Word: mondrians
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...competent. The history they describe is more settled and hence readily encapsulated. The "period rooms"-unconvincing reconstructions of the Gertrude Stein salon at 27, Rue de Fleurus, the "291" gallery in which Alfred Stieglitz introduced Matisse, Brancusi and modern photography to a tiny coterie in New York, and Piet Mondrian's Manhattan studio, among other places-are tackily made and none too accurate. But the paintings fare better...
...living painter could set forth. He is not, as the condescending tag once read, a California artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn's best paintings mediate between the moral duty to acknowledge the ancestor and the desire to claim one's own experience as unique, unrepeatable. In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words "high seriousness" might have been invented...
They are the medium for one of the most exhilarating meditations on struc ture - the tradition being that of pre-1914 Matisse and post- 1918 Mondrian - ever conducted by an American artist...
Delectable Glow. He came to abstract painting through still life, canceling out recognizable objects until the tabletop became a flat plane inlaid with small, quirky geometrical forms. But Cavallon's formative encounter was with Mondrian's work, and it is to Mondrian that the grid paintings he made from the late '30s onward incessantly allude. Cavallon's geometrical works, like one dated 1946, are not Utopias: there is little of Mondrian's austere, architectonic rectitude in them. They are sociable, warm, busy and a bit sloppy. They stand to the more purist kinds of geometrical...
...effect they are-Noland's targets and chevrons bloom and pulsate with light. They offer a pure, uncluttered hedonism to the eye. But that is all they do offer. The more recent work, the plaid paintings of 1971 with their tartan grid of lines laid like pastel Mondrian across a blue ground, and the irregular polygonal canvases from 1976 with rays and cuts of color, cannot even do that. One realizes, descending the ramp of the Guggenheim, that Noland is hardly a giant of cultural history. He is simply an ornamental artist and-compared with the Arab tile makers...