Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute, by Nicholas Fox Weber, Alfred A Knopf, 639 pp, £33, ISBN: 978-0307961594
‘Van Gogh and Gauguin were having an argument about whether physical pain was worse than spiritual pain,’ explained Mondrian. ‘Van Gogh said physical pain was nothing. And to prove it, then and there, he cut off his ear. I’d have done the same. When I was young, I was just as stubborn.’
- DIAGONAL, from Greek diagōnios (‘from angle to angle’)
Was the way he’d cut that thing some kind of retort, a provocation? Or with a new friend on the way to take his picture and in so doing fix his image for a century, had nerves got the better as his hand snipped away at the mirror? About the moustache he had on him, in 1926, when André Kertész called into his studio in Paris, for me the curious thing is not how little time would have to pass before its style became synonymous with Hitler; nor is it the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, whose films he may or may not have seen. About Piet Mondrian’s moustache, in 1926, for me the curious thing is its shape. A far cry from the ‘perfectly squared thick black dash’ he had worn since 1922, according to this new biography by Nicholas Fox Weber, that thing beneath his nose does little to establish that ‘even the human head could be a vehicle for ruler-straight lines’. When the fifty-five-year-old abstractionist stared into the camera in 1926, that ‘squared’ tuft of hair was, at best, squarish. The briefest look reveals a baseline far lower on its right than on its left, with the right borderline jutting out at an angle. These are diagonal lines. In that dawn, for this man, diagonal lines were not normal. A decade had passed since his last one. A large square canvas that, inspired by a 1917 stained-glass by Theo van Doesburg, had been tilted on its corner; Lozenge Composition with Gray Lines, produced in 1918, was a shimmering mathematic grid of horizontal, vertical and fourteen diagonal lines. As he worked through his pre-war foray into Cubism, Mondrian’s pictorial code had grown increasingly reduced. In search of an absolute minimum, he would soon let the last but the very last things fall. Diagonal lines were out, secondary colours too. What else? What else could I do without painting?
- ANIMOSITY, from Latin animus (‘spirit’, ‘courage’)
‘Theo van Doesburg’ was not his real name. Almost two decades before he founded the magazine and movement called De Stijl, Christian Emil Marie Küpper signed his first paintings with his stepfather’s name, adding the ‘van’ for good measure. ‘Theo van Doesburg’. I can’t tell you how much I despise how it looks on the page. Doesburg. A small Dutch town close to Germany. Does meaning ‘death’. A place on a map that resembles an ear. A word few know how to pronounce. With Nelly Van Moorsel, a twenty-one-year-old pianist sent off to an escapable convent in Wexford for falling in love with this twice-married Protestant man, in 1923 let’s call him Theo Van decides to leave Weimar for Paris. Paris, where Mondrian lives. For years, he’s adhered to the strict pictorial code that has developed in the essays by Mondrian he’s commissioned for De Stijl. Yet just a few months after his move to Paris, dining out with the Surrealists on his proximity to Mondrian, who rarely leaves his studio, something starts to give. ‘In the summer of 1924,’ writes Fox Weber, vaguely, ‘he began to work with slanted lines.’ Here none of these new paintings will be named, much less reproduced as illustrations. But Counter-Composition V – in which nine diagonalised blocks of colour touch up against each other to form thirteen diagonal lines – would seem to be the chief, indeed the only, apostate. Omitting to narrate Mondrian’s first encounter with Theo Van’s new paintings, Fox Weber opts instead for ostensibly tactful concision. ‘To Mondrian, this was treason.’ Not only does he break off all ties with De Stijl, he terminates his friendship with Theo Van and Nelly as well. If the means by which he does so is a letter, Fox Weber’s biography doesn’t quote it for some reason. ‘It was time to tell Van Doesburg that the break-up was irrevocable,’ it reports. ‘For five years following the end of the First World War, they had shared the goal of providing humankind with unprecedented equanimity through the visible.’ Alas, however, now, perhaps in person, but likely in a letter uncited for some reason, ‘Mondrian informed Van Doesburg and Nelly that if by chance they were in the same place at the same time, neither of them should expect so much as “hello” from him.’
