In 1972, a Dutch woman gave an interview to the Holland Herald, an English-language magazine, in which she reported that, in 1929, Mondrian fell desperately in love with her. Following a brief, intense tryst in Paris, he proposed marriage. She was then twenty to his fifty-seven.
Lily Van Pareren-Bles was sixty-two years old when she made her story public. Although there was a flurry of newspaper coverage, including a piece in The New York Times, the revelations never gained a lot of traction. Either the public did not believe the story or preferred not to consider it. Even in the Netherlands, where he was a cultural icon, his alleged desire, as a seemingly confirmed bachelor, to take a wife young enough to be his granddaughter only briefly spurred attention.
If Van Pareren-Bles’s account is accurate, Mondrian’s ardor destabilized him. The dream of companionship, with the daughter of a friend, a girl he had initially encountered when she was barely out of diapers and he was forty-two years old, and his longing for their future together, readied him to reconfigure the existence he had constructed so carefully. The values Mondrian extolled and demonstrated to a fault were, apparently, up for grabs. The idea that the artist—who had renounced marriage and domesticity nearly thirty years previously, after precipitously breaking his wedding engagement and fleeing his homeland in 1912—was ready to overthrow his solitary existence suggests a side of him that was never evident before or since. For most of his life, Mondrian had conspicuously sublimated personal desire and individual emotions in deference to the quest for universal truths and for their expression through objective abstraction. He had been unwavering. Was he really so swayed by passion for a friend’s young daughter that he was willing, at age fifty-seven, to upset the meticulous organization of his life and carry on differently from this point forward? Was he so naïve as to think that the young woman might agree to his plan?
If so, did it make him happy to succumb to this consuming and unexpected surge of emotion, or was he torn by the idea of love for another person taking precedence over everything to which he rigidly clung? Was this possibly the ultimate extension of his willingness to be like a jazz musician, conforming to his goal of allowing preconceptions to be overruled by spontaneity? Or did the impact of desire discombobulate him?
Mondrian, after all, believed, at least in theory, that rigidity should be supplanted by instinct. As a painter, he counted on feeling taking over in his work, once rationalism had enabled him to lay the proper groundwork. Rapturous joy was the goal in art. Why should it not be his to enjoy completely in his own life? Why should he be forbidden it?
At the time that Lily Bles’s alleged revelations appeared in newspapers, at least one Dutch journalist questioned their validity. This may well have been the familiar pattern of women claiming, many years after the death of a creative genius, to have been the man’s girlfriend. We know of that scenario in the mythology of, among others, Le Corbusier and George Gershwin. In both instances, the “I was his lover” character had, indeed, met the famous man but was almost certainly not a sexual partner; now that he was no longer alive to contradict the story, it gave the woman luster to have the alleged connection believed. It would not be surprising for someone who knew and admired Mondrian to invent more of a liaison than actually existed.
Until 1972, Bles had never mentioned these events publicly in the forty-three years between the alleged romance and her interview. Assuming that her story of what happened with a man who had been dead for nearly three decades was true, it recounts events about which Mondrian confided to no one in writing—except, supposedly, in three letters Bles says he wrote to her directly but that she was unwilling to produce. On the other hand, Albert van den Briel wrote a letter to Robert Welsh describing what appears to be this relationship, while leaving the woman nameless, and Charmion von Wiegand said that Mondrian told her that in the late 1920s he was counting on having a baby with a woman and on their living as a family in the studio at 26, rue du Départ. Still, the very reliable Von Wiegand wrote that the young woman was a shopgirl, and from an entirely different background than Lily Bles.
Lily’s father, Dop Bles, was a friend of Mondrian’s. Dop, eleven years younger than Mondrian, born in Rotterdam, was a successful poet who wrote under his own name and a slew of imaginative pseudonyms, among them R. Brevier, Ronselaar Brevier, R. de Buci, A. Dolfers, J. Th. Ring, and Ida de Wilde. He published his first book, Mijn dagboek (My Diary), in 1905. He was working on his second, Schrijven zoals (Writing Like), when Mondrian, according to Lily, first came to know her as a little girl. “I was four years old when we first met,” she told the Holland Herald in January 1972. “Mondrian often came to visit my father in our home in Amsterdam. Mondrian used to perch me on his knee and I would sing Amsterdam street songs for him. It was my party-piece.”
