Hi, everyone.
Let's see. I think
it's better with a microphone, I
think.
Hi. Welcome to the Hammer Museum.
I'm Claudia Bestor. I'm the director
of public programs here, and I'm
very pleased to welcome you to
today's talk by art historian John
Walsh.
While she's been giving a series of
four lectures on the work and ideas
of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.
And today is the final talk called
Mondrian's Intentions.
I hope you all have a chance to see
all four talks which can be found on
the Hammer website.
Walsh has shown us Mondrian as we've
never seen him before, from
his early works of figurative
painting to his final works in
abstraction.
By showing us Mondrian's world view
and the music, architecture, art,
religion, fashion, and even
the dance moves of his milieu,
as well as the shattering impact of
World War One.
Walsh's created a fascinating
portrait of Mondrian and given
us all a much more profound and
meaningful insight into his work.
In today's final talk, Walsh
connects Mondrian with his
contemporaries and shows how they're
all intertwined.
All the past talks are available now
on the Hammer website, and today's
talk will be as well in a few days.
I highly recommend
watching them.
And now I'll just give you a brief
introduction to John Walsh.
Walsh is a world renowned
art historian.
After graduating from Yale and
getting his Ph.D. from Columbia, he
worked as a curator at the
Metropolitan Museum in New York and
the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
And he taught art history at
Columbia and Harvard.
He was the director of the J.
Paul Getty Museum from 1983
until 2000.
Since he left the Getty, he's been
teaching part time at Yale and
giving public lectures there.
And you can see the fascinating
lecture series that he did here
on Vincent Van Gogh in 2019
and another series on Rembrandt in
2020, all available on
the Hammer website.
Walsh is the author of many articles
and catalogs on Dutch paintings of
the 17th century and of several
books, including Jan Steen:
The Drawing Lesson and the J.
Paul Getty Museum and Its
Collections: A Museum for the New
Century.
He currently sits on the boards of
Yale University Art Gallery and
of the Hammer Museum.
After today's talk, we'd love for
you all to join us for coffee, tea
and cookies up in the theater lobby
for additional discussion.
And now, without further ado, please
join me in welcoming John Walsh.
Thank you.
Thank you, Claudia.
I realize this is my last chance
to thank Claudia,
who's just disappeared.
And Shannon, the
very large and extremely
clever crew who
make all of this happen in the booth
and elsewhere.
It's a wonderful program the
Hammer runs, and I'm very proud to
be part of it.
Now, at the end of
the series, I'm going to give
you a quick
look back at Mondrian's
evolution as a painter
through the evolution of his own
spirit and.
I want also to remind
you of his
mature work, the years
of his maturity,
how he became the artist
whose work we know
work like this.
We'll also have a look at a
generation of European abstract
artists and their
mostly idealistic intentions.
Painter's paintings, like the two on
the screen, have made Mondrian
the most easily recognized
modern painter.
In fact, an emblem of
modernity itself,
so much that in Star
Trek: The Next
Generation.
For centuries.
In the future.
You remember when an officer
of the Starship Enterprise called
Commander Data so-called
because he's an android.
A product of artificial intelligence
and by bioengineering
is explaining to a brand new
Android pupil that he's recently
created that the thing
she sees on the wall is what humans
call a painting.
The TV audience doesn't need
to be told
that this is the
24th century after
all. And this man has become an
old master.
One of the surprises about Mondrian
was that he'd already had a career,
a respectable one, before he had 30.
He'd mastered one style after
another since being
a student at the academy in
Amsterdam in the 1890s.
He'd won a prize or two.
He concentrated on landscape.
He was attracted to it, and he could
see a possible way of making a
living at it.
His family was educated
and genteel but
poor and couldn't afford
to support him.
Near his studio in Amsterdam.
There were workaday subjects, too,
that he could paint in different
styles.
He mastered oil sketching
in monochrome.
Working here on an overcast
day with smoke and
steam in the air, using
as few broad strokes
as possible to get the masses and
the overall tones right.
In the farmland around Amsterdam.
He kept the cattle and
the sheep and often
chose audits like this
house in the middle with the dancing
white laundry on the line.
Or he'd choose a canal
in half light
with leaves and Pollard branches
and shimmering water with brushwork
that becomes more and more
confident.
In fact, his technique with the
brush is almost impressionist
at times.
At the rate he stabs
at the surface with broken strokes
of green.
And he gives the elderly branches
a sort of cranky kind of energy.
And at the left, a snowy scene,
another apple tree
and a mass of vines
with a level pruned top
that leaves
left to winter over.
He was fascinated by the rhythms
of trees planted along
the rivers and the reflections
in the water.
Claude Monet had been
taken the same subject, too, but
it's unlikely that Mondrian had seen
Monet's paintings of poplars
here.
And in any case, he treats the motif
differently.
In the middle, in the
daylight, with thick, opaque
strokes and over
to the right, in moonlight,
with trees backlit against
a sky green gone bit.
Brick, red.
A big finished exhibition.
Picture shows
sunset at the bend
of a river.
The trees follow the bend
gracefully and they catch the last
red rays.
While above them, the sky is a mass
of blue puffs.
Here. He paints a windmill.
