Word: mondrian
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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...
...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...
...Mondrian may have wanted to transcend nature, but the Dutch landscape was in him like a dna code. He said there were no straight lines in nature, so that straight lines--the grid--were inherently more abstract than curves; and yet, as anyone can see in Holland, the flat horizons and punctuating verticals of mill and steeple must have affected him right from the start. The momentum of his work begins with landscape--the delicate screens and friezes of trees above watery meadows, in their pearly gray light. The color explodes in 1908 with his Mill in Sunlight, an orgiastic...
From then on, Mondrian's work unfolds at a deliberate, ruminative tempo and in accord with a growing sense of inner logic, quite unlike the fits and starts by which most artists develop. By degrees, in 1911-12, the interweaving of Mondrian's fruit trees ceases to look like energetic lacework on a plain ground; the space between the branches is energized--it presses forward, no longer a void but a continuum of shape as active as the branches themselves...