While resident in London (he arrived in 1938 before the Nazi invasion of France), Piet Mondrian caught the eye of a brainy female Oxford University graduate. Henry Moore, his Belsize Park neighbour, wondered if she was suited to the solitary Dutch champion of abstraction. “No,” Mondrian said tersely, “she’s too representational for me.”
Nicholas Fox Weber’s Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute—detailed, gossipy, enthusiastic in its admiration—finds nuance and humanity in the life of an uncompromising man often working in poverty and fleeing from war. Mondrian, who once said that “every drop of semen spent is a masterpiece lost”, still enjoyed the company of women friends. He was an avid dancer if jazz was playing and he dressed well. He loved nature and painted dunes, waves and trees. His haunting, elegiac Compositions (1913-17)—mute fields of vertical and horizontal lines—put those subjects in the past.
“I am convinced”, he wrote to a friend, “that by not trying to express anything determinate, one expresses what is most determinate: truth (the all-embracing).” “Mondrian could not control the world around him, but he could control the one he made,” Weber notes. Up to a point, as we see. Making art was a vocation that provided little income. Mondrian often thought of abandoning it. As with so many European artists of that time, stubbornness, luck and generous supporters kept him alive.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (his real name) was born in the central Dutch city of Amersfoort in 1872. His father, also Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, was a teacher of drawing and a radical Calvinist, a member of the rigid Orthodox Protestant sect that broke away from the Dutch Reformed Church. Pieter Senior headed a church school for boys in Amersfoort, until the Netherlands ended government support for single-faith education. He then operated a school in Winterswijk, near the German border, where the family lived comfortably. Young Piet refined his drawing skills thanks to an uncle, Frits Mondriaan, a successful weekend painter who ran the family’s wig-making and haircutting business. Piet qualified to teach art in schools, then entered the Rijksakademie, in 1898 failing to capture a Prix de Rome grant because, Weber notes, his depictions of anatomy in male nudes (part of a gruelling exam) were judged deficient.
From portrait to plastic
Piet often supported himself painting landscapes, portraits and copies of Old Master paintings. Signs of independence led his uncle Frits to pressure the young man to end their lessons and shorten his name to Mondrian, so no one confused the two. Later, Piet drew bacteria for researchers in Leiden.
Friends and acquaintances sustained him. When they did not, he had flowers and landscapes to paint; he still signed his flower paintings “Mondriaan”.
“Logic demands,” Mondrian wrote, “that art be the plastic expression of our whole being: therefore it must be equally the plastic appearance of the non-individual, the absolute and denying opposition of subjective sensations. That is—it must also be the direct expression of the universal in us. Which is the exact appearance of the universal outside us.”
A publicity photo for Yves Saint Laurent’s model no.81 Mondrian dress, featured in the October 1965 edition of L’Officiel magazine RKD—Netherlands Institute for Art History; The Hague; Archive Piet Mondriaan
His breakthrough to public attention was aided by Theo van Doesburg, the co-founder with Mondrian of De Stijl, the now-legendary journal and movement committed to promoting abstraction (Neoplasticism) in art and design. Although fractious, their bond helped Mondrian find his way to wealthy collectors.
In France, where he first went in 1911 looking for an art world richer in painters and buyers, Mondrian absorbed the styles of Edvard Munch, the Fauves and Theosophy (a religious system founded by the Russian mystic and spiritualist Helena Blavatsky). He was stuck in the Netherlands during the First World War and then returned to Paris, eventually turning a gritty third-floor apartment in Montparnasse into a poor man’s Gesamtkunstwerk in primary colours against a white background. That magical place, hovering amid squalor, became a destination for curious artists including the American sculptor Alexander Calder, who told him that his work should move. Mondrian, aware of the powerful rhythms of his own lines and squares, told Calder that they moved enough.
Mondrian’s journey through abstraction involved fleeing Paris for London, as noted, in anticipation of the Nazis invasion, and then fleeing England for New York before his street was bombed. Nazis looted “degenerate” works by Mondrian that they found in Germany.
Manhattan’s cacophonous rhythms were an accompaniment for his last works. Many saw (and still insist they see) a traffic grid in the criss-crossings of Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The last days in New York, where a sickly Mondrian worked with young admirers nearby, are observed up close in their journals and reminiscences—a large final section of the book. The entire biography would have benefited from more images of works that Weber describes so extensively.
Marketing coup
Two decades after his death (in 1944), Mondrian became the face of a marketing windfall. In 1965 Yves Saint Laurent launched a series of Mondrian dresses with vertical and horizontal lines and rectangles in primary colours. The dresses sold far better, back then, than did Mondrian’s paintings. Saint Laurent and his business partner Pierre Bergé cashed in before knockoffs of the popular designs swarmed the marketplace. The pair showed how fashion, with Mondrian as a brand icon, could make inroads into the emerging consumer base among young people, called the “youthquake”.
Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, professor emerita in art history at Stanford and a scholar of American 20th-century art and fashion respectively, track that process in Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art, which examines the entry of Mondrian (or applied Mondrian) into the world of fashion. Other artists in that mix were the Pop satirist Tom Wesselmann, the comic book appropriator Roy Lichtenstein and, of course, the former shoe illustrator Andy Warhol. The Mondrian lines and colours, difficult to sell as art—a constant lament from Mondrian—brought a new gravitas to Saint Laurent and Bergé. Thus enriched, the two then embarked on art collecting, another source of wealth.
Troy and Tartsinis start out in stiff academic prose. Soon the products and the pictures take over as a parable about the power of marketing that accounted for far more than the value (back then) of Mondrian’s paintings that inspired the fashion craze. The “Mad Men” of the day were as eager to ride the wave of fashion fervour as were young female consumers. Advertisements for beer and Campbell’s Soup—Campbell’s made its own dress, in red paper—were shameless and hilarious: expect to laugh.
Who remembers the Mondrian dresses today besides Pop historians and a few collectors? All the more reason for Troy and Tartsinis to exhume the Mondrian merchandise. As for the champion of abstraction, what is more figurative than a young body in a dress? Mondrian’s response, had he seen it, might have been: “Too representational.”
• David D’Arcy is an art critic, journalist and regular contributor to The Art Newspaper
• Nicholas Fox Weber, Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute, Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 656pp, 16 colour and 88 b/w illustrations, $40 (hb), published 22 October 2024
• Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art, MIT Press, 192pp, 91 colour and 41 b/w illustrations, $49.95 (hb), published 24 October 2023
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