Page 26 - Studio International - December1996

put him up in Hertfordshire but he refused to move until lived in Park Avenue at a point where there is, I under-
later he wrote to us in Cornwall that he'd 'felt an urge stand, a single tree every two or three hundred yards—
to move'. This 'urge' proved to be a large unexploded Mondrian looked out of the window and then turned to
bomb close to his studio, and he moved to a Hampstead Gallatin and remarked 'I'd no idea that you lived in a
hotel. Quite soon after this he left for New York. One day rural district'. q
he brought us a present of a recent painting, a most Ben Nicholson
generous gift, and as it was near tea time we asked him to
have tea with us, and with our triplets then aged about I had no so-called intimate relations with Mondrian.
four, and to their amazement he proceeded to eat his jam We were friends in the abstract sense. He used to come to
off the end of his knife, obviously a tremendous event in us often for lunch, however. Our relationship was not
their lives. As we walked away he remarked that all small really very different from when I knew him in Paris,
children are barbarians. I must say that during tea this from 1926 or 1927 onwards, and used to visit him in his
particular bunch were so angelic as to be unbelievable: if studio. My brother Antoine knew him well. We were
only he could have seen them when they were at their both committed to an idea, and Mondrian used to
barbaric best or heard their remarks on his barbaric defend his own philosophy— neo-plasticism—very strongly.
knife. When reading notes on Mondrian I have not yet His Paris studio was a Mondrian in space. White, with
seen any mention of his humour— there were a number of geometrical shapes of colour on the wall. The furniture
examples of this in London but one of the more typical was just straight up and down: he made it himself. We
examples occurred when he arrived in New York and used to have tea in exquisite white cups: they too went
visited the enlightened collector A. E. Gallatin, who straight up and down.
collected early Cubism, Brancusi and Mondrian. He I remember when he was in the Mall. Always his idea