Abstract
Mondrian’s neoplastic painting shows a transition from a covert to an ostensive treatment of rhythm. The transition roughly divides Mondrian’s practical development into two periods: the first from 1919 to 1932, and the next covering the ‘double-line’ and New York periods of 1932 to 1944. The transition in Mondrian’s theoretical development, however, which this Chapter investigates through analyses of Mondrian’s own writing, indicates a shift which occurs a few years earlier than its practical counterpart: the two periods which divide Mondrian’s theoretical development occur, roughly, from 1917 to 1927, the first stage of his early mature painting period, and then from 1927 to 1932 (before the ‘double-line’ was introduced in 1932), which is the second early mature painting period. Finally, the years 1932 to 1944 mark the period of dynamic (kinetic) rhythm, and includes the New York period of 1940 to 1944.
What is brought to rest aesthetically is art
– Piet Mondrian (Mondrian 1986, 127).
Obviously plenty of definitions are required to elucidate this “vision” and Mondrian, in a supplement to the catalogue, supplies them. If you are as unprogressive as I think you are, dear reader, you are in for a considerable struggle with these definitions, but to keep it and ponder over it, and then go occasionally to see the Mondrian’s paintings
– Henry McBride (McBride 1942, 23).
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Notes
- 1.
De Stijl magazine was first published in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg.
- 2.
The original Dutch title was “De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst.” This essay was published over a series of issues (twelve installments ) of De Stijl magazine, beginning its first year of circulation in October 1917, and continuing until May 1918 (although under the same title it appeared sporadically until October 1918). Strictly speaking two articles were in fact published prior to the essay’s (‘De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst’) publication in De Stijl. The first was Mondrian’s letter to the author Israël Querido , who published it in the magazine De controleur in the summer of 1909. A rare supporter of Mondrian’s painting, Querido “had discussed the Spoor-Mondrian-Sluysters exhibition at great length” in the magazine (Blotkamp 1994, 35). The second, a letter to the critic Augusta de Meester-Obreen, was printed in the magazine Elsevier’s Maandschrift, 25, no. 50 (February 1915) as an artist’s response. In part this explains why Mondrian refrained from too emotionally loaded paintings (such as the flower series) and painted instead the so-called ‘Plus-Minus’ painting – ‘cold and without feeling’, which astonished the critic (Mondrian 1986, 15).
- 3.
Neo-plasticism (between 1914 and 1917, but before the first publication of De Stijl magazine) are neither known nor documented in any form other than in letters to friends, and so on. But Mondrian’s struggle to elucidate his ideas about ‘new art’ can be thought to have converged in the essay “The New Plastic in Painting” of 1917. According to Blotkamp, this article was originally intended for publication in Theosophia in 1914, but was rejected. Subsequently the article was expanded into book form in 1915, but remained unpublished. After his encounter with Theo van Doesburg late in 1915, and later with Bart van dar Leck in 1916, Mondrian revised the work considerably in response to their suggestions, in preparation for publication of a new art magazine – De Stijl. Mondrian wrote to the collector H. van Assendelft, referring to this essay: “For the moment at least, my long search is over” (Mondrian 1986, 28, Blotkamp 1994, 107).
- 4.
An obvious reference would be to Mme. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, regarded as the ‘Bible’ of Theosophy . A. P. van den Briel, Mondrian’s friend from around 1898 until Mondrian left for London 1938, comments on Mondrian’s attachment to non-European art, especially Chinese painting (Harthoorn 1980, 14).
- 5.
There is a slight time difference between the theoretical neoplastic period and the neoplastic works themselves. Mondrian’s neoplastic theorising started from his first publication (“The New Plastic in Painting”) in 1917, but his (immature) neoplastic work appeared in 1920, after a period of experimentation (from 1916 to 1919, which included the two Checkerboard and four Diamond-shaped canvases).
- 6.
The meaning ‘regularity’ here has no correlation to ‘structure’ or ‘composition ’, but to a calculated (including that mathematically measured in, for example, the ‘golden section’) series of repetitive pulses or spaces among the pictorial elements.
