Arts & Manners: Potpourri

If the opening of the new art season has not offered any real novelties, it has made up for this by giving New Yorkers a welcome chance to reacquaint themselves with older, halfforgotten figures whom, as it turns out, age does not wither. Take, for instance, the Guggenheim Museum’s whiz-bang presentation of the Dutch modernist, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), in his first full-length showing since a Museum of Modern Art retrospective back in 1945. Personally, I hadn’t been lamenting Modrian’s nonappearance; had anyone asked me whether an exhibition of his work would be worth the trouble and expense, I would have unhesitatingly said no—his very considerable contribution to the development of twentiethcentury art had, it seemed to me, been amply demonstrated in surveys of cubism and the development of abstraction, and what more was there?

well, there’s a lot more. Modrian achieved his status as a founding father of modernism in Holland in 1916-1917 as the most gifted member of De Stijl, one of the many didactic groups of the period who thought they had the answer to the perennial burning question “whither art?” Inspired by the cubism of Picasso and Bracque, they went still further in repudiating reality, advocating the doctrinaire reduction of all forms to the rectangle (or cube), all colors to the primaries (red, yellow, blue plus black, white and grey), and the making of a work of art to the arrangement of these colored blocks in asymetrical balance. Their influence still survives, not only in Sears Roebuck-type linoleum, advertising and typography, but also (alas!) in those ubiquitous boxes with colored balconies which housing experts have been perpetrating in the name of modern architecture for over fifty years. It is hardly surprising that the pictures Mondrian painted according to Neo-Plasticism, as the formula was called, and to which he was faithful up to his death, are variations, albeit refined and subtle, on a single theme: At the risk of outraging fashionable intellectuals, I can find only one phrase to express my meaning—when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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If the opening of the new art season has not offered any real novelties, it has made up for this by giving New Yorkers a welcome chance to reacquaint themselves with older, halfforgotten figures whom, as it turns out, age does not wither. Take, for instance, the Guggenheim Museum’s whiz-bang presentation of the Dutch modernist, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), in his first full-length showing since a Museum of Modern Art retrospective back in 1945. Personally, I hadn’t been lamenting Modrian’s nonappearance; had anyone asked me whether an exhibition of his work would be worth the trouble and expense, I would have unhesitatingly said no—his very considerable contribution to the development of twentiethcentury art had, it seemed to me, been amply demonstrated in surveys of cubism and the development of abstraction, and what more was there?

well, there’s a lot more. Modrian achieved his status as a founding father of modernism in Holland in 1916-1917 as the most gifted member of De Stijl, one of the many didactic groups of the period who thought they had the answer to the perennial burning question “whither art?” Inspired by the cubism of Picasso and Bracque, they went still further in repudiating reality, advocating the doctrinaire reduction of all forms to the rectangle (or cube), all colors to the primaries (red, yellow, blue plus black, white and grey), and the making of a work of art to the arrangement of these colored blocks in asymetrical balance. Their influence still survives, not only in Sears Roebuck-type linoleum, advertising and typography, but also (alas!) in those ubiquitous boxes with colored balconies which housing experts have been perpetrating in the name of modern architecture for over fifty years. It is hardly surprising that the pictures Mondrian painted according to Neo-Plasticism, as the formula was called, and to which he was faithful up to his death, are variations, albeit refined and subtle, on a single theme: At the risk of outraging fashionable intellectuals, I can find only one phrase to express my meaning—when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.