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Mondrian’s magnanimity to a tyro who,
as he may even have sensed, would usurp
his place atop avant-garde royalty.
I
ntent on Mondrian’s internal reck-
onings, Janssen scants what it’s like
for a viewer to confront one of the art-
ist’s great abstractions. It’s kinesthetic
for me—gut-felt. Gravity is key, the
force that urges everything on Earth
toward horizontality. In regard to that,
a diagonal is a mere anecdote: some-
thing propped up or toppling. Verti-
cality is how, standing, we stalemate
gravity, with autonomic, tiny adjust-
ments of balance. Paintings by Mon-
drian have seemed a mite wonky to my
eye when hung on the curved walls
along the slanting ramp of the Gug-
genheim Museum. Certainly, they op-
pose the weightless modes of abstrac-
tion that were advanced by the Russians
Vasily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malev-
ich, which would look fine in outer
space as a Mondrian couldn’t, with its
occult memory of Dutch upright en-
tities (windmills, lighthouses, a church)
on low-down terrain. He augmented
the simple physical reality of his works
in the third dimension by thrusting
canvases forward of recessed frames.
The complexities of a Mondrian
register all at once, with a bang that
can hold up to even the most quizzi-
cal inspection ever after. It’s no cinch
to argue with something that has hap-
pened to you. Because they are typi-
cally asymmetrical, the compositions
may trigger slight bodily crises. If we
look long and hard enough, we may
feel that the slightest displacement of
a line or corruption of a color could
compromise the stability that prevents
us from falling down. Test this the next
time you are in person with a Mon-
drian. Try speculatively altering any de-
tail and see what happens. The effect
is a condition of subjectivity without
subjects. No one’s feelings, starting with
those of the artist himself, are either
addressed or ruled out.
Though he quailed at ever meeting
Picasso—I’d have been nervous of that,
too—Mondrian admired him, and Pi-
casso may or may not have returned
the favor. (He held “non-figurative” art
in contempt, arguing that any mark on
a surface constitutes a figure.) Janssen
writes that Duchamp, another con-
trary genius, “had a weakness for the
Dutch master of ultimate simplifica-
tion.” The choice of the word “weak-
ness” intrigues. It is precisely at points
where we stand aghast at our inability
really to know, and fully to understand,
anything cosmically pertinent that
Mondrian looms like a menhir in a
desert, silently replete.
Janssen successfully quashes any ten-
dency to regard Mondrian as an odd-
ball, or to rank him pragmatically with
the many other moderns whose lega-
cies have informed developments in
fine and applied arts. Did he routinely
paint the walls of his studios stark white
and on them pin, in scattered array, ob-
longs of vivid color? Yes, with endless
imitative ramifications for minimalist
interior design. But it was not a state-
ment. Simply, the scheme aided his con-
centration, which was imperilled by
outside urban noise—cacophonous at
times in Paris and New York—and by
vicissitudes of ill health. Mondrian had
chronic bronchitis, among other mala-
dies, which came to include arthritis
and hardened arteries. Bedeviling him
incessantly were floaters in his ocular
fluids that he saw as drifting and dart-
ing threads, like radio static in the broad-
cast of a sonata. Rarely entirely well, he
suffered spells of incapacitation, even
as he credited fevers with helping him
see things more vividly, between bursts
of creative and social vitality. He died,
of pneumonia, at the age of seventy-one.
M
ondrian passed away four months
before the D Day landings and
the subsequent liberations of his be-
loved France and native Netherlands.
The title of “Victory Boogie Woogie”
was his first and last reference to the
war or, as far as I know, to anything po-
litical; Picasso, by contrast, gave us
“Guernica” (1937). But, no less than Pi-
casso, Mondrian counsels against ca-
pitulation to tyranny. He never wavered
from a heartfelt adherence to the vision
of civilized progress, tensed against the
big-time barbarisms, that will always
memorialize the twentieth century. He
transcends world events, not to men-
tion changes in artistic fashion. Criti-
cal attention to him may rise and fall.
For anyone undertaking to pay it,
though, there can be no ups or downs
in Mondrian’s importance, relative to
other artists past, present, and to come.
There is only a steady state of inex-
haustible meaning, beggaring compar-
ison and defying definition. Even the
critically consummate Janssen, with his
magnum opus of a biography, can merely
dance around, and not penetrate, the
adamantine conundrum of the Dutch
magus’s dead stops in lived time.
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