Piet Mondrian Research Articles

Living in Glass Houses: Domesticity, Interior Decoration, and Environmental Aesthetics

In his Philosophy of Interior Design, Stanley Abercrombie writes that can live happily with art-some cannot live happily without itbut we cannot live in art or even in a 'white cube.' This is a strange assertion by someone writing a book on interior design theory. Interior design is presumably an art and since we live in interiors, we must also live in art. Of course, what Abercrombie means is that we cannot live in interiors entirely given over to an aesthetic vision and, consequently, divorced from all consideration of what it might really mean to inhabit them. Abercrombie's examples include Piet Mondrian's Salon de Madame B. and Kurt Schwitter's Merzbau. I think we could add, by implication, a number of what are typically thought of as extreme examples of modern architecture, notably Philip Johnson's notorious Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.2 The Glass House is a canonical example of high modernist architecture and interior design. The walls are made of plate glass, enclosing the structure while retaining a complete 360-degree view of the property outside. From the outside, one gets a free view into the interior as well. The interior itself is sparsely but carefully furnished in the characteristic high modernist mode. Johnson's Glass House captured a great deal of attention when first built. It is still widely hailed as a high modernist masterpiece and is regularly included in surveys of modern architecture. At the same time that Johnson's house is celebrated as great architecture, it is sneered at for being unlivable. Despite its art-historical significance, the Glass House is thought by most to be unlivable not necessarily because it is aesthetically displeasing, but because it subordinates all other goals to this aesthetic pleasure. If the interior of the Glass House is thought of as ugly by many, it is perhaps because the attractiveness of an interior depends not just on visual spectacle but also perceived livability. The Glass House lacks what we judge today as livability: comfort, casualness, and a certain degree of dowdy familiarity. The building serves more to make an aesthetic point or an art-historical splash, and these motivations turn out here to be separate from the more mundane pleasures of domestic life. At first glance, the Glass House seems to be very much a work of environmental art. Surrounded by glass walls, the occupant is immersed in, though not physically subject to, the shifting atmospheric conditions of the outdoors. Perhaps no other house allows the occupant a more intimate sense of its natural surroundings. But is this what is meant by an environmental aesthetic of domestic space? A basic precept of any introductory interior design course is that the role of interior design is to provide artistically satisfying and practically effective solutions to the organization of the environments in which we must do particular things, like cooking, entertaining, sleeping, bathing, and lounging. The art of domestic interior design would be to create an environment that facilitates domestic practice while at the same time making the environment worthy of aesthetic attention and admiration. On this view, the Glass House fails as full-fledged interior design (that is, as environmental art) because it never recedes into the background, never becomes an environment for the practices of everyday life.3 The glass walls render the occupant perpetually self-conscious of being watched; the sparseness of the furnishings and the extreme orderliness of the house, where even table-top bric-a-brac are discreetly marked with indications of their correct

Introduction to high-speed imaging

were produced, MRI has continued to surprise us. I well remember the first strange image of a finger that I saw almost 18 years ago. Since then progress has been incredible and extremely fast. All the supposed limits of MRI have become its strengths. We used to say (and think) that MRI was unable to see bone; nowadays it provides us with perhaps the best examination technique for evaluating bone density. We used to believe also that MRI could not visualise vessels nor read the signal from moving protons, but now MR angiography is here, to demonstrate the error of our mistrust. We were so sure of the slowness of MR acquisition times that we could never have foreseen the development of high speed imaging. Now, it is all too easy to discuss the magnificent future of MRI in medicine in terms of a seemingly endless list of opportunities. Today, it is clear that MRI provides a completely new approach to routine neuroradiological study. Highspeed acquisition times combined with functional capabilities provide new perspectives, moving from one of morphology to one of function and from statics to dynamics. The level of morphological examination with MRI is outstanding, and although functional studies are still in their infancy, they can nevertheless still be performed daily on the majority of MR systems. In the early days of digital radiology, I was fascinated by the matrix and the use of computers. At that time, I discovered that Piet Mondrian, the painter, had been able, some 70 years ahead of the game, to go inside the image (The red tree, 1908), to draw a matrix (The chessboard, 1919) (Fig. 1), and then to paint many portraits of pixels seen from a very close perspective (compositions 1917±1937). Mondrian's research fascinates me; as a radiologist I believe that our discipline, an imaging discipline, has followed the same pathway: from analogic imaging of conventional radiology to the digitised images of computed tomography (CT) and MRI. Eur. Radiol. 7 (Suppl. 5), S 164±S 165 (1997)  Springer-Verlag 1997

