Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Yve-Alain Bois

The scholarship on Piet Mondrian has undergone a massive transformation in the last 25 years brought about by a flurry of new publications. These include not only his complete writings, but also a number of detailed studies about specific aspects of his art and theory, as well as various documents such as his correspondence with fellow artists. But this patient research has been dispersed in sometimes obscure journals (often in Dutch), and until now has only reached a circle of specialists. We have to thank Carel Blotkamp, then, for providing an informed synthesis of this accumulated scholarship in his remarkable Mondrian: The Art of Destruction. The release of Blotkamp's book, and of the other books under review here, is of course timed to coincide with the present traveling Mondrian retrospective.

The contrast between current Mondrian scholarship and what preceded it is all the more striking when comparing Blotkamp's book to Meyer Schapiro's 1978 essay on the painter, now reissued by George Braziller. Even when it first appeared, as an essay in the second volume of Schapiro's selected papers, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, it felt a bit dated -- and with good reason: the author tells us in a footnote that its "essential points o back to lectures on Mondrian and other abstract painters in [his] courses on twentieth-century art at Columbia University and in lectures elsewhere since the late 1930s." That some of Schapiro's ideas on Mondrian's work were first formulated while the painter was still alive and much in need of recognition helps understand the essay's oddly apologetic strategy: in order to convince a reluctant audience that Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism did not consist of mere decorative patterns, Schapiro endeavors "to show [the] continuity" of its "pure relations" with "structures of representation in the preceding art" -- to show, in other words that there is nothing fundamentally new or frightening in his work; that between Degas' framing device and Mondrian's use of the diamond format, or between Pissarro's frenetic views of Parisian boulevards and Broadway Boogie Woogie's optical dazzle, there is only a difference of degree, not of nature.

The argument might work as a beginning (and Mondrian himself used it around 1917, only to drop it soon after), but it is also dangerously pernicious, for it evades the real question posed by Mondrian's enterprise -- how can painting signify abstractly? This is not to say that Schapiro himself does not reflect upon the issue (as always, his formal analyses are breathtaking, and no one has more vividly captured the open rhythms of Composition with Lines, 1917, and Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43), but that he does so with all sorts of warnings that seem or should seem unnecessary today. This limpid essay should be cherished for its inimitable pedagogical urge, but it should be approached almost as a historical document, as the best example of a bygone moment in the Mondrian literature.

Blotkamp's Mondrian, in contrast, is clearly abreast of the newer scholarship. I dare say that it is the best book on the artist to date. The two main reasons for this are clearly stated in Blotkamp's introduction: first he has traced Mondrian's development chronologically and avoided "the anachronisms that, in the past, have cropped up in much of the literature" on the artist. Second, paying attention to Mondrian's early remark (1909) that what distinguished his art from that of his colleagues was its assertive relationship with philosophy, Blotkamp takes the painter's theory seriously. These two conditions are in fact interrelated.

Like many of his peers in the first generation of abstract artists, Mondrian felt compelled to write in order to justify his then extremely enigmatic pictorial practice. However, his texts only exceptionally deal directly with the specifics of his painting: the theory of Neo-Plasticism covers all aspects of human activity, painting being only one (the "purest," of course). Yet what Mondrian suddenly has to say about jazz and his "open rhythm" in 1927, for example, is absolutely keyed to the latest development in his art. (One only has to work a bit to find how and why.) Furthermore, Mondrian rarely highlighted the changes that occurred in his all-encompassing theory. Such changes do exist, however, sometimes quite drastic ones (usually following the art but sometimes preceding it, as Blotkamp points out), but, again, to locate them requires devoted attention -- and given Mondrian's turgid style, it comes as no surprise that few readers have paid much attention to these shifts. In short, Mondrian's theoretical corpus has mostly been read as a homogeneous text, not as the stratified and complexly reactive formation it actually is.

A good example is provided by Mondrian's most pedagogical text, "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality," published in De Stijl in 13 installments, which Martin James offers us in a new and more accurate translation than his previous one, done in collaboration with Harry Holtzman (George Braziller). While some of the early sections of this "trialogue," as Mondrian called it, were written in Holland during the late spring of 1919, at a time when he was struggling with the use of a modular allover grid, its last parts were composed in the early summer of 1920, just when he was laying the foundation of Neo-Plasticism. Needless to say, the text echoes the dramatic change that occurred in his painting (notably with regard to color) during this one-year gap, but one can easily miss these echoes if one does not measure them against what remained stable in the theory. It is precisely this degree of acute awareness that prevents The Art of Destruction from falling into the usual traps of the Mondrian literature. Blotkamp does not overburden the book with references to Mondrian's somewhat arcane theory, but when he does refer to a specific passage in Mondrian's writings, it is with a precise knowledge of the issues that were at stake at the moment of its utterance.