Early Mondrian

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Some years ago, a respected critic told me of a liberating realisation that came only late in his career: an essay can dispense with logical, cumulative order. He wanted to present three observations regarding the sensory, material features of the art under review, but could find no concept that would unite his insights. He resorted to recording a series of self-sufficient notes that lacked both motivating narrative and integrating theme. His lesson for himself: better to fail to connect than to force a false rationale. The critic could have aligned his three vignettes with the existing account of stylistic development, affirming the consensual fantasy of the art historians. Their collective subjectivity was passing for objectivity because everyone believed the same. Instead he set forth his observations unadulterated, with no contextual reconstruction, no theoretical elaboration, no excuses. He put his subjectivity on objective display.

Even the most affecting narrative coherence ultimately proves false, does it not? History moves on; our assessment of it changes. The metaphorical and metonymical links that maintain the flow of an interpretive text are only as secure as our faith in the principles we use to validate them.1 My older colleague was experiencing a crisis of confidence in his long-held analytical habits. The potential success of a critical essay becomes evident in the process of its being composed, as the writer

develops a narrative line that he or she can justifiably continue to follow. Writing must convince the writer before it convinces others. Having reached an impasse, my colleague – in this instance, at least – decided to abandon any pretence of narrative order. When a critic discovers motivation, coherence and consistency in the art at issue, these qualities reflect back on the written account, which likewise requires motivation, coherence and consistency. The risk that writers take is to have inadvertently projected their personal motivation onto a work of art that does not share it. And if a critic is aware of the prevailing interpretation of an artist, the confirmation of knowledge already established can itself become a central motivating force. By maintaining the collective critical fantasy, writers avoid being ‘wrong’. But being ‘right’ often entails being blind to insight.

A Project

The pre-canonical beginnings of a major artist expose distinctive qualities that may or may not prove compatible with the same artist’s ends. Some weeks ago, when I was asked the nature of my current project, I replied ‘early Mondrian’: Mondrian before he became the extreme abstractionist feted in the history books. The curators of Mondrian’s 1994 retrospective outlined the longstanding interpretive situation: ‘The prolific and often

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gifted work of these earlier years [1890 –1907] belongs, fundamentally, to an aesthetic formed in the nineteenth century. It was only after 1908 that he began to absorb various modern movements.’2 One wonders where to locate the origin of the ‘modern movements’ themselves, if not in ‘an aesthetic formed in the nineteenth century’. We need to have faith in a certain historical narrative of radical innovation –Cézannisme, Fauvism, Cubism – to justify this twisted logic. Such faith has merit, so long as we acknowledge our acceptance of it. It provides a collective platform for judgement, even if a bit shaky. Our prevailing account relies on a context of external influences and distinguishes degrees of modern practice, as if a certain arbitrary degree of the modern, and no less, were responsible for any transition from the past worth identifying as a break. By scholarly consensus, Mondrian’s break occurred after 1908. But how much of a break was it? There may be room for narrative adjustment.

In reply to the question concerning my project, I announced the topic but no narrative strategy, no storyboard of nineteenth-century continuity and twentieth-century break. My colleagues responded: ‘Ah, yes, early Mondrian: those terrific landscapes, the trees.’ The supposition that landscape was my focus was correct, but not the specific examples. Because we think ‘abstraction’ in relation to ‘Mondrian’, we readily recall compositions of trees that

the painter developed with patterns of tensed lines and a limited number of colours. Most of these date from after 1908. 3 The lines and colours depart from naturalistic and descriptive conventions; they become Mondrian’s abstracting elements and set the terms of his pictorial organisation. By this reasoning, which imposes a conceptual binary – representation/ abstraction – any pictorial element might be singled out as the conveyer of modern abstraction within a representational image. 4 Abstraction is the abstraction of something that would otherwise appear less focused, with less compositional articulation. Pictorial abstraction selectively isolates a limited range of visual qualities or identifiable features to generate a desirable image.

Think of abstraction as initially a process of extraction: an artist extracts from visual experience the elements that constitute a compelling representational order. Whatever abstraction removes, it can return in an altered, enhanced form. The process might add rhythmic movement to an unremarkable descriptive feature, such as the asymmetrical growth of a tree: see the sense of rotation in the branching of Polder Landscape with Silhouetted Young Tree (1900 – 01; p. 40), where marks of foliage and of sky assume the same scale, resulting in a spatially ambiguous yet integrated pattern. This rhythmic enhancement is innocent enough – relatively neutral as an index

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9
Geinrust Farm in the Mist , c.1906 – 07
.5 × 42.5 cm | 12 ¾ × 16 ¾ in
Oil on canvas
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of cultural values – but the process introduces hierarchy to the representation/abstraction binary, favouring rhythmic abstraction over descriptive representation. Given Mondrian’s more canonical trees – AVOND (Evening): The Red Tree (1908 –10), or The Gray Tree (1911; p.17) – the abstractions of his mature practice through the early 1940 s can be viewed as their logical fruition. Regularise the linear network, saturate the colour and abandon all mimetic allusion: Mondrian 1910 becomes Mondrian 1930 or 1940. My colleagues would probably have been willing to reach a little further back in the standard chronology, recalling the atmospheric trees that Mondrian abstracted by blurring a scene and muting its chromatic tones: a test case might be Geinrust Farm in the Mist (c.1906 – 07; p.9), or ZOMERNACHT (Summer Night) (1907). But to think earlier still, returning to Polder Landscape with Silhouetted Young Tree, is to realise that retrospective traces of the Mondrian of the textbooks begin to fade. We resist or ignore whatever fails to correspond unambiguously to a story drawn with plot lines already sufficiently clear. Mondrian circa 1900 – 05 receives proportionately little critical attention, even from his specialists.

How well does Geinrust Farm in the Mist fit the extreme abstraction of the later Mondrian, typically a non-representational format limited to two orthogonal directions and no more than five colours, as in Composition with Red, Blue,

and Yellow (1930 ; p.22)?5 In the early painting, a stand of mature vertical trees shelters a horizontal farm building and rises to form – in Mondrian’s act of reductive, focused abstraction – an arching horizontal, a pictorial canopy. With easel paintings of intimate size (this one is 32.5 × 42.5 centimetres or somewhat less than 13 × 17 inches), individual brushstrokes become especially determinative unless the artist switches to a facture proportionately reduced in scale. On the whole, Mondrian did not miniaturise his marks. In this respect, he resembled contemporaries who rendered landscape naturalistically, preserving a sense of spontaneous observation through the coarse network of a limited number of brushstrokes (compare the summary patchwork of Blossoming Trees Before a Haystack [c.1902– 05; p. 43], a signed, presumably completed composition despite its looseness).

Mondrian’s strokes engage their neighbours by assuming a contrary direction or a subtly contrasting tone. In Geinrust Farm in the Mist, some of the strokes break the compelling curve of the canopy motif, which is nevertheless echoed at least three times: in the curving strokes rendering the sky just above the trees, in the curving reflection of the entire expanse of sky in the river at the base of the composition, and in the curved roof line of the building structure. All of these concentrations of pictorial energy, all of this abstraction generates

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The Gray Tree, 1911
79.7 × 109.1 cm | 31 ½ × 42 7/8 in
Oil on canvas

tones that have no direct referent in the natural scene. Mondrian’s haphazard mixing, perhaps inadvertent, generates instances of muted violet among his green foliage, blue sky and bright blossoms, both rose-coloured and white. The presence of the violet hue is a material abstraction. It adds to the pictorial effect without contributing to the representation. In the decade to follow, a comparably energetic work such as The Gray Tree introduces restraint through its relative regularity. Less seems unpredictable, because Mondrian limits the abstracted features that he needs to control, while also liberating them from responsibility for descriptive representation. His method for The Gray Tree is to fit a patchwork of light grey tones between dark grey linear elements.