More or less old
fashioned Dutch composition
made to sell.
You might say, but exaggerated
in breadth and the sense
that something more significant is
going on than just the daily
disappearance of the sun.
More like an apparition
affirming the presence of
goodness and order in the land.
Mondrian was not a practicing
Calvinist, but he developed
a kind of secular veneration
of nature and of the particular
structure of the land
flat and of trees
vertical with branches
and patterns out of which he
distilled what he believed
to be its essential nature.
In the following year.
He'd been impressed by what he'd
seen of the French food
masters, Matisse and
her, and he decided to try
something different.
Another meal, this time in bright
sun and shattering colors.
It was the debut also of the red,
blue, yellow triad of primary
colors that Mondrian made
his own.
He'd been experimenting
with very simple compositions and
in this case, almost magical effects
of light.
He had discovered Zealand
and its beaches and dunes facing
the English Channel, where
some adventurous and
up to date painters had a kind of
summer colony.
Some of them were practitioners
of Theosophy, which
is a blend of Eastern and Western
beliefs and adaptable
to Mondrian's inclinations.
More on that in just a minute.
His work made something
mystical out of the ordinary.
Here, another sunset
and another cloud formation.
This one massive
here on a seven
foot wide campus
canvas.
We see twilight
sun just touching the dunes,
expanding them and simplifying
them.
Mondrian took this and took the
suggestion of the folk painters
not only for that shrieking
red and yellow windmill you just
saw, but also for a tree
as you've seen it. A favorite motif,
the gnarly apple tree that
picks up the very last rays
of the sun.
The sky behind it is churning
as it darkens.
A few years later, he comes back
to that motif with a radically
different purpose.
He coordinates
the curves of the branches and
emphasizes the contrast
of vertical and horizontal.
He makes the gray voids between
the branches almost solid,
and he reduces the
illusion of space.
He's been to a show in Amsterdam
in 1911 where he sees pictures
by Braque and Picasso.
Pictures that they've been painting
in grays and tans,
giving equal weight to
both solid forms and empty
spaces.
Mondrian sees cubism
being born, and soon
he's off to Paris.
His conversion to his own
distinctive kind
of cubism involved
refashioning the imagery he
brought with him trees, buildings
and the sea, trying to
identify their essence
and express the emotions
that they aroused in him.
Working during World War
One and back at Holland,
the Sea became
a shifting field of
horizontals and verticals
stripped of anything that
we could actually identify.
Mondrian reintroduced colors
here in the middle and
rectangular patches that seem
to have the ability to shift
but have been brought into balance.
These years of experiments led
Mondrian to a solution
to his search for these
essential elements of the world.
We see vertical
and horizontal lines in
opposition primary
colors brought into
equilibrium.
And all of that richness,
all that energy
distilled.
He makes an arrangement of those
things that feels.
And he's brought them into balance
and he tinkers with it a lot.
He paints and often repaint
them.
He goes on for more than 20
years of painting
on these general lines.
He invents a new format,
the diamond shape.
He makes a square compositions
there at the right that suggest
that they might shift or rotate
or levitate.
In the 1930s.
The paintings get bigger.
They're more assertive and at the
same time more enigmatic.
Then he breaks his own rules
by giving the bar's colors,
not just black.
And the compositions become more
complex and syncopated.
During his few years
during World War Two in New York,
his love of American jazz
and American dynamism
came out in a few dazzling
paintings like this one.
Well, that's the too quick summary
I promised, and I haven't said much
about what Mondrian believed
about his art.
I'm going to come back to that in
just a minute.
But first I want to say something
about what his contemporaries were
doing.
Idealists during
a revolutionary period for European
art and what they
hope to accomplish.
There are lots of utopian schemes
afoot.
Some of them called for anarchism
and violent revolutions.
Others visions for society
were more peaceable.
Some nostalgic for the simplicities
of the past.
Wishful.
There was religion and
internationalism.
Mysticism.
Or competing.
Or overlapping.
You've heard me say that Mondrian
believes that art, that is his art,
could help eventually to save
the world from its materialism
and its belligerence.
He wasn't alone in believing that
since the turn of the 20th century,
many artists and intellectuals
had premonitions of horrors
coming, destruction
and death on a vast scale.
Mondrian's own beliefs were shaped
by theosophy, which
taught that the world could
improve
one person at a time
if individual consciousness
could be raised and strengthened.
Mondrian knew who that how that
might happen.
He and other artists would turn away
from merely picturing appearances,
and instead they would make an art
that would embody the central
universal truths expressed
by line and color alone.
Their art would help.
An audience lets us
to see and think differently.
If we could involve and
evolve to hire an awareness.
So which society?
In time, we'd eventually create
a populace that would be less
selfish, less
rivalrous, less factionalized,
more tolerant, and more
compassionate.
In time, possibly centuries,
we'd evolve to a higher state of
being.
Mondrian gave this kind of abstract
art a name
neoclassicism,
unfortunately, and
he wrote about it fervently.
He helped to launch a movement
and a publication devoted
to those ideals called
The Style.
And he made paintings to demonstrate
it for 25 years until his death.
