On Art

...On Art PURSUING PERFECTION BY JAMES R. MELLOW THE ART OF Piet Mondnan (1872-1944) is among the most beautifully ordered and rational in the history of modem painting Seldom has its superbly logical progression, or its essential probity, been more effectively demonstrated than in the centennial exhibition now on view at the Guggenheim Museum The assemblage of 131 paintmgs, drawings and watercolors drawn from private and public collections in Europe and America is making only this one appearance in the United States After the New York show closes, on December 12, at wdl be taken to the Kunstmuseum m Bem, Switzerland The chronological sequence of Mondnan's art is important to an appreciation of the seemingly irresistible logic of his development Accordingly, the Guggenheim presentation opens with two stolid and unimpressive early paintings, "Trees with Cornfield" (1889-92) and "Still Life with Dead Hare' (1891), both rather stale academic pieces hi the dull-brown 19th-century tradition Then it proceeds through a long series of works culminating in a significant group of landscapes completed around 1907-08, in which the artist is clearly explonng, though shll in quite conventional terms, every formal device that will lead to his later geometric compositions These groves of dark trees silhouetted against dull gray or evenmg skies prefigure the reduction of detail and flattening out of forms against the picture plane that were to become part of the doctrine of modernist abstraction Other paintings, obviously influenced by Fauve and Pomtilliste techniques—like "Mill by Sunlight" (1908), with its slabs of blue positioned against a brilliant yellow sky—anticipate another phase of Mondnan's abstraction, his attempt to build pictures out of free-floating color planes Also present is an odd sampling of the painter's early flirtation with Symbolism The first, a watercolor titled "Passion Flower," dating back possibly to 1901, depicts a sallow-colored woman, facing front, eyes closed as if in rapture A flower, symbolizing Christ's crucifixion, hovers in midair above each shoulder The picture is closely related to the large triptych oil, "Evolution" (ca 1911), not a great work by any means, but a singular and interesting item in his oeuvre Comprised of three blue nudes, again facing front their figures built up of faceted planes, it establishes that he had begun to take a serious look at early Cubist painting As R P Welsh demonstrates quite convincingly in a contribution to the forthcoming centennial catalogue, the hovering symbols that replace the flowers of the earlier paintings are drawn from the Theosophical precepts of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolph Sterner, whose writings Mondnan kept with him until his death Equally important is the earlier, more mundane "Farmhouse with Peasant Woman m the Snow" (1898-99) Although the stand of bare winter trees against a gray sky is only a minor detail, Mondnan was to create an astomshmg senes of paintings out of that pictonal image after acquainting himself with Cubism on his first trip to Pans in 1911 It serves as a kind of paradigmatic sequence in the conversion of modern art from reahsm to pure ab-traction The tree forms give way to gnd-hke structures and broken color planes—at first in wintry grays and ochers, then softened into reds and blues—eventually resulting in a pure geometry purged of naturalistic associations Mondnan's conversion to pure abstraction is one of the most unusual and complicated developments of his career He drew upon the formal and structural ideas of Cubism (pushing them to their logical extremes) and encompassed the Theos-ophists' transcendental faith in the triumph of spint over matter, adopting their occult lore of preferred shapes and colors In his "Evolution," for instance, he employed the "sacred hexagram" of Theosophism, a symbol for the merging ot opposing principles (masculine and feminine, temporal and eternal, etc ) His use of this device both signifies his philosophical ideas and points toward the final geometric resolution of his esthetic fheones Together with his complex mix of beliefs, there was, apparently, a growing distaste for the world of nature Walking with Dutch friends in Pans, Mondnan commented, "Yes, all in all, nature is a damned wretched affan I can hardly stand it" He is said to have had an aversion to the color green because it was "too close to nature " According to some observers, he was something of a martinet about his living quarters, too Visitors had to worry about disturbing the precise arrangement he had estabhshed for furniture, ashtrays, table settings From 1916 through the mid-'20s, Mondnan's most important contact was the Dutch de Stijl group that he helped found along with Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch painter and theoretician The two artists collaborated in editing the group's periodical, also named de Stijl, the single most influential vanguard art publication of its time In its pages they espoused the cause of the new painting and architecture, and reached the most design-conscious group of professionals of the day, including members of the Russian avant-garde and the Weimai Bauhaus During this period Mondnan evolved his strictest artistic disciplines, insisting on the mtegnty and flatness of the picture plane, reducing his structures to horizontal and vertical lines, restricting his colors to the primaries and black, white and gray He broke with van Doesburg supposedly when the latter introduced diagonals into his compositions In the catalogue, however, an interesting memoir by Nelly van Doesburg tends to discredit the idea of a bitter dispute over orthodoxy The two artists, she notes, continued to see each other and to discuss artistic matters after the break She also remained on fnendly terms with Mondnan after her husband's death Even with his marked personal ldiosyncracies, she claims, he was not quite the fanatic that legend has made him out to be For all his aveision to natuie—in lestau-lants he would sit with his back to the window in older to avoid looking at trees—he was perfectiy capable of taking walks in the country and he seldom disapproved of the naturalistic painting of artist friends Mme van Doesburg offers some charming insights into Modnan's character The well-rouged and youthful Mae West, it seems, was his ideal love goddess Although he remained a bachelor all his lite, he was extremely fond of female companionship and was somewhat addicted to dancing Mme van Doesburg thinks it would have been impossible to find the woman with the right combination of qualities to have fitted into Mondnan's "pnstine studio", what he needed was "a Mae West in crinoline " THE LONG SERIES of geomet-nc abstractions in the Guggenheim show, dating roughly from the early '20s until his death in 1944, establishes the almost impregnable authority of Mondnan's mature work He seems to progress from painting to painting without a failure, playing out vanations m structure, format and color, making each pictuie remarkably individual and—despite the limited formal means he had adopted—remarkably varied Sometimes he attains a radical purity and simplicity, as m "Composition" (1936-42), an open grid ot black honzontal and vertical struts with a solitary, small blue square At other times, he produces a new tension by simply turning the square canvas on one of its points, juxtaposing his honzontal and vertical structures against the angled edges of the format His New York paintings open up a new vein in his art A refugee from Hitler's Europe, he found life in the American metropolis bracing He liked the man-made environment, the bnght lights, the brisk tempo Friends had introduced him to the use of colored tapes, and it allowed him to work and rework his pictures constantly before finally committing them to paint Their cool, conceptual and facile appearance notwithstanding, Mondnan's paintings were ar-nved at pragmatically through a continuous process of studying them, rearranging and readjusting their elements until he achieved the "dynamic equilibrium" he wanted The tapes brought a new innovation m his last two paintings, "Broadway Boogie Woogie' and "Victory Boogie Woogie" He abandoned the black gnds as being "too graphic," and along the now colored narrow lines he set small squares of bnght pnmary colors that gave the composition a jazzy, syncopated rhythm When the American painter Charmion von Weigand first saw "Broadway Boogie Woogie,' she remarked that it broke his own esthetic doctrines Mondnan replied, "But it works You must remember, Charmion, that the paintings come first and the theory comes from the paintings " At the time of his death, Mondnan's friends thought that his last picture, "Victory Boogie Woogie," had been completed but they discovered it in the studio, new colored tapes stuck to it, the composition and its various structural elements in the process of being rearranged In some haste, apparently, Mondnan had begun to remake the picture shortly before he died Hanging in the Guggenheim show with its small bits of tape peeling slightly, it provides a mute, affecting symbol of Mondnan's art—susceptible to change, perfectible to the end...