Word: mondrian
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...matters that the stooped Gerontion in Segal's Hot Dog Stand, 1978, is a cast of the sprightly museum director Martin Friedman; what does count is the peculiar tension between his dark shape and the bright white figure of the waitress, under the glare of the lit mock-Mondrian ceiling...
...fugitive and worried scribbles of the brush. When he leaves his customary palette of white and earth colors, the results show his background in abstract painting: Canadian Envelope, 1977, with its immaculate placement of rectangles, its cross-rhymes of blue and red, seems as consciously organized as a Mondrian...
...abstraction, of the painting as an object rather than an image, would stay with Nicholson. It is not much to the fore in his first tentative cubist paintings, but it is evident in the severely geometric white reliefs Nicholson did in the 1930s under the spell of constructivism and Mondrian, and it pervades his later work. The viewer is always aware of material gently asserting itself: how the tobacco-brown hardboard, rubbed and glazed with a pow dery white or blue that clings to its sur face like fog to a headland or lichen to a rock, has the reality...
...ground on which it flourished was a traumatized Europe whose ruins and shaken regimes offered a kind of blank tablet: any design for Utopia, once drawn there, might stick. At one end of Europe, constructivism was apolitical; its center was the De Stijl group in Holland, led by Mondrian and Van Doesburg. The bright shuttles of color-red, blue, yellow, white and black, without tints or complementaries or tones-in works like Mondrian's Color Composition A, 1917, or Van Does-burg's majestic but unbuilt design of 1923 for a university hall-refer to no ideology...
...material here is certainly newer to French than to American eyes -most of it comes from U.S. collections -but there is one sublime group of paintings that have never been seen together in public before: Piet Mondrian's series of canvases centered around Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43), done in exile in Manhattan. They make up one of the most exalted statements about ideal form in the history of art. One gains, at 30 years' distance, a full sense of why Mondrian's fanatical purity and countervailing richness of surface so obsessed his American followers...