Word: mondrian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pictures had the sort of eye-widening freshness which modern artists are apt to try for and miss (as these same kids would, a few years later). Three Men under Williamsburg Bridge, by ten-year-old Walter Kmeta, looked like a Mondrian abstraction-and had more life in it. Yvonne Grogan's black & white Landscape had a sense of balance that a trapeze artist might envy. Hypo and Little Hypo, by Brooklyn's John Pietrowski, 8, for all its blots and blotches, was a study of mother love. Almost all the pictures, selected from 42 New York City...
Dutch-born Piet Mondricm (1872-1944), pioneer of purest abstractionism, also felt fettered by objects. But where Kandinsky went off in a whirl, Mondrian painted straight, narrow paths. He finally became so ascetic that curves were too emotional for him, and he drew nothing but horizontal and vertical lines, convinced that the right angle was the purest "expression of the two opposing forces [which] constitute life." To the uninitiated, the result might look something like a linoleum pattern, but Mondrian spent days shifting colored Scotch tape around a canvas, hoping to achieve a perfect harmony of balanced rectangles...
Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian stand in somewhat the same relation to art as Gertrude Stein does to literature. Just as the unfettered Stein prose confused many a layman but benefited such popular writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, so the abstractionists have had a major impact on U.S. typography, advertising layout, architecture (see cut). By now, the layman, whether he knows it or not, owes a good-sized debt to the nonobjective painters...
Died. Piet Mondrian (Pieter Cornells Mondriaan), 71, Holland-born dean of rectilinear abstract painters; in Manhattan. The gentle, jazz-and-orange-loving hermit, heavily influenced by Pablo Picasso, always said that regular curves made him nervous; deplored the necessary circularity of records and oranges...
...ever seen. With eleven top-flight portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals as its central attraction, the exhibition (valued at some $2,000,000) covered 500 years of finely-turned painting, from the squirming, mystical fantasies of 15th-Century Hieronymus Bosch to the geometric designs of 20th-century Piet Mondrian. What made Grand Rapids Dutch almost as proud: the name of practically every artist in the show could also be found in the Grand Rapids telephone directory...