Page 22 - Studio International - December1996

Reminiscences of When one thought of visiting Mondrian one had to tele-
phone beforehand—no free and easy knocking at his door
Mondrian —this was not because he might be working—he was

by Winifred Nicholson, always at work; but so that he could put on his patent
leather shoes and his black striped trousers. His studio
Barbara Hepworth, Miriam Gabo,
was in a noisy street of Paris up many flights. There was
Herbert Read, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo
no lift, no water, nor heating in it. What there was, was
clarity and silence. The silence in which one could com-
pose and create. The clarity did not come from windows
but from the many canvases of which the studio was full,
in all stages of their creation, for he worked at each one,
for long periods, considering each charcoal horizontal,
each charcoal vertical and moving them an inch or a
millimetre one way or another. When at last the positions
were settled then there were many coats of white to be
applied one after another and only last of all after many
months or even years the rectangles of colour. Yellow,
blue or red were painted, sometimes only one colour,
sometimes a duet of two, sometimes but more rarely a trio
of three. For if the studio was full of the silence of human
voices, the voices of the pictures were all the more audible
—and what they said, clear, fundamental without frills or
fancy—but sometimes did their speech become insistent to
their creator, or was he lonely in his hermitage of purest
art ? Anyhow he had a cheap square little squeaky gramo-
phone painted vivid dutch red—and on it he played the
hottest blue jazz—only jazz, never that classical stuff— I
don't remember any other objects in the studio except
that gramophone, I doubt if there was any room for
anything except all those canvases—sometimes we had
tezanne made of cherry stone stalks, that was if he had
sold a picture in Switzerland and was in funds. He seldom
Mondrian in 1908 and, below,
in 1911. (Reproduced from sold a picture, and when he did he lived on the proceeds
Michel Seuphor's Piet for long periods. He liked flowers, he told me that in his
Mondrian)
regenerate days he lived on the pictures that he had
painted of them—but in Paris he had never had any. One
would not have dared to bring any to him. Too fancy; one
took flowers when one visited Brancusi—he loved them
and kept them for ever, dead and dry as beautiful he said
as when they were in bloom. Mondrian bought Cam-
bridge colours not because they were less expensive than
others, but because he thought that Oxford and so also
Cambridge was the most reliable English commodity. I
regret that in this reliability we English let him down. He
was just and honest and Dutch and stern, friendly to those
who were people of progress, harsh to those who were not,
surrealists, Fascists, reactionaries, people who tolerated
green, purple, or orange all impure. 'You are the first
person who has ever painted Yellow', I said to him once,
`pure lemon yellow like the sun.' He denied it, but next
time I saw him, he took up the remark. 'I have thought
about it,' he said, 'and it is so, but it is merely because
Cadmium yellow pigment has been invented.'
The painter he liked best of the old painters he said was
Fra Angelico —no surrealism there. There was war in the
air—but the war between nations was not so bitter as the
war between the constructivists and the surrealists—once,
only once, I went to a constructivist studio party where a
surrealist had slipped in. He was a Japanese critic—a
brash fellow. He did not know what one did in Paris. But
when the war of nations burst into our quartier life—I
packed up my flat overlooking the Seine—no place for