One of the contemporary artists
who held beliefs like Mondrian's
was Vasily Kandinsky.
In 1911.
This book came out
on The Spiritual in Art,
a treatise like Mondrian's.
He was born six years before
Mondrian in Odessa,
Ukraine.
He was a 30 year old lawyer in
Moscow when he quit to become an
artist, and he was drawn
not to Paris, but to Munich,
where there were teachers, a
progressive art world and
a market for his work.
Which at first was
printmaking there at the right and
then paintings.
He used woodcut.
A consciously archaic technique
for the prince and
for the paintings, a brilliantly
colorful kind of neo primitive
style for fantasies
of Russian medieval
life and folk cultures.
He spent summers in the Bavarian
Alps with his partner, the
painter Gabriel, a mentor.
And around that time, he had a
couple of experiences that in
his retelling have become
classic origin stories
of abstract art.
Here's one.
In Munich.
I came home with my painting
after making a study, still
dreaming and wrapped up in the work,
when suddenly I saw
an indescribably beautiful picture
drenched with an inner
glowing.
I rushed towards this mysterious
picture of which I saw nothing
but forms and colors
and whose contents was
incomprehensible.
Immediately, I found the key to the
puzzle.
It was a picture that I had painted,
leaning against the wall, standing
on its side.
The next day I attempted to get the
same effect by daylight,
but was only half successful.
Even on its side, I
always recognized the objects.
Now I knew for certain
that the objects harmed
the paintings.
Here's the other story.
Kandinsky recalls seeing a monet
painting for the first time.
Previously, he said, I had
only known realistic art,
and suddenly for the first time, I
saw a painting.
The catalog informed me
that it was a haystack.
I could not recognize it.
This non-recognition was painful
to me.
I duly felt and dully
felt that the object of the picture
was missing.
And I noticed with astonishment and
confusion that the picture not only
draws you, but impresses you
indelibly
on your memory and completely
unexpectedly floats before your
eyes, even to the last detail.
What was entirely clear to me was
the unexpected power
of the palette, the colors
which surpassed all my dreams.
Painting acquired a fairy
tale power and splendor.
And unconsciously the object
was discredited as
an indispensable element of a
painting.
Mondrian was going
to come in the same conclusion
just a few years later.
For Mondrian, it wasn't an epiphany,
but instead an
evolution through long meditation
on the essential forms of what
he saw.
The motion of the waves,
the structure of the trees,
the light and the colors of nature.
Observing those elements led
Mondrian to isolate and
concentrate them.
Kandinsky at the right there
imagined a world of shapes endlessly
expanding and floating,
forming, reforming.
Mondrian's poetry at the left
was of relationships
between defined contrasting
forms.
He had the experience of first
working his way through season
there at the top.
And the cubists down
below.
Kandinsky did not have
that experience. Kandinsky was
instead exploring a kind
of visual free association
on a very large scale.
Mondrian was absorbing how
the cubist techniques
could frighten space, could
liberate objects from gravity,
could give the forms a
life of their own.
Both of them were devoted to using
art to elevate humanity
by helping individuals to see.
For Kandinsky, the heart of the
matter was what he called
inner necessity.
The need for the artists to
understand the power of color and
form and use them empathetically
to move the spirit of
the viewer.
So similar
purposes,
different forms.
For Mondrian, the essential forms
were in opposition to one another.
Lines were vertical and horizontal.
Shapes they made were rectangular
and the colors were primary.
Everything was in the relationships
between them, which he said
by the artist's intuition.
All of this should
result in balance.
Kandinsky's lines
and shapes were fluid and floating,
and the relationships were
enigmatic, suggestive.
The title he gave the painting at
the right is Yellow, Red,
Blue.
The primaries.
Having a kind of airborne
ballet there
while Mondrian's
primary colors are sitting
still at a polite
distance.
Kandinsky's shapes are circular
spiral undulating.
Mondrian, on the other hand,
banished circles and
even curves from his visual utopia,
where they would have been
disruptive.
Curves and circles had a lot more
appeal than straight lines for most
abstract artists across Europe
because of their associations
with the natural world, with the
human body, with planetary
orbits and the cosmic, the
infinite.
Curves could express movement
as they do in France.
Coupe curves painting at the far
left or next
to it,
of growth and nature and
the work of Jaco.
Ben Dean, a Dutch artist
connected to the style group.
Two paintings over.
Spheres by Robert
Delaunay, a mystic.
And of course, at the
far right.
Kandinsky himself.
Who wrote this?
The circles that Kandinsky is the
synthesis of the greatest
oppositions.
It combines the concentric and
the eccentric in a single
form and equilibrium.
In the middle.
The blue painting is a work by
another believer and the expressive
energy of curves and
circles.
And this is Hilma AF Klimt.
Whose career tracks mondrian's.
But it was barely heard of outside
Sweden until 1986,
when she was included with Mondrian
in the Great Exhibition at the L.A.
County Museum called
The Spiritual in Art.
She was recognized not just for
being spiritual, but for having a
claim to being the first abstract
artist.
Like Kandinsky.
She was middle aged when she
started.
When she went to the Royal Academy.
I like Mondrian.
There's a very good conventional
landscape painter.
I like both of these men.
