ART REVIEW : Mondrian at MOMA: Exhibition as High Art

It isn’t often that retrospective exhibitions go beyond a mere accounting of what happened, when, during an artist’s life and career, and try instead to make a polemical point. Museum curators more commonly feign invisibility, drawing a tattered veil of scholarly objectivity across their furrowed brow.

The assumption seems to be that evenhandedly assembling representative examples of paintings or sculptures produced throughout an artist’s life is most appropriate to letting the artist’s achievement happily shine through. To see how wrong that assumption can be, visit the drop-dead retrospective “Piet Mondrian: 1872-1944,” jointly organized by Washington’s National Gallery of Art, the Haags Gemeentemuseum in the Netherlands and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the show is making the final stop on its yearlong tour. A five-member international team of curators, led by Angelica Zander Rudenstine, has a particular point to make about the pivotal work of the Dutch abstract painter, and it hasn’t been shy about arguing its case.

This retrospective frankly asserts: Late Mondrian is great Mondrian. Skillfully organized to demonstrate the point, the show is utterly persuasive in its curatorial contention.

In fact, “Mondrian” is close to being a perfect museum exhibition. Some 146 paintings and drawings have been brought together for the event. They span the artist’s career, from the earliest Dutch realist watercolors, drawings and small oils, dating from the beginning of the century, to the gridded abstractions in primary colors, inspired by jazz and boogie-woogie, with which he made his enduring reputation between 1920 and 1944. However, the selection is anything but evenhanded in its distribution.

The largest number of paintings--43--date from the last dozen years of Mondrian’s life. The expatriate artist was almost 72 when he died of pneumonia in New York City on the morning of Feb. 1, 1944. When he was 60, he had suddenly begun to transform the grid paintings he had been making, infusing their classically harmonious format with a dynamic openness that sent them through the stratosphere. The retrospective is dedicated to laying out those late paintings in their full glory, and to showing us how he got there.

Mondrian’s career was conducted under the sign of the tortoise, not the hare; it’s marked by a steady and methodical march toward the finish line. For a committed Dutch fan of the syncopated, dissonant rhythms of American jazz (he was happily present at Josephine Baker’s celebrated Paris debut in the fall of 1925), it seems odd but somehow appropriate that almost every photograph of the artist working in his studio shows him dressed in a painter’s smock worn over a suit and tie.

Mondrian was 35 and had been painting for more than a decade before his first serious encounter with Modern art, especially the colorful Fauve paintings of Kees van Dongen, the dreamy Symbolist work of Ferdinand Hodler and the vivid Expressionist reveries of Vincent van Gogh. The MOMA exhibition is frugal in representing his early years, selecting only enough examples to show how the artist began to explore Modern idioms that would subsequently blossom in his abstract work.

Eventually, he began to abstract from nature. You can see it coming in early pictures like the loosely painted landscape “The Woods Near Oele” (1908), where the staccato vertical rhythm of bluish trees is carried across the canvas by a through-line of yellow light on the distant horizon. With his move to Paris in 1912, after a decisive encounter with the incomparable work of Cezanne and the early Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, he began to narrow his focus.

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The show, having quickly and concisely skittered through the first half of Mondrian’s life in just about two dozen pictures, begins to slow down for an in-depth analysis of the painter’s studied movement toward complete abstraction. Mondrian’s gray and beige Cubist pictures, often derived from the patterns of interlocking tracery in a tree’s branches or the component parts of a building’s facade, are carefully built up from small strokes of paint, brick by brick, visual rhyme by visual rhyme.

The structural complexity of these paintings, their sense of eternally ordered tempo, is played out against a backdrop of unprecedented devastation in Europe. Mondrian was forced to return to Amsterdam as World War I exploded into the most horrific rent in a social fabric yet witnessed on the planet.

By the time the catastrophe was over, the artist was no longer painting abstractions in which you could still detect a tree or building as the visual source. Instead, he had begun to divide his paintings into spaces and planes of horizontal and vertical color. In the most radical examples, dating from 1918 and 1919, the painting was simply a checkerboard of dusky or pastel-colored rectangles.

These strange and eccentric works, which offer no direct visible mimicry of the world outside the canvas, represent a complete about-face. No longer abstracting from nature, he was now looking for a way to abstract toward nature. Painting would be nature’s independent proxy.

In the 1920s Mondrian constructed paintings that employed only the basic elements of his medium of artifice--straight lines, primary colors, the non-colors of black and white--to create a living, breathing equivalent to the natural world. The show is filled with resplendent examples, including a room with several drawings and unfinished paintings that show the careful but intuitive process through which he arrived at his compositions.

It’s worth emphasizing that Mondrian did not devise the basic visual vocabulary of his mature art until he was 48 years old. By then, he was in full command of his artistic capacities.

The climax is a gallery with five nearly identical paintings, whose shared composition is characterized by a black cross slightly off-center. The densely painted red, yellow and blue rectangles in four of them are carefully modulated in size and scale, depending on their arrangement and on the thickness of the surrounding black lines. The intent is to keep the equilibrium of the picture harmonious.

In the fifth, from 1932, something small but nonetheless surprising happens: One of the black lines has been doubled. The visual effect is amazing. The carefully structured compositional stability suddenly begins to hum. Pictorial space opens up. The thrilling transformation from a calmly balanced equilibrium to a vigorous and dynamic equilibrium is under way.

The exhibition has done such a good job bringing you to this complex point in Mondrian’s magnificent career that the subtle shift to a dynamic form arrives with the powerful force of a visual thunderclap. When you look through the final galleries, where the artist is joyfully trying out new riffs and remaking old ones in a determined effort to--as he put it--give “more boogie-woogie” to paintings he once thought were finished, you can’t help but feel the excitement.

In a period like ours, when so many artists seem to peak early and then fade away, watching Ol’ Man Mondrian hit his stride at 60 is wondrous to behold. This is one retrospective that makes looking backward in time a convincing exercise in optimism for the future.

* Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St., New York, (212) 708-9400, through Jan. 23. Closed Wednesdays.