- 7.
Yve-Alain Bois responds to ‘The New Plastic in Painting’ with a genealogical diagnosis of Mondrian’s rhythm. Bois begins with this comment:
For Mondrian, rhythm is the subjective part of composition , the relative (“natural ,” particular) element that must be interiorized, neutralized by the constant nonrepetitive opposition of plastic elements; it is by this means that we may attain the universal , the balance, repose , and that the tragic can be abolished (Bois 1990, 161).
Bois’ view that ‘non-repetition ’ is a key concept in Mondrian’s concept of rhythm is aligned with one put forward in this essay, in addition to ‘non-sequentiality’: a key concept, non-repetition and non-sequentiality, is described by Bois. However, while Bois does describe the concepts, he does not clearly investigate these two key elements distinctly (and does not touch on non-sequentiality in his writings) in Mondrian’s visual rhythm. Also, Bois does not investigate the difference between ‘naturalistic ’ rhythm and ‘internalized’ (or ‘interiorized’) rhythm; the latter denoting neoplastic and ‘static’ rhythm. Bois’ scepticism with regard to Mondrian’s ‘abnormal’ rhythm seems to get in the way of him elucidating the meaning of rhythm as stasis or repose , or of investigating the meaning of ‘repose ’ itself, which is crucial to understanding Mondrian’s neoplastic rhythm. In his comment that “Mondrian’s theory of rhythm is a theoretical hocus-pocus” (Bois 1990, 161), Bois is aligned with other critics who do not take Mondrian’s theory of rhythm before the Boogie Woogie paintings seriously.
- 8.
Mondrian, ‘A folder of Notes (ca. 1938–44)’, in New Art, 385.
- 9.
Whether Mondrian himself read Bergson or not is uncertain, and as Michel Seuphor writes:
I don’t believe that he ever read Bergson ’s Creative Evolution, but in the little book by Krishnamurti …, noting that he kept it until his death, I find this echo of Bergsonism, dressed up in religious phrases: “The religion of a man and the race to which he belongs are things without importance; what is really important is to know God’s plan with respect to man. Now God has a plan, and this plan is evolution. Once man has understood this plan and really knows it, he cannot help but work for its realization, identifying himself with it. Such is his glory and his beauty. Because he knows he is on the side of God, he can give himself utterly to the good, resisting evil, working for progress and not for his own interests.” And the following could serve as an epigraph for Mondrian’s whole life: “Be a force for evolution !” (Seuphor 1956, 177).
However, Mondrian did use the French term “élan vital” in his essay “Liberation from Oppression in Art and Life (1939–40) as we see immediately below in this Chapter.
The term “élan vital” had become something of a slogan among artists and writers around the early part of the twentieth century, although the original Bergsonian meaning of the term may have come from van Doesburg. Nelly van Doesburg mentioned Bergson as being among van Doesburg’s reading list in her memoir of her husband (Van Doesburg 1971, 72).
- 10.
Aristoxenus of Taras, a leading disciple of Aristotle, is purported to have written over four hundred books, of which only three on the Elements of Harmony and part of Book II of his Elementa Rhythmica have survived. There are numerous references to his other works, and later scholars refer to Aristoxenus’s interpretation of rhythm, which seems to include the missing volume I. Elementa Rhythmica was published in English translation only in 1990 (Pearson 1990). We will discuss Aristoxenus’s definition of rhythm in Chap. 5.
- 11.
Greenberg had met Mondrian in the 1940s. At that time Greenberg was a writer responsible for The New York Times art column.
- 12.
On this correction Bois conjectures the background which might have brought Greenberg to perceive the painting incorrectly. He points out, interestingly, the different lighting effects on the canvas in Mondrian’s studio and the Museum of Modern Art respectively. He cites Holty’s comment: “Mondrian complained of the radiance of the yellow in Broadway Boogie-Woogie when he saw the painting hanging in the Museum of Modern Art.” Bois points out that this radiant yellow produced an optical mixing; turning the tone of adjacent white fields into yellowishness by reflection. This optical mixing, in Bois’s contention, might have been a factor in Greenberg’s erroneous observation (Bois 1990, 175–6).