She had learned from teachings of
philosophy, theosophy.
More than that, she was an active
practitioner.
Like them, she wanted to make art
that embodied the deepest truths
about life and growth and the
structure of the world.
And for that, only lines and shapes
would do mostly circular
and spiral in
her will. She sequestered and
kept secret.
1200 paintings
abstract works
for 20 years after her
death. That's why it's only recently
that we've heard of her.
In Russia after World War One,
a group of a dozen artists
led by Kazimir Malevich,
was inspired by cubism and
its radical
remaking of imagery by
deconstruction and reconstruction.
At the left, we see a painting
by Malevich of a knife grinder
as though through multiple
exposures like a Duchamp
idea with leisure flavor.
The name for the new movement
was Suprematism,
which meant nothing political.
It was going to stress
what Malevich called the primacy
of pure feeling in
art. In other words, nothing
material and nothing useful.
There was a lot of playful
wit and mockery, though,
which you can see in Malevich's
installation.
On the left on of 1919,
the infamous painting of a black
square hanging in the top
corner, a place in the room that
Russian traditions had reserved for
religious images of icons.
The two at the bottom.
Have a.
Spoofy sort of relation
to picture titles and
to abstraction
right there.
Airplane flying
could suggest flying apart
and the red and black one entitled
painterly realism of a boy
with a knapsack color
masses in the fourth dimension
as wonderfully officious and silly.
Suprematism didn't last long
in the fraught political situation
in Russia and was soon
succeeded by Constructivism
movement led by El Lissitzky
that was deadly serious about
putting art and design to work for
the new proletarian
Republican and revolutionary
state.
Now in this somewhat dizzying
look I'm giving you in all
directions around Mondrian.
I need to say something about
Italians and futurism.
I put this turbulent Kandinsky
on the screen on the right
because it's one of his visions
of the future.
The ultimate truth.
In fact. The end destruction.
A future that's described
in the apocalypse.
And next to it is boccioni's
apocalyptic looking, but actually
forward looking vision of
humankind advancing,
building a city that's rising in the
background full of laborers
laboring and huge horses
racing through the street streets,
terrified.
The Italian futurists were not only
visual artists, but writers and
musicians, and their founder was
a poet, Tommaso
Marinetti, who
wrote this We
want no part of the past.
What we wanted was rapid
progress, not peaceable
revolution and
basta to venerable
Italian culture and tradition
to everything that had held back
progress in the new century.
Marinetti said
the machines, the speed,
the crowds, the electric
light, the fast cars,
the daring, even the violent.
Futurists were big on manifestos,
too. Matisse's was published.
Sorry, Marinetti's was published in
1909.
It put Mondrian's hopes
for peaceable evolution
into perspective.
Marinetti wrote, We want
to glorify war.
The only cure for the world
militarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of the
anarchists, the beautiful
ideas which kill
and contempt for women.
We want to demolish museums and
libraries.
Fight morality, feminism
and all opportunist and utilitarian
cowardice.
Let the good incendiaries
with their charred fingers come
here. They were arm heaped up the
fire to the shelves of the
libraries.
Divert the canals to
flood the sellers of the museums.
Let the glorious canvases
swim ashore.
Well, the futurists
of all stripes socialized
and exhibited in Paris
with the international avant garde
at the bottom here.
There's Gino Severin
and the Eiffel Tower.
Re revision
a suitable.
Thrilling, futurist
subject.
And at the top, a Belgian called
Jules Schmaltz
agog, painted a
motorcycle.
There was a future shooters
diaspora, not just to Russia and
Belgium, but also to the United
States.
In the person of the Italian Joseph
Stella, who'd known
the Futurists back in his
home country and
in Paris, who had emigrated
to New York and had celebrated it
30 years before Mondrian did
as the city of the future,
including the electrified paradise
of Coney Island at night.
Well, it's time to look to the
Netherlands in these same years.
In the second lecture, I talk
briefly about the style
that Dutch abstract art
movement began in the Netherlands in
1917
and disbanded 14 years later.
Mondrian was the inspiration,
not just the painting at
the time, but his ideals
for a new approach to art
and even a new life.
A new life.
He called the movement
neoclassicism, as I've said,
which wasn't very helpful of him.
And the publication was this style
not much more helpful even
for the Dutch, for whom it simply
meant the style,
implying a new style
and implying more than just a
painting style as
to what neoclassicism
meant.
Mondrian had to do a lot of
explaining, which he did at length
and repeatedly in
Dutch. It began as never
building.
But even building was unfamiliar
and archaic sounding meaning,
form giving or
imagining.
Mondrian tried to translate Nieva
building into French
as neoplastic is
a
plastic meaning for shaping or
molding and translated that
into English as neoplastic.
Which was doubly misleading
since Neo
as a prefix denotes
a revival, which the certainly was
not.
In any case, despite that, through
the haze of Mondrian's
words, you could make out the
shape and he was
at pains to explain it.
His younger partner in the project,
the man on the right to form
Duesberg, pitched it to
the art world in 1917 with
a new magazine under a new name,
The Style.
It was aimed at painters, sculptors
and architects,
and there were eventually a hundred
odd members from Europe and America.
