Piet Mondrian 1870-1944: MoMA • New York, New York
The first Mondrian that I saw was a blurry
one. It was an out-of-focus, fuzzy painting, with planes of primary colors
dissolving into the background.
I was then 13 or 14; and although I had just developed nearsightedness,
I was too shy to wear glasses. The few times that I had worn them other
boys made fun of me. So I refused to wear glasses and looked at the world—people
and paintings alike—through squinting eyes. The genius of Mondrian,
as with all the geometric abstractionists, eluded me.
It was years later, after I was older and brave enough to wear glasses,
that I finally saw Mondrian’s paintings as Mondrian intended, with
all of their hard-edged clarity.
So it was with some perverse pleasure that I found many of the paintings
in MoMA’s Mondrian show framed behind glass. It recalled the thrill
that overwhelmed me when I saw my first Mondrian through eyeglasses. But
viewers with perfect vision can also see the paintings as Mondrian saw
them—through Mondrian’s eyes. Like me, Mondrian wore glasses.
So who painted these paintings behind glasses?
From the realist to the abstractionist to the non-objective painter, MoMA
gives us the Mondrian we expect. It is familiar Mondrian— the quintessential
modernist, the logician. No other painter of the modern era developed
as linearly as Mondrian did.
From his early romantic landscapes reminiscent of the Barbizon school,
we see Mondrian developing his art like the unfolding of a well-illustrated
modern art textbook—through Impressionism, through Pointillism, through
Cubism, in that order.