Page 31 - Studio International - December1996

one tree; of architecture, are paintings of a lighthouse or a maturity.)
single windmill or an isolated church—a solitary tower, Focusing inwards is rejected by Mondrian when the
often with its entrances as if blocked, like a fortress, object is rejected. Focusing inwards is involvement. In-
refusing disruption of its monolithic intactness, its im- volvement with objects entails suffering. In the paintings
maculate otherness, its self-sufficient singularity. of chrysanthemums—that most centripetal of flowers—
Likewise the early romantic landscapes are rarely at all there is a sense of concentration that is agonizing. It is as
panoramic : they usually take in something like a couple if the artist were trying to hypnotize himself by gazing
of cows and a tree, three or four trees in a row, a group of into this flower and as if he were trying to hypnotize the
farmhouses. And the tendency to concentrate attention flower into suspending its process of growth, the process
inwards persists into the paintings and drawings of the sea that will make the petals fall away, the flower wilt and
of 1914-15: half of them are of a Pier and Ocean. The ocean die (as it is seen to do in two of the paintings in the series).
is not oceanic, consuming, illimitable : it radiates from a The rapt quality of the image seems to embody a longing
vertical motif representing a man-made projection—like to deny time, the flower is held together with a sort of
the towers jutting into the sky. Only, the composition is desperation. In the series of images of trees that followed
no longer centripetal. The pluses and minuses of the sea the forces of growth can no longer be held in. Growth is
do not converge upon the pier: they do radiate outwards, seen as an irresistible force moving through the tree—a
are then checked by the containing oval within the rect- river of life, spreading, demanding space into which it
angle of the page or canvas. These works are, of course, can expand. Pictures such as The Red Tree reflect not
among the key transitional pieces between figuration and simply a tree seen now, but the way it has evolved, has
non-figuration in Mondrian. In the tensions they exhibit lived, has been formed, is still in formation, will wither
between centripetal and centrifugal, they are also repre- and die. In pictures such as The Blue Tree the urgency of
sentative of his transition from centripetal, to centrifugal the need to grow is such that it is as if the whole growth
design. In Mondrian figuration is equated with the centri- were telescoped into one explosive moment like a shell-
petal, non-figuration with the centrifugal. (It is remark- burst. Coursing with life, the trees are twisted images
able that an artist so exceptionally given to symmetry in of torment and despair.
his early days should so rigorously exclude it in his Intense involvement with living things is involvement