Recent Rhetorics of Purity in the Visual Arts. Infection, Dissemination, Genealogy

The rhetoric of purity has been foundational in the visual arts of this century, particularly in the advent of abstract art. Is it still a potent discourse? There can be no question that contemporary artists address this issue. As examples, I analyze the relationships between Kazimir Malevich's art, especially his notion of the “supplemental element,” and new work by Taras Polataiko, who is “infected” by the earlier artist. I extend this analysis of medical discourses of infection, purity, and impurity to the group General Idea's recent manipulations of the images and ideas of the quintessential Modernists Piet Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt. My readings suggest that purity as a concept in the visual arts remains powerful — both in the genealogy of artists and in individual works — but in a mutated form.

Slavko Osterc med neoklasicizmom in ekspresionizmom

Slavko Osterc med neoklasicizmom in ekspresionizmom

To Paint on Water: The Audiovisual Duet of Complementarity

Concealed within television and today's electronic technology lies a world of untapped potential. Computer colors joined in harmony with offer the composer and the artist alike a precious new amalgam of dynamic art resources. Extraordinary possibilities remain untried, unknown, even barely imaginable. Concealed similarly from public view or understanding, certain painters at the start of this century began developing iconoclastic principles of composition in bold color abstraction, revealing potential forms of expression capable of intimate, feeling. To make color dance was beyond their reach, but despite the fixed nature of oil on canvas, their painterly forms did seem to deal with abstraction in musical ways. Elementary concepts and aspirations of these artists were perhaps first expressed in a few chosen words by pioneer abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky in this excerpt from his earliest letter to Arnold Sch6nberg, dated January 1911: your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed in The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is what I am trying to find in my painting (Crawford 1984). Kandinsky's dream of creating a painter's theory of harmony-color and line for their own sake, like Sch6nberg's radical compositional system of 12 tones, of equal potential-could be identified with many painters thereafter. Each in his or her own way-Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Sam Francis, and many others-without solidarity, and inadvertently, have become members of a unique group. With hindsight, one perceives that, to varying degrees, each artist was devoted to a spiritual or a universal concept of the pure plastic, to the notion of and content at one and the same These terms frequented Mondrian's essays. Such concepts evolved into a long-standing quest what I label today simply a musicalization of Walter Pater declared that all art aspires to the condition of music. Kandinsky wrote that those individual voices in Sch6nberg's were exactly what I am trying to find in my painting. And so too by an ironic inversion of this quest, Alexander Scriabin and perhaps even Sch6nberg himself envisioned a color counterpoint as partner to their musical ideas. In light of the high esteem accorded painters of this epoch, who would care whether or not their particular aspirations toward some kind of musical form actually might be realized through computer arts of motion? Even today, it remains obscure just how any new art (or music) could come from computing machines. Nevertheless, the impulse to deal creatively with and content at one and the same time, to aspire to the condition of music excited the intuitive aspirations of many artists throughout this century. These concepts indeed are about to come to fruition in an altogether different way-dealing with color and tone at one and the same time.