In the second lecture, I read you
some key parts of the manifesto
of this tale, which I'll spare you
today, which appeared
three years after the
World War One had broken out.
The main idea is that the old
dominance of.
An individual will
and individual power
has to give way to a no
a new universal
awareness.
Here's just a bit of the text.
The war is
destroying the old world
with its contents.
Individual domination in
every state
that new art has brought forward.
What the new consciousness of time
contains a balance
between the universal and the
individual.
It called for artists of the world
to join in the war against
individual despotism
and to work for an internationalist
unity in life, art
and culture.
Well, that is
pretty elevated and pretty
vague.
Mondrian followed up with his
prescription for art.
It's pure.
It aims for the absolute.
Artists will be moved by nature,
the recognizable world, in other
words, but move to make abstract art
stripped of recognizable images.
It'll consist of lines,
right angles, rectilinear
forms and primary colors,
plus black and white.
The artist is to bring these into
what he calls dynamic equilibrium
of opposing elements,
avoiding symmetry.
If artists can achieve
that and viewers can absorb
it, that's us.
We will gradually be strengthened in
mind and heart and be better
citizens in a less despotic
society.
Neoclassicism made
converts even before it had its
name, starting with Teo
from Duisburg himself.
He was adept, clever,
energetic and above all
persuasive as a
painter. He was impatient with
mondrian's limits and boundaries
from the very beginning.
For example, in 1916
he knew Mondrian was making
his most radical works,
yet using
nothing but short, vertical and
horizontal lines to evoke the
sea and its shifting
movement.
So Duisburg adopted
the device for a sort of quasi
abstract version
of a woman in a chair
seen in profile, a side
view created by the void
between the sticks.
Kind of a bit of cleverness.
Borderline gimmick.
Duisburg did.
However, for Mondrian, what Mondrian
couldn't have done for himself,
which is to give international
platforms for his work and his
ideas
in his own studio.
Duesberg was, as I say, adept at
riffing on Mondrian's imagery,
going beyond it in many different
directions in the composition.
For example, at the left he
uses Mondrian's empty square
and the one in the center,
the superimposed grid,
and at the right the play with
diagonals which Mondrian had
banished.
In fact, after debating the matter
with Duesberg, Mondrian
broke with him.
A couple of painters
had originally had
some genuine
originality in their worth.
Look here.
This is the Hungarian emigre
in Holland, Vilmos Hussar.
His freer compositions to take
more from Duesberg probably than
they do for Mondrian.
He designed that magazine,
and, like many other textile
artists, ventured into product
design, furniture,
interiors, even sculpture.
A lot of his work certainly hasn't
survived or has gotten lost
like this metal automaton
at the rate of a dancer
that was shown in the Dada
exhibitions in the 1920s
and since then has vanished.
This is George Fanta Marlow,
who was a Belgian only sculptor,
and the founding group of the style.
He worked to apply the Sun
fundamental ideas to three
dimensions non
figural pieces, mostly
freestanding that had to
be coherent and pleasing
from various points of view
as you move around them, which is
of course the traditional challenge
of figural sculpture in the round.
This is Chris Beekman,
who was a 30 year old anarchist
when he was attracted to this style,
thinking that these radical artists
could be useful in the political
struggle.
He's traded his colorful, flat,
pseudo primitive style on
the upper left for Deuce
Berg's kind of neo
plasticity, some honor underneath.
And he sticks with that until his
social conscience during the
Depression takes hold of him and
in solidarity with demonstrators
on the streets of Amsterdam
protesting cuts in welfare
payments by the government.
Beckmann turned to social realism.
That's not a trajectory that many
Dutch artists followed.
And here is a German artist
from the style group who
had a long career as a
painter and a graphic designer.
Friedrich Fordham Bariga Guild of
Art
Duisburg promoted the
style heavily in Germany,
trying at first to get himself
on the faculty of the Bauhaus.
And in 1924, he converted
Fordham there and in Hanover,
where he a few other important
artists were working abstractly,
particularly Schwitters and Hans
ARP, a Ford.
And Berger was talented
and a pretty original painter
of geometric abstractions.
He had the distinction of being
labeled a degenerate artist
by the Nazis and moved to
Switzerland and then Amsterdam,
where he became a Dutch citizen.
The reach of Mondrian's ideas
was very wide in Europe and America,
well beyond the actual members
of the style and a lot wider
than we can reach in this lecture.
Here I just want to turn for
architecture and design for
a few moments.
Duke's first magazine and his
missionary travels
encouraged the merger of
art and architecture.
That merger had an ideal
of a lot of modern modernism.
The total work of art, the Gazumped
Queensferry described
by Richard Wagner, who
integrated set design with
poetry and music.
Duisburg was an interior
designer himself
who applied the style,
forms and colors
in his work with architects
And the middle. Here is a
demonstration published
in the Style in collaboration with
the architect Farid Rietveld,
at the right of tile floor
with his colleague Jacobus out.
Here at the bottom left,
Duisburg got a chance to create
something on a bigger scale, a kind
of walking sculptural environment,
immersive, as we would say now,
which was a makeover of a
grand 18th century building
in Strasbourg to make
a cafe, a movie
theater and a dance hall.