Lily’s details are off. If she was four, the year was 1913. In 1913, Mondrian lived in Paris, as did Dop Bles, who was supporting himself in part by being a tour guide. Lily might have met Mondrian in Paris, but not in Amsterdam. If Mondrian regularly visited Bles’s home in the Netherlands, it has to have been after June 1914, by which time Mondrian, counter to his initial plan, was living back in the country where he was born. We know, from letters that Mondrian wrote Dop Bles, that Bles had mailing addresses in The Hague and Rotterdam, but we have no evidence of an Amsterdam address, and, in any case, Lily, who was born in 1909, would have to have been at least five if she met Mondrian in the Netherlands rather than France, and, if so, it would have been in one of those other two cities. On November 4, 1916, by which time Lily would have been seven, Mondrian wrote Dop Bles proposing that they meet in Amsterdam, but at a café, the Americain, which suggests that Bles did not have a home in Amsterdam; in any case, there is nothing giving the impression of Mondrian meeting Bles at home.
There is added spice to a woman’s claim that a much older man asked her to marry him if she has memories of having sat on his lap as a four-year-old. That detail gives the romance a Lolita twist. It is not impossible that this occurred, and that she simply got either the age or the location, or both of them, wrong, but something is off.
We know from a letter Mondrian wrote to Theo van Doesburg on June 6, 1917, that he was no longer in touch with Dop Bles, because he reports that he had no idea how the poet was doing. In 1918, Mondrian told Van Doesburg that he and Bles had lost all contact. The next trace of Dop Bles in Mondrian’s known correspondence was when, in a letter to Van Assendelft on February 10, 1926, he asked the Remonstrant minister if he ever heard from Dop Bles and his wife; Mondrian asks for Bles’s address, if Van Assendelft can provide it. Mondrian then learned that Bles’s wife—Lily’s mother, Jo Bles-Thuring—had died two years earlier, at age thirty-eight. We don’t know, however, if Mondrian got in touch to offer belated condolences. Nor do we know from any source other than Lily Bles’s account if Mondrian actually saw Dop Bles after 1917; there are no known references to encounters with the poet in the following years, although Mondrian’s tone about Bles was always friendly.
By the 1920s, Bles had had a successful, if less than lucrative, career as a writer. Schrijven zoals had come out in 1915, Levensdrang (Life Urge) was published the following year, Narcose (Narcosis) in 1921, and Parijsche verzen (Parisian Verses) in 1923, the same year that Bles translated Cyrano de Bergerac into Dutch. But what the connection between Mondrian and Bles was—except for Mondrian’s making references to not having been in touch with Bles and not realizing that his wife had died—cannot be apprehended by any source other than Lily Bles’s reminiscences. It is not implausible that in May 1929, Bles took Lily along to see Mondrian. Bles and his daughter lived together in the Netherlands, but occasionally visited Paris. We know for sure that Lily was in Paris then, because Gino Severini gave her a drawing of a harlequin that he inscribed to her with the date and location. But nothing other than Lily’s own account corroborates that she and Mondrian saw one another, although they very well might have.
Lily paints a rich picture. Following her claim of having had those repeated encounters with Mondrian when she was four, she tells The Herald:
Our next meeting was 16 years later in Paris when my father took me to visit Mondrian. The three of us went to operas, theaters, exhibitions and dined together with friends like Jean Cocteau. But whenever we could, Piet and I would spend time alone, away from my father’s gaze. We were in love but my father disapproved because Piet was 56. I was 20. But not bad looking, I must say!
