Word: mondrians
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...meticulous grilles of Piet Mondrian look as if anyone with a ruler and a paintbox could have done them. The delight they inspire as design has strongly influenced architecture and graphic advertising. If. upon familiarity, they now seem somewhat sterile, they were no mere gimmickry but the deadly serious result of a lifetime of intellectual search for the truth beyond the surface of reality. Seldom has an artist traveled a more complex route to achieve such striking simplicity...
Last week Manhattan's Sidney Janis Gallery had on view a small retrospective show that traces some of the steps along that route. It begins with the year 1903 when Mondrian, then 31, was painting the common sights of his native Holland -houses and windmills, rivers and canals. As the years passed, Mondrian began to strip awyay the outer layers of nature to reveal its skeletal geometry. A tree was not made up of a trunk and branches but of horizontals and verticals. When Mondrian painted a flower, he was primarily interested in its "plastic structure...
...Seurat peasants bend to their toil near some childlike magic created by Paul Klee and a few austere and haunting landscapes by Lyonel Feininger. And near them hang the museum's latest acquisitions-two perfect chrysanthemums, one in pencil, the other in watercolor-done by Piet Mondrian in the days before he began painting his color-laden grilles...
...Moving Mondrian. Having been brought up in the shadow of two traditional sculptors, the third Calder was a bit bored with the idea of becoming one himself. He started out to be an engineer. In the 1920s he began making statues (Josephine Baker, Helen Wills) in wire, produced a series of wire goldfish bowls in which the fish swam rhythmically back and forth at the turn of a crank. Out of his contact with Mondrian, he wanted to do "a Mondrian that moves." Thus the mobile...
Born in Hannover in 1887, Schwitters forsook the realism of his academic art training to become associated first with the sardonic Paul Klee, then with the Dadaists and such pioneer abstract painters as Piet Mondrian. But all his life Schwitters made a modest living painting realistic portraits aimed at pleasing the sitter. In 1919 he branched away from the Dadaists, founded his own movement, which he called Merz. The word had no meaning, but came from a fragment of a piece of newsprint bearing the phrase Commerz-und Privatbank that he had pasted on one of his collages. "Merz...