Mondrian :: Essays Papers

Mondrian Everything was spotless white, the like a lab. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing his heavily glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all in all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and verbalize Ive arranged these to make it more cheerful.Thus Charmion von Wiegand on Mondrians New York studio. In his Paris studio he had used flowers to make it more cheerful. wizard tulip in a vase, an artificial unity, its leaves create white.As Mondrian was in all probability unequal to(p) of irony, the tulip was unlikely to be a wry joke about his having had to arouse flowerpieces between 1922 and 1925 when he no longer wanted to because there were no buyers for his abstracts. It could, of course, have been a revenge for the agony a compromise of that configuration mu st have cost him. More likely, it was simply a go against of the general revulsion against green and growth which made him, when seated at a table beside a window through which trees were visible to him, shake some iodin to change places.The artificial tulip fitted in, of course, with the legend of the studio as laboratory or cell, the artist as scientist or anchorite. Mondrian felt it mattered that an artist should fork over himself in a manner appropriate to his artistic aims. A fritter away of him taken in 1908 shows a bearded floppy-haired Victorian man of sensibility. A photograph of 1911 shows a twentieth-century technologist, cleanshaven with centre parting and brilliantined hair the spectacles were an undeniable accessory. Soft and hairy becomes hard and smooth one of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green fields intolerable.The loneliness of the artificial tulip with its variegated leaves might seem to suggest that flora were admitted grudgingly, one plant existence the next best thing to none. But it probably meant the opposite of that - was probably a sign, not of Mondrians having become a different person, but of his having remained the same. When Mondrian had painted flowers, he almost invariably painted one chrysanthemum, one amaryllis, one tiger lily. His most personal paintings of trees are paintings of one tree of architecture,