Word: mondrian
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...vintage cartoon by Saul Steinberg shows a baroque room, all gold and curlicues; in it, a maestro is delicately prodding at a canvas filled with a grid of straight lines - a Mondrian, pure and polemical, red-yellow-blue-gray-white-black, utterly incongruous against the florid décor of the 19th century. How could Europe produce the painting within 70 years or so of finishing the room? That in effect is the question posed by "De Stijl, 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia," an exhibition that opened last month at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and will...
Everyone knows something about Piet Mondrian; barely a detail of his life has escaped the attention of aspiring Ph.D.s, from the fantastic fox-trot routines that earned him the nickname the "dancing madonna," to the exact spot where an artificial tulip stood in his Paris studio (painted white, leaves and all, so as not to offend his eye with the detestable color green). Like Kandinsky, the other fa ther figure of abstract painting, he was a Theosophist: a man given to dreams of the millennium, when material reality would wither away and leave an ideal domain of the pure spirit...
...Mondrian was not the only Dutch artist to pursue the dream of social renewal through ideal abstraction-though he was the most gifted one. What of his less renowned colleagues, painters like Theo van Doesburg, Bart van der Leek and Georges Vantongerloo, architect-designers like J.J.P. Oud or Gerrit Rietveld? Though they all used much the same language of geometrical shapes, primary colors and rectilinear layout, their variety as artists is faithfully rendered in the show...
There is all the difference in the world, for instance, between a work like Mondrian's Composition with Line (Pier and Ocean), 1917, and Van Doesburg's Countercomposition V, 1924. One is a reduction of atmosphere and light, the twinkling and palpitation of reflections on the flat sheet of the northern sea that Mondrian used to gaze at, hour after hour, during his walks at Scheveningen; it is transparent and delicate, reaching stability through addition. By contrast, the Van Doesburg throws an almost physical blast of color from its surface; the tilted red square is both monumental...
...Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity...