Word: mondrian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...second time it appears Dick is going to die is when he is rocking on a chair leaning against a window 12 floors above the pool at the Mondrian hotel. "It makes me a little nervous, but in a weird, comforting way," he says, momentarily straightening the chair. Looking down at the pool, where beautiful, half-naked European women lounge on giant pillows sipping cocktails, he thinks about his girlfriend. "You would really s__ if you saw my girlfriend," he says...
Early American modernism is filled with European borrowings, from Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Picabia, Leger, etc., etc. Nothing characteristically American there, you might say. But the crux of the identity issue is not the stylistic sources the artists drew on but the experiences on which they used them. It was there that the American-ness of American art hove into view, and it showed itself in two enormous image fields...
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...
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...