Page 33 - Studio International - December1996

with death. If you follow nature, wrote Mondrian in
1919-20, you have to accept 'whatever is capricious and
twisted in nature'. If the capricious is beautiful, it is also
tragic: 'If you follow nature you will not be able to van-
quish the tragic to any real degree in your art. It is
certainly true that naturalistic painting makes us feel a
harmony which is beyond the tragic, but it does not
express this in a clear and definite way, since it is not con-
fined to expressing relations of equilibrium. Let us recog-
nize the fact once and for all: the natural appearance,
natural form, natural colour, natural rhythm, natural
relations most often express the tragic. . . . We must free
ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only
then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled con-
sciously to contemplate the repose which is within all
things.'
Mondrian could find a repose to contemplate in natural
things so long as he could see them with their energy held
in check, as with the chrysanthemums. The object was
tolerated so long as it seemed to contain its energy. Look-
ing at the trees, he recognized the forces flowing out of
them—so that the tendency towards the centrifugal first
appears among these images—felt the need to release
those forces from objects and objectify them in another
way. Attachment had to be transferred from natural
objects to things not subject to death. To an artificial
Pier and Ocean 1914
Charcoal tulip, which would be everlasting. To lines which were
19 3/4 x 25 5/8 in. not lines tracing the growth in space of a tree but were
S. B. Slijper Coll., Blaricum lines not matched in nature, lines proper to art, lines
echoing the bounding lines of the canvas itself.
The lines which had followed the lines of the boughs and
branches and twigs of the trees gave way in 1912 to lines
derived from the scaffolding in space of Analytical
Cubism. Geometric abstraction by and large has its
origins in the flat shapes of Synthetic Cubism, a mode
completely foreign to Mondrian. One imagines, in the
first place, that he must have disapproved of the way
Picasso and Braque, having evolved with exquisite logic
for four years from the Estaque and Horta landscapes to
the shattered luminosity of the hermetic period, suddenly
took a capricious sideways leap into the arbitrary impro-
visations of papier collé. It is known that he disapproved of
the fact that, having attained a sublime level of abstrac-
tion from nature, they used papier collé to let reality—in all
its banality and all its subjection to time—in through the
back door—a recourse to nostalgia and materialism. It is
evident that he could accept no form of assemblage as a
solution. The assembled shapes of Synthetic Cubism
ultimately derived from the flat separate shapes of
Gauguin. Mondrian's allegiance belonged to Im-
pressionism and Seurat, to their concern with translating
a sensation into a mesh of brushmarks. Mondrian's Neo-
Impressionist brushmarks of 1908-10 were elongated into
the short lines of the seascapes and facades of 1914-15
which in turn were elongated into lines extending from
side to side of the canvas and seemingly beyond.
A painting by Malevich or Van Doesburg or Kupka is
an assemblage of shapes. A Mondrian does not consist of
blue rectangles and red rectangles and yellow rectangles
Pier and Ocean 1915
Oil and white rectangles. It is conceived—as is abundantly
331/2 x 42 9/16 in. clear from the unfinished canvases—in terms of lines—lines
Kröller-Müller Museum,
Otterlo that can move with the force of a thunderclap or the
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