He and Hunsaker and
her and
Sophie Tobar.
AAP, the great Swiss Modernists,
did a huge redesign in the
style colors.
Wonderland paid attention
to what Duisburg and the
architects were doing to test
immersive installations.
He had a head start as he
experimented in his own Paris studio
in the twenties and thirties.
At the left, though, he's still in
Amsterdam with 19th century
furniture and objects here
and there. Paintings hung up,
high drawings
pinned up, canvases stacked
in the back.
Just the kind of live work
arrangement with a stagy flavor
that was common at the time.
20 years later, though, in Paris,
as a pioneer modernist,
Mondrian lived differently
in a scarlet
walkup whose front door
was made famous There at the right,
famous by this photograph
by a young Hungarian visitor, Andre
Kertesz, who
set up that shot, complete with
a single tulip,
to emphasize the kind of hushed,
minimalist, still low
life the Dutch Esthete
was assumed to be living.
The reality was more like the room
in the center wonderland's
actual studio.
Lots of stuff stashed
in shelves and cabinets.
Paintings again hung high.
And what everybody who went there
remarked Lots of cardboard
panels painted in primary
colors plus black and white,
pinned to the white walls
that he would move around to test
various combinations.
One grand studio was so remarkable
that he himself had it photographed
in 1926, and
recently the Tate in Liverpool
had it reconstructed at Lifesize
at the left.
The Kunstmuseum in The Hague also
has made a model on the right.
In October 1930,
a young American sculptor living
in Paris came to visit Mondrian
and he wrote this.
It was very exciting.
Rome light came in from
the left and from the right, and on
the solid wall between the windows,
there were experimental stunts
with color rectangles of cardboard
tacked on.
Even the Victrola, which had
been some muddy color, was
painted red.
I suggested that the Mondrian, that
perhaps it would be fun to make
these rectangles oscillate.
And he, with very serious
countenance, said, No,
it is not necessary.
My painting is already very
fast.
This one visit
gave me a shock, said the artist
that startled things by startled
things.
Alexander Calder meant that he had
been converted to abstraction.
He also picked up a few colors he
was going to become famous for.
Collectors in Dresden had been
buying Mondrian's paintings, too,
and they knew about his studio.
And so Mondrian designed a
room for Madame Binet's
room for her house, which would
have been a kind of walk in
Mondrian.
The project didn't get built, but we
have a couple of drawings for it.
Isometric projection
at the left and what architects
call an open box, drawing
on the right with all four walls
splayed out.
A lot of Mondrian all around
you. And for comfort.
Just a built in love seat and a
coffee table.
The architect and designer
Garrett Rietveld was
a product of the style and
a member.
His greatest surviving building is
this building.
This house built at the
lot at the end of a row
of 19th century
houses in Utrecht.
The woman who commissioned it was
a progressive minded single mom
with three children named
Schroder who wanted
something different.
And in 1924, she
got it.
It's the fullest realization
of the style, principles of
openness,
of plan,
strict geometry.
Thoughtful scale sliding
panels to change the room shapes
and sizes, primary colors
and fluid circulation,
light and air.
The upstairs is particularly
wonderful.
And at the bottom, there's an
invention. You recognize the kind of
icon for the style.
A chair that Roitfeld designed
in 1917
and repainted six years later
in Mondriaan colors.
And as to comfort her, each of
these lines incised on the
bottom of the seat
where I sit.
I do not want to sit
as my seated flesh
likes, but rather
as my seated spirit would
sit if it wove the chair
for itself.
Just one more.
The style building project
this row of five houses by Jacobus
out the architect
of the building with Duisburg
yellow and black tile floor.
You saw just a minute ago
I would had been on the Distell
roster from
the very beginning with Mondrian in
1917,
and this is his contribution to
a famous project in
the summer of 1927 in Stuttgart.
By 17, invited
architects, including Le Corbusier,
Walter Gropius and others,
a project to be a showcase for
modern housing, which
was our specialty.
I can't talk about this project and
the stale architecture without
a nod to the competition, however,
which had so many
ideals and principles in
common with the style.
And that is a great German
Academy for the Arts,
whose buildings and Dessau were
going up at the same time,
designed by his founder and director
of Walter Gropius.
Now, that's another lecture.
But I have to read you a letter from
Duisburg, founder of the Style,
who went there to conquer the place
and manages to sound like
a futurist.
In the process, he said at the
Bowhouse. I have radically
overturned everything.
This is the famous academy, which
now has the most modern teachers.
I've talked to the pupils every
evening. I've infused the poison
of the new spirit everywhere.
The style will soon be published
again and more radically.
I have mountains of strength, and
I know now that our notions will be
victorious over everyone
and everything.
Well, I have to come down from
the lofty subjects of
mondrian's meanings for
a moment and the adaptation
of his ideas in the world.
And just take a second here for a
few crass facts.
Mondrian has been worth a lot
of money to a lot of people,
and I'm not even including the
buyers and sellers of his paintings.
It's been a game of associations
and of prestige for
80 some years.
When his studio was open to visitors
and photographers just after his
death in 1944.
