Page 34 - Studio International - July 1966

and Bauchant. She had also a Raoul Dufy Nude which I inviting prospect, I agreed. And she took me to the studio
did not buy, and always later regretted : it is odd how of Piet Mondrian.
one can regret what one didn't buy rather than gloat As soon as I was within those four white walls I was
over 'finds'. transformed. They were covered with those extraordinary
Primitives were becoming rather a rage in New York pictures, unlike any others, fascinating in their clear,
and we began to hear of a little old Brooklyn tailor and clean, ascetic, geometric quality. I had translated the first
shoemaker of seventy-one, called Hirshfield, who had book on the Gestalt theory of psychology; here were
certainly Gestalten and das Zueinander von Gestalten (forms
and interrelation of forms). I kept staring at the black
lines and white squares, the small shapes of bright red,
blue, yellow ...
From a corner someone watched me with smiling plea-
sure, a small, spare, rather nondescript-looking man, as I
recall, with sandy hair and a sharp pointed nose. And
then Mondrian started talking to me, telling me his ideas,
why he painted the way he did, how the black lines were
not exactly the same width, each one—which I then
examined carefully and found to be true. How refresh-
ing, I thought afterwards, to meet greatness and not
know it for 'greatness', a 'simple', unencumbered human
being, immersed in his work, dedicated and at pains to
understand his own attitudes and thoughts, his own
creativity.
I stayed and stayed, the afternoon waned and I still
listened, looked, learned. Mondrian brought out chrys-
anthemums, trees, paintings and drawings, old pencil and
ink drawings of decades ago. He illustrated his develop-
ment; told how he had come to refine his tree down
from the realistic tree with all its branches to that essen-
tial form now so well-known. I learned more about
painting that afternoon, I suppose, than years of art
school could have taught me.
A few weeks later Mondrian was dead.
Morris Hirshfield never 'learned painting'. He decorated his birds and But he had sold me two paintings, one of his last
Nude with kittens 1941 flowers and fields with minute ornamental beading, like geometric ones and a detailed Chrysanthemum with all its
Oil
25+ x 34 in. beads on shoes. We liked one special painting Nude with petals, painted in 1906. The geometric one now hangs in
kittens; the whole family responded to the humour and the Tate Gallery, its first and only Mondrian.
so we acquired her—and later I acquired three other It was during the war also that I happened on Lissitzky.
Hirshfields. I went to Moscow as a war correspondent in 1944 and
Attractive and sometimes 'socially conscious' were some between war horrors and moving incidents of home-front
other pictures I owed to this period, factories show- heroism, I looked for the Constructivists. It was a time of
ing the workers both inside and outside, milk cans harsh denunciation of abstract art; Tatlin, who was still
being overturned (in a notorious farmers' milk strike). alive, an old man now who hardly ever left his flat, con-
And a number of Americans, Ben Shahn, Howard Koch, fined himself to scene designing. Malevich had gone
Charles Howard, Max Weber, Paul Burlin, John Sloan, away long since. Rodchenko was dead, and El Lissitzky
Paul Semple. had died three years earlier leaving behind a German
A young American radical used to go to Europe and widow, Sophie. She was about to be moved to Siberia
bring home, from European painters, pictures to sell for with the Volga Germans when I happened to discover
`left-wing' purposes—Spanish relief, help for the foreign- that she was willing to sell what she had of her late
born, anti-Nazi organizations. From such sales I garnered husband's work. He had in later years confined himself
Suzanne Valadon etchings, a large and rare Leger, mainly to poster work, theatrical designs, 'propaganda'
Picasso lithographs, a Man Ray construction. drawing. Under the watchful eyes of two young VOKS
It was also during the war that I met Mondrian and had (Cultural Organization) officials, Sophie Lissitzky
the good fortune to be steered by him to two great works showed me the water-colours from her husband's early
of his. period, and a Revolutionary handbook of abstract designs
A girl I knew was a good friend of Mondrian's. One day and revolutionary symbols meant to illustrate simple
she said, 'If you have any dough at the moment, I know arithmetic for Soviet children.
a poor old painter who is quite ill and needs to sell some- She wanted 10,000 roubles for the five water-colours and
thing to pay for a doctor—though he's some kind of the eight-page handbook. This was several thousand
Christian Scientist or something and doesn't want to pounds, much beyond my means.
call one. Would you come and see him?' Rather reluc- There were in Moscow at the time commission shops to
tantly, because a 'poor, sick old painter' was not a very which people brought old treasures to sell in order to eat.