Mondrian's Meanings

- Hello and welcome to the Yale University Art Gallery. Thank you for joining us here and at home. My name is Molleen Theodore and I am the Jane and Gerald Katcher Program Curator. It is a pleasure to be here with all of you and to introduce you to my friend, mentor and collaborator, John Walsh. It's true that Juan needs no introduction, not with this crowd. Everyone knows John Walsh, everyone loves John Walsh. You keep coming back and luckily for us, John keeps delivering. This series has received great praise so far. To quote one Zoom participant: “I want to hear everything John Walsh has to say about art.” (Audience laughs) (Audience applauds) John has been asking for a show of hands at these conferences. "How many of you have attended a John Walsh lecture before?" (Audience laughs) How many of you were at his first lecture series in the fall of 2013, “Let This Be a Lesson,” focused on the history painting tradition?

If not, I recommend searching for it on YouTube. And even if you were, go back and watch it again. This first series, the brainchild of John and Pam Franks, was an early example of a kind of open university course. In total, John has so far delivered nine lecture series including 55 lectures. All of you in this conference room have enjoyed these talks. And video recordings of all lectures can be found on the gallery's YouTube channel. John's Art Gallery lectures on YouTube have received almost 800,000 views and counting. UH Huh. Good? (Audience applauds) That's a lot. Juan has taught us a lot.

About how to look at art and how to talk about what we are seeing. But his influence does not end there. His commitment to looking closely and his model of patient engagement with art, thoughtful questions, comfort with silence, good humor, and beautifully crafted prose have influenced generations of Yale students. Each year, John generously accepts our invitation to meet with the Yale undergraduates we train to take tours of the museum. Last fall, we spent an hour with John in front of a Mondrian painting. "I loved the session." It was a student's review. When students reflect on all the training we have over the course of a year, the session with John consistently rises to the top. "John Walsh, just incredible." A student wrote.

John supports the work of this museum in ways large and small, and for that I am enormously grateful. We also thank series sponsorship, the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund, and the John Walsh Lecture and Education Fund. And now, the culmination of what John's daughter, Anne Walsh, has called... The "Mondrian-athon." (Audience laughs) (Molleen laughs) I can't take credit for that. Please join me in welcoming John Walsh to the podium, for "Looking at Mondrian, the Meanings of Mondrian." (Audience applauds) - That was my producer. (Audience laughs) Everyone should have someone like that. Few will do it. Thanks Molleen.

Well, today we take one last look at Mondrian's remarkable early career as a realist painter, up to his evolution into abstraction. He evolved in part through an evolution of his own spirit, and we glimpse some twenty years of mature work as the painter we know. We will also take a look at his generation of European abstract artists and his mostly idealistic motives. I think Mondrian must be the most easily recognizable modern painter... (audience laughs). So much so that in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as you may remember, it is set two centuries in the future, when an officer of the Starship Enterprise calls Commander Data, so called because he is an android, a product of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. . .

Data explains to an android student that this thing on the wall is what humans call a "painting." (Audience laughs) And the audience, of course, doesn't need to know who that artist is. But hey, who painted this? Or this? Yes, it is less obvious. You would have to be a specialist in Dutch art, or be Dutch, or both, to recognize the work of the young Piet Mondrian. One of Mondrian's surprises was that he had already had a respectable career before he was 30. He mastered one style after another after being a student at the Amsterdam Academy in the 1890s.

And he had won a prize or two. He concentrated on the landscape. He was attracted to it and saw a possible way to make a living from it. His family was educated and gentle, but poor and he could not support them. At home, near where he lived, there were everyday subjects that he could paint in an astonishing variety of styles, first meticulously observing them on the spot with drawings like this, and then painting very restrained pastels in the studio. He mastered monotone oil drawing, working here on a cloudy day with smoke and steam in the air, using few strokes, as few as possible, to achieve the correct overall masses and tones.

And in the countryside around Amsterdam, he skipped conventional rural subjects like cattle and sheep, often choosing odd bits like this house, a clothesline, and dancing linen. He was also good at half-light, capturing leaves, pollarded branches, and shimmering water with sure brushstrokes. He is almost an impressionist when he wants to be. On the right side, he stabs the surface with green brush strokes, giving the old branches a kind of irritable energy. On the left, a snow scene with another apple tree and a mass of vines with the tops trimmed level and the dead leaves left to overwinter.

