Word: mondrian
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...this show is brilliant. Like late Imperial Rome, modern America is riddled with superstition, addicted to gurus, Sibyls and purveyors of every kind of therapeutic nostrum. One does not need a planchette to deduce that an exhibition which demonstrates as clearly as this one how great painters like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky conceived their art in terms of thought forms, astral vibrations and hidden cosmic symbolism is bound to attract a far larger audience than any orthodox show of abstract...
...idea that the universe, instead of being the vast agglomeration of distinct things perceived by science or realism, was a single, living entity, pervaded by "cosmic" energies; these revealed themselves in "vibrations," the formative agents of all material shapes. Hence the desire to paint archetypal forms, so that Mondrian's rectangles and Kandinsky's floating circles are to be read as a kind of sacred geometry, pyramid power in paint. Hence, too, the peculiar use of light by artists like Franticek Kupka -- a shuddering, lyric vibration that implies the sublimities of landscape without describing them. Then there is the imagery...
...that durable old alchemist, Marcel Duchamp. It also features several vitrines of early mystical, cosmological and alchemical texts known to have been studied by modern artists, some of whose illustrations are of astonishing beauty and suggestiveness. But its main focus, inevitably, is on the inventors of abstract art: Kandinsky, Mondrian, Kupka, Kazimir Malevich -- all represented by remarkable works. One would have to go a long way before finding a more intriguing Kandinsky, for instance, than his Lady in Moscow, 1912, with its gray "health aura" and its sinister coffin-shaped black mass that, floating across the street, menaces the life...
...next day Sotheby's sale of impressionists and moderns set a one-night record -- an astonishing $42,372,000 -- and individual milestones for nine artists. Mondrian's Composition in a Square with Red Corner sold for $5.06 million, the second highest price ever paid for a 20th century painting (Yo: Picasso, a self-portrait, went for $5.83 million in 1981). Renoir's La Coiffure was gaveled down at $3.52 million; Joan Miro's Woman in the Night at $2.53 million; and Henry Moore's Reclining Figure (Festival) at $1.76 million. Sotheby's great rival, Christie's, rang up $30.6 million...
...income of top investment bankers ranges between $1 million and $5 million and when takeover specialists can make tens of millions of dollars on a deal, the ability to buy a Rolls-Royce or a Riviera villa is vouchsafed to many. Only one person at a time can own Mondrian's Composition in a Square with Red Corner...