Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie

Abstract

interior. By 1940 he was thoroughly uprooted, first by a move within Paris in 1936, forced by urban renewal, then by his emigration via London to New York. He used to stroll proudly through notorious double traffic circle at place de l'Opera, a latter-day flaineur. In New York he had trouble crossing streets, missed sight of Paris prostitutes, and patronized a cheap French restaurant for its red-and-white tablecloths.4 Of course, Mondrian would have dismissed any feelings of nostalgia or dislo3. Holtzman played records on Mondrian's first or second night in New York. See Holtzman, Piet Mondrian: The Man and His Work, NANL, p. 2, and Virginia Pitts Rembert, America, and American Painting (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1970), p. 33. Mondrian owned five boogie-woogie albums and frequented, among other clubs and dance halls, Caf6 Society Downtown, which showcased music. 4. Theo van Doesburg to J. J. P. Oud, February 4, 1920, quoted in NANL, p. 124: One could cross Place de l'Opera only with greatest caution, but Mondrian did it as calmly as if he were in his atelier. The information about New York is from Von Wiegand's journals. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.184 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 06:09:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie 121 cation as individual, tragic, and romantic, not to mention embarrassing to a good internationalist. His anxieties found expression in a more allowable concern: namely, that exile might break flow of time, and thus of painting. If New York works have a subject, it is shape of time or history as such. Admittedly, this history, like Hegel's, is abstract, lacking full grain of ordinary reality. Yet Mondrian's pictures bear traces not only of his physical body, but of that other corpus, work itself, which he felt bound to protect, transport, and shape into something that would register his experience. To read these traces, must consider Mondrian's thinking about time and change, in history and in painting. Hegel and Continuity Mondrian's great subject, in some sense his medium, was time. This is opposite of accepted view, that Mondrian was a Platonic idealist who valued not becoming, and wanted his work experienced all at once, in a transcendent instant. As a recent critic writes, Mondrian's color planes all need to be seen at once for their meditative harmony to register with full force.... Mondrian's work seems to sit lotuslike in harmonious austerity of his apartment. ... Mondrian's art is meant to transcend material world.5 That Greenbergian account would do well for many an abstract painter, but Mondrian's idealism was by no means purely Platonic. He subscribed to Hegel's critique of Plato, which he knew through popular work of Dutch Hegelian G. J. P.J. Bolland, if not also directly. Hegel qualified Plato's celebration of eternal Forms with a Heraclitan emphasis on change and flux.6 He insisted that time could be transcended only by working through it, and likewise, that ideal could only be approached along path of material embodiment. Spirit necessarily appears in wrote Hegel, so long as it has not grasped its Notion, has not annulled Time.7 Beyond time is True Reality, Mondrian paraphrased, but (significantly switching emphasis) we are living in time. We have to reckon with its Changing.8 5. Simon Schama, Dangerous Curves, The New Yorker, November 4, 1996. 6. Hegel's Science of Logic famously opens by contrasting pure of Parmenides (crucial for Plato's theory of Forms) with of deep-thinking Heraclitus, and proceeds to derive becoming from dialectic of being and nothing (G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller [Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969], p. 83). Significantly, it was quality of in distinction to that Theo Van Doesburg insisted on in his first review of Mondrian's work in 1915. See PM, p. 170. Of course, Hegel can figure in many ways. Annette Michelson argues that what De Stijl artists heard in Hegel was the stilled voice of Becoming in repose of Absolute Spirit, in place where Dialectic comes to rest, that point beyond Time, at end of History, and that Mondrian more than Van Doesburg hoped to instantiate movement of Dialectic toward Ideality through progressive elimination of particular determination (De Stijl, Its Other Face: Abstraction and Cacaphony, or What Was Matter with Hegel? October 22 [Fall 1982], pp. 8, 11). Without at all denying importance to Mondrian of an idealist teleology, present essay emphasizes material, temporal, half of dialectic in Mondrian, as in Hegel, and difficulty and resistance that accumulate as historical endpoint of dialectic is felt to approach. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 487. 8. Mondrian [Life, Time, Evolution, c. 1938-44], NANL, p. 361. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.184 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 06:09:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms