Audio Stop 19

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This abstract, geometric painting has been tipped on one corner to create a diamond form rather than a square. The surface of the canvas is crisscrossed by an irregular grid of black lines running vertically and horizontally like offset ladders. The black lines create squares and rectangles of different sizes, and the width of the lines vary slightly. One complete square sits at the center of the composition and is painted white. Other rectangles are incomplete, their corners sliced by the edge of the canvas, and each is a different shade of white with hints of pale blue and gray. The black grid creates triangular forms where it meets the angled edge of the canvas in some places, and some of these are filled with flat areas of color. A tomato-red triangle is placed to the left of the top center point, and a vibrant yellow triangle is to the left of the lower center point. A black triangle is next to it at the bottom center, and a cobalt-blue triangle is situated just below the right point. The painting is signed with the artist’s initials at the lower center: “PM.”

Piet Mondrian

Tableau No. IV; Lozenge Composition with Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, and Black, c. 1924/1925

Piet Mondrian intended his abstract paintings to express his spiritual notion that universal harmonies preside in nature. The horizontal and vertical elements of his compositions, carefully calibrated to produce a balanced asymmetry, represented forces of opposition that parallel the dynamic equilibrium at work in the natural world. Mondrian said the diamond compositions were about cutting, and indeed the sense of cropping here is emphatic. Forms are incomplete and sliced by the edge of the canvas, implying a pictorial continuum that extends beyond the physical boundary of the painting.

Read full audio transcript

HARRY COOPER:

This is a Mondrian. And [laughs] we say “A Mondrian” because he was one of these artists that developed a style. He was part of the movement called “The Style,” or “De Stijl,” in Dutch, which had some very particular rules about how to make abstract art.

NARRATOR:

The rules? Only horizontals and verticals. No symmetry. Primary colors, and white, black, and gray.

Harry Cooper, curator and head of modern art.

HARRY COOPER:

The colors typically are kept at the edges apart from one another, almost as if he doesn’t want us to feel those color interactions. To keep them pure. Purity is certainly a big part of this aesthetic. I think the simplest, maybe most important thing to say about Mondrian is he wanted each element of painting to have its own life, and its autonomy, its own viability.

NARRATOR:

Here he rotated the canvas 45 degrees, but maintained strict horizontal and vertical architecture, which he deemed the essential structure in nature.

HARRY COOPER:

What you get is a real challenge, because almost everything is going to be cut by the edge sooner or later; probably sooner rather than later. So his structure that was so stable and comfortable for him really gets threatened by these edges. Mondrian liked to talk about dynamic equilibrium. I think we start to feel a great deal of dynamism.

It looks simple, but the structure, the complexity is more than we think. I would challenge anybody to look at this for maybe ten minutes, and then turn away and draw it. Draw the basic structure. Not easy to do.

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