Oh, trees!
If you’re a Mondrian-lover you stand in front of one of his paintings, like the one above, and exclaim, “I just love the way he painted trees!” Right?
You have a friend who doesn’t understand Mondrian, so you volunteer to give her a tour of the moderns at the Art Institute of Chicago or the MoMa. You position yourselves in front of the Mondrians, and you learnedly explain that here we have the essence of tree-ness. Right?
Mondrian was painting simplified trees. Right?
Mondrian drew diagrams of trees. Right?
Abstract trees. Right?
Oh, please!
No one has ever looked at a Mondrian and seen trees. Right?
Right!!!!!
Then why do we constantly get the evolution of his paintings—The Mondrians—from trees.
http://emptyeasel.com/2007/04/17/piet-mondrian-the-evolution-of-pure-abstract-paintings/
[The] process of simplification and reduction would continue until he wasn’t even painting from nature at all.
The rise of Cubism also gave Mondrian a means to segment and reduce objects to their most basic forms.
Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) lived in Paris when he was in his early 40’s. There he met Braque and other Cubists.
To interpret Cubism as “reducing objects to their most basic forms” is as blatantly ridiculous as the other cliché about cubism, namely that a cubist painting shows us an object from all four sides. I’ll post just one example here, Picasso’s “Portrait of D.H. Kahnweiler,” 1910. Have a good look. You are seeing Mr. Kahnweiler’s “basic forms” and you’re seeing him from all “four sides.” Correct?
Really?
LOOK!
Cubism is so scary to think about that people, even otherwise intelligent people, repeat these absurdities about “basic forms” and “four sides.” You’ll find this sort of thing not only on internet pages but, with more academic circumlocutions, in serious publications. The Cubists—Picasso and Braque–are scary to think about because they made a clean break with the past. Naughty, naughty. Thou shalt honor thy father and mother… The only father the Cubists honored was Cézanne and he, in Robert Hughes’ words, painted DOUBT.
Let’s see now, we don’t have any commandments honoring doubt.
In 1910, art that threw out all previous assumptions was difficult to take. Still is. But doubt is so much more invigorating than having answers without first having questions. Medieval certainties and Renaissance illustrations of mythological characters are not invigorating, are they?!
The Cubists—and they didn’t call themselves that—came up with something new. The painting is now not an illustration but a work in its own right.
You must be kidding? In its own right? The audacity!
That’s right. Audacity.
So, are Mondrian’s paintings abstractions or essences or diagrams of trees? No. They are something completely new. They stand in their own right as objects. Something to contemplate.
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 