An art appreciation curriculum for preschool children

A 10‐week art appreciation curriculum was provided for 17 preschool children for one‐half hour per week in small groups in their classroom. The works of five artists (Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Andy Warhol, Piet Mondrian and Henry Moore) were presented along with biographical sketches of the artists, demonstration of the artists’ techniques, and hands‐on experience with the techniques. Before and after the course, the children's self‐esteem, art involvement, and preference, as well as classification of art works were evaluated. Following the course the children showed greater involvement in art and tended to be more consistent in their artwork preferences. They were also better able to distinguish paintings from sculptures and improved on tasks that involved naming artists and identifying artists’ works. Finally, their self‐esteem scores increased. Thus, the preschoolers appeared to benefit in several ways from this early art appreciation curriculum.

Mondrian and the "boogie woogies": interruption of inner developmental logic or completion in old age?

Taking the work of the painter Piet Mondrian as a point of departure, artistic continuity and change are examined from a lifespan developmental perspective. It is argued that decontextualized continuity tends to occur within a given lifestage, whereas contextualized change is apt to emerge during a transition from one lifestage to another. Thus, Mondrian's gradual development of a unique style, predicated on logical, stage-like unfolding, is related to a midlife emphasis on formal structure. From a similar perspective, his dramatic shift away from this inner logic of development in his last work, the Boogie Woogies, is attributed to an ultimate effort in old age to synthesize art and reality, to reconcile a conflict between the laws of art and direct expression of sense experience.

Painting as Model

is pass4 or in, to antiformalists who see in formalism a kind of ideological sellout, or to symbol chasers and iconographers. He is vehemently against belletristic art writing, taxonomical art history, journalistic art criticism. He sees positivism and humanism as trite disgraces (p. xxx). The introduction, Resisting Blackmail, shows author, sword drawn and flashing, driving back into shadows what no one familiar with scene of humanities today will fail to acknowledge as monsters. And given pressure to theorize, politicize, iconologize when theories are inflated, politics fashionable, iconology hardly robust, it is initially difficult not to applaud author as a champion of intellectual bon sens, even if swordsmanship is accompanied by a certain grands 6coles swagger. Besides, he has written an immortal line, USA politics pervades everything but politics per se (p. xx). is Yve-Alain Bois for? He is for the urge to take painting seriously, or any kind of art for that matter, and to understand it not as illustration of a theory but as a model, a theoretical model in itself (p. xxx). His guide in this pursuit is art historian Hubert Damisch, his graduate adviser at Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. If introduction is a tribute to Damisch's example, concluding chapter, which gives book its title, is a somewhat defensive review of Damisch's book Fen~tre jaune cadmium, published in 1984. In Damisch's book question is raised, What does it mean for a painter to think?; and tone of embattlement and polemic clings to Bois's review: Damisch in France seems to take [this question] seriously; book stands alone in France; it is resolutely to more or less what Bois himself is opposed to in his introduction. Damisch, along with Bois, is concerned with the formulation of a question raised by work of art within a historically determined framework, and search for a theoretical model to which one might compare work's operations and with which one might engage them (p. 245). Damisch is pondering possibility of what o e might term purely pictorial thought, where problems, perhaps historically given to artists, are given purely pictorial solutions. In brief, Bois, and if he is right, Damisch, aspire to a kind of autonomous Kunstwissenschaft, which is to say, an art history that is not an application of theories external to art. At this point sword does service as a kind of razor, shaving off as insufficiently explanatory what does not pertain to pictorial essence of art. For example, Bois claims, order to comprehend... abandonment of all curves, there is no need to get mixed up in theosophical nonsense with which [Piet Mondrian's] mind was momentarily encumbered (pp. 247-48). Those who wrote on Mondrian before Damisch

Piet Mondrian and Sean Scully

Mondrian and Scully, could they be political artists? Many critics would think that question absurd. They believe that a political artwork is an image implying an attitude toward what it depicts. Guernica is the model of political art that, in different ways, Anselm Kiefer, Leon Golub, and Eric Fishl imitate. I have explained elsewhere why I mistrust such art.