Some pictures like this one
and fashion magazines
quickly led to Mondrian's art
becoming identified with
sophisticated modernity.
You could be chic in black,
particularly if you visited abstract
painter Studios and you recognized
Mondrian's paintings
like the one on the easel.
Or you can be comfortably stylish
in unstructured sweaters, especially
if you were on close terms with
highly structured, abstract
paintings.
Or 20 years later, you could be a
walking billboard,
not accidentally during the first
ever Mondrian retrospective
in 1965 and 66.
The Commander Museum in The Hague,
which is the home to the greatest
collection of Mondrian's work, gave
its okay to the photo shoot on the
far right there for Eve
and 1965,
and used some of its slimmer
docents to serve as models.
This was the irresistible choice for
the cover of Nancy Troy's very
engrossing book of 1912
on this whole subject called The
Afterlife of Peter
Mondrian.
Mondrian's dresses were knocked
off by mass
producers and spared
a spread. The Mondrian
or Mondrian ish brand
far and wide.
And it's not going to die.
A friend spotted this some students
in Florence this summer.
When we moved to L.A.
in 1983, there was a generic
mid-fifties apartment building
in West Hollywood being turned into
a hotel.
Look, Mondrian
getting painted on the outside by
an Israeli abstract artist called
Yaakov Agam and sort of boogie
woogie colors.
Soon that got faded
and dated and
the Mondrian had a facelift.
Meanwhile, the Mondrian Hotel
Company was building elsewhere in
the Arabian Gulf
in Qatar.
Times were changing.
No more rectangles and primary
colors for this Mondrian.
In the Gulf, it's Mondrian
and brand only.
But if in 1917
you saw Sorry, in 2017
you'd been in Doha and you checked
out of the Mondrian Hotel and flew
to Amsterdam and went on
to The Hague for some quiet good
taste.
You would have gone past the
pristine new City hall designed
by Richard Meier,
and you would have been startled
that that year there was no getting
away from Mondrian.
On the pure white panels.
They were temporary stick
on plastic sheets
to celebrate the 100th anniversary
of the style.
And the style was virtually
identical in the public mind with
Mondrian.
Big Mondrian exhibitions
are held in major cities in the
United States and Europe,
and they produced not only
and sponsored a lot of good
scholarship, excellent catalogs
on books, and they also spread
the brand far and wide.
How far?
I was delighted the other day
to see pictures of Samsung
Electronics brand new chip factory
in South Korea where 16
enormous fake mondrian's float
high above the heads of the
workforce.
And I saw something else even more
recently, a 2024
Cadillac. Cadillac Mondrian
with art on the doors.
Lee leaning in for speed.
There's Duisburg. Duisburg.
I've been happy.
If a mondrian car
doesn't appeal, whatever
your cravings may be, there's a
product for you.
Just as.
Yeah, just as
just a snack.
There's a delicious labor intensive
cake you can make if you have the
time.
And if you have even more time as a
jigsaw puzzle.
Same one your parents bought in the
1960s.
Or if you want to just step out for
a cigaret, we've got that too,
which is kind of perfect
for Mondrian who smoke like a
chimney.
There are these are mondriaan super
lights.
You may just want to
look around the gift shop most any
gift shop and museum.
And there's no end
to Mondrian swag,
including if especially as the
pandemic comes back, you could
be ready and stylish.
I am.
Back now from
all this foolishness for a minute.
And the purpose of his work, what
did what did wonder and believe he
might accomplish
and how accomplished
for us individually, if anything,
and for art and for human
society.
Well, after years of experiments, he
said his art would express what he
called pure reality.
He would do that by reducing the
forms of nature to their what
he called constant elements,
not images, just
horizontal and vertical lines,
but no curves,
rectangles and the three primary
colors plus black and white.
And why do that?
Because he wanted to express the
vastness of nature.
He said it's expanse,
it's repose, and
it's unity.
And why just its constant elements,
the vertical and horizontal lines.
Because he said they are the pure
expression of opposing forces.
Vertical and horizontal, which exist
everywhere and dominate everything.
Their reciprocal action
constitutes life.
The equilibrium of any aspect
of nature, he believed, rests
on the equivalence of its opposites.
Mondrian was no physicist,
but he knew about molecular motion.
And the fact that what appears to be
fixed and solid
to our eyes is actually
on closer examination
what he called dynamic
movement and equilibrium.
Monahan was no biologist either,
but he was convinced that
art needed to evolve.
He grew up at a time when evolution
began to be recognized as a process
found in culture, not
just in biology.
As conditions changed,
all the forms and art will be
replaced by newer, better
adapted ones
that in turn will make society
healthier, less oppressive.
Writing in the era of
Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin,
he said, in the present
moment.
Oppression is so clearly evident
that everyone must regarded as one
of the greatest evils.
But does everyone see this evil
and its real significance
and its positive and negative
factors?
Events pass,
but oppression remains
as long as it's not individually
and actively opposed
by an equal force
to be opposed, it must be viewed
realistically, observed
and studied.
It must be basically understood
if it is not to continue in new
forms.
Destruction is followed by
construction.
So Monahan's
diagnosis is that
we're suffering from oppression, but
we can cure oppression and
be free by
defeating its cause, which is
our ignorance of true reality.
