THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 69
of sync, contrasting with the rhythmi-
cally varied ‘melody’ played by his right
hand”—boogie-woogie in utero.
Janssen’s expert citations of paral-
lels in music for Mondrian’s art are a
treat and a revelation for a musical doo-
fus like me. Janssen likens the artist’s
frequent motif, in the mid-nineteen-
thirties, of paired horizontal black bands
to the bass line running under the sax-
ophone cadenzas of Armstrong’s group
and others. (Thereby alerted, I see and
spectrally hear it.) If, in Janssen’s tell-
ing, one dynamic recurs throughout
Mondrian’s aesthetic adventuring, it is
rhythm, incipient even in his youthful
renderings from nature. Underlying
toccatas impart physicality to works
that have too often been taken as dryly
cerebral. Thought, if any was needed,
followed touch.
Mondrian’s favorite outings in New
York were to Café Society, on Sheridan
Square, and to Café Society Uptown,
on Fifty-eighth Street, the city’s only
unsegregated white-owned clubs, which
shared the slogan “The Wrong Place
for the Right People.” (Want to know
from racism? At other venues, accord-
ing to Janssen, Black patrons, should
there be any, had whatever glassware
they’d used smashed and tossed out.)
Janssen persuasively relates Mondrian’s
new liberties to his almost certain ex-
posure, in New York, to jam sessions
featuring the young Thelonious Monk,
a keyboard augur of bebop and beyond,
who unclenched “abrupt variations in
tempo, rapidly switching chord patterns
and sudden, unexpected changes in key.”
So complex are the possible correspon-
dences that I get lost trying to track
them. But there can be no mistaking
the analogous energy.
Mondrian loved the relative imper-
sonality of the finest jazz, exalting form
and technique over seductive perfor-
mance—not that he minded fun. Jazz
left you alone with your perceptions,
even as it might bring you to your feet
in joyous motion. A master like Monk
built cloud castles with many rooms
and startling passageways. Hearkening,
you might believe that he played for
you alone. I remember, poor in the six-
ties, standing one dank night outside
the Five Spot on St. Marks Place and
seeing and hearing him, clearly, through
the club’s large windows. Then he stood
up from the piano, as regular a person
as you or anyone. But something had
changed that could not change back.T
hrough it all, there were dance
f loors, where Mondrian could
blissfully lose himself in up-to-the-
minute mass culture. Immune to snob-
bery, he relished the animation, and
the pathos, of Walt Disney’s “Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and the
novel ubiquity of the jukebox. Non-
competitive, as far as I can tell, he re-
spected the successes of other artists,
or, at least, compassionately rued their
vagaries. He had acquaintances but few
intimates among the hosts of hero-
worshipping colleagues that accumu-
lated, starting in Europe and burgeon-
ing in America, most of whom spent
years presuming to match or extend
the gravitas of his art. Their reward?
Style. They run changes on the anat-
omy but lack the pulse. Not that Mon-
drian begrudged them. Like his fellow-
exiles Marcel Duchamp and Fernand
Léger, he was keen to meet and to en-
courage American artists, unlike the
standoffish European Surrealists who
had also wound up in New York. It’s
good that he lived long enough for a
foretaste of the New World that would
prove worthy of his singular spirit and
refractory intelligence.
A delicious tale of modern art and
a testament to Mondrian’s personal
character transpired when, in 1943, he
served as one of the jurors for a group
show at Art of This Century, a New
York gallery directed by the fabulously
rich heiress and aspiring doyenne
Peggy Guggenheim and devoted
chiefly to works by celebrated Euro-
pean émigrés. The episode is drawn
by Janssen from published accounts
that rely on firsthand testimony re-
fracted through memory and muddled
through retellings at, no doubt, doz-
ens of cocktail parties.
Janssen describes Mondrian walk-
ing from painting to painting, “slowly
and a little stiffly,” until he comes to a
halt in front of one. “Pretty awful,” Gug-
genheim says. “That’s not painting, is
it?” Mondrian, who does not stop star-
ing at it, eventually responds, “I’m try-
ing to understand what’s happening
here. I think this is the most interest-
ing work I’ve seen so far in America.”The piece is Jackson Pollock’s “Steno-
graphic Figure” (circa 1942). Guggen-
heim objects, “You can’t compare this
and the way you paint.” Mondrian re-
plies, “The way I paint and the way I
think are two different things.” Later,
when the other jurors have filed in,
Guggenheim drags them over to the
Pollock, saying, “Look what an excit-
ing new thing we have here!”
Mondrian had known a little of Pol-
lock, Janssen asserts, through Lee Kras-
ner, a favorite youngish dance partner
and the volcanic American’s wife-to-be.
(They married in 1945.) She later re-
called that her fast, ingenious pas de
deux with Mondrian, initiated by him
and elaborated upon by her, made them
the center of attention on several occa-
sions, delighting him. He commented
tactfully on her tentative, Picasso-
influenced works of the time. But his
special fascination with the Pollock
painting seems no politic nod but an
authentic and, to me, crystal-clear re-
sponse: he saw a rare fellow-painter
striving, in this preliminary instance
with tropes cribbed from Picasso and
Joan Miró, toward a rule-breaking
merger of form and feeling and mind
and body, brimming with unforesee-
able possibilities.
Janssen surmises an ulterior motive
for Mondrian’s remarks, positing them,
somehow, as a bargaining chip to per-
suade Guggenheim and others on the
jury to consider paintings by Harry
Holtzman. (Though shy of patronage,
as of anything entailing obligations,
Mondrian had succumbed to accept-
ing, from immediate necessity, an offer
by Holtzman to pay the rent for an
apartment on East Fifty-sixth Street
at First Avenue.) The insinuation of
nepotism by Mondrian in favor of
Holtzman puzzles me. Granted, we
enter shadowlands of alluvial art-world
gossip. And perhaps Janssen viewed
Abstract Expressionism without much
enthusiasm. (He doesn’t say.) I perceive
a firm affinity between Mondrian’s fas-
tidiously self-abandoning cultivation
of what Janssen calls “organised loose-
ness”—fuelled by jazz—and Pollock’s
seething, more gestural equivalents:
fusions, in the eventual major drip
paintings, of sullied surfaces and the
depthless music of the spheres. I’m
moved by what I can only believe was