Page 29 - Studio International - December1996
P. 29

A Tulip with White Leaves
                                 an essay on Mondrian









                                 David Sylvester


                                 `Everything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a   The artificial tulip fitted in, of course, with the legend
                                 light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing  of the studio as laboratory or cell, the artist as scientist or
                                 his heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or  anchorite. Mondrian felt it mattered that an artist should
                                 priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were  present himself in a manner appropriate to his artistic
                                large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung  aims. A photograph of him taken in 1908 shows a bearded
                                in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls. Peering at  floppy-haired Victorian man of sensibility. A photograph
                                me through his glasses, he noticed my glance and said :  of 1911 shows a twentieth-century technologist, clean-
                                "I've arranged these to make it more cheerful." ' Thus  shaven with centre parting and brilliantined hair; the
                                 Charmion von Wiegand on Mondrian's New York studio.  spectacles were an inevitable accessory. Soft and hairy
                                 In his Paris studio he had used flowers to make it more  becomes hard and smooth: one of the great landscape-
                                cheerful. One tulip in a vase, an artificial one, its leaves  painters of his generation, one of the great flower-painters
                                painted white.                                     of his generation, comes to find trees monstrous, green
                                 As Mondrian was probably incapable of irony, the tulip  fields intolerable.
                                was unlikely to be a wry joke about his having had to   The loneliness of the artificial tulip with its painted
                                produce flower-pieces between 1922 and 1925 when he  leaves might seem to suggest that flora were admitted
                                no longer wanted to because there were no buyers for his  grudgingly, one plant being the next best thing to none.
                                abstracts. It could, of course, have been a revenge for the  But it probably meant the opposite of that—was probably
                                agony a compromise of that sort must have cost him.  a sign, not of Mondrian's having become a different
                                More likely, it was simply a part of the general revulsion  person, but of his having remained the same. When
                                against green and growth which made him, when seated  Mondrian had painted flowers, he almost invariably
                                at table beside a window through which trees were visible  painted one chrysanthemum, one amaryllis, one tiger
                                to him, persuade someone to change places.         lily. His most personal paintings of trees are paintings of

                                                           'Too many trees'—the                               'Like a laboratory'—
                                                           garden of 60 Parkhill Road,                        Mondrian's last studio in
                                                           Hampstead, from                                    New York, photographed in
                                                           Ben Nicholson's former                             1944 (reproduced from Michel
                                                           studio                                             Seuphor's 'Piet Mondrian')
   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34