Word: mondrian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Though the public saw him as the archetypal modernist, he was disconnected from much modern art. Some of the greatest modern painters--Kandinsky, for instance, or Mondrian--saw their work as an instrument of evolution and human development. But Picasso had no more of a Utopian streak than did his Spanish idol, Goya. The idea that art evolved, or had any kind of historical mission, struck him as ridiculous. "All I have ever made," he once said, "was made for the present and in the hope that it will always remain in the present. When I have found something...
...mediumistic ("Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do what it wants"), solipsistic even. To Picasso, the idea that painting did itself through him meant that it wasn't subject to cultural etiquette. None of the other fathers of Modernism felt it so strongly--not Matisse, not Mondrian, certainly not Braque...
...small sights of Paris between 1926 and 1930; it was seen and enjoyed by a whole roster of artists, designers and architects--Joan Miro and Fernand Leger, Le Corbusier and Isamu Noguchi and, most important for the eventual direction of Calder's own work, Piet Mondrian...
Calder's jump into originality as a sculptor is one of those flash-bang conversion tales in which the legends of early modern art abound. It seems that in 1930 he went to visit Mondrian, the great Dutch abstractionist, in his Paris studio. He already admired Mondrian's work, but he had never seen its environment before--that fanatically judged, ordered workplace of white and primary colors where even the Victrola was painted red. Rectangles of painted cardboard were pinned around the walls, and Calder was seized with the desire to see them move. They should oscillate at different speeds...
...disguise, since he was posted to Quantico, Va., and while there was able regularly to visit Washington museums, especially the Phillips Collection. One painting there, in particular, got to him: Matisse's Studio, Quai St. Michel, 1916. Though Diebenkorn would continue to meditate on other works by Matisse (and Mondrian, and Cezanne, and Bonnard, and so on through a wide classical-modernist pantheon) for the rest of his working life, this particular Matisse, with its simultaneous inside-outside view, thrilled and inspired him: "I noticed its spatial amplitude; one saw a marvelous hollow or room yet the surface is right...