Piet Mondrian

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The interpretation of the visible

We begin this page with some basic historical information about Impressionism, Expressionism and the work of Cézanne.

Impressionism

In 1872 Claude Monet painted a canvas depicting a harbor at dawn and entitled it Impression Soleil Levant.

The official culture of the time preferred an art rich in academic virtuosity and designed to celebrate life in the showy aspects that appealed to the upper classes. These young painters instead dared to paint everyday life rather than the heroic deeds of established historical figures that no longer had much to do with real life.

Everything began to change in human life halfway through the 19th century with the process of industrialization and its attendant social transformations, the advent of photography, a magical device making it possible to “paint” a scene in real time, and the increase in the speed at which people traveled and perceived the world around them. The Impressionist painters shared the perception of a reality undergoing transformation and introduced this sense of the flux and change of life into their canvases. The focus was not on immanent and lasting aspects but those of a fleeting, everyday nature.

In 1893 Monet painted several versions of the façade of Rouen cathedral at different hours of the day, with the appearance of the solid and imposing edifice altering in relation to the light of the moment.

Expressionism

“I can bring together the armchair beside me in the studio, the cloud in sky, and the rustling leaves of the palm by the water’s edge with no effort to differentiate the places and without dissociating the different elements of my motif, which are all one in my spirit.” (Matisse)

Outer reality is constituted and assumes meaning in the inner space of consciousness. While this has obviously always been true and is a fact implicit in every human activity, the painters most sensitive to the new developments at that time appear to have focused on this fundamental truth.

Cézanne

While Monet’s addressed the light enveloping and molding everything, Cézanne sought a more solid structure of space capable of expressing change but also a certain sense of duration and permanence at the same time. As he put it, “Nature is always the same, but nothing remains of it, of what appears. Our art must give the shiver of its duration and enable us to appreciate its eternity.”

Cézanne wanted to find some indication of greater constancy among the changing appearances of the external world. “Everything in nature is modeled on the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. We must learn to paint in these simple figures. Later on it will be possible to do whatever you want”.

He searched for a way to reduce the immense variety of the world to a common denominator and suggested, purely as a preliminary measure, that nature should be seen in terms of the elementary forms of the sphere, cone, and cylinder. He needed to find a solid basis from which to address the changing variety of appearances.

Faced with a reality that was multiplying its appearances at the end of the 19th century, Cézanne strove to concentrate and unify. His work endeavors to abolish the perspective illusion of the third dimension by integrating the different planes in one. Objects and space tend to interpenetrate; solids and voids acquire the same value.

Mondrian

In the wake of the so-called Dutch luministic painting, as well as the work of Vincent Van Gogh and the Fauves painters, Mondrian begun around 1907 to use bright colors corresponding more to his inner vision rather than the more immediate appearance of things. In this respect we talk about Mondrian’s Expressionism although there are significant differences between Mondrian and, for instance, the German Expressionism.

The opposition between horizontals and verticals generates in the background a sinuous horizontal line (highlighted with yellow dots) whose winding horizontal course seems to absorb the vertical thrust of the trunks. In the upper section the arched form of some trunks is concentrated in the circle of a sun, suggesting a synthesis of vertical and horizontal.

Mondrian was intent at that time on expressing strong contrasts, not only with a marked accentuation of color but also with a gradual orientation of his compositions more toward a decided opposition of horizontal and vertical lines within the same canvas (Wood near Oele) or through the alternation of canvases showing a predominant horizontal an all-vertical space.

Examination of this period reveals in fact a gradual opening up of the landscapes, which now appear, with respect to the rural scenes of previous years, like boundless horizontal expanses. The landscapes are gradually stripped of trees, houses and any other sign of human presence and seem designed to emphasize the infinite extension of natural space:

As art historian Hans L. C. Jaffé observes, “His confrontation in 1909 with the infinity of nature coincides with his joining the Netherlands Theosophical Society, where man’s union with the infinitude of the universe was a central problem.”

At the same time the painter’s attention turns to constructions such as mills, lighthouses, and church towers:

Let us now have a closer look at the horizontal landscapes and the vertical architectural volumes shown above:

Landscapes

While some of the sea paintings present a space tending toward the rectilinear and uniform (Fig. 1), other works that take dune landscapes along the coast as a motif show the horizon with a slightly raised profile that coincides with a hypothetical vertical axis running through the center of the composition (Fig. 2 and 3):

It looks as if the painter wished to concentrate the immeasurable physical space of the external world into the measurable space of thought.

Something similar can be seen in Geinrust Farm with Mist of 1906-07 (Fig. 5) where a black segment representing the roof of a farm (a symbol of the steady human presence) is placed along a river (the flowing, ever-changing space of nature).

