Word: mondrian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...beauty of nature does not satisfy me entirely," Mondrian once wrote. "I cannot enjoy a beautiful summer evening, for instance. Perhaps then I feel ... how everything ought to be, while at the same time I am aware of my own impotence to make it so in my life...
...Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, curated by an international panel led by the art historian Angelica Zander Rudenstine, is quite simply one of the best shows MOMA has ever held--a worthy successor to its surveys of the two other 20th century titans, Picasso and Matisse. In its New York form, the exhibition includes paintings that, owing to their fragility, couldn't be lent to earlier venues in Washington and Holland--Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, and Victory Boogie Woogie, left unfinished at his death...
...then Mondrian's presence was a talisman to the small New York avant-garde. It was the gift of Hitler. Like many of the Surrealists--whose work he cordially detested--Mondrian had fled to refuge in New York in 1940 as the Nazi threat to "degenerate artists" such as himself became inescapably plain. The mere arrival of this diffident and somewhat reclusive man symbolized the passing of modernist leadership from Paris to Manhattan. Yet unlike the Surrealists, he had few American followers, and none who became painters of the first rank. Part of the paradox of Mondrian was that although...
...singular confession for any artist to make, and it helps explain why this show is such a poignant experience. Its humility masks a bizarre pride. What other artist could recoil from nature because its order exceeds that of his own art? How could he expect to rival nature? Did Mondrian envy God? Or perhaps he meant something less Luciferian: that nature, to the artist, is like carnal desire to the saint. It is a trap, a lower substitute for higher ecstasy, an occasion of sin. He knows it is beautiful, but he must still banish it from...
...Mondrian was the supreme Platonist of modernism. He believed that his grids, representing nothing but themselves and, as Plato said of his perfect solids, "free from the itch of desire," could demonstrate a universal order, an essence that underwrote the mere accidents of the world as it is. Reach that essence, and consciousness would be transfigured. This mystical idea had a long history, running from Plato through medieval Catholicism and thence to the pseudo religion of Theosophy, to which Mondrian adhered in his youth in Holland...