Multiple paths exist for understanding the impulse to increased abstraction felt by artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mondrian included. It helps to acknowledge that the perspective of his painting is specific to its medium. It develops neither as the controlled geometric recession of an architectural rendering nor as the single-lens, all-at-once focus of photography. The perspective proper to painting is diffuse, like a field of marks or colours that lack hierarchical order and resist being sorted into definite categories. An unusually large (1 metre wide) forest scene by Cézanne, Melting Snow. Fontainebleau (1879 – 80) has a photograph as its model. The comparison

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Paul Cézanne
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5
7
Melting Snow. Fontainebleau, 1879 – 80 Oil on canvas
.
× 100.
cm | 29 × 39 5/8 in
Unknown photographer Forest of Fontainebleu, Snow, c.1880
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40
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present. After all, this was not only a chance for the father to show his pride in his son’s social success, but also an opportunity to celebrate this display of his artistic prowess at the heart of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam.

Family was an important link in the unbreakable bond between faith, authority and tradition. The fact that Mondrian still had a close bond with his parents is evidenced by the photographic portrait that the young artist commissioned from elegant ‘court photographer’ Max Cosman, taken at the photographer’s studio behind the Palace of the People in Amsterdam. Mondrian wrote the date, 12 May, on the back, along with a dedication to his parents, and gave them the photograph as a gift for their thirtieth wedding anniversary.3 It might be that this confident-looking young artist wanted to let his parents know that he was successful and well-off, especially as a few weeks previously he had sold a large pastel for 300 guilders at the art society Arti et Amicitiae –a sum equivalent to the annual pay of an assistant teacher. His father and mother therefore had every reason to be proud of their son.

The assembled company was a conventional one, firmly bound to tradition by clear values and norms; people who as a community did everything necessary to keep the foundations of an old civilisation intact. Beyond the church, in the city, a new world was advancing, a world of material prosperity and merriment; of people

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Max Cosman Portrait of the artist, 1899

learning to think and feel differently in a city bursting at its seams. The city was spreading in all directions as new neighbourhoods were being built and the historic centre was being sacrificed to modernisation, with new shop windows, canals filled in, and streets widened to provide room for modern forms of transport. Shops, bars and the dream world of the consumer had arrived.

Within the church, the old civilisation still held sway. 4 Anyone in the Netherlands who had been raised according to traditional values and virtues had learnt from a young age to focus on the Higher Being, on the Word. Earthly existence would always be imperfect, and the purpose of life was for everyone to raise that which was imperfect in themselves and in the world around them to a higher plane. The new society taking root in the Netherlands around 1900 – much later than in neighbouring countries – was based on another principle. Life on Earth should be taken for what it was, with all that was good, evil, beautiful or ugly about it, truth and goodness becoming primarily material concepts. The higher plane soon became synonymous with improving one’s financial situation. Materialism was a threat to the ancient culture of the Word. In this new age, religion became the main custodian of the norms and values associated with the gradually crumbling foundations of the old civilisation. From the perspective of that ‘old civilisation’, just about everything was in jeopardy.

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Scheepstimmerwerf (Shipworks), 1898 Oil on canvas
31 × 37 cm | 12 ¼ × 14 5/8 in
The artist (centre) with his contemporaries Johanna van Bijlevelt, Simon Maris and Hendrik Kroon, Simon Maris studio, Amsterdam, c.1901

the new art, through its form and simplicity. The influential critic Jan Kalff was not convinced, and grudgingly remarked that Mondrian’s ‘masses of branches criss-crossed like a spider’s web and precisely rendered little landscape beyond’ did not reflect the impact of Nature.35 However, Mondrian sold the watercolour to the Lindeboom-Harrenstein family, who bought many pieces from him in those early years. The artist secretly took long walks with one of the Harrensteins’ daughters, teaching her about ‘Plato and Beauty’.36 He also developed a reputation for prolonged kisses, which sometimes lasted in excess of half an hour.