- DIFFERENT, from Latin different (‘carrying away’)
If Mondrian (born ‘Mondriaan’, but pressured, pre-war, to abandon an ‘a’ by his uncle, a painter, who so feared the ‘mad confusion’ of his protégé’s work would depreciate the value of his own commercial landscapes that he paid for a notice in the paper proclaiming he had ‘nothing in common with his nephew’) could so vehemently come out against Theo Van’s diagonals, then how can we account for the cut of his Hitler moustache? For all his hermetic withdrawal from the world, he was not by any means above a gesture; yet with a new friend on the way to take his picture, and in so doing fix his image for a century, was it not simply nerves that had got to his hand at the mirror? One of four sons born to a hard-line Orthodox Protestant preacher, except when he went dancing, which was often, he was never on good terms with that thing, that closeted thing, which always getting sick, pneumonia, Spanish flu, called his body. Nor anyone else’s. Twice in his twenties he applied for a bursary to study in Rome, and each time he was rejected for my failure to render an ‘adequate nude’. Flat broke at thirty, he moved back to the countryside to live with his parents. There he earned a crust doing portraits on commission. But in his own work from that period, the human figure dissolves into the landscape, and the landscape is coming apart. Never had he studied the diagonal as closely. Village Church (1898). At Work (1899). Triangulated Farmhouse Façade with Polder Blue (1899). Two Girls in a Wood (1899). In Wood with Beech Trees (1900), whose suggestion of pictorial flatness comes after Van Gogh, a convergence of diagonals presides over the frame. A signature of one-point perspective, this convergence ought to scan as space receding. But does it? Is that not a hill? Aren’t those leaves decomposing much closer? ‘No matter how long we study this painting,’ says Fox Weber in this exhaustively ekphrastic, discursively reticent book, ‘it remains unclear if that triangle of soil on which dead leaves are strewn is a hill rising up, or a flat expanse that juts into a lake along a shoreline that appears to have been cut with oversized shears.’
- ACCOUTREMENTS, from Old French cousture (‘sewing’)
Of the half-dozen photographs André Kertész was to make in Mondrian’s studio that afternoon or afternoons in 1926, which occasion or occasions we know little about, no thanks to Fox Weber, who devotes to the event only one of 550-odd pages, the most beautiful and brilliant shot, I think, the one I love the most, a masterpiece in starkest chiaroscuro, which, although embedded in the body of this authoritative biography, receives not a word, not a single word of context, nothing, not even its title, not at the front, not even at the back, where the credit list amounts to three pages of numerical archival classifications, nothing but a paratextual legend that reads beneath this reproduction and one other of a vase from which would always bloom a flower in plaster, his staircase and landing, ‘André Kertész was fascinated by the way Mondrian arranged the few accoutrements in his life’, is in the museums and monographs named Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe. When did Mondrian start wearing glasses? I’d quite like to know. Yet strangely for a biography of a painter, especially a biography of this painter, about whom we learn that as a child he refrained from all play out of a paranoid fear of injuring his eyes, there is scant information, no information in fact, about the condition of Mondrian’s eyesight. When did he start wearing glasses? The reader can only deduce. In 1901 – cross-legged on the floor of a literary salon in Amsterdam – Mondrian is not wearing glasses. In 1911 – stood next to the fiancée from whom he would soon break – Mondrian is not wearing glasses. In 1914 – as depicted in a portrait at the start of five years stranded on a brief visit home – Mondrian is not wearing glasses. It’s not till 1922, in a portrait cropped to an oval like the egg-like interior frames of compositions made in 1914, that Mondrian, his gaze at three-quarters, is eventually shown wearing glasses. By that stage, he was fifty years old. Avoiding the eyes of his subject, Fox Weber attends to his moustache, the ‘perfectly squared thick black dash’ which debuted in this portrait as well. ‘The mustache represented a midlife identity shift. The tangled full beard of his hard-core Theosophy days was a thing of the past; rationalism and order now reigned.’ Presuming this in 1922, how about 1926? Either side of a pipe at a slant in a circular ash-bowl, a circular ash-bowl in the corner of a table, a cloth-covered plane retouched by the photographer in such a way that it could pass for a searchlight cast upon us from a point just over the horizon, Kertész snaps not one, but two pairs of glasses. Encased by those diagonals that almost don’t converge like in Wood with Beech Trees, the arms of those spectacles which, like so many pairs of glasses worn in Weimar, have bold dark circular frames, extend out like horizontal and vertical lines; yet inward as quotation marks, the ears of the eyes averted bend. About that pipe, I have wondered for years. Haven’t you seen this already? Yet about those frames, I am struck only today. In the picture of Mondrian’s diagonalised moustache, the glasses he wears are not circled by frames. Isn’t three pairs of glasses a lot? Mightn’t this merit some comment? Fox Weber decides to move on. After a weak, ostensibly perfunctory transition at the start of the next paragraph (‘Sometimes,’ he writes, ‘he was not able to maintain his personal balance’) he embarks on an ostensibly measured account of a half-veiled attack on Mondrian’s code that had appeared that very month, signed ‘Theo van Doesburg’, in De Stijl.
- TREASON, from Latin traditio (‘handing over’)
From this dutiful biography, there’s quite a lot left out. Strangely for a history, there’s plenty left between the lines as well. Describing the first work Mondrian completed in the wake of Theo Van’s ‘treason’, Fox Weber writes: ‘A red triangle on the upper left relishes a jaunty face-off with a blue one.’ A reprisal of the diamond-shaped canvas Mondrian had first used in 1918, Lozenge Composition is a large square canvas turned forty-five degrees. Does the edge of a painting not constitute to a line? For all his lyrical attention to the triangles in this work – a painting which got under way, he drops in crucially, in 1923 – his engagement with the edges, the four diagonal edges of this Lozenge Composition, begins and ends with the word ‘diamond-shaped’. His attention turns instead to the interior frames. ‘The black lines of different thickness move like a piston,’ he writes. A piston. A metaphor. Aren’t metaphors excluded? Converting explosive into mechanical energy, a piston derives motion. What does it mean for a painting to have motion? The idea is repeatedly invoked by a variety of metaphors. At times these purplish flights can make it sound like bullshit. But for something more concrete, we can always read Deleuze, who isn’t cited. ‘The difference in the thickness of Mondrian’s lines has a very peculiar optical effect,’ he explained in 1981. ‘The fact that the lines do not have the same thickness makes the eye, the eye of the viewer, follow a diagonal line that Mondrian has no need to draw himself. Here we have a virtual line.’ With every subtle departure from expectations established by such an apparently formulaic aesthetic, Mondrian constructs in the viewer a painterly eye, a suspicious and measuring eye which, at every intersection of horizontal and vertical, traces immanent diagonal lines. Allow me one metaphor, please. Like the rectilinear plane of the cloth-covered table, the table over which stands the billiard player, the great one, mapping routes around three cushions then on toward the object; so every rectilinear plane of a Mondrian composition is a vast labyrinth of virtual diagonals. Donald Duck, you know. Après lui, le billard électrique. Once, when Alexander Calder suggested that Mondrian experiment with motors that would make the works move around a space like Calder’s sculptures, he refused. ‘My painting is already very fast.’ Yet for Mondrian, time was a problem. To make a painting very fast took ages.
