The painter David Salle once wrote — he was quoting a friend — that you could recognize one of Alex Katz’s canvases if it fell out of an airplane at 30,000 feet. The same is true of the Dutch-born painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). His grids and super-luminous yellows, reds and whites are instantly identifiable.
Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography, “Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute,” is a big and especially beautiful book from a publisher, Knopf, that has been making beautiful books for more than a century. To glimpse “Mondrian” is to want to own and display it. What’s inside is of more varying merit.
Weber, who has previously written lives of Balthus and Le Corbusier, has delivered a necessary book, in the sense that this is a rare full-dress biography of Mondrian, the reclusive painter who drifted from figurative painting to geometric and boldly colored abstractions, becoming in the process one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century.
The common reader — as Samuel Johnson called you and me — may find that 600 pages of Mondrian is a lot of Mondrian. This is especially so because Weber’s prose is monochromatic. Painting after painting is described in detail. These descriptions are literary chloroform.
This reader began to feel that he was chewing through a block of wood. Every moment is held a beat too long. But Mondrian was a deeply eccentric man, and the details of his alienlike existence keep you turning the pages.
His father was a school headmaster, a strict and severe Orthodox Protestant, who didn’t want his son to become a painter. But one of Mondrian’s uncles was a successful commercial artist who gave him lessons and set him on his way.
In his early career, in Amsterdam, Mondrian made easily salable paintings to survive while slowly narrowing down and simplifying his own work, especially in his stark paintings of chrysanthemums. His increasingly abstract style had its origins in Cubism.
In 1917, he helped start the influential Dutch magazine de Stijl (“The Style”) and the art movement of the same name. The movement was characterized by the strict use of straight lines and primary colors; it sought harmony through order and simplicity.
Mondrian left Amsterdam for Paris and then London. He was an antisemite who nonetheless was unhappy to be chased out of both cities by Hitler’s encroaching armies. He moved in 1940 to Manhattan, where he spent the rest of his life, finding increasing fame and casting a long shadow over his rivals. He struggled financially, however, until relatively late in life.
Weber writes that Mondrian “never exhibited an iota of pretentiousness.” This comment is hard to square with the contents of “Mondrian.” This is a book that reminds you of the dangerous proximity between dignity and pomposity. Mondrian lived like an ambassador from the kingdom of ridiculous notions.
He went in for spiritualism and phrenology and unusual diets. He had no sense of humor and rarely smiled. His peculiar style of dance made others snicker behind his back. “He moved only his feet and held the rest of his body rigid, with his head tilted upward,” the author writes.
Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as “You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.” Taking him into certain social situations was like throwing a cat into a swimming pool. He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, “It smells old in here.”
Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was “hostile to the spirit.” He once remarked, “Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.”
He appeared to be asexual but had a series of close friendships with handsome younger men. Some of these relationships may have been physical.
Mondrian “forsook natural color for pure color,” he said in a 1941 essay. He so abhorred natural color that on at least three occasions, while lunching with friends, he refused to sit facing a window, lest he be forced to look at the smallest bit of a tree. Weber argues, unconvincingly, that this was because he loved nature altogether too much. Discovering electrical tape changed Mondrian’s life. Before that, he had spent enormous amounts of time painting, erasing and moving the lines in his work.
His small and spare apartments were designed to look like his paintings, and he rarely left them. He was a solipsist who would have leaped on a grenade for no one. He had an ego that should be displayed in the Smithsonian, in a lighted box.
There was something of the lost child about him, a touch of both Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson. Perhaps Patricia Highsmith was correct when she commented in her diaries, “The greatest artists are always childish.”
You must approach this book with a sense of humor because Weber, like his subject, has little to none. He upbraids those who would even lightly criticize Mondrian’s art or personality.
The work matters more than the life, and yet here the life is. Weber does get this story told, if creakily, and he corrects errors that have slipped into other accounts. He is a good tracer of Mondrian’s influence, not just on other painters but on architects. It is hard to imagine Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, without him.
Mondrian’s appeal shows no signs of waning. In 2022, one of his paintings sold for $51 million. On occasion, those who have bought his paintings have been uncertain how to hang them. Which side of pure color and geometry is up?
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