He painted watercolors, sometimes in the countryside on his bicycle, as you see, contemplating the pale green of late winter or spring, and the feeling of endless fields on the distant horizon, and water everywhere, in the clouds. and in the shallow waters. backwaters. To Mondrian's generation, 17th-century Dutch engravers and painters depicting rural landscapes and life on the land were well known. And they were increasingly so as new museums opened in the Netherlands in the 1880s and 1890s, inspired by growing nationalist pride in Dutch history. Illustrated books about artists were published in editions that artists could afford. The young painters of flat views and imposing skies, and their buyers, remembered how beautiful their country had always been.

In its distinctive way, that is. And how human ingenuity and hard work had kept it dry and prosperous. For several centuries, admirers of landscape paintings grew up with the belief, reinforced by preachers, that to study nature was to study God, who revealed himself in his own creation. In Britain and the Netherlands it was a cliché that nature was another sacred book like the Bible, a book of revealed truth. Mondrian was not a practicing Calvinist, despite his upbringing in a religious home, but he was an observer of the landscape as well as a museum visitor, and developed a kind of secular veneration for nature and for the particular structure of the landscape. . level ground.

And of trees, vertical, with branches and patterns, from which he distilled what he believed to be his essential nature. Collectors liked watercolors, which were cheaper than oil paintings, and Mondrian supplied them with popular subjects. Quiet corrals along the river, clothes hanging again, meticulously detailed. Individual flowers, which were a specialty of Mondrian's that he painted when he needed money, something that was chronic until the 1920s when he was an abstract artist in Paris. Also still lifes in watercolor. For money, and probably to keep working on cold or rainy days. He also painted commissioned portraits, although not frequently, if he could help it.

And the occasional self-portrait, like this one. They are mostly frontal and serious. But outdoors was where Mondrian's heart was. Mills, everywhere. But his historic work of grinding grain or seed oil was largely being taken over by machines. Mondrian did not treat them as heroic as Jacob van Ruisdael had, but as the main feature of the otherwise flat land, pumping drainage into canals and creating ponds. Mondrian painted this windmill from many angles and using different techniques, very detailed in the image on the left, where the moon tries to hide behind a faint cloud, and wonderfully fluid on the right, in the smaller painting here.

Close-up... Also in the case of this sketch, upper cropped by the artist. Pay close attention to the lilies and the reflections in the water. It's a kind of game. The reflection in the water appears as vivid and substantial as the real object. And good high beam. Really almost impressionistic light. And look in the detail on the right what he does with the brush. He makes clouds with white paint with just a few flicks of his wrist, then dried and drew the black paint over the clouds to form the empty weather vane. Here the mill is idle, out of service, and the sail frames are apparently under repair.

Showing its barn back and crumbling wood. Here the mill is part of a classic Dutch composition, one could say sold, but exaggerated in the breadth of the view and in the feeling that something more significant is happening than the simple daily disappearance of the sun, rather an appearance, a kind of eternal presence of goodness and order on earth. He painted this just a year before deciding to try something different. (Audience laughs) A mill in the sun and dazzling colors. An experiment with colors, in fact, used by his younger French contemporaries, Matisse and Vlaminck, and the beginnings of the red, blue and yellow Mondrian that we know.

He used studies he had made along the rivers to generate large paintings, intended for exhibitions. That group of trees on the left became the central motif of the larger painting on the right. He made the clumps of trees bigger. He bent the trees with their reflection in the water. And the colors in the water are really striking in a way that's nothing like the rushing windmill you just saw. Here it is with layers of blue and yellow above and in the water below. And everything spread and intensified with those curling touches of thick paint. Trees. Mondrian finds many different ways to see and use trees.

On the left, there is a screen of tiny leaves between the painter and the farm beyond, a bit dreamlike. Next to it, the majestic shape we just saw. Beyond, trees that in summer would be a canopy over the farm below, providing shade, but are now almost bare, with branches and trunks that twist and dance against the sky. And on the far right, a surprisingly free sketch of trees with yellow-orange leaves under a bright blue sky. After seeing notable paintings by the Fauve group in Paris and by some younger artists, Mondrian applied the lessons, not only to that noisy red and yellow windmill he saw, but to his favorite motif, the twisted apple tree collecting the last rays . of the sun.

And the darkening sky behind him stirs. When he goes to an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1911 and sees the paintings that Braque and Picasso have been painting in pale greens, grays and tans, rendering solid forms and empty spaces with equal force, he soon heads to Paris. In previous lectures we analyzed the consequences of that movement, his conversion to his own distinctive type of cubism. So far I have only given a sketch of what Mondrian believed about his art. I want to now examine what his idealistic contemporaries were doing during a revolutionary period for European art. I'm just going to spend a few minutes looking at other major artists and what they hoped to achieve.