- OCCASION, from Latin occasio (‘juncture’, ‘reason’)
On the back of this biography, a blurb by John Banville jokes: ‘A passionate dancer: who’d have thought?’ Somehow, I knew he’d be here. Lozenge, for me, is one of his words. In seven of his novels, it appears. In Birchwood, his second, it debuts: ‘Dead roses scattered amidst bits of shattered bowl considered their splintered reflection in a mirror laced with cracks. A fat lozenge of sunlight sat on a chair. I could touch nothing, nothing. They had maimed my world. I climbed the stairs to the high window on the landing.’
- ULTERIOR, from Latin (‘further’, ‘more distant’)
‘At the end of 1924 Mondrian believed he had completed a single painting,’ we read, a little suspiciously. How long Mondrian had laboured or ceased to have laboured in the impression or under the impression that this one single painting was complete isn’t mentioned. Anyway, no, it wasn’t. Not until the summer of 1925 was Lozenge Composition completed. ‘We have a black-and-white photo of this painting taken when he first considered it finished,’ we read, and here something in the tone makes the first-person plurals feel different. Animosity granted, the most anecdotally rich year of Mondrian’s life is reduced to one single sentence. ‘Mondrian continued to change the thickness of the lines and the deployment of color in various positions.’ No letters are quoted, no studio talk. The black-and-white photo that Fox Weber says ‘we have’ we’re not shown. Suddenly, the painting is finished. By suggestion and omission, his ekphrasis invites, without ever quite outlining, an interpretation of the painting, of Lozenge Composition, the triangular cusp of which finds an echo in a corner of a cloth-covered table, shot, perhaps the afternoon the man who had been Andor depicted the painter, a serious old man with an asymmetric dash beneath his nose, as a masterly retort, a coup de grâce. By simply tilting the square on its corner again, a large square canvas on its corner, damn it, yes, that’s right, damn it, within the pared-down code that Theo Van betrayed, I – number five! – five triangles. ‘A red triangle on the upper left relishes a jaunty face-off with a blue one of nearly the same size on the lower right, whereas a smaller, more intense yellow, sparkling and vibrant, chimes in from the lower left,’ writes Fox Weber. ‘With the esprit and confidence and playfulness of Fred Astaire executing a tap dance, Lozenge Composition performs impeccably.’
- RETORT, from medieval Latin retorquere (‘twist back’)
Often figured as Theo Van’s return the diagonal, elsewhere I learn that in 1924 Counter Composition V was hung as a diamond. The diagonals the line runs tore them apart, in other words, before the cut, had not taken place.
- DANCE, of unknown origin
Amsterdam, Amsterdam! I thought I was there. Not long in the wake of Wood with Beech Trees, I thought for a while I was there. After taking on two lucrative commissions – the first one depicting bacteria, the second one painting a ceiling – the quietly apocalyptic painter has enough in the claw to move out of his parents’ and, with the help of the odd society portrait, to rent a small apartment in the capital again. Amsterdam, Amsterdam! I think I was there. For a couple of years, his mouth becomes a fixture on the artistic scene. ‘Mondrian was respected for the earnestness with which he delivered his incomprehensible monologues,’ writes Fox Weber, ‘but he remained an outsider.’ When he makes for the first time a self-portrait in oil, the year is 1900, he is twenty-eight years old, and an occasional night of theatre he can finally afford. Amsterdam! Amsterdam! Did I not see you there at Hedda Gabler? Two points of eyeshine the colour of the lake or perhaps the horizon in Wood with Beech Trees notwithstanding, the palette of this portrait, one of only half-a-dozen self-portraits he would make, is so earthen; like early Van Gogh or Gaugin gearing up toward maddening colour, the palette is so earthen as to give the impression of a man face-up in an open grave awoken after years. ‘Mondrian artfully deployed bright high-lights within the overall dark palette,’ we read, then time falls out of focus. ‘A few years later’, he invited a friend to come over to his basement with a pistol. As targets, we learn they ‘generally’ used discarded canvases, all of them failed portraits. ‘Piet was a good shot,’ remembered his friend.
1/7/2025
Kevin Breathnach is the author of Tunnel Vision and Morphing.