The detail about Cocteau—a uniquely witty and talented writer and artist associated with Dada and Surrealism—is puzzling. Lily said that she and her father and Mondrian went to La Coupole together, which is plausible—even if Mondrian’s usual café was Le Dôme—but nothing the artist himself or anyone else has ever said suggests that he knew Cocteau. Cocteau could well have been a friend of Dop Bles; they may all have dined together; but, if so, neither Mondrian nor anyone else refers to his meeting Cocteau, whose work and lifestyle were antithetical to his own. It makes a nice scene—Mondrian, Cocteau, a lesser-known Dutch writer, and the writer’s adolescent daughter—having dinner together, but the only record of it is in Lily Bles’s recall over forty years later.
The impressions that Lily Bles reported in hindsight ring true, however. “I admired Mondrian for his quiet charm, his enigmatic personality and his clean paintings. His apartment and his studio were like his paintings—you felt that if you moved anything you might unbalance the total décor,” she told her interviewer.
The New York Times picked up the story shortly after it appeared in the Holland Herald. Whether because the Times journalist had direct contact with Lily Bles, or because the writer simply decided to embellish the Herald story, it became slightly more dramatic in this second account.
“Then,” she went on, “we fell in love…. As soon as my father suspected something, he hustled me back to Amsterdam. Mondrian was 56 and I was 20. We wrote each other for a while and at last in one letter he asked me to marry him. I could not say yes because in those days, parental consent really meant something, and that was the end of it. A mutual friend later told me that Mondrian after that last letter waited for two years before he gave up hope.”
The Times also refers to “rumors,” although it cites no source for them. Where the writer got his idea about what was being whispered forty-two years previously is hard to imagine, but he declares it nonetheless. “Around 1930, the Dutch painter worked in Paris. There were rumors at the time that one woman had played a more important part in his life than any other, but she had never been identified.” Maybe it was so; maybe this was the relationship about which Mondrian told Charmion von Wiegand; maybe others heard of it as well. Nonetheless, there is no actual evidence other than hearsay and Lily Bles’s amorous history.
An article by Ben van der Velden—“Late liefde in jaren 20: Mysterieus huwelijksaanzoek van Mondriaan” (Late love in the 1920s: Mysterious marriage proposal from Mondrian)—appeared in Dutch in the NRC Handelsblad on January 8, 1972, just after the Herald piece came out. Van der Velden wrote it quickly, wanting to be in the lead breaking the story. He did not have the scoop—De Telegraaf, which came out in the morning, had a short article about Mondrian and Lily Bles that day, and NRC Handelsblad was an evening paper—but Van der Velden was the first Dutch writer to go into the news of the marriage proposal in depth.
It is unclear whether Van der Velden spoke with Lily Bles directly or based his piece entirely on what had appeared in English in the Herald. He reports that Mondrian’s scandalously young girlfriend recalled that, following that idyllic week together in Paris, “the love between Mondrian and her flourished.” As soon as she returned to the Netherlands, Van der Velden writes, Bles received a letter in which Mondrian asked her to marry him. It was quickly followed by another letter repeating the proposal.
In the Herald her father knew about the romance and was appalled, while according to the NRC Handelsblad, Lily Bles said nothing about her and Mondrian to her father, who she knew would be horrified at the idea of her marrying this friend of his who was eleven years older than himself. In this second account, apparently her father had failed to notice the romance. She recalled that she simply wrote back to Mondrian saying that she knew how much her father would have opposed the idea, and that she would not go against him. The scenario of her father even having to confront such a heinous possibility was, however, hypothetical; she would never have imposed it on her beloved parent. “Mondrian sent a third letter in which he wrote that he couldn’t understand all of it.” That was, she said, their last communication of any sort.
Van der Velden describes Lily Van Pareren-Bles as giving this account “without any reticence.” The writer makes clear that he would not expect otherwise. Then Van der Velden—who gives the impression that he did, indeed, participate in the same firsthand audience as the writer for the Herald—writes:
But that makes it all the more strange that she won’t let anyone see those three letters she has of Mondrian’s. Nobody else has ever set eyes on them, so she says. She doesn’t keep them at home, they are hidden away somewhere. Not in a bank’s deposit box, and not with friends, but she won’t say where.
Nor will she say what exactly Mondrian wrote in those letters. “I can’t remember exactly myself,” she says, “because I never re-read them. I didn’t want to, because it was a closed chapter of my life, and I don’t intend to read them again now either.” But if that chapter of her life is so definitively closed, why does she so enjoy talking about her romance with Mondrian?