Art can express true reality if
it gets rid of its ancient habit of
representing things
and uses only the most simple
fundamental means.
No more mimicry.
With the help of a new kind
of art, to look out
patiently, think about,
absorb, will gain
a deeper understanding of
the world and each other.
The transformation may take
generations or even
centuries.
Now, a century later, we can vouch
for that,
and we've managed to invent some
new kinds of oppression on top
of it.
For a long time, I assumed that
Mondrian was another
interesting utopian between
the wars like Kandinsky
and Boccioni, and just
as doomed to failure.
No doubt he believed what he
wrote.
He worked in earnest
hard and long.
But really, could it ever have
come true?
The elite of
thoughtful people could grasp it
and adopt it and elect
wiser, better balanced
people to govern us.
That we'd become less selfish,
less tribal, less
belligerent.
That's what Monahan believed.
But how likely was that?
And what if we don't believe
it?
Assuming some of us don't.
Is Mondriaan still worthwhile?
And if so, why?
I'm going to make a few suggestions.
There are many things about his life
and character that I've learned to
admire.
Bravery is one.
His career was full of experiments
and some great leaps away
from the obvious.
There were some shocks.
It took amazing courage for him
to experiment for the conservative,
skeptical Dutch public
with this squinty display
of clashing colors
for a venerable Dutch subject.
It was an embarrassing dead end
when he exhibited this triptych
of semi cubist
allegorical females attempting
to symbolize human
potential for growth and
enlightenment.
When he wanted to recreate the
sensations of awe and wonder
at the endless restless
sea.
He invented strange new
formulas for both the variety
of the sea and its repetitiveness.
Going beyond cubism.
When he wanted to join the company
of great artists who had painted
starry skies.
He tried to evoke the sensation
by, of all things, creating
a uniform grid
that glitters.
When he found solutions, he
kept testing and opening
new doors.
Even when he admitted that he was
pleased and had made his clients
happy.
He'd go off in another direction.
The last leap was at
the age of 70, in a new country,
when he took some liberties with
the rulebook of neoclassicism
that he'd written and lived by for
25 years and made
paintings that recreated
the structure and patterns
and energy of the city.
That last leap took courage.
Well, what's made Mondrian more
valuable to me has been
the practice of experimenting
on my own with sitting
and not looking at art.
But at nothing.
Letting go of my habits of
mental hyperactivity.
Analytical thinking.
Fear of failure.
Over what? I didn't know.
Having students has helped me
to slow down and really observe.
Information has a way of inhibiting
our capacity,
our capacity to respond
to works of art, especially abstract
art work, and even to speculate
on the associations that they may
arouse.
Anyway, a lot of looking in a
speculative way without the pressure
of mondrian's ideas of
what's good for me.
Let me relax a bit.
Mondrian.
I came to see Mondrian's paintings
wherever I found them, as a kind of
exercise equipment,
sort of to stretch and strengthen my
powers of observation and
imagination.
They are an invitation by Mondrian
to look closely, of
course, and I think also
to speculate what's
going on here.
I never mind that Mondrian was
explicit about his paintings not
representing anything outside
themselves.
They are what he called
the abstract hyphen real.
But sometimes in the paintings,
associations arise that
I think we shouldn't ignore.
I think he's given us permission,
in fact, given us food
for thought.
Well, this again.
For me.
There's a radiant yellow at the top.
Deep blue, below,
unbounded, literally
blue.
Pale blue sky blue
above.
I'm not saying it's just some
schematic day at the beach,
but those colors in that
configuration please me in
a way that is familiar.
So would Mondrian scold me
for admitting that?
I don't doubt it.
I think not.
I mean, remember that he told a
critic that it was okay if he felt
the spirit of Christmas in
a purely abstract, black and white
painting of his.
It was the feeling.
The association that had aroused
that mattered to him.
I think that the wide open,
diamond shaped compositions.
Invite you to speculate outside
the picture.
Montreal, I think, wanted us to
observe how he achieved dynamic
equilibrium with just
those lines.
And a little bit of blue.
Okay, fine. We can do that.
We might even associate the lions
with maybe a dancer at the bar
related to the way the canvas
stands on a point.
Okay, that's the world inside
the canvas.
But that 45 degree tilt
of the whole canvas
seems to me like the arbitrary
is arbitrary.
Artists can just arbitrary
interference with the bigger
picture outside.
He encourages you to ask
what he's cropped out.
Isn't this tilted square, a
kind of aperture into a bigger
field of completely unknowable
dimensions?
All we know of the imaginary field
is that it has four
shapes designed
and defined by those lines.
And one of those shapes is blue.
This looks to me like a
demonstration of the tiny
extent of our knowledge
and the vastness of our ignorance.
Lately, I've been studying
photographs.
Taken by the Hubble Space
Telescope that revealed
countless galaxies,
each one bigger than
our own.
Trillions of miles away.
This experience of vastness
of which we see only a tiny part.
That's been exhilarating and
humbling.
And truthfully, it's made me love
this painting more and more.
But that's also another lecture.
This one is done.
I want to thank you all for your
patient attention for
all this time.
Thank you.