In the meantime, the young artist sat there on that Sunday morning, 28 May 1899, in the pews of the English Church, perhaps assessing his possible options along these lines: the potential of community art, the strict rules of the Dutch Reformed Church, the orderly arrangement of the newest art, accompanied by the ideas at the back of his own mind at that point, to which the Arti et Amicitiae submissions bore witness, about an art in which he could be free, as in Scheepstimmerwerf, within the world of the ‘windmill without sails’. The old civilisation and the new world were clashing without anyone noticing – not even Mondrian. In his world view the norms of the past continued to apply today and would do in the future. This was essentially what the newspapers reported the following week,

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Pulpit of the English Reformed Church of Amsterdam (1898), designed by Piet Mondrian and carved by LF Edema van der Tuuk

when they concluded that the panels would clearly ensure that ‘the little church, which already has such an interesting history and holds for the antiquarian and artist so many features of note, will deserve the notice of both local resident and outsider even more than previously’.37 There was an ambiguity to this that was typical of the self-image that began to take root in Amsterdam and its residents in the late nineteenth century.38 On the one hand, the pulpit was heralded as an uplifting addition to the old beauty of the capital, as an exponent of the old era, despite the fact that it was something new. On the other, it was presented as a curiosity, a tourist attraction, an example of the ‘culture of things’, an aspect of the visual culture that was good business for Amsterdam, attractive to ‘local resident and outsider’. As such, it was an object of the new age.

The conflict between the old and the new could be seen everywhere, particularly in Amsterdam. Two years before, Berlage had produced a design for the new stock exchange building on Damrak, where ‘community art’ would assume hysterical proportions. By 1898, construction was well underway, but – despite the new buildings he designed – Berlage was also one of the many who protested against the loss of beauty in the city. The constant threat that the old canals would be filled in and bridges demolished was a thorn in his side; protesting against changes to the look

of the city had become a standard feature of Amsterdam culture by the end of the nineteenth century. This was not just a battle against the spirit of the times; under the leadership of Berlage and De Nieuwe Gids, it had also become a utopian mission to bring society closer to Beauty, Goodness and Truth, as well as to use art, architecture and literature for edification. Amsterdam eagerly followed this edification, which so resembled the process that, in the ‘old civilisation’, had led to the truth of the Word and the Bible.

Halfway Between Image and Meaning

Mondrian met fellow artist Kees Spoor through Simon Maris in 1899. Spoor had worked at the studio of Simon’s father, Willem, and had now branched out on his own as a painter. Mondrian and Spoor got along well because they both associated the beauty of art with the spiritual. Spoor was au fait with Theosophy and his sister, Josephine, was particularly active in the Theosophical Society and frequently gave lectures. He himself was seeking a pure art, which was a notion that also interested Mondrian. Through Spoor, Mondrian also became acquainted with Jan Toorop just after the turn of the century.39 Toorop was the leading Dutch artist of the time, having found success abroad through work that could match anything produced in the way of new art

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Published in 2016 by Ridinghouse on the occasion of

Early Mondrian: Painting 1900 – 1905

Curated by Karsten Schubert

26 November 2015 – 23 January 2016

David Zwirner

24 Grafton Street

London w1s 4ez

United Kingdom davidzwirner.com

Ridinghouse

46 Lexington Street

London w1f 0lp

United Kingdom ridinghouse.co.uk

Publisher: Doro Globus

Publishing Manager: Louisa Green

Publishing Associate: Daniel Griffiths

Publishing Assistant: Jay Drinkall

Distributed in the uk and Europe only: Cornerhouse Publications

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United Kingdom cornerhousepublications.org

Texts © the authors

For the book in this form © Ridinghouse

Editor: Karsten Schubert

Assistant Editor: Daniel Griffiths

Copyedited by Melissa Larner

Proofread by Sarah Auld

Translated by Sue McDonnell (pp.54–81)

Designed by Marit Münzberg

Colour separations by Dexter Premedia

Printed in Belgium by die Keure

ISBN 978 1 909932 19 7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A full catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Great care has been taken to identify all image copyright holders correctly. In cases of errors or omissions please contact the publisher so that we can make corrections in future editions.

Ridinghouse

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