Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: An Essay in Trialogue Form, 1919-1920.

The scholarship on Piet Mondrian has undergone a massive transformation in the last 25 years brought about by a flurry of new publications. These include not only his complete writings, but also a number of detailed studies about specific aspects of his art and theory, as well as various documents such as his correspondence with fellow artists. But this patient research has been dispersed in sometimes obscure journals (often in Dutch), and until now has only reached a circle of specialists. We have to thank Carel Blotkamp, then, for providing an informed synthesis of this accumulated scholarship in his remarkable Mondrian: The Art of Destruction. The release of Blotkamp's book, and of the other books under review here, is of course timed to coincide with the present traveling Mondrian retrospective.

The contrast between current Mondrian scholarship and what preceded it is all the more striking when comparing Blotkamp's book to Meyer Schapiro's 1978 essay on the painter, now reissued by George Braziller. Even when it first appeared, as an essay in the second volume of Schapiro's selected papers, Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries, it felt a bit dated - and with good reason: the author tells us in a footnote that its "essential points go back to lectures on Mondrian and other abstract painters in [his] courses on twentieth-century art at Columbia University and in lectures elsewhere since the late 1930s." That some of Schapiro's ideas on Mondrian's work were first formulated while the painter was still alive and much in need of recognition helps understand the essay's oddly apologetic strategy: in order to convince a reluctant audience that Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism did not consist of mere decorative patterns, Schapiro endeavors "to show [the] continuity" of its "pure relations" with "structures of representation in the preceding art" - to show, in other words, that there is nothing fundamentally new or frightening in his work; that between Degas' framing device and Mondrian's use of the diamond format, or between Pissarro's frenetic views of Parisian boulevards and Broadway Boogie Woogie's optical dazzle, there is only a difference of degree, not of nature.

The argument might work as a beginning (and Mondrian himself used it around 1917, only to drop it soon after), but it is also dangerously pernicious, for it evades the real question posed by Mondrian's enterprise - how can painting signify abstractly? This is not to say that Schapiro himself does not reflect upon the issue (as always, his formal analyses are breathtaking, and no one has more vividly captured the open rhythms of Composition with Lines, 1917, and Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43), but that he does so with all sorts of warnings that seem or should seem unnecessary today. This limpid essay should be cherished for its inimitable pedagogical urge, but it should be approached almost as a historical document, as the best example of a bygone moment in the Mondrian literature.

Blotkamp's Mondrian, in contrast, is clearly abreast of the newer scholarship. I dare say that it is the best book on the artist to date. The two main reasons for this are clearly stated in Blotkamp's introduction: first, he has traced Mondrian's development chronologically and avoided "the anachronisms that, in the past, have cropped up in much of the literature" on the artist. Second, paying attention to Mondrian's early remark (1909) that what distinguished his art from that of his colleagues was its assertive relationship with philosophy, Blotkamp takes the painter's theory seriously. These two conditions are in fact interrelated.

Like many of his peers in the first generation of abstract artists, Mondrian felt compelled to write in order to justify his then extremely enigmatic pictorial practice. However, his texts only exceptionally deal directly with the specifics of his painting: the theory of Neo-Plasticism covers all aspects of human activity, painting being only one (the "purest," of course). Yet what Mondrian suddenly has to say about jazz and his "open rhythm" in 1927, for example, is absolutely keyed to the latest development in his art. (One only has to work a bit to find how and why.) Furthermore, Mondrian rarely highlighted the changes that occurred in his all-encompassing theory. Such changes do exist, however, sometimes quite drastic ones (usually following the art but sometimes preceding it, as Blotkamp points out), but, again, to locate them requires devoted attention - and given Mondrian's turgid style, it comes as no surprise that few readers have paid much attention to these shifts. In short, Mondrian's theoretical corpus has mostly been read as a homogeneous text, not as the stratified and complexly reactive formation it actually is.

A good example is provided by Mondrian's most pedagogical text, "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality," published in De Still in 13 installments, which Martin James offers us in a new and more accurate translation than his previous one, done in collaboration with Harry Holtzman (George Braziller). While some of the early sections of this "trialogue," as Mondrian called it, were written in Holland during the late spring of 1919, at a time when he was struggling with the use of a modular allover grid, its last parts were composed in the early summer of 1920, just when he was laying the foundation of Neo-Plasticism. Needless to say, the text echoes the dramatic change that occurred in his painting (notably with regard to color) during this one-year gap, but one can easily miss these echoes if one does not measure them against what remained stable in the theory.

It is precisely this degree of acute awareness that prevents The Art of Destruction from falling into the usual traps of the Mondrian literature. Blotkamp does not overburden the book with references to Mondrian's somewhat arcane theory, but when he does refer to a specific passage in Mondrian's writings, it is with a precise knowledge of the issues that were at stake at the moment of its utterance.

