66 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
BOOKS
DUTCH MAGUS
Excavating the mysteries of Mondrian’s greatness.
BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
P
ablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are,
to me, the twin groundbreakers of
twentieth-century European pictorial
art: Picasso the greatest painter who mod-
ernized picture-making, and Mondrian
the greatest modernizer who painted.
(They call to mind an earlier brace of
revolutionaries from the southern and
northern reaches of the continent: Giotto,
in Italy, humanized medieval storytell-
ing, and Jan van Eyck, in the Low Coun-
tries, revealed the novel capacities of oil
paints with devout precision.) The case
for Picasso makes itself, with the preter-
natural range of his formal and icono-
graphic leaps—forward, backward, and
sideways—in what painting could be
made, or dared, to do. The brief for Mon-
drian is harder to extract from a cookie-
cutter modernist narrative (“Next slide,
please”) of marching styles, from the art-
ist’s modest-looking Dutch landscapes
in the eighteen-nineties to the riveting
abstractions he made in the decades be-
fore his death, as a wartime expatriate in
New York, in 1944. But style for him,
from first to last, served a quest to man-
ifest soul-deep spirituality as a demon-
strable fact of life. His aim, he said, was
not to create masterpieces, though he
did that, too. It was “to find things out.”
He reduced painting’s uses and proce-
dures, the whats and the hows, to a
rock-bottom why.
“Piet Mondrian: A Life” (Ridinghouse
and Kunstmuseum Den Haag), by the
late Hans Janssen—a former chief cura-
tor at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, with
its matchless collection of the artist’s
work—is the first thorough Mondrian
biography since the nineteen-fifties to
be published in English (translated, from
the Dutch, by Sue McDonnell) and un-
likely to be supplanted. It is audacious in
structure. Janssen, who died last year, at
the age of sixty-seven, drew on his pro-
found knowledge to dispense with strict
chronology and to write not only about
his subject’s prodigious mind and eye but
also from within them. He openly em-
ploys devices of fiction to parse intellectual
insights and emotional states and, now
and then, to cobble together imagined
conversations between Mondrian and
some of his significant contemporaries,
with lines taken verbatim either from
Mondrian’s own writings and letters or
from the diaries, letters, or recollections
of others, such as the American sculptor
Alexander Calder. The readerly effect is
a bit uncanny, recalling Marianne Moore’s
definition of poetry as “imaginary gar-
dens with real toads in them.”
Mondrian fully justifies heterodox
analysis of his famous abstract paintings
of sparse black lines or bands and of
blocks of primary color, his predominant
repertoire after the early nineteen-twen-
ties. There’s obdurate mystery in his pow-
erful combinations of hermetic sensibil-
ity and formal clarity, which dumbfound
even as they command attention. Mon-
drian’s character as a man is enigmatic,
too: cognizant of his times, but, with rare
exceptions, living and working stubbornly
alone. He never married. He and Picasso
cohabit no world except the whole one.
Picasso’s sphere is Dionysian, saturated
with his personality. That of Mondrian
is Apollonian, evacuated of anyone’s. Peo-
ple will have things to say about Picasso
forever. I expect that Janssen’s book will
remain sui generis for Mondrian.
M
ondrian was born in the province
of Utrecht in 1872. His father was
a headmaster with a specialty in draw-
ing instruction. The young Mondrian
used to paint and draw in the Dutch
countryside in the company of an artist
uncle. His early landscapes exercise modes
of naturalism, verging on Impressionism,
Mondrian, shown in his thirties, was driven to reach beyond appearance. but restlessly, with a palpable yen toward COURTESY RIDINGHOUSE AND KUNSTMUSEUM DEN HAAG / NATIONAL ARCHIVES / SPAARNESTAD COLLECTION