In asking the question, Van der Velden implicitly casts doubt on Lily Pareren-Bles’s plausibility. On the other hand, he is not the most scrupulous of journalists. He spells both names incorrectly in reporting that “Mrs. Van Pareren-Bles’s account is confirmed by her friend Ella Hojak, to whom Mondrian mentioned that he waited for two years before giving up hope of marriage.”
None of the journalists covering the story, however, bothered to reach Ella Hoyack directly. We are left without much to hang our hats on, except for the melodrama that Van der Velden evokes in reporting that Lily van Pareren-Bles said that the week with Mondrian had affected her forever after, although she had never previously discussed it. Seeing her former suitor rise to worldwide fame after his death, and coming to realize that marriage with him might have left her with great financial wealth, she was glad to have had enough time with him to be grateful that she had not accepted his marriage proposal.
“Because, could we have been happy together? Mondrian was a tormented man. He was a masochist, really. Everything he considered beautiful caused him to suffer. He loved the sun, but wanted a window-less house to be built. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually wanted me to turn down his proposal,” she says.
Ken Wilkie, the author of the piece for the Herald, writes:
Over the years it was frequently rumored that in Paris there was a mystery woman in Mondrian’s life about whom he would never talk. There was. And she is still in Amsterdam to tell the tale. Authoress, translator of countless cookery books and The Life of Helena Rubenstein, Lily van Pareren-Bles—still an eye-catching figure at 62—recalls how she fell for Mondrian’s “quiet charm.”
Yet, like Van der Velden, Wilkie also emphasizes that in her reflections on the proposal she declined at age twenty, a factor beyond her father’s disapproval was that, however enamored she was, she considered Mondrian too neurotic and puzzling to be a suitable husband. Wilkie writes:
Like others who knew him, Lily found Mondrian enigmatic. “He had some of the qualities of a monk—austere and detached. His apartment in Paris was small and simple. I couldn’t have imagined a bouquet of flowers there. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. The walls were painted in geometrical patterns that reflected the precise way he thought. Like the impression given by his paintings, you felt that if you moved anything you would unbalance the total decor.”
In Wilkie’s account, Dop Bles, knowing what was going on, was not the happy third for a week of outings with Mondrian and his daughter, but a furious parent:
The meetings between Lily and Mondrian were making her father so hot under the collar, she says, that he took his daughter back to Amsterdam. “Piet and I wrote to each other. In his last letter he asked me to marry him. But I couldn’t. I was still under the influence of my father—as Mondrian himself had been at my age. I never saw Piet again. But a friend called Ella Hojak, who knew the painter well in Paris, told me he had waited for two years before giving up hope of marriage. I was told that during these two years Mondrian kept one little flowering plant in his bedroom. I definitely would have married him had it not been for my father. Consents were all-important in those days, I’m afraid.”
Van der Velden differs from Wilkie in saying that Mondrian proposed marriage in his first, not his last letter. But not only are there the discrepancies between the different articles; there are inconsistencies in what Bles said to Wilkie. Having made it sound as if she would never have married Mondrian, and was wise not to have done so, Bles then says that she certainly would have married the man who was nearly three times her age, and that the only reason she had not done so was knowing how much it would have upset her widowed father. And she changes her mind about being sure she was better off for not having married him:
“I may have been happy with Mondrian, maybe not,” says Lily, who ultimately eloped at 27 and is now a widow. “But when I see his paintings today all my old feelings are rekindled. More than anything else it was the cleanliness of his whole work that I loved. It reminded me of a fire burning and leaving behind clean white ashes.”
What is consistent is Lily Bles’s love for the poetic.
Albert van den Briel wrote to Robert Welsh about a relationship in which he leaves the woman unnamed:
There was a forbidden relationship which caused M a lot of sadness. Someone he had known for a long time (and of whom he was very fond) was influenced by slander and gave in to pressure from her family to break with him. When M left for England he asked me to keep an eye on her, and to help her if necessary. Which I did…. The break of what might fairly be called the engagement happened around the same time that he was informed that he was not eligible for membership of the French Free Masons (because his work was too communistic). After M picked me up from the Gare du Nord we went to his studio, and those were the first things he told me.
