Yuko Otomo: MONDRIAN / FLOWERS (AFTER STEVE)

Piet Mondrian: Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43
oil on canvas, MoMA, NY
photo Mark Harden
(http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/mondrian/)

MONDRIAN / FLOWERS (AFTER STEVE)

a painter must have
lent his ears
to a breath of flowers

(http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/online-reading/small-poems-by-yuko-otomo/)

(Yuko Otomo)

(Steve Dalachinsky)

Mondrian: Selfportrait

Piet Mondrian - Selfportrait, c 1900
oil on canvas mounted on masonite

Can you believe?

(Phillips Collection)

Roy Lichtenstein at MoMA

I would name this Still Life with Mondrian and Hat Carrier. I know that I should not call names on the works of Roy Lichtenstein, but I like enormously his art, so I hope to be forgiven.

(MoMA)

Cézanne and Beyond: Mondrian

Paul Cézanne - Château Noir, 1900-1904
oil on canvas
Washington DC National Gallery of Art

Piet Mondrian - Opposition of Lines, Red and Yellow

By 1920, Mondrian had reduced his pictures to a grid of verticals and horizontals -- the same grid that Cézanne, even at his most disorderly, had relied on 40 years before. Mondrian's flat fields of unmixed color, bordered in black, can also be spotted in details in most of Cézanne's paintings. Mondrian said that Cézanne had discovered that everything has a geometric basis, that painting consists solely of color oppositions. That doesn't even start to explain Cézanne, but it's a fine account of the small part of him that Mondrian drew on (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).


(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)

(Cézanne)

Andre Kertesz, Chez Mondrian

(click here for the Romanian Version)
I went to his studio and instinctively tried to capture in my photographs the spirit of his paintings. He simplified, simplified, simplified. The studio with its symmetry dictated the composition. He had a vase with a flower, but the flower was artificial. It was colored by him to match the studio.
[Andre Kertesz telling the story of this photo]

With their extrem abstractionism the works of Mondrian are very challenging. Can the photos made by Kertesz give us some hints, to progress a little bit in discovering Mondrian's artistic personality? At first view, they are very enigmatic, these photos, Chez Mondrian and at the Modrian's Glasses and Pipe. There are however some very subtle references, and I discovered on the web this essay that made relevant for me the references from the two photos, the thick glasses, the tulip ... one tulip in a vase, an artificial one, its leaves painted white... wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist:


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...

The artificial tulip fitted in, of course, with the legend of the studio as laboratory or cell, the artist as scientist or anchorite... 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 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...

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...

[David Sylvester, About Modern Art]

Andre Kertesz, Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe

Through its simple means, pure abstract art can attain the objectivity of ornament, the purity of geometric construction, the spontaneity of the child. But to be art, the subjective must be manifested through the objective, the apparently mathematical must be free, spontaneity must be consciously expressed.
Piet Mondrian, 1929

I was today at the Phillips Collection to see again the two compositions by Piet Mondrian they have there. Geometrical abstractionism? Minimalism? His compositions consist of rectangular forms of red, yellow, blue, or black, separated by thick, black, rectilinear lines. What is there, beyond this extreme simplicity?

I believe, said Mondrian, it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Mondrian's art is intimately related to his spiritual preoccupations - he was extremely interested in theosophy. Helena Blavatsky (her work had a profound influence over Mondrian) believed that it was possible to attain a knowledge of nature more profound than that provided by empirical means. How?

If we look for the reality, then we should free ourselves from the tyranny of objects - and while the literature language is one of words, the language of music is one of sounds - so, the language of paintings should be one of shapes and colors - to see through them the reality beyond the objects - is that the lesson taught by Mondrian?

The two compositions by Mondrian are to be found usually in the same room with a couple of works by Paul Klee, and a splendid Blue Room, by Picasso.

Only today the arrangement was changed. The Blue Room of Picasso was in another place - and the works of Klee were also moved - there was a Paul Klee exhibition, with works gathered from different American museums and collections.

Today I found Mondrian in the company of Stuart Davis (Still Life with Saw). Two other works of Stuart Davis (Blue Cafe and Corner Cafe) were in another place, near a room devoted entirely to Soutine.

Phillips - the collection of masterpieces in downtown DC - Giacometti, de Kooning, Pollock, Gottlieb, Noland, Modigliani, Matisse, Cezanne (Mont Sainte Victoire, reminding me by some curios association the Mount Fuji of Hokusai), Braque, Rouault (with a portrait of Verlaine), Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard, Redon, Van Gogh ...Siskind, Kline ... a Repentant Saint peter by El Greco, and a replica by Goya ...

And I like John Sloan with his Staten Island ferry-boat.

And the Rothko room ... they had in mind the Mark Rothko - Barnett Newman Chapel from Houston, Texas, that I saw only in albums.

At the entrance of the Collection, a bronze by Arp, a Helmeted Head, with strong influence of Brancusi.

As for Paul Klee, let's talk about him in another post ...

(Phillips Collection)