You may have heard me say that Mondrian believed that art, his art, could eventually help save the world from its materialism and belligerence. And he wasn't the only one who believed that. Since the beginning of the 20th century, many artists and intellectuals had premonitions of large-scale horrors, destruction and death. There were many utopian plans afoot. Some called for anarchism and violent revolution. Other visions of society were more peaceful, some nostalgic for the simplicities of the past, illusory. Others were religious sects. There was internationalism, mysticism, all competing or overlapping. Mondrian's own beliefs were shaped by Theosophy, which taught that the world could be improved, one person at a time, if the consciousness of individuals could be raised and strengthened.

Mondrian knew how that could happen. He and other artists would stop simply representing appearances. Instead, they would make art that embodied core universal truths, expressed solely by color and line. And this would offer help to an audience, which is us, to see and think differently. And so we could evolve towards a higher consciousness, and society would too. And over time, we would eventually create a population that would be less selfish, less rivalrous, less factionalized, more tolerant, and more compassionate. And over time, probably centuries from now, we would evolve into a higher state of being. Mondrian gave a name to this type of abstract art.

Unfortunately, neoplasticism. And he wrote about it with fervor. He helped launch a movement and a publication dedicated to those ideals,called "De Stijl". And he made paintings to prove it for 25 years until his death. I want to now look at some contemporary artists who have held similar beliefs to Mondrian. One of them was... Vasili Kandinsky. In 1911 this book on the spiritual in art appeared, a treatise like Mondrian's. Kandinsky was born six years before Mondrian in Odessa, Ukraine. And he was a 30-year-old lawyer in Moscow when he decided to quit and become an artist. He was attracted not to Paris but to Munich, where there were professors, a progressive art world and a market for his work, at first printmaking and then painting.

He used woodcut, a contemporary but consciously archaic technique for the prince. And for the paintings, a bright and colorful neo-primitive style for fantasies of medieval life and Russian popular culture. He spent summers in the Bavarian Alps with his partner, the painter Gabriele Münter. And around that time he had a couple of experiences that, when recounted, became classic origin stories of abstract art. and I'm going to read them. I sent them to you because I love reading them. "In Munich, I returned home with my painting after having studied, still dreaming and absorbed in the work I had finished, when suddenly I saw a painting of indescribable beauty, drenched in an inner radiance.

I ran towards this mysterious painting, from which I saw nothing but shapes and colors, and the content was incomprehensible. I immediately found the key to the puzzle. It was a painting that I had painted, leaning against the wall, sideways (the audience laughs). daylight, but I only half succeeded. Even from the side, I always recognized the objects. Now I knew for sure that the object damaged the paintings." Here's the other story, when he remembers seeing a Monet painting for the first time. "Before, I only knew realist art. And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a painting.

The catalog informed me that it was a haystack. I couldn't recognize it. And that non-recognition was painful for me. I felt that the object of the image was missing and I looked with amazement and confusion, and I noticed that it not only attracts you, but that it is indelibly recorded in your memory, and in a completely unexpected way it floats before your eyes down to the last detail. For me, the unexpected power of the palette, the colors, was clear. , which surpassed all my dreams. The painting acquired a fairy-tale power and splendor and, unconsciously, the object was discredited as an indispensable element of a painting.

Well, Mondrian would come to this conclusion himself a few years later. by an epiphany like Kandinsky. Instead, Mondrian evolved through a long meditation on the essential forms of what he saw. The incessant movement of waves, the structure of trees, the light and color of nature. Those things led Mondrian to isolate and concentrate them. Kandinsky could imagine a world of forms that endlessly expanded, floated, formed and reformed. Mondrian's poetry, there on the left, was about relationships between contrasting forms. He had the experience of working his way through Cézanne, at the top, and below, Cubism, and Kandinsky did not.

Kandinsky was exploring a kind of large-scale visual free association. Mondrian was absorbing how the Cubists' techniques could flatten space, free objects from gravity, and give forms a life of their own. Both were dedicated to using art to elevate humanity and help people see. For Kandinsky, the crux of the matter is what he called "inner need." That is, the need for the artist to understand the power of color and form, and use them with empathy to move the spirit of the viewer. Such similar purposes, different forms. For Mondrian, essential forms were opposed to each other. The lines were vertical and horizontal, the shapes they made were rectangular and the colors were primary.

And it was all in the relationships between them and each other. That's what he said. And that, by the artist's intuition, could result in balance. For Kandinsky, lines and shapes were fluid, floating and relationships enigmatic, suggestive. In fact, the title he gave to this painting on the right is "Yellow-Red-Blue." The primaries. But they are having a kind of ballet in the air, as Mondrian's primary colors remain still at a polite distance. Kandinsky's shapes are circular, spiral and wavy. Mondrian, on the other hand, had banished circles and even curves from his visual utopia, where they would have been disruptive.

