Word: mondrians
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...Piet Mondrian's life was dedicated to style. He was the leader, in fact, of the Dutch-centered De Stijl movement that began during World War I. For Mondrian, the ascetic ideal of De Stijl was renunciation of the physical representation of things. His art was right-angular, asymmetrical, and colored only in the primaries of red, blue and yellow. All lines were straight-for the sake of the spirit. Wrote he: "Natural roundness, in a word, corporeality, gives a purely materialist version of objects." Followers of De Stijl designed furniture, built architecture and patterned typography, industrial and household...
...Yves St. Lau rent sent his models out with their hair done up in little-girl braids or little-boy helmets. The colors were as gay as a picture book; in fact, that is where the idea came from, St. Laurent explained. His mother gave him a book of Mondrian's paintings just last Christmas, and his showstoppers were all movable Mondrians, practically gift-wrapped: jersey dresses splashed with squares of stand-up-and-yell colors on neutral ground...
Right from the start the mood was bullish. First up were European blue chips: a Kandinsky watercolor went for $7,200, a Salvador Dali watercolor reached an extraordinary $11,500, and a fine 1921 Mondrian peaked at $42,000. Then Russian-born Nicolas de Staël, who jumped out his studio window in 1955, sent bids skyrocketing when his semi-abstraction, Fleurs, soared to $68,000 to set a new record. In all, four works by De Staël brought...
...Mondrian in Motion. Calder made his restless, looping pencil line draw in wire, caricaturing his audience, sometimes with barbs. The toast of Paris, Josephine Baker, was his first metal portrait in 1926; her belly button turned into a shimmying, shaking brass spiral. All that was delightful, a gadgeteer's daydream, until one day Calder visited Mondrian's studio...
...visit, Calder recalls, was "the necessary shock." The de Stijlist's studio, with its neat plane geometry of primary colors (which Calder henceforth stuck to) stilled the errant Yankee. "But how fine it would be," Calder thought, "if everything moved." He gave Mondrian wings. He balanced metal cutouts on wire arms, and in 1932, Duchamp dubbed them "mobiles." Almost as much as Mondrian's forms, the stiff nature of metal forced Calder toward abstraction...