Broadway Boogie Woogie(1942–1943).^13 [Plate 16,Figure 20] He snagged
this comparison fromDas Bild in Islam(1971) by Turkish art historian
MazharŞevketİpşiroğlu, who used the formal similarities of the work to
suggest Islamic aesthetics as a forerunner to modernist abstraction.^14 For
Grabar, the apparent similarity suggests a universal human subject. Bryson
describes such an apparently“natural”attitude as follows:
The less that culture (academism) intervenes, the more lifelike the image: remove
‘projection’from the world, and the world will reveal its luminous essence. At the
end of the process of falsification, an image will be produced that will contain no
false information: what is not false must be true; and true universally, since the false
accretion of culture will have been discarded. Reduced to a rudimentary cognitive
Figure 20Piet Mondrian,Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–1943, oil on canvas,
127 × 127 cm. Anonymous donation, Museum of Modern Art, New York,
73.1943. DIGITAL IMAGE © 2019 Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence
(^13) Grabar, 1992 : 18. (^14) İpşiroğlu, 1971 : 171.
Pattern as Pathology 271