- 13.
Strictly speaking, the term ‘abstract’ is not fully appropriate to Mondrian’s painting because as stated in his article “The New Plastic in Painting” in 1917: “The new plastic is abstract-real because it stands between the absolute-abstract and the natural or concrete-real” (Mondrian 1986, 35–6). However, Mondrian himself, perhaps for convenience, often uses “abstract” instead of “abstract-real”. In his last published essay, “A New Realism” (1942–43), he succinctly defined it thus: “[A]bstraction means reducing particularities to their essential aspect ” (Mondrian 1986, 345).
- 14.
Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James mention ‘twelve installments’ but there were in fact thirteen installments if one actually counts them in the original text (Mondrian 1986, 82).
- 15.
There were the Two Paris Sketches of 1920, but these are works of an experimental or literary kind, rather than ‘scholarly’ essays concerning theories of art.
- 16.
This interpretation is shared by Els Hoek:
The most important aim was, as Mondrian formulated it in a letter dated September 16, 1919, to represent rhythm and proportion in a living harmony . In order to achieve this, he decided to vary the dark colors of the lines, and not to adhere to the regular division of the plane any longer. He wrote about this in a letter dated October 11, 1919; the formulation shows that he was seeking a solution to the problem in consultation with van Doesburg: “I also had already noticed that not all lines must always be equally dark. I think you are right. Now again I do not always stick to the regular division (Hoek 1986, 62).
But the extent to which this process of rhythm can be said to become a compositional element, and to operate as a function of contrast which is perceived or comprehended as ‘rhythm’, cannot yet be determined, and remains a question to be explored in Chaps. 6 and 7.
- 17.
Clement Greenberg contends: “Mondrian … has shown us that the pictorial can remain pictorial when every trace or suggestion of the representational has been eliminated” (Greenberg 1986, 139).
- 18.
- 19.
Bois rightly pointed out that “Mondrian did not employ this term [dynamic equilibrium ] until the 1930s” (Bois 1986, 17). Actually the term first appeared in Mondrian’s writing in his essay ‘The True Value of Oppositions in Life and Art’ (1934).
- 20.
Paul Creston, tracing this Aristoxenian line, writes: “[R]hythms which cannot be heard do not really exist” (Creston 1961, 34).
- 21.
Victor A. Grauer points out that Mondrian’s use of dialectics is similar to Adorno’s ‘negative’ dialectics (Grauer 1996, 25 n.65).
- 22.
Mondrian’s emphasis on ‘expressive’ form and the dynamic feature of his painting and theory can be seen in many of his writings of the New York period, and in interviews around that time. In his ‘Interview by James Johnson Sweeney in 1943’, Mondrian said:
The great struggle for artists is the annihilation of static equilibrium in their paintings through continuous oppositions (contrasts) among the means of expression. It is always natural for human beings to seek static balance. This balance of course is necessary to existence in time. But vitality in the continual succession of time always destroys this balance. Abstract art is a concrete expression of such a vitality (Mondrian 1986, 357).
- 23.
An interesting episode concerns a peer of Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, who measured Mondrian’s neo-plastic canvases. Finding that these measurements came close to the ‘golden section’, Vantongerloo applied the formula to his own painting. Mondrian vehemently rejected Vantongerloo’s ‘discovery’ as too mathematical, a principle in which Mondrian never took recourse (Mondrian 1986, 133–4, Blotkamp 1994, 204).
- 24.
Harry Holzman explains:
Mondrian’s painting method, which he called “pure intuition,” constituted a direct approach by way of trial and error in relation to the given space of the canvas. There were no a priori measures of any kind, there was no “golden section.” He also referred to it as “pure sensuality” (Mondrian 1986, 6).
- 25.
Mondrian 1986, 155.
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Tosaki, E. (2017). Rhythm in Mondrian’s Early Theory of Painting. In: Mondrian's Philosophy of Visual Rhythm. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1198-0_2
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