There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would include some stinkers. Guests would complain about cold, cramped rooms and comfortless furniture. And that would be without mentioning the dining options. For a time, Mondrian seemed to live on nothing but lentils. On the plus side, there would be jazz and dancing and handmade artworks.
The maker of abstract grids enclosing lozenges of colour, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was one of the two or three epoch-shaping artists of the last century. But his life story isn’t widely known and few of us would be able to identify him from a photograph. Because his work seems cool and smart, and designers have sampled it ad nauseam for that very reason, we tend to imagine that he was probably cool and smart too.
The reality is rather more complex and curious, according to Nicholas Fox Weber’s assiduous and sensitive biography. Mondrian lived alone in a series of rented flats which weren’t much more than bedsits. They were in crowded corners of big cities: Paris, London and New York. He could seldom afford to heat his digs, and he ate sparingly, even when he was entertained by his few loyal supporters. He was a hypochondriac (to be fair to Mondrian, he also enjoyed poor health). He expected his long-suffering friends to console him, but he could be glassily unavailable to them. As with a number of artists, there were difficulties with girls: broadly speaking, Mondrian avoided them, though he appreciated their company as dance partners. This frowningly serious man liked to comb out his toothbrush moustache, climb into an ensemble perilously close to a zoot suit and cut a rug to the latest dance style – the Charleston or the boogie-woogie, say. There’s not much evidence that he preferred men to women. One hangover of Mondrian’s paralysingly strict upbringing in the Netherlands, where his father was a Calvinist schoolmaster, was a fastidious distaste for matters of the flesh. His father also put Mondrian off God. He became a convert to theosophy, which teaches that there is a spiritual reality beyond everyday existence, out of reach of the more established religions.
Although Mondrian was associated with the De Stijl (‘The Style’) school in the Netherlands, and his ideas have been endlessly recycled in the glossies and on catwalks, he wasn’t an overachieving decorator like Andy Warhol, who began his career dressing shop windows and drawing women’s shoes for advertisements. He had more in common with the artists of the Vienna Secession, his near contemporaries, including Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, who were advocates of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’). With cardboard and paint, Mondrian transformed those walk-up apartments of his into walk-in works of art. The few household goods he bought became Mondrians: stools were given a coat of white emulsion, a gramophone was painted a bright Dutch red. But perhaps his true affinities lay with a much earlier generation of artists who yearned for the sublime – painters like J M W Turner and Caspar David Friedrich. Like them, Mondrian believed he was going beyond what was apparent to the naked eye in order to reveal a deep, ineffable truth. Although he was a notable painter of trees in his younger days, and turned out pretty pictures of flowers to make ends meet, he disapproved of landscapes and figuration in general. He combined theosophy with the Cubism that was all the rage while he was in Paris. Out of this came neoplasticism, a philosophy which rejected naturalistic representation in favour of a stripped-down style of straight lines, rectangular planes and core colours. The artist believed that his classic works, the ones we think of as Mondrians, penetrated to the heart of things. As far as he was concerned, they weren’t paintings; they were X-rays.
His entire life was built around knowing what to leave out, from both his art and his modest billets (he only ever owned a handful of books). A similar commitment to concision eludes his biographer. He sets himself the daunting (or foolhardy) task of trying to do justice to Mondrian’s abstracts one by one. The artist husbanded his palette of primary colours with increasing frugality, but Fox Weber’s commentary goes in the opposite direction, becoming ever more purple. He compares Composition with Yellow, Red, Black, Blue and Gray (1920) to ‘Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet, or orgasms’. In Composition I (1921), we’re told, small rectangles of colour ‘frolic like carefree children’. Waiting to see how the author will outdo himself, from one canvas to the next, is an unintended pleasure of the book.
But his exhaustive survey also reaps great rewards. We learn about incidental characters like the art dealer who was an interpreter in the First World War and managed to buy paintings while he was serving on the Somme. Mondrian dabbled in stage design, saying that if it were up to him, the actors would deliver their lines while standing behind screens. Fox Weber has read the correspondence and diaries of those who were closest to Mondrian, including Charmion von Wiegand, a young artist from New York who became his amanuensis and seems to have understood him as well as anybody. She wrote, ‘He can be so charming when he wants to be. As if there were two personalities … He can show the most tender solicitude, the greatest indifference I have known in one human being.’ She teased out of him the heartbreaking story of the woman who had jilted him many years earlier because his prospects had seemed so poor.
English was the artist’s third language, but he produced some memorable aperçus all the same. During the Blitz, friends urged him to leave London for the countryside but the maestro of red, yellow and blue declined. ‘It is too green,’ he said. He also said, ‘How wonderful everything could be if only people were different. The same goes for art.’
In 2024, Mondrian is a commodity. The record price for a work of his is £43 million, achieved by Composition No II (1930) two years ago. He’s a very considerable artist but he didn’t become the John the Baptist of neoplasticism, as he’d hoped he would. No one was interested. He failed as a prophet. It would be no consolation to him that he’s become a figure of even greater significance than that today: an influencer.