Piet Mondrian and Sean Scully: Two Political Artists

Piet Mondrian and Sean Scully: Two Political Artists

The German Revolution of 1848 and Rethel's Dance of Death

an indicator of conditions beyond it, the artist's inner life may even seem, or in fact be, a distorting element. His psychological constellation and the aesthetic expression it finds in images or structures are always shaped to some extent by forces independent of the outside world. Even when the artist is encapsulated in a firm tradition, meets the specific demands of a patron, or in other ways functions according to external constraints, traces of individuality remain in his work. On the one hand, historians seeking evidence on social or political developments, or on changes in ideas and attitudes, may be deceived by this residue. On the other hand, recognizing the nature of the residue enables us to analyze links between particular and general elements, and makes possible an interpretation more accurately attuned to the special character of the material than one that categorizes the work of art simply as yet another document that mirrors its times. We may believe that a landscape by Camille Pissarro or an abstraction by Piet Mondrian can help us explain the social and political world in which they were created, even if the artists consciously or unconsciously meant to paint merely a farm house and a meadow shaded by a few poplars, or an arrangement of lines and rectangles. Inevitably the application of such art to political or social analysis is marked by a high degree of subjectivity. Art that openly addresses contemporary developments, especially if it does so in a figurative manner-a lithograph by

To Be Continued: A Note on Some Recent Mondrians

Piet Mondrian's ascetic lifestyle was already legendary before his death on February 1, 1944. The sparseness and apparent simplicity of his paintings seemed to confirm his reputation as spectacular devotee of solitary life,' and those who knew the artist were not surprised that scarcely any personal effects were to be found in the New York studio he left behind. One would expect the disposition of his estatewhich passed into the hands of his friend, fellow artist, heir, and executor, Harry Holtzman to have been a relatively straightforward matter involving documentary material on the one hand and works of art on the other. The large number of texts and manuscripts Mondrian had written in several languages posed no problem, for, as Holtzman was already promising in December 1944, these would be translated into English and published in a volume of collected writings.2 Among the drawings and paintings, only the fragile condition of the unfinished tape pictures would have aroused special

Mondrian's Designs for theSalon de Madame B…, à Dresden

In 1925, Piet Mondrian was commissioned to redesign an interior in the home of a German art collector and patron named Ida Bienert. Bienert asked Mondrian to redesign the room, which was intended to be a library-study, after she bought one or more of his paintings from an exhibition at the Kuhl und Kuhn gallery in Dresden in 1925. An established collector, having acquired engravings by Durer and etchings by Rembrandt around 1905, Bienert began collecting modern art in 1911.1

Piet Mondrian from the Museum of Modern Art

Piet Mondrian from the Museum of Modern Art

PIET MONDRIAN: An Untitled and Unknown Drawing circa 1918

Art HistoryVolume 1, Issue 2 p. 229-235 Article PIET MONDRIAN: An Untitled and Unknown Drawing circa 1918 Tim Threlfall, Tim Threlfall University of WarwickSearch for more papers by this author Tim Threlfall, Tim Threlfall University of WarwickSearch for more papers by this author First published: June 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.1978.tb00014.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume1, Issue2June 1978Pages 229-235 RelatedInformation

Comments on David L. Drabkin's Book "Fundamental Structure: Nature's Architecture"

