Piet Mondrian: the anguish of angularity 

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) emerges from Nicholas Fox Weber’s exhaustively detailed, 639-page Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute (Knopf, $40) as eccentric and humourless, petty and phlegmatic, vituperative and petulant, bigoted and unappealing.  This rather dour Dutchman came from a strict, provincial Calvinist background.  The sect, tormented by a sense of sin, threatened evil-doers with hellfire and reformed the Dutch Reformed Church.  He could not break free from his fire-and-brimstone father and, plagued by his repression, could never enjoy the ordinary pleasures of life: good food and drink, love and sex, marriage and children, even fame and wealth.  He was not interested in literature, theatre, opera or ballet.

Mondrian left Holland for Paris in 1919, never again lived in a rural town, never returned to his native country and never travelled on the Continent.  He did not seem moved by the deaths of his parents and did not attend their funerals.  The Germans had invaded Belgium and France in 1914, but he ignored the war that was destroying Europe.  In World War II, when the Nazis invaded and occupied Holland, Mondrian was safe (via London) in New York and scarcely mentioned the national disaster.  After five years in America, he still spoke imperfect English with a guttural Dutch accent.

Piet Mondriaan, 1942 – New York City

He had a creepy-looking skull, a rigid corpse-like body and an obsessive anal-compulsive personality.  Mondrian sometimes shaved half his face, divided it vertically and crossed it with a Hitlerian mustache.  After each meal he stacked the dirty plates, glasses and utensils in neat orderly piles, and washed them every three days.  He was unfamiliar with a cocktail, didn’t offer guests alcohol, thought drinks “on the rocks” were unhealthy and treated his parched visitors to V8 juice. 

The artist had an uneventful existence, a secret but mainly repressed bisexual life and a few quirks.  He lived simply but bought expensive clothes, and subjected women to mouth-to-mouth kisses that lasted as long as 20 minutes while they tried to squirm out of his grip.  He loved jazz and dancing in ballrooms or fox-trotting alone in his studio, but had an awkward and robotic posture and was so stiff on the dance floor that he seemed to be wearing a corset.  

He became involved with weird sects: Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Alfred Waldenburg’s phrenology, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s medical mysticism, and the crankish William Hay diet, which forbade the mixture of proteins and starches.  Mondrian insisted on eliminating all disturbances and Weber writes that his French studio had “clarity and silence.”  But in Paris he lived right next to the loud whistles and clamour of the Gare Montparnasse, which had scores of trains emerging from and rattling into the station.  In New York the sirens of fire engines racing up First Avenue continually bothered him.

Weber states that Mondrian was unable to “integrate sex and emotional connectedness into his life” and there was a “strong possibility that he had sex with female prostitutes and was intimately involved with men.”  But he also adds that “it is possible that Mondrian never had sex with a woman” nor—since he never used models—that he had ever seen a naked woman.  He broke off several engagements; somewhat obviously, Weber notes that “the failed relationship with Nell deflated Mondrian’s spirits”.  Unlike the Italian author Gabriel D’Annunzio, who was inspired by sex and spilled sperm as he spilled ink, Mondrian believed, “every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.”  He proclaimed, as in Tosca’s aria Vissi d’arte, “I have always lived for my art.” 

The artist attracted many obedient young disciples but had no distinguished or lifelong friends.  A bewildering array of obscure acquaintances—with comical-sounding Dutch names: Toorop, Van der Pot, Van der Tunk and Vantongerloo—briefly turn up and make cameo appearances on his stage.  He soon quarrels with them and they disappear.  Weber unhelpfully describes Simon Maris as “an amiable young painter who knew lots of people”.  

Mondrian hated Jews, but gave a papal dispensation to patrons, collectors, dealers, photographers and saviours who helped him: Sal Slijper (another amusing name), Paul Sanders, Léonce Rosenberg, André Kertész, Evsa Model, Naum Gabo, Sidney Janis, Harry Holtzman, Jacques Heim and Peggy Guggenheim.  They all looked after him as if they were his wife.

Weber doesn’t note that Mondrian’s early and excruciating lithograph that “depicts a hooded man cutting out the tongue of a fellow tied to a post” was inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War.   Mondrian surely did not, as Weber maintains several times, get his black verticals and horizontals from the windows in his childhood home.  Most European windows, except Gaudi’s in Barcelona, were rectilinear.  Weber also agrees with Phyllis Greenacre’s wild speculation, offered without the slightest evidence, that Mondrian painted walls after hearing his parents having sex, and concludes that it “is probably correct”.

