Word: mondrians
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...DUTCH ARTIST PIET MONdrian, along with the Russians Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, was one of the three founding fathers of 20th century abstract painting. The period 1910-20, when their ideas were in their first messianic flood, is a long way from us now, and the very idea of abstract art has lost some of its old modernist prestige; nobody supposes it could have become, as its makers and early evangelists supposed, the ultimate art form, the end of art history. And yet Mondrian remains an artist of extreme importance, not only because of the historic inventiveness...
...Mondrian retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, curated by an international panel led by the art historian Angelica Zander Rudenstine, is quite simply one of the best shows MOMA has ever held--a worthy successor to its surveys of the two other 20th century titans, Picasso and Matisse. In its New York form, the exhibition includes paintings that, owing to their fragility, couldn't be lent to earlier venues in Washington and Holland--Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, and Victory Boogie Woogie, left unfinished at his death...
...then Mondrian's presence was a talisman to the small New York avant-garde. It was the gift of Hitler. Like many of the Surrealists--whose work he cordially detested--Mondrian had fled to refuge in New York in 1940 as the Nazi threat to "degenerate artists" such as himself became inescapably plain. The mere arrival of this diffident and somewhat reclusive man symbolized the passing of modernist leadership from Paris to Manhattan. Yet unlike the Surrealists, he had few American followers, and none who became painters of the first rank. Part of the paradox of Mondrian was that although...
...stripes and Benday dots. Its flat, posterish colors will read with infrangible aplomb. It will parody other art, as in the past Lichtenstein's work has parodied everything from Art Deco to synthetic Cubism, from Franz Marc's horses to Monet's versions of Rouen Cathedral, from Mondrian's squares to the generic brushstroke of late Abstract Expressionism. It will have a number of concealed jokes for the art-initiated, often genuinely funny ones -- as when, redoing Matisse's Still Life with "Dance" in 1974, Lichtenstein inserted a comic-strip blast of musical notes to give the figures something...
Generally, Rothenberg seems to be at her best in paintings that combine a single image with anxious focus. In the later '80s she became preoccupied with a different, atmospheric style of painting and images of dancers (including one of her aesthetic heroes, the painter Piet Mondrian, imagined solemnly doing the fox-trot with a Rothenberg-like partner). In their cold, flickering, indistinct light, one catches long-distance echoes of Impressionism and of the sequential-position photography that was once copied by the Italian Futurists. In these, as in the drawings from this period, form is extremely provisional -- the shape...