Well, curves and circles had much more appeal than straight lines to most abstract artists across Europe. I am sure because of its associations with the natural world, with the human body, even with planetary orbits and the cosmic, the infinite. Curves could express movement, as they do in Frans Kupka's painting to the left, or growth in nature in the work of Jacob Bendien, a Dutch artist associated with the De Stijl group. And two paintings above, Robert Delaunay, a mystic, and finally on the right, Kandinsky himself, who wrote this. "The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions.

It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and balance." Now I skipped the middle painting. It is a work by another believer in the expressive energy of circles and curves. These are works by Hilma af Klint, whose life and career parallel those of Mondrian, but who was hardly heard of outside Sweden until 1986, when she was included with Mondrian in the great Los Angeles exhibition, "The Spiritual in the art". She was recognized not only as spiritual, but also as the first abstract artist. Like Kandinsky, she was middle-aged when she decided to go to the Royal Academy and, like Mondrian, she was a very good conventional landscape painter.

Like both, she had learned of the teachings of Theosophy, but she actively participated. Like them, she wanted to make art that embodied the deepest truths about life, growth, and the structure of the world, and for that, only lines and shapes, mostly circular and spiral, would do. In her will he sequestered and bequeathed, and in fact kept secret, 1,200 abstract works, none of them seen except by a few, and they could not be seen for 20 years after her death. In Russia after World War I, a group of a dozen artists led by Kazimir Malevich were inspired by Cubism and its radical reconstruction of images through deconstruction and reconstruction.

On the left you see his wonderful painting of Malevich at Yale, the knife sharpener in multiple exhibitions, a kind of Duchamp idea with a Léger flavor. The name of the new movement, Suprematism, actually meant nothing political. He was going to underline what Malevich called the "primacy of pure feeling" in art. In other words, nothing material and nothing useful. However, there was much wit and mockery, as seen in Malevich's 1919 installation, with the infamous painting of a black square hanging in the top corner, which was a place, in the Russian tradition, a place in the room that had been reserved for religious icons. (Audience laughs) The two at the bottom here have a kind of parody relationship with the image titles and with abstraction itself.

On the right, "Plane flying" might suggest "Flying apart." The black and red, titled "Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Backpack, Masses of Color in the Fourth Dimension," is wonderfully officious and silly. Suprematism did not last long in that particular tense political situation in Russia, and was soon succeeded by constructivism, the movement led by El Lissitsky that took very seriously the idea of ​​putting art and design to work for the new revolutionary state. proletarian. Now, in this look that I give you in all directions on Mondrian, I need to say something about the Italians and futurism.

I put this turbulent Kandinsky on the right because he is one of the visions he had of the future, the ultimate truth, in fact the end, the destruction, as described in the Apocalypse. Next to it is Boccioni's apocalyptic but actually progressive vision of humanity moving forward, building a city looming in the background, filled with workers at work and huge horses running in terror through the streets. The Italian Futurists were not only visual artists, but also writers and musicians. And its founder was the poet Tommaso Marinetti, who wrote: "We do not want to be part of the past." What they wanted was rapid progress, not peaceful evolution and "Enough!" to the venerable conservative Italian culture and tradition, in fact, to everything that held back progress in the new 20th century.

The machines, the crowds, the speed, the electric light, the fast cars, the daring ones, even the violent ones. The futurists were big fans of manifestos. Marinetti's was published in 1909. It puts Mondrian's hopes for peaceful evolution into perspective. He wrote... "We want to glorify war, the only cure for the world, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas that kill and the contempt for women. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight! Come the good arsonists with charred fingers! Bring the fire to the library shelves! Let them divert the canals to flood the basements of the museums!

Imagine what this guy could have done on Truth Social, huh? (Audience laughs) The futurists socialized and exhibited in Paris with the international avant-garde. Down there, Gino Severini encounters the Eiffel Tower, a suitably engrossing futuristic theme. At the top... Now here's one. At the top, a Belgian named Jules Schmalzigaug, and a motorcycle, bought by a Dutch collector. So there was a futurist diaspora, and not only to Russia and Belgium, but also to the United States, in the person of the Italian Joseph Stella, who had met the futurists in his native Italy, and in Paris, who had emigrated. to New York and had celebrated it 30 years before Mondrian as the city of the future, including the electrified paradise of Coney Island at night.

It's time to look back at the Netherlands from those same years. In the second lecture, I spoke briefly about De Stijl, a Dutch abstract art movement started in the Netherlands in 1917 and dissolved 14 years later. Mondrian was the inspiration. And not only his painting from that time, but his ideas for a new approach to art, and even an approach to a new life. He called the movement "neoplasticism", not very useful, and his publication was De Stijl, not much more useful, even to the Dutch, for whom it simply meant "the style", somehow implying the new style, I think. .