But Weber doesn’t mention the most important sources for Mondrian’s geometric art.  His long straight lines came from Classical Greek architecture, the flat Dutch landscape, the straight canals running right under the bridges and the wide straight boulevards created by Baron Haussmann in 19th-century Paris.  Three centuries earlier, Vermeer’s Little Street in Delft has a horizontal road in front of the house that crosses a vertical alley on the left; his little patch of yellow, so admired by Proust, appears in his View of Delft . Moreover, Vermeer’s Procuress is painted in the blue, red and yellow adopted by Mondrian.

Johannes Vermeer – Gezicht op huizen in Delft, bekend als ‘Het straatje’

Mondrian’s early pictures were mediocre and he was twice rejected as a student by the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam.  His important work began in 1913 and his innovative technique grew out of Cubism.  In 1919 he moved from smaller to larger squares, with darker black lines and a limited palette of bright contrasting primary colors: blue, red and yellow (suggesting the sky, fire and sun) and three primary values: white, black and grey.  He planned his work with ever-shifting rectangular pieces of coloured cardboard that he pinned to the walls of his studio.  He drew his rigidly straight lines by hand, without the help of a tape or ruler, and hit his stride in 1920.  

His paintings are the extreme opposite of the emotional German Expressionists and dynamic Italian Futurists.  His art is most like the work of his close contemporary, the Swiss Paul Klee (1879-1940): Harmony of Rectangles (1923) and Individualized Measurement of the Strata (1930).  Klee worked for the stylistically advanced German Bauhaus, but Mondrian thought even the modernist designs of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were too traditional. 

(Individualized altimetry of stripes by Paul Klee (1879-1940), pastel on paper)

Weber calls Mondrian’s neutral and repetitive titles— Composition I, Composition in and Composition with —“audacious”. But each work is severely limited by the regular and meticulous grid of graph paper or checkerboard.  Weber ties himself into ludicrous knots by trying to vary his descriptions of a great many similar pictures.  Some of his analyses are minutely detailed and boring: “A small vertical canvas, it has a bifurcated red rectangle in its upper left-hand corner, and a horizontal blue landing pad on the lower right. . . . The difference between the height and the width is 120 millimeters, or about half an inch; the canvas is 100.3 cm (39 1/2 inches) high, and 99.1 cm (39 inches) wide.”  But we don’t have to know these minute details to understand his pictures.

Wildly overrating Mondrian’s achievement, Weber claims that his gridlock of black horizontal and vertical lines “create rhythm and express energy and joie de vivre in a way that boggles the mind.  They have the same power as certain Romanesque church interiors and the grandest Baroque staircases.”  It would be difficult, however, to imagine any artist less like the extravagant style, elaborate ornamentation and sensuality of the Rubensian Baroque.

Piet Mondrian Victory boogie woogie (1944)

Weber torpedoes his own analyses and hurts Mondrian’s reputation by distorting his work with far-fetched and absurd exaggerations.  He compares the art to astronomy, geography, anatomy, physiology, inebriation, conflagration, explosions, electricity, mobility, mysticism, music, mirth, heat, gemstones, circuses and acrobats.  He praises “glorious new territory” instead of endless variations and repetitions, and repeats, “the vertical slit of yellow is glorious”.  In overheated prose he exclaims: “The little vertical on the left, is perhaps twenty millimeters wider than the one on the right, is one of Mondrian’s utterly brilliant moves”; “the horizontals have the deliberate precariousness and stretch of a tightrope”; “the ying and yang evoke sheer laughter.” 

Despite the overwhelming impression of calm, stillness and harmony, Weber—as if watching in an earthquake—insists that one picture “has fantastic rhythm and motion, its form and colors jump up and down with great élan.”  He repeats: “The checkerboard manages to be in perpetual motion”; the paintings have “the spark of combustion”; “the lower-right quadrant is where the action peaks.”  In these vibrant compositions, “the black lines move, the verticals jump”; “the clash generates a confrontation: the charge of two elements hitting like electrodes”; “the by-product resembles jazz music: cheerful, universal, uplifting and timeless”; “they are jewels: color and light emerging from minimal vibrant components in perpetual interaction”; “he was painting, exuberantly, the animation of the cosmos”; “the whole heavenly city was infused with an energy of atomic scale”; “the paintings can alter one’s existence and intoxicate the viewer”; “ ‘A’ and ‘B’ induce a meditative state in which our spirits rise”; “he presented the soul on a journey from materialism to spiritual freedom”; “he provides a super charge of energy and transports the viewer into paradise”; “Mondrian presented worlds as complex as the inner workings of the human body or the entire earth with its variables of life on and in sea and land”; “the very large white rectangular center is like a vast ocean.  The result is a lively dysrhythmia.” The latter term means a physiological abnormality of the heart or brain!

