The Mysteries of Mondrian

Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are, to me, the twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest painter who modernized picture-making, and Mondrian the greatest modernizer who painted. (They call to mind an earlier brace of revolutionaries from the southern and northern reaches of the continent: Giotto, in Italy, humanized medieval storytelling, and Jan van Eyck, in the Low Countries, revealed the novel capacities of oil paints with devout precision.) The case for Picasso makes itself, with the preternatural range of his formal and iconographic leaps—forward, backward, and sideways—in what painting could be made, or dared, to do. The brief for Mondrian is harder to extract from a cookie-cutter modernist narrative (“Next slide, please”) of marching styles, from the artist’s modest-looking Dutch landscapes in the eighteen-nineties to the riveting abstractions he made in the decades before his death, as a wartime expatriate in New York, in 1944. But style for him, from first to last, served a quest to manifest soul-deep spirituality as a demonstrable fact of life. His aim, he said, was not to create masterpieces, though he did that, too. It was “to find things out.” He reduced painting’s uses and procedures, the whats and the hows, to a rock-bottom why.