In the earlier chapter on Mondrian I drew attention to another kind of growth, a kind that is equally astonishing. But here the growth went in another direction from that of Feininger, and with different accents. Mondrian changed his style during the last two years of his life. The marvel of this change, given such a fanatical puritan as Mondrian, is almost more astonishing than Feininger’s spiritualization.
In his last period—that of the Broadway Boogie-Woogie and the Victory Boogie-Woogie—Mondrian is no longer the strict orthodox horizontal-verticalist, but becomes, without a transitional phase, almost orgiastic. That he could have made this leap with complete success at the age of seventy seems hardly short of miraculous.
I had been able to see signs of this “other” Mondrian in his feelings toward women—passionate feelings, which he could not master sometimes. In Paris in the mid-1920s, several of us went to the premiere of the Revue Nègre performing in the little theater on the Champs-Elysées—Theo and Nelly van Doesburg, Walter Hasenclever, Mondrian, and myself. A ravishingly rhythmical “stepper” danced first along a graveyard wall, but this ravishment stopped at once when there appeared on the stage, all of a sudden, a tall, completely naked woman built like a Greek goddess—only slimmer, more supple. It was the first appearance of Josephine Baker. We were electrified, every one of us, women included. After the performance, van Doesburg contrived to get us all admitted to Miss Baker’s dressing room, where she received us, by now half clad. Mondrian was beside himself, and we had some difficulty restraining this abstract Neoplasticist from forcing his attentions upon this dark and wondrous being.
So there was in him this other side, but it was held in check by the puritanical discipline of his work, and he did not act upon it. You saw it, sometimes, in the way he danced.
His life and work called for the most austere economy, a cancellation of everything not absolutely necessary for the maintenance of his bodily machine or for his pictures.
But this whole economic system broke up with a shout of joy when he was seventy. The current of life gushed forth. Suddenly he was living in small scintillating points of color. True, the elementary colors and the horizontal-vertical relation were not cast aside; but they were suddenly drawn into the dance, the boogie-woogie of the joy of life.