Page 29 - Studio International - December1996

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')