (I am thinking of broadway boogie woogie particularly) do not merely return to the real time of the “flicker” paintings, but move beyond that to represent the present (our past) in a new and exciting way. Here, Mondrian abandons the timelessness of Modernism and embraces the actual time of war, urban decay, and jazz. His days as an illustrator of musical effect are over; here he sings the song of the city.
This achievement locates Mondrian weirdly as post-modern, placing him in my mind alongside W. H. Auden, who himself abandoned Eliot’s imagined wasteland in order to “rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.” broadway boogie woogie reflects the exuberance, the energy and the hope of the real, complex, modern city. Unlike the flat European cityscapes of Mondrian’s early days, the New York pictures depict the way the city interacts with people. It is about how I feel maybe twice a year, when the city, this city, seems to be the only place in the world where one can be completely human, where the full richness of civilization is made possible. This approach is neither utopian nor is it pragmatic: it is aesthetic, in the broadest sense of the word. This use is a more appropriate and satisfying one for painting, and that is one reason why the final pictures are so meaningful.
I admit that the installation of the show fosters exactly this kind of “onward and upward” reading. The house style at MoMA, of course, is one of inexorable linear development. The show begins with the early, undistinguished landscapes and ends with the unfinished but superb victory boogie woogie. This method is fine as a convention for hanging, but it makes it very difficult to move back and forth through the oeuvre. I always feel that if I backtrack, the ghost of Alfred Barr will appear and strike me on the heinie with an Endless Column: “Forward! Forward!” It is worth swimming against the tide, though, especially to return to the gallery of unfinished paintings, which in many ways is the most rewarding room of the whole show.
A more troubling form of historicism on display at the museum is the “re-creation” of Mondrian’s last studio. Entire walls adorned with faded color tests were chopped out of Mondrian’s studio on 59th Street and are displayed here like Pompeian frescos, while the master’s brushes rest under plexiglas nearby. A stack of his actual records is here, too, and real jazz plays in the background. Do the binoculars resting by the studio window indicate that Mondrian was more interested in hanky panky than he was in boogie woogie? Perhaps. There is so much of this tchotch around that one could speculate about his life and art for hours. However, this bizarre line of inquiry and the crap that fuels it are so irrelevant I could scream. The whole despicable exercise in biographical determinism makes me want to boogie woogie right down to City Hall and propose an ordinance outlawing this chicanery. Sadly, MoMA is not alone; this dimwitted curatorial tendency is reaching epidemic proportions in this town. I would gladly tolerate the Mondrian highball glasses and hankies in the gift shop if the curators would just refrain from treating the institution like a natural history museum.
Yes, the paintings are quite sufficient in themselves. In fact there are too many of them and too many in very bad shape. It is ridiculous that there has been so much wind about the exquisite brushwork in these paintings when excessive cracking and fading makes many of them painful to look at. Probably a third of these pictures are severely beaten up, suggesting either that Mondrian’s chemistry was off or that he was popular among collectors with a predilection for domestic disputes.
Whatever the reasons for the shortcomings, this show ultimately provides a deeply affecting experience. After surviving the tedious galleries of neo-plastic monotony, one can not help but feel that old Piet came out the other end with art of a new order. He became a painter of his time whose work still holds remarkable poignancy for our time, especially if you happen to live in the space of New York City. One steps back out onto 53rd Street feeling one’s perspective somehow shifted. Nothing to paint and nothing to paint with, indeed.
Spencer Finch
Brooklyn, New York
1995