And involving more than just painting. As to what "neoplasticism" meant, Mondrian had to do a lot of explaining, which he did extensively and repeatedly. Here are those words on the screen, next to him. In Dutch, it began as "nieuwe beelding", but even "beelding" was unknown and sounded archaic, i.e. to shape or imagine. So Mondrian translated nieuwe beelding into French as Neo-plasticisme, plastic that comes from shaping or molding, and he translated it into English as "neoplastic," but since the prefix "neo" denotes a rebirth, which it wasn't, it was all doubly misleading. But through the haze of Mondrian's words, a shape could be made out, and he strove to explain it.

His younger partner in his project, Theo van Doesburg, launched him into the art world in 1917 with a new magazine, under the new name, De Stijl. It was aimed at painters, sculptors and architects. In the end there were about 100 members from Europe and America. In the second lecture I read to them key parts of the De Stijl manifesto, which appeared three years after the First World War broke out. The main idea is that the old dominance of individual will and power must give way to a new universal consciousness. Here you have a little of the text. "The war is destroying the old world with its contents.

Individual domination in each state. The new art has brought forward what the new consciousness of time contains. A balance between the universal and the individual." He called on the world's artists to join the war against individual despotism and to work for an internationalized unity in life, art and culture. Mondrian continues with his prescription of art. Is pure. Aim for the absolute. Artists will allow themselves to be moved by nature, the recognizable world, moved by it, but they will make abstract art, stripped of recognizable images. And primary colors plus black and white. The artist will bring them to what he called "dynamic balance" of opposite elements, avoiding symmetry.

And if artists can achieve it and visitors absorb it, we will gradually grow stronger in mind and heart and become better citizens in a less despotic society. Well, neoplasticism gained followers even before it had a name, starting with Theo van Doesburg himself. He was knowledgeable, intelligent, energetic and persuasive. As a painter, he was impatient with Mondrian's limits and boundaries from the beginning. In 1916, for example, he was aware that Mondrian was making his most radical works on the left, using nothing more than short vertical and horizontal lines to evoke the sea and changing movement. Doesburg adopted the device for a kind of almost abstract version of a woman in an office sitting in a chair witha typewriter, created by the void between the sticks, a bit of cunning, almost a trick.

Doesburg did for Mondrian what Mondrian could not have done for himself: gain an international platform for his work and his ideas. In his own studio, he was adept at drawing inspiration from Mondrian's images, going further in many directions. The composition on the left, for example, Mondrian's empty square. In the center, the superimposed grid. And on the right, the game of diagonals, which Mondrian had completely banished, and in fact, after discussing the matter with Doesburg, he sort of cut it off and broke with it. A couple of painters who joined De Stijl had genuine originality and I think they are worth seeing here.

It is about a Hungarian émigré in Holland, Vilmos Huzar, whose free compositions take more from Doesburg, I think, than from Mondrian. He designed the magazine and, like many other De Stijl artists, dabbled in product design, furniture, interiors and even sculpture. But much of his work has not survived or has been lost, such as this metal automaton on the far right of a dancer, which was shown in Dada exhibitions in the 1920s and then disappeared. This man, Georges Vantongerloo, was Belgian. The only sculptor of the founding group of De Stijl, who worked to apply the fundamental ideas to three-dimensional, non-figurative, mostly independent pieces, which had to be coherent and pleasing from various points of view when moving around them.

This was the difficult but traditional challenge of figurative sculpture in the round. This is a man named Chris Beekman, who was 30 years old and an anarchist when he became attracted to De Stijl, thinking that these radical artists could be useful in the struggle. He has traded his colorful, flat, pseudo-primitive style at the top left for Doesburg's brand of neoplasticism in the middle, and he sticks with it until his Depression-era social consciousness takes hold. And in solidarity with protesters in the streets protesting cuts to government welfare payments, he turned to realism. That's not a trajectory that many Dutch artists have followed.

And here is a German artist from the De Stijl group who had a long career as a painter and graphic designer, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart. Doesburg intensely followed De Stijl, promoted it intensively in Germany, attempted to join the Bauhaus faculty, and in 1924 converted Vordemberge into Hannover, where some other important artists worked abstractly, notably Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp. . Vordemberge was a talented and quite original painter of geometric abstraction. He had the distinction of being labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis; he moved to Switzerland and then to Amsterdam, where he became a Dutch citizen. The Gallery acquired two of his paintings from his nephews, the two very delicate and suggestive paintings on the left side.