One of Weber’s most ill-conceived comparisons is that the work ethic of the preternaturally gloomy and despondent Dutchman is like the overall mentality of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go” and “Whistle while you work.”  Weber concludes: “Those two different thicknesses and the clusters formed by the intersections of the lines going in three different directions,  create the shimmer and sparkle of a diamond that has been carefully cut by a jeweler to achieve maximum brilliance. The luminosity of the white adds to the state of perpetual movement.  The result is as forceful and timeless as a star-filled sky on a clear night.”  But the second part of this description contradicts the first part.  The surface is tranquil, not sparkling; static, not dynamic; and there are no jets of light in the white (not dark) background.  He adds with a note of puzzlement, “The grey against the white is intoxicating.  Where did Mondrian acquire this genius?  Who else could convey the essence of joy, the assurance that human existence is beautiful?”  The answer to this rhetorical question is clear: Gauguin in Tahiti, Matisse in Nice, Bonnard on the French Riviera.

Mondrian’s essential style, with scores of variations, has a limited palette of three colours, which stand out against the white background and suggest a subtle depth.  They convey a balanced, tranquil, reflective and harmonious feeling—as in still and quiet waters and Mark Rothko’s later paintings.  To me, his Composition in Line (1917), though rigidly abstract, looks like the aerial view of a cemetery, and his famous  Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943) suggests tramcars riding up a hill.

Piet Mondrian, 1942 – Broadway Boogie Woogie

Mondrian’s writings range from childish rubbish to stupefying obscurity. Weber claims that “Mondrian exults in the complexity of the scene” in his essay of 1920 that begins: “Ru-h, ru-h-h-h-h-h.  Poeoeoe.  Tik-tik-tik-tik.  Pre.  R-r-r-r-r-uh-h.  Huh!  Pang.”  His contorted hot-air essays also fail to make sense: “Only through equivalent relationships can the oppression of particular form be annihilated so that the tragic in life ceases to be reflected in our palpable environment.”

The “impure” green, purple and orange colors used by other artists aroused Mondrian’s fury.  Though dogmatic and critical of other artists, he was deeply distressed by a mild New Yorker satire that claimed, “He’s probably the only painter in the world who hasn’t drawn a curved line in twenty years.  Anything circular makes him nervous.”  He despised all figurative pictures, but admired a traditional landscape: “This is very good indeed.  It is what I have come to destroy.”  Surprisingly, he praised Jackson Pollock’s paint-scattered explosions: “Where you see ‘lack of discipline,’ I get the impression of tremendous energy” — an energy that is notably absent from his own work.

In addition to his distortions and exaggerations, Weber’s Mondrian has serious faults.  It is far too long, and overloaded with trivial details and sinking sentences, especially about Mondrian’s childhood homes and early life: “he spent several weeks in the small Brabant village of Uden, seven kilometers east of Nistelrode.”  Weber also contradicts himself by stating that Mondrian’s “studio attested to the heroic abnegation of  monk,” but also that “the unfettered will for pleasure pervades Mondrian’s world.”

Weber’s nauseating 8-page Acknowledgements praise more than 300 “spectacular individuals” and “phenomenal human beings,” most of whom have nothing to do with this book.  This brilliant gathering includes tennis and swimming partners and, most egregiously, Jackie Onassis and Michelle Obama. This monomaniacal exercise shows that Weber is a wonderful fellow and beloved friend who has legions of admirers.  Despite massive support Weber’s book, which began as a doctoral dissertation, is deeply flawed and often off the rails.

Weber concludes with a sketch of the artist’s character: “Mondrian lived in his own universe.  With friends but no intimates, he was amused by odd things, and rarely showed signs of being bothered by anything.  But what amused him and what he wanted in human relationships was incomprehensible.  He cared deeply about his appearance; as for the effects of his behavior, he seemed indifferent or unaware.”  Readers who admire Mondrian’s work will find it very difficult to sympathise with such an egoistic and ill-tempered man.

Mondrian influenced architecture, design and fashion.  Like many prominent modern artists, he did not achieve commercial success in his lifetime, was often impoverished and had to rely on generous patrons.  In November 2022, 78 years after his death, Composition No. II (1930) sold at Sotheby’s for $51 million.

Piet Mondriaan, 1930 – Mondrian Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow

Jeffrey Meyers has published Painting and the Novel , The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis , Impressionist Quartet , Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real .