The allusion to a possible oval shape seems designed to contain and endow with greater permanence a space undergoing endless expansion.

The accents placed in the center of Fig. 1 and Fig. 4 , the line of the horizon rising in the middle in some canvases (Fig. 2 and Fig. 3) as well as the allusion to an oval shape are all signs of a search for unity.

I was struck by the vastness of nature and I tried to express expansion, tranquillity, unity”. (Mondrian)

It is worth recalling that during the naturalistic phase Mondrian had used an oval shape and an oval will be used again during the cubist period.

Architectural volumes

Similarly, but in the opposite sense to what we have just observed in the sea and dune landscapes, some paintings present exclusively vertical volumes (Fig. 1, 2, 3):

Some works present volumes in which a lateral offshoot appears to mediate between the vertical of the building and the horizontal of the ground (Fig. 4, 5, 6):

While some canvases display the use of fluid material applied in broad brushstrokes (Fig. 2), others present a surface divided into small dot-like marks (Fig. 8):

For this reason certain works have been described as “pointillist” or “divisionist”. It should be pointed out, however, that Mondrian’s “pointillism” has very little in common with the work of Seurat, Signac, and Cross. While the latter used the dotted structure in order to translate variations in light and capture them on canvas, the Dutch painter, like Cézanne, adopted it in his search for a sort of common denominator underlying the variation of mutable things presented by reality around us; a common denominator between “empty” and “full” portions of space which are indeed different level of concentration of the same energy.

Summarizing so far: In the compositions that expand horizontally, the gaze opens up to the infinite dimension of nature, while the vertical compositions with the buildings bring everything back to the finite dimension in which the human being thinks, plans and builds to rise from a primitive condition of nature:

Nature and non-nature

As mentioned in a previous page, the history of mankind has been a slow and laborious process of emancipation from natural conditions ever since the Stone Age. In striving to improve their living conditions, human beings alter the landscape with architecture and transform nature into artifice (the countless objects and tools used for human life today).

How are we to define artifice? Is it a natural product or only a human product? And if mankind is part of nature, are the plastic, concrete, glass and aluminum used to alter the landscape and move faster between continents the result of natural evolution? It seems as if nature creates a “non-nature” through mankind. A curious contradiction. A contrast that finds a visual rendering with a vertical opposed to an horizontal.

Moreover, the inner life of human beings is marked by the search for equilibrium between contradictory drives such as the natural instincts and what we call intellect, reason or mind or as Mondrian used to say the spiritual, and hence opposition between a part of us that is closer to the natural world and another that most distinguish and separate mankind from the rest of nature.

Nature and “non-nature”, the natural and the spiritual find concrete visual expression with the horizontal-vertical opposition. The painter appears to focus in this phase on expressing contrast, both with the alternation of opposing thrusts and through the use of strong colors. Yellow is opposed to pink or green; red is opposed to blue; horizontal compositions are juxtaposed with others characterized by marked vertical development.

The landscapes of the naturalistic period include numerous works showing rows of trees along rivers:

These gave way to paintings emphasizing the silhouette of a single tree:

which became predominant in some works of the expressionist phase:

While Mondrian contrasts the absolute horizontal expressed through the landscapes with a sudden and massive vertical thrust of architectural volumes, the two opposing directions interpenetrate and relativize one another in the figure of a single, bare tree:

The branches expand toward the sides of the canvas while the trunk holds them back toward the center. In the figure of the tree space simultaneously expands (the branches, similar to the horizontal extension of the landscapes) and contracts (the vertical concentration of the trunk similar to the buildings).

Visual metaphors

Mondrian was a great painter capable of transforming the surface of the canvas into a precious artifact as regards richness of texture, combinations of color, and dynamic balancing of the composition. It is essential to see the original works in order to appreciate all their beauty. His aim in painting those landscapes, mills, lighthouses and trees was not, however, solely to reproduce the fleeting appearance of things. The artist read and interpreted those objects as plastic symbols of a deeper reality, as visual metaphors of existential meanings. Mondrian’s eye addressed the objects and situations of the external world but pulsated with a wholly internal rhythm.

Mankind and nature

In the tree layout the artist imagines an ideal balance between the horizontal infinite expansion of nature and the concentrated, measured space of man-made vertical constructions. The fact that the artist finds in a tree the synthesis between nature and human artifice suggests that he has wished for an artifice (evoked by the vertical architectures) in balance and harmony with nature (symbolized by the horizontal). Think of today’s ecological question.