The reach of Mondrian's ideas was quite broad in Europe and America, far beyond the actual members of De Stijl, and much broader than we can reach in this conference. But here I want to focus for a moment on the architecture. And design. Doesburg's magazine and his missionary journeys fostered a fusion of art and architecture. This fusion had been an ideal of modernism, the total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, described by Wagner, who integrated stage design with poetry and music. Doesburg was an interior designer who applied De Stijl shapes and colors in his work with architects. And in the middle a demo published in De Stijl in collaboration with Gerrit Rietveld.

And to the right, a tiled floor, with his colleague at De Stijl, Jacobus Oud. Faced with the opportunity to create something on a larger scale, a kind of immersive sculptures, as they say today, Doesburg renovated a large 18th-century building in Strasbourg into a cafe and movie theater. and dance hall. Here on the left. He, Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp, husband and wife Swiss modernists, gave him a great makeover in De Stijl colours. And it has been recently restored and is now open again. Mondrian paid attention to what Doesburg and the architects were doing to test immersive installations.

In fact, he had an advantage. He had experimented with these things in his own studio in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. On the left, it is still in Amsterdam, with 19th century furniture, objects here and there, paintings hung high, drawings pinned and canvases stacked at the bottom. It's just the kind of live arrangement and work with a theatrical flavor that was expected at the time. The modernist pioneer Mondrian lived differently. It was a sky-lit walk-up whose front door remains famous from a photograph taken by a young Hungarian visitor, Andre Kertesz, who completes the shot with a single tulip to emphasize the kind of silent, minimalist life an aesthete leads.

Dutch. . And the reality was that the room was much busier. In fact, the center room, with a lot of things stored on shelves and cabinets, paintings hanging high up and, what everyone who went there noticed, a lot of cardboard panels painted in primary colors, as well as white and black, pinned to the white walls that he would move. Mondrian's study was so remarkable that he had it photographed in 1926, and the Tate in Liverpool recently reconstructed it in life size on the left. The Kunstmuseum in The Hague made a model (on the right) that you can look at.

In October 1930, a young American sculptor living in Paris came to visit Mondrian and wrote this. "It was a very exciting room. Light came in from the left and right. And on the solid wall between the windows, there were experimental stunts with colored cardboard rectangles glued on. Even the Victrola, which had been a muddy color, It was painted red. I suggested to Mondrian that maybe it would be fun to make these rectangles swing and he, with a very serious face, said... "No, it's not necessary, my painting is already very fast." ) Oh, and he went on to say... "This visit gave me a shock that started things." When he said "it started things," Alexander Calder meant that he had converted to abstraction.

Some colors he was going to be. known. Collectors in Dresden had been buying Mondrian paintings and knew his studio, so Mondrian designed a room in Madame Bienert's house. It would have been a kind of Mondrian walk-in. The project was not built, but we have a. pair of drawings, an isometric projection on the left and what they call an "open box" drawing on the right, with all four walls extended. So, lots of Mondrian, and just a built-in loveseat and coffee table for added comfort. Architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld was a product of De Stijl and a member.

The largest surviving building of his is this house, built on land at the end of a row of 19th-century houses in Utrecht. The woman who commissioned it was a progressive-minded single mother of three named Truus Schröder. She wanted something different and she got it. (Audience laughs) It is the most complete realization of the opening principles of De Stijl, strict geometry, well thought out scale, ingenuity, sliding panels to change the shapes and sizes of rooms, primary colors, fluid circulation, light and air . The upstairs here at the top right is particularly wonderful, and at the bottom is that Rietvelt invention that became a kind of icon for De Stijl, a chair he designed in 1917 and which was repainted six years later with Mondrian's colors.

On the underside of the chair's seat, Rietvelt had a poem engraved that said: "When I sit, I do not want to sit as my sitting flesh likes, but as my sitting spirit would sit, if it wove the chair for itself. " Just one more De Stijl construction project. On the right, this row of 5 houses by Jacobus Oud, who was the architect of the building with the yellow and black Doesburg tile floor that you saw a moment ago, Out had been on the De Stijl list with Mondrian from the beginning in 1917. And this is his contribution to the famous project of the summer of 1927 in Stuttgart. 17 invited architects, including Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, among others, were a showcase of modern housing, which was Oud's specialty.

I can't talk about this project and De Stijl architecture without first showing you another building. This is Le Corbusier's corner house and also a nod to the competition for De Stijl, which had so many ideals and principles in common. And that is the great German Academy of Arts, whose buildings in Dessau were being built at the same time, designed by its director and founder Walter Gropius. That's another conference. But I do have to read you a letter from Doesburg, founder of De Stijl, who went to the Bauhaus to teach and conquer. He wrote to a friend... "At the Bauhaus I have changed everything radically.

