Mondrian :: Essays Papers

Mondrian Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-s grantn face, taciturn, wearing his heavy glasses, Mondrian reckoned more a scientist or priest than an operative. The only relief to all the white were astronomical matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and said Ive arranged these to happen upon it more cheerful.Thus Charmion von Wiegand on Mondrians New York studio apartment. In his Paris studio he had used flowers to make it more cheerful. One tulip in a vase, an artificial one, its leaves painted white.As Mondrian was probably incapable of irony, the tulip was unlikely to be a wry joke about his having had to produce flowerpieces between 1922 and 1925 when he no longer wanted to because there were no buyers for his abstracts. It could, of course, have been a revenge for the agony a compromise of that sort must have cost h im. More likely, it was simply a part of the general incompatibility against green and growth which made him, when seated at a set back beside a window through which trees were visible to him, persuade someone to diversify places.The artificial tulip fitted in, of course, with the legend of the studio as laboratory or cell, the artist as scientist or anchorite. Mondrian felt it mattered that an artist should present himself in a manner appropriate to his artistic aims. A photograph of him taken in 1908 shows a bearded floppy-haired Victorian man of sensibility. A photograph of 1911 shows a twentieth-century technologist, cleanshaven with centre parting and brilliantined hair the spectacles were an inevitable accessory. Soft and haired becomes hard and smooth one of the great landscape-painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters of his generation, comes to sense trees monstrous, green fields intolerable.The loneliness of the artificial tulip with its painted lea ves might seem to suggest that flora were admitted grudgingly, one plant being the next top hat thing to none. But it probably meant the opposite of that - was probably a sign, not of Mondrians having become a different person, but of his having remained the same. When Mondrian had painted flowers, he al just about invariably painted one chrysanthemum, one amaryllis, one tiger lily. His most personal paintings of trees are paintings of one tree of architecture,