David L. Drabkin's book [1] is a labor of love. It is dedicated to his late wife Stella Drabkin, an artist. He was the first to crystallize human hemoglobin. The bulk of his book consists of 51 beautiful photographic prints, six in color, of hemoglobin crystals from various sources, photographed under various conditions, in various magnifications and polarizations, some in positive, others in negative prints. The architect Norman N. Rice provides the Foreword, which was to have been written by the late Louis J. Kahn, architect and long-time friend of the Drabkins. Drabkin provides the Introduction, describing a Happening consisting of his photographs at the Philadelphia Art Alliance in 1958 entitled 'Prelude, Performance and Aftermath'. Both the Foreword and the Introduction are addressed to the differences and analogies between scientific and artistic activity. Crystals, whether as minerals, as snow crystals or as hemoglobin, have long struck people by their beauty. Some have said they are forms of art. But they are not, for art involves at least a human decision. The orderliness and symmetry of crystals appeal not only to the intellect but also to the aesthetic sense. Undoubtedly, this appreciation of and search for order underline creative activity in both science and art. Cyril Stanley Smith is fond of pointing out that snow crystals are invariably depicted as symmetrical, whereas in point of fact they rarely are. The book under discussion clearly and lucidly refutes the fallacy of considering nature's objects, visual aspects, sounds, etc. as art per se. What we have in the book are examples of artful still-life photography, the images being of a scale not visible to the unassisted eye. To produce them, the human decision process was involved in the selection of light polarization and special printing techniques and in the use of composites and special juxtapositions. Drabkin finds an appreciative critique comparing one of his plates of the monoclinic 'horse-type' twins to a nonfigurative work by Moholy-Nagy unacceptable. However, books like this will inevitably blur the distinction between so-called figurative and nonfigurative or abstract art. By now artists accept the reality of these crystals, and their visual impact is bound to affect painters and sculptors. It is reasonable to assume that an aerial view of his native Holland and skyscraper skeletons influenced some of Piet Mondrian's so-called abstract paintings. It is known from his early series of tree studies

La iconografía floral teosófica de Piet Mondrian

La evolución artística de Piet Mondrian viene articulada por sus conexiones con la teosofía de principios del siglo XX. Desde muy joven, comenzó a estudiar los planteamientos filosóficos de H.P. Blavatsky y posteriormente los trabajos teóricos de Rudolf Steiner. La influencia de esta corriente de pensamiento se materializa en una serie de trabajos pictóricos, de carácter figurativo, pero notablemente simbólicos en su interpretación. El artista se adentrará en la tipología floral de los crisantemos y su referencialidad semiótica desde los parámetros de la teosofía.

The New Reality in Art and Science

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection of Modern Art

Peggy Guggenheim was one of the most important (and celebrated) art world figures of the twentieth century. Born into a wealthy New York family, she traveled throughout Europe during the 1920s and 1930s where she was a witness to the major art movements through her association with artists such as Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, to name a few. With a keen eye and exalted social standing, she amassed one of the most significant modern art collections in private hands. This volume is the only complete book on her exceptional collection. Through several essays and extended captions, every aspect of Guggenheim's collection, which was donated to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1979 after her death, is explained. The breadth of the collection is astonishing: from the earliest examples of abstraction by Piet Mondrian to the controlled abandon of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings (whose career she single-handedly launched), her intuition regarding the important trends was almost clairvoyant. The book begins with an essay devoted to the concept of structure as it relates to the cubist work of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; the lyrically expressionistic work of Wassily Kandinsky and the spare constructivist work of Lissitzky, among many others. Guggenheim was also deeply interested in surrealist and dada work examples of which are well represented in the collection including the fantastical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst's whimsical collages. Sculpture formed an important part of Guggenheim's collection, many of which were installed to glorious effect on the well-manicured grounds of her home in the Grand Canal, Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. Withexceptional care and thoughtfulness, she was able to strike a remarkable balance between more classically-inspired work, such as the soft and refined curves of Henry Moore's figures, and more avant-garde work of Alberto Giacometti whose ghostly, attenuated figures were some of the most haunting works produced this century. In the end, the book chronicles not only the development of a great collection and the life of the socialite eccentric who built it, but, more importantly, the history of modern art.

Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s “Composition with Lines” (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture

A digital computer and microfilm plotter were used to produce a semirandom picture similar in composition to Piet Mondrian’s painting “Composition With Lines” (1917). Reproductions of both pictures were then presented to 100 subjects whose tasks were to identify the computer picture and to indicate which picture they preferred. Only 28% of the Ss were able to correctly identify the computer-generated picture, while 59% of the Ss preferred the computer-generated picture. Both percentages were statistically different (0.05 level) from selections based upon chance according to a binomial test.