This is a famous academy that now has the most modern teachers! I have talked to the students every afternoon and infused them with the poison of the new . spirit everywhere (audience laughs) De Stijl will soon be published again and in a more radical way. I have mountains of strength and now I know that our ideas will triumph over everyone and everything." He then became a futurist. In short, a fan. I have to descend for a moment from the lofty themes of Mondrian's

meanings

and adaptations of his ideas in the world, to just a few crude facts about him.

And Mondrian has been worth a lot of money to a lot of people. And he didn't even include the owners of his paintings. It is a game of associations and prestige. When his studio opened to visitors and photographers shortly after his death in 1944, a few photographs like this one in fashion magazines quickly led to Mondrian's art being identified with a sophisticated modernity. You could look elegant dressed in black, especially if you visited the studios of abstract painters and recognized Mondrian's paintings as the one on the easel. You could look comfortably stylish in unstructured sweaters, especially if you had a close relationship with highly structured abstract paintings.

Or, twenty years later, you could be a walking billboard. (Audience laughs) It is no coincidence that during the first Mondrian retrospective in 1965 and 1966. The Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which houses the largest collection of Mondrian's works, gave its approval to this photo shoot for Yves Saint Laurent in 1965 and used some of his thinnest teachers as models. (Audience laughs) Some of Saint Laurent's dresses were an irresistible choice for the cover of Nancy Troy's excellent and fascinating 2012 book on the whole subject, called "The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian." It's in the bibliography of the Yale University Gallery website. Anyway, many mass producers eliminated the Saint Laurent Mondrian style dresses and spread the Mondrian brand everywhere.

When we arrived in Los Angeles in 1983, there was a generic mid-'50s apartment building in West Hollywood that was being converted into a hotel, "Le Mondrian." (Audience laughs) And have an Israeli abstract artist named Yacov Agam paint it on the outside in boogie-woogie colors. (Audience laughs) Soon that faded and became old-fashioned, and Le Mondrian had a facelift. And it looks like this now. And meanwhile, the Mondrian Hotel Company was building elsewhere, in the Persian Gulf, in Qatar. Times were changing. No more rectangles and primary colors for this Mondrian. It's a brand-only Mondrian. Well, if in 2017 you had been in Doha, checked out of the Mondrian Hotel, flown to Amsterdam and gone to The Hague in search of some quiet good taste, you would have gone for the pristine new town hall by Richard Meier, and I found this.

Surprising adaptation. And there is no escaping Mondrian in Holland. However, this was temporary, on adhesive plastic sheets, to celebrate De Stijl's centenary. And, in the public mind, De Stijl was virtually identical to Mondrian. Mondrian's major exhibitions in major cities in the United States and Europe have not only produced and sponsored a wealth of scholarship and excellent catalogs and books, but also a tsunami of merchandise. (Audience laughs) Whatever your cravings, there is a Mondrian product for you. (Audience laughs) Just a snack? There is a delicious but labor-intensive cake that you can make if you have time. And if you have even more time, there is a puzzle, the same one your parents bought in the 60s.

Or if you just want to smoke a cigarette, the ideal thing to think about Mondrian, who smoked like a chimney, is this. And you might want to stop and take a look at the gift shop, almost any gift shop in the museum. There is no end. Finally, I want to go back to Mondrian himself for a moment and talk about the purpose of his work and what he thought he could achieve. And how. Achieve it for ourselves, in any case, and for art and for human society. After years of experiments, he said that his art would express what he called "pure reality." And he would do it by reducing the forms of nature to their "constant elements", not images, just horizontal and vertical lines, but without curves, rectangles and the three primary colors, plus black and white.

Then whyto do that? Well, because she wanted to express the immensity of nature, she said. Its extension, its rest, its unity. And why only the "constant elements" of it? Horizontal and vertical lines. Well, because, he said, "they are the pure expression of opposing forces. The vertical and the horizontal exist everywhere and dominate everything." Their reciprocal action constitutes "life." The balance of any aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. Now, Mondrian was no physicist, but he knew about molecular motion, he knew the fact that what appears fixed and solid to the eye is actually, upon closer inspection, in restless, bustling action.

What he called "dynamic movement in equilibrium." Mondrian was not a biologist either, but he was convinced that art needed to evolve. He grew up in a time when the idea that evolution was a process found in culture, not just biology, and as conditions change, all art forms will be replaced by newer and better adapted ones. . That evolution, in turn, makes society healthier and less oppressive. And writing in the time of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, he said: "At the present moment, oppression is so clearly evident that everyone must regard it as one of the greatest evils. But does everyone see this evil in its true meaning, in what?

Its positive and negative factors? Events pass, but oppression remains as long as it is not individually and actively fought by an equal force. To oppose it, it is necessary to consider it realistically, observe it and study it. "continue in new forms. Destruction is followed by construction." So Mondrian's diagnosis is that we suffer oppression. And we can cure oppression by being free, 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 old habit of representation and uses only the most simplified and fundamental means.

No more mimicry. With the help of a new type of art, which we look at, think about and absorb. We can gain a deeper understanding of the world and others. The transformation can take generations or even centuries. And now, a century later, we can attest to it. We've even invented some new types of oppression. For a long time I assumed that Mondrian was another interesting interwar utopian, like Kandinsky and Boccioni, and equally doomed to failure. No I doubt he believed, he worked seriously, hard and long, but could it ever have come true? That an elite of thoughtful people would pick it up, perpetuate it, and elect better, wiser, more balanced people to govern us?

That we would be less selfish, less tribal, less belligerent? That's what Mondrian believed. How likely was that? What if we don't believe it? Assuming some of us don't believe Mondrian's prescription, is it still worth it to us and why? I'm going to make a couple of suggestions in closing. There are many things about his life and character that I learned to admire. Courage is one of them. His career was full of experiments and great advances far from the obvious. There were some commotions. It took incredible courage to experiment before the conservative and skeptical Dutch public with this half-closed display of contrasting colors before a venerable subject.

He was a shameful dead end when he displayed a triptych of semi-cubist allegorical women in an attempt to symbolize human potential for growth and enlightenment. When he wanted to recreate the sensations of wonder and awe before the endless and restless sea, he found this strange formula that had both the variety of the sea and its repetitiveness, and went beyond cubism. When he wanted to join the company of great artists who had painted starry skies, he tried to evoke the feeling that, of all things, he created a uniform grid that shines. When he found solutions, he kept trying and opening new doors, even when he admitted that he was satisfied and making his clients happy, he would go in another direction.

The final leap was at the age of 70, in a new country, when he took some liberties with the rule book he had written and governed for about 25 years, Neoplasticism, and made paintings that recreated the structure, patterns and energy. from the city. That last jump took courage. What made Mondrian most valuable to me was the practice of experimenting on my own by sitting down. Not to look at art, but to look at nothing. Let go of my habits of mental hyperactivity, analytical thinking and fear of failure. Failure because of what I didn't know. Having students has helped me a lot to observe.

And I discovered that information has a way of inhibiting the ability to respond to most works of art, especially abstract ones, and even to speculate about the associations they may elicit. Anyway, a lot of speculative looking, without the pressure of Mondrian's ideas about what is good for me, has led me to relax a bit with the artist. I came to see Mondrian's paintings here and everywhere, like a kind of exercise equipment. Stretch and strengthen my powers of observation and imagination. I think they are an invitation from Mondrian to look closer, of course. And I think speculating. "What's going on here?" And never mind that Mondrian was quite explicit about his paintings not representing anything outside of themselves.

They were what Mondrian called the "abstract-real." But sometimes associations arise in paintings that we should not ignore, and I think he has given us permission, in fact, he has given us something to think about. This again. For me, there is that radiant yellow above, a deep blue below, the limitless pale sky blue above. It's not a sketchy day at the beach, but those colors in that configuration please me in a way that feels familiar. Would Mondrian scold me for admitting that? I doubt it a little. Remember, he was the one who told a critic that it was okay if he felt the Christmas spirit in a purely abstract black and white painting he had done.

In other words, it was the feeling that association had had toward that person that mattered to Mondrian. And let's get back to this. I think open diamond-shaped compositions invite speculation outside the image. I think Mondrian wanted us to look at how he achieved a dynamic balance with those lines and a little bit of blue. Okay, okay, we can see it. We might even associate the lines with something like a dancer on the pole, related to the way the canvas stands firm. Well, that's the world inside the canvas. But that 45-degree tilt seems to me like an arbitrary interference by the artist with the broader exterior panorama.

It encourages you to ask what has been cut. Isn't this tilted square a kind of opening into a larger field of completely unknowable dimensions? All we know about this imaginary field is that it has four shapes defined by the lines, and one of those shapes is blue. This seems to me to be a demonstration of the minuscule extent of our knowledge and the immensity of our ignorance. Lately I have been studying photographs taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of infinite galaxies, billions of kilometers away. This has made me feel euphoric and humble and in the end...

Modest, I think. And a true believer, and I love this painting more and more. But that is also another conference. (Audience laughs) Thank you all so much for your patient attention to all this talk. Thank you. (audience applauds) (relaxing music)