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unusual nuances of beauty. After study-
ing at the National Academy of Fine
Arts in Amsterdam, where fashions ran
to provincial emulations of Symbolism,
Mondrian took to adapting such avant-
garde demeanors as the blazing palettes
of French Fauvism, but with a latent fe-
alty to nature. His “Evening; The Red
Tree” (1908-10) is feverishly brushed and
plenty fiery but achieves the very quid-
dity of leafless tree-ness. Always, there’s
a drive to reach beyond appearance to
something unbound by precedent.
For Mondrian in these years, frustra-
tion and self-doubt alternated with inti-
mations that he was on the right track,
by whatever route seemed viable. Deci-
sively, in 1909, he encountered a show in
Amsterdam of pictures by Paul Cézanne.
Cézanne’s game-changing translation of
visual reality into equally emphasized
lines and daubs electrified Mondrian.
The look didn’t matter to him. What did
was the self-abnegating intensity.
Mondrian came into his own during
his first sojourn in Paris, from 1911 until
the onset of the First World War, where
he hungrily absorbed Cubism, with res-
ervations. He regarded the illusory
bumps and hollows in pictorial space
of even the most radical works by Pi-
casso and Georges Braque as surrepti-
tiously conservative, and he took no
pleasure in their overlays of collage. True
to the formal logic of Cézanne, he would
keep things righteously flat. Among my
favorite of all art works—I want one!—
are his “plus and minus” paintings and
drawings from the war years, made back
in Holland: oval arrangements of short,
often crisscrossing horizontal and ver-
tical black lines. Poetically evoking ocean
wavelets and starry skies, they give me,
however fleetingly, a sense of coming
home to a refuge of all-forgiving grace.
No big deal, because the results are
vouchsafed by humility. Recoiling from
anything in art that smacked to him of
“vanity,” Mondrian evinced a sincerity
like that of no other modern except his
compatriot predecessor Vincent van
Gogh, whom he appropriately revered.
M
ondrian was caught up for much
of his life in Theosophy, the anti-
materialist mythos that was initiated in
1875, in New York, by the much trav-
elled Russian occultist Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky. Its pantheistic mysticism
seemed to resonate with everything he
craved in both art and life. Theosophy’s
tenet of an ascent from the natural by
way of the spiritual toward a union with
the divine was right up Mondrian’s tem-
peramental alley. He was most immersed
from about 1908 to 1912, when he painted
metaphysically supercharged f lowers
and frankly weird totemic figures. In
the years that followed, he shrugged off
the aspects of the movement that seemed
pedantic and nebulous rather than lib-
erating and practical, not to mention its
mediumistic hocus-pocus, but he never
regretted the influence. He remarked
later, “One cannot call oneself an athe-
ist without really having experienced
some form of religion.” He kept paint-
ing f lowers, however, with unfailing
virtuosity but waning enthusiasm, as a
stock-in-trade to support his experi-
mentation with frontal, vibrant geomet-
ric patterning.
Mondrian boiled down his religi-
osity to a belief in the intrinsic potency
of the craft of painting, in and of it-
self. His voluminous writings on the
subject grope, not very cogently, toward
possible theories but mainly expatiate
on forms that he had intuited with
brush, pencil, palette knife, or ruler in
hand. Intuition was everything for
him—versus “instinct,” which he de-
plored as an ego-inflating snare and
came to associate with, among other
derangements, the brutally repressive
mystique of Nazism. He was ever eager
to explain what he did, after he had
done it, with an ingenuous presump-
tion that anyone else might pick up
the thread and accomplish as much.
Mondrian wrote in an appreciative let-
ter to an admiring critic, in 1914, “By
not wishing to say anything human, by
completely ignoring oneself, the art-
work becomes a monument to Beauty:
transcending the human; and yet human
in its depth and generality!” That’s as
mordant an aesthetic verity as I know,
but Mondrian’s guileless confidence
in being understood is touching. He
seemed genuinely to want other artists
to be as good as or better than him-
self. Only, for that to happen, they
would have to be him.
In 1917, after he’d returned to the
Netherlands, there began a spell of pub-
lic collaboration—propagating ideals
and commercial applications of abstrac-
tion—with Theo van Doesburg, the
crackerjack designer and gifted pro-
moter, if lesser artist, eleven years his ju-
nior. Their movement was dubbed De
Stijl, after a magazine that van Does-
burg published. Mondrian preferred the
rubric Neo-Plasticism, to identify paint-
ing with the flexible manipulation of its
naked means and ends. This led him to
limit himself to strictly horizontal and
vertical lines or bands, echoing a can-
vas’s edges, and delimited zones of solid
color. Many-layered blocks of white ad-
vance to the eye, melding with the sur-
face rather than representing negative
space. He felt, Janssen speculates, that
“‘beauty’ was not the same as ‘truth’.
The ‘beauty’ of the New Plastic was
more ‘beauty-as-truth’.” You can’t go
looking for that. Work hard enough,
though, and it may find you.
Janssen notes as a transitional step
to the artist’s mature methods the work
“Composition with Grid 9: Checker-
board Composition with Light Colors”
(1919). Jarringly simple for its time, it
presents uniform small squares, thinly
outlined in black and painted watery
red, blue, yellow, or gray. In a darker ver-
sion from the same year, “Composition
with Grid 8: Checkerboard Composi-
tion with Dark Colors,” Janssen’s sea-
soned eye notices variant hues of “cyan,
magenta or chromate yellow” in addi-
tion to off-white. (Such discriminations
lose force, as do the truly crucial factors
of objecthood, scale, and directed brush-
work, in photographic reproductions.)
A year earlier, when holding a painting
by one of its corners, Mondrian hit by
accident on the potency of diamond
formats—square or squarish canvases
rotated forty-five degrees—to hint at
the extension, invisibly, of rectilinear lay-
outs beyond their material bounds, per-
haps to infinity. He needn’t portray the
complete universe. He could imply it.
Van Doesburg, clinging to a meta-
physics of art that his friend was cast-
ing off, seemed not to have grasped Mon-
drian’s increasing rigor. The formerly
fervent friendship cooled. Mondrian’s
uniqueness revealed itself as fate: soli-
tary but not lonely. He mingled in what-
ever art scene he encountered and, given
sparks of commonality, formed the agree-
ments with colleagues that Janssen sche-
matizes in his little one-act dialogues,
mosaics of ping-ponging ideas. Among
