the voices is that of Calder, who was af-
fected by a visit to Mondrian’s Paris stu-
dio in 1930. He suggested that Mon-
drian add physical motion to his forms.
Mondrian replied, “No, it is not neces-
sary, my painting is already very fast”—a
remark, regarding stolidly stable com-
positions, that had to refer to a kind of
subliminal velocity. It’s as close as Mon-
drian comes to illuminating the intro-
spective incentives that he could only
show, not enunciate. You need receptive
eyes to remind you why his discourse
should interest you in the first place.
O
n the sparsely documented front
of Mondrian’s personal life, Jans-
sen is at pains to counter a caricatural
image that he traces to a 1956 biogra-
phy by Michel Seuphor, a proprietary
Belgian apostle. Seuphor had cast the
artist as, in Janssen’s paraphrase, “an as-
cetic, who did not relish the company
of friends, behaved strangely towards
women and was obsessively focused on
a strict and geometric attitude to art
and life.” Janssen establishes by abun-
dant testimony that, when not holed
up working, Mondrian was an ebul-
liently convivial charmer and, although
chary of commitment, had affairs. Al-
beit formal and reserved, Mondrian
was always elegantly dressed, cordial
and kind in manner, and, of special
note, an avid recreational dancer, adept
early on in the one-step, the foxtrot,
and the Charleston. Janssen reports
that among women in Amsterdam the
young Mondrian “developed a reputa-
tion for interesting, prolonged kisses,
sometimes lasting for more than half
an hour.” In 1911, he broke off an en-
gagement to an Amsterdam merchant’s
daughter, and in 1932, at sixty years old,
he was rebuffed, to his acute distress,
by a loving but ultimately reluctant
Dutch woman who was much younger
than him.
Mondrian enjoyed and profited from
friendships with women. You might ex-
pect a strain of puritanism from an in-
dividual who was raised Calvinist in
what Janssen terms “perhaps the most
traditional communities in one of the
least forward-looking of countries.” The
effect on the country boy of his move,
in 1899, to Amsterdam’s “Quartier Latin,”
a district of “bars, nightclubs, cabarets
and brothels,” as Janssen tells it, can
only be imagined. But, as much or as
little as Mondrian plunged into the noc-
turnal tumult, he kept his art and his
life as remote from each other as pos-
sible, to the point of destroying most of
the letters that he received after read-
ing them. Janssen, for all his sleuthing,
finally confesses that Mondrian’s amours
remain “more or less a closed book.”
Yet there was a doubleness about
him in matters of eros that chimes, for
me, with the latent ardors and explicit
constraints of his painting. In 1941, ac-
cording to the diary of a valued but
inconveniently smitten journalist and
painter, Charmion von Wiegand, whom
he allowed to assist him in the studio
and to watch him paint, he admonished
her, saying that sex is “not unpleasant
while it lasts—but only a communion
of ideas leaves a memory.” She failed
to see any compelling logic in that, but
the two stayed friends.
M
ondrian arrived in New York, by
way of England, in 1940, on a
convoy that had lost five ships to Ger-
man submarines en route. The New
York painter Harry Holtzman, an im-
poverished aesthete when he introduced
himself to the artist in Paris, in 1934,
but now flush with money by marriage,
was the first in line to greet him. The
move occasioned a dramatic shift in
Mondrian’s art. After briefly continu-
ing the noble astringency that he had
pursued on his stopover in London, as
seen in the majestic “Trafalgar Square”
(1939-43), he loosened up sensationally,
displacing his customary black bands
with chains of syncopated squares in
plangent colors. The dazzling “Broad-
way Boogie Woogie” (1942-43) and the
unfinished “Victory Boogie Woogie,”
which he started in 1942, were climac-
tic. The latter retains the tentative bits
of tape and strips and patches of col-
ored paper with which Mondrian
worked out compositions in a self-
critical process of continual revision
that could take months or even years
to satisfy him.
The spur was jazz, a passion and a
wellspring for Mondrian since his re-
turn, in 1919, to Paris, where he favored
clubs that featured Black American per-
formers. He adored Josephine Baker
and ignored her box-office brand as a
civilized “savage.” Rather, he deemed
Baker’s improvisatory dance, song, and
costume (or lack of it, in one routine,
but for a few pink feathers) galvanic
fine art. At a concert in 1934, in Paris,
Mondrian thought Louis Armstrong
already old hat except for the trumpet-
er’s “long lines,” he said. But he was
transported “into a state of ecstasy,” Jans-
sen writes, by Armstrong’s pianist Her-
man Chittison, who “allowed the bass
line played with his left hand to fall out
“Wanna buy a tote? We’re aiming to do away
with plastic bags by next year.”