In the tree, the horizontal of the natural land or seascape is concentrated in the trunk, which is equivalent to the vertical of the buildings. The trunk appears as an ideal projection on the canvas of the viewer in the act of mentally appropriating the natural space beheld. The trunk would thus constitute a metaphor of the unifying consciousness addressing the infinite extension and variety of the world.

The tree appears as a miniature universe that succeeds through its trunk in isolating itself from the unbroken continuity of the line of the ground (the infinite space evoked by the landscapes). It can therefore be contemplated as a manifold space (the branches) that tends toward complexity (like the real world) while maintaining its unitary nature at the same time (the trunk), unlike the dunes, whose uninterrupted continuity disintegrates our field of vision. In other words, the trunk would symbolize the unifying consciousness of man addressing the unforeseeable variety of the world suggested in metaphorical terms in the figure of the tree by the manifold space of the branches. 

In this phase Mondrian was in search of space based on a relationship between opposing entities generating multiplicity and evoking unity at the same time. Contemplating the duality within oneself and the multiplicity around us; opening up the self to the diversity that life brings with itself but without forgetting that all that variety is a unity. Multiplicity and unity, infinite and finite, universal and individual: painting was becoming a form of spiritual exercise for Mondrian. 

Multiplicity and unity

A relationship between multiplicity and unity can be traced back in some early naturalistic works such as Wood of Beech Trees that we have examined in the previous page:

Around 1899 Mondrian paints some trunks of beech trees in a wood. Each trunk has its own particular appearance and, all together, they express the sense of variety seen in nature. The landscape, made of vertical trunks, expands horizontally. Toward the sides of the painting the horizontal line of the ground sharply contrasts with the vertical shapes of the trunks whereas in the central upper part horizontal and vertical merge together to become one. 

It is as though the painter wanted to concentrate within a vertical (symbol of the spiritual) the variety seen in nature which expands horizontally to the sides; expansion which he would express years later with the all-horizontal landscapes and seascapes:

In The Red Tree we can see an analogous structure to Wood with Beech Trees but in a reversed mode, that is to say, with unity generating from the bottom toward the top instead of from the the top to the bottom:

Expressionism?

I have referred to these works as expressionistic. As mentioned, this is not the type of Expressionism that was to develop around 1910, above all in Germany, inspired by a critical stance toward the society of the time and, in a more general sense, by chronic malaise with respect to the life typical of a certain north European culture. These canvases by Mondrian have never given me the impression of clumsy, overwrought space to be seen in many works of German Expressionism.

Even the bright greens, reds, magentas, and yellows of these paintings are always somehow classical and measured. Mondrian seeks to express space in a state of tension; he addresses oppositions and strong contrasts, which he then endeavors to resolve in a balanced whole that ultimately expresses harmony.The colors express tangible matter that is not, however, the matter of Van Gogh or Munch. Everything vibrates but the sound emitted is a deep and graceful note rather than a high-pitched shriek.The expressionistic phase was for Mondrian an initial step toward the process of abstraction that was to guide him throughout his existence.

Van Gogh, Cézanne, Mondrian

Van Gogh, the Fauves, and then the Expressionists used the accentuation of color to highlight the relationship between the outer world and inner space, between the object and the subject, in other words, the interpretation of reality. Mondrian found himself in harmony with this approach from his naturalistic phase on.

Unlike the Expressionists, however, he addressed the issue in greater depth and breadth between 1907 and 1910, considering the relationship between subject and object no longer solely through the chromatic transposition of sensory data (as Van Gogh had done and as the Fauves and Expressionists were doing at that time) but also through the search for a more solid formal structure (as suggested by Cézanne’s work) with the progressive orientation of his compositions toward dynamic interaction between horizontal and vertical (seen respectively as plastic symbols of the external and internal worlds). With the dunes, the buildings, and the tree, Mondrian was unconsciously channeling the work of Van Gogh and Cézanne into a single approach.

Mondrian opened up the canvas to the infinite space of nature with the dunes and concentrated it all before him for an instant with the buildings. The two opposite motions reached interpenetration in the tree. This marked the dawn, the very beginning of a dialogue between the two opposing directions that was to occupy the artist for his entire life, a dialogue that essentially meant the search for greater equilibrium between inner and outer worlds, the human subject and the natural universe. 

It is a great pity that the reading of these explanations cannot be accompanied by enjoyment of the brilliant greens, the thrilling oranges, and the deep and graceful shades of blue used to tone down the vivid yellows and bright reds of these wonderful canvases. One of the most interesting aspects, to which we shall be returning at length, is the fact that Mondrian’s sensitivity to philosophical and spiritual themes does not transcend but indeed takes concrete shape in the beauty of the world, its colors, and its forms.

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