Reading the first page of the introduction, where Mondrian's membership card in the Theosophical Society is mentioned among the few personal papers found in his studio after his death, I feared that I was once again embarking on a tedious exploration of the occult, replete with endless symbolic decodings of Mondrian's "geometry." This fear was unwarranted, as I learned a few pages later: Blotkamp resolutely parts company with the previous "theosophical" readings of the artist's work (notably that of Robert Welsh). In fact Blotkamp's treatment of the theosophical issue mainly concerns Mondrian's earlier work (up until the grotesque Evolution of 1911), and, if anything, one could scold him for failing to deliver on his promise to demonstrate the continuing importance of this religious pseudoscience for Mondrian's later production. I shall not scold him here, however, because his "success" would have contradicted his main position, with which I entirely concur: that what Mondrian kept from theosophy was mainly its evolutionism, and that he definitely rejected its symbolism as soon as he encountered Cubism.

Blotkamp's treatment of Mondrian's career up to 1914 is excellent, in part because it does not suffer from the highbrow respect one usually finds in monographs. (Blotkamp's severe treatment of Mondrian's market-oriented beginnings is particularly refreshing, coming from a Dutch art historian.) The artist's early works are never presented as announcing later ones (on the contrary, his pre-1908 works are shown to be conservative in a fairly cosmopolitan and Modernist environment), and his obvious weakness in painting the human figure is readily acknowledged. Blotkamp's reading of Mondrian's landscape series and flower paintings of 1908-10 as theosophically charged cycles of birth, decay, and renewal is utterly convincing, as is his dismissal of the cliche concerning the influence of Cubism on Mondrian's geometricizing style in the handful of canvases, directly alluding to theosophy, that he painted in 1911, shortly before he left for Paris. I am not so convinced that Mondrian's fascination with the geometric patterns of the blind walls of partially demolished Parisian buildings, so frequently the point of departure for his 1913-14 canvases, partakes of the same theosophical impulse to see reality as an immense cyclical organism, but that is a minor issue: Blotkamp's major point here - that, at first, Mondrian interpreted Cubism through some sort of neoplatonic lens - is perfectly argued and helps understand the slow transformation that led the artist from Cubism to abstraction.

Blotkamp is at his best in his analysis of Mondrian's passage to abstraction during the artist's confinement to Holland in 1914-19. It is not that I am always in full agreement - for example, I cannot accept Blotkamp's theory, already presented to the readers of this journal in 1979, that Mondrian's first diamond paintings were originally orthogonal canvases bearing diagonal lines. (This is not the place for a detailed refutation, which would involve a cross-examination of the documents brought forth by Blotkamp, and of offer scholarly minutiae. At any rate, the works in question were never exhibited "orthogonally," as Blotkamp himself admits, and thus the discussion remains fairly academic.) But in this chapter, the task announced in the introduction, of a meticulous and chronological pairing of the art and its attendant theory, is clearly accomplished.

One could not say the same of the second part of the book, dealing with the Neo-Plastic period - the years in which Mondrian produced his most significant work. Indeed, partially because Mondrian's later writings were progressively less concerned with painting, Blotkamp has split the theoretical from the pictorial realm. While he devotes a full and extremely rich chapter to Mondrian's mostly theoretical forays into architecture, music, and literature, Blotkamp does not attempt to link the artist's ideas (and practical explorations) in these fields to his pictorial enterprise. Conversely, the book's final chapter, which concerns Mondrian's career as a painter after 1920, makes surprisingly little reference to his evolving theory.

But the strangest thing about this last section, besides the fact that it is too short, is that Blotkamp is unaccountably reluctant to come to terms with the paintings themselves. The flower water-colors of the '20s are courageously dismissed as mediocre and mercenary; the quarrel with Then van Doesburg is thoroughly revisited (we learn that the latter's use of the oblique line, until now thought to be the main cause of the dispute, was rather an effect of the rift); and numerous other issues are handled with brio, but on the whole the work-by-work readings that were so engaging in the first part of the book are scarce in this later one. That is all the more regrettable since, when Blotkamp occasionally indulges in the detailed pictorial analysis at which he excels (as in the case of the 1937 Compositions in Blue at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague), there is much to learn. Let us hope he will allow himself to return to Mondrian's Neo-Plastic period in a future volume, and let us not complain, for it is surely a good sign, when one finishes a book, to be crying for more.

Yve-Alain Bois is Harvard University's Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art. He cocurated the Piet Mondrian retrospective that opens this month at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and will come to New York's Museum of Modern Art in the fall.