If the unnamed woman whom Mondrian asked Van den Briel to keep an eye on was Lily Bles, it contradicts Bles’s story. By Lily’s account, she and Mondrian were never in touch after she wrote him declining his marriage proposal; why would she have communicated with a friend of his she had probably never even met?
There is also the factor that Dop and Lily Bles were Jewish. Could someone as given to anti-Semitic generalizations as Mondrian, and who made that nasty anti-Semitic drawing of his landlord when he lived in Brabant, really have wanted to commit his life to a Jewish woman and have children with her?
Van den Briel also alluded to the near marriage in a letter to Michel Seuphor. There, too, Van den Briel associates the anguish of the personal blow with the pain of his rejection from the Freemasons.
This failure to become a member [of the Freemasons] was a great disappointment. It was a difficult time for him for other reasons, too. His engagement was broken off by the girl, under pressure from her family. That period, around 1930 and shortly afterwards, was the period of his best work.
In this account, the two were actually engaged to marry, another discrepancy from Lily Bles’s own story, and it seems possible that Van den Briel, writing in 1951, was conflating the true marriage engagement of 1912 with Mondrian’s wish for marriage in 1929. Charmion von Wiegand’s “shopgirl,” about whom nothing more is known, is a more likely candidate.
Maud van Loon, a writer and painter who was married to the NRC Handelsblad journalist Henry van Loon, was a close enough friend of Mondrian’s that he gave her his collection of phonograph records when he moved to London in 1938. She wrote about Mondrian two years after he died. In these recollections, she gives a fascinating, romantic account of the effect of an episode in Mondrian’s life for which she provides no year:
One time when I visited his studio I noticed that something had changed, it was more luminous, more radiant, as if the sun had penetrated into the monastic cell. He seemed somewhat secretive, and didn’t play his latest gramophone record straight away. His hair seemed darker and shinier, he was somewhat restless, and then he suddenly announced that he was planning to get married. So then I saw what had changed in the studio. All the black had gone—ousted by his new life-view. For weeks he was filled with youthful optimism. Afterwards he never mentioned those plans again, he grew even more reticent towards strangers than before, but the black never returned to his studio.
This seems like another case of someone believing what she wants to believe, and sticking to it. At no point in those years did Mondrian stop using black lines in his painting, and since he had never used elements of black on the studio walls, it is hard to imagine how he removed it.
But Charmion von Wiegand’s diary entry seems to confirm that, whether or not Lily Bles was the woman in question, there is some validity to the idea of a disarming passion that had Mondrian ready to overturn his life at just about the time that Lily Bles claims was when Mondrian wished to wed her. Von Wiegand and Mondrian themselves had an ambiguous relationship. She wrote about it and related issues at the start of January 1942, when they saw each other regularly in New York. “Carl” is probably the painter Carl Holty. “Mrs. Glerner” refers to Lucy Glarner, wife of the painter Fritz Glarner, who had first visited Mondrian in Paris in 1929 and had moved to the United States in 1935.
The other night Carl told me a story that explains Mondrian’s whole attitude to me now. He said that I think Mrs. Glerner [sic] told him that Mondrian ten years [ago] in Paris was planning to get married. He fixed over his studio, got a bigger bed, and built a cradle. All was ready and then it never happened. When I hear this a big lump came in my throat—and Carl said “You see he created a whole fantasy.” But I knew it was no fantasy and that it had been a terrible blow to him.
Even if he had decided, after breaking off his engagement with Greta Heijbroek in 1912, that the idea of marriage and domesticity had no reality for him, and had determined that there was only one way in which he might live, Piet Mondrian had, it seems, on at least one occasion in his life, been overcome by love for another person. There is no certainty that she was the daughter of a friend and thirty-seven years his junior and therefore taboo, but passion had flourished, with enough force to quash all of his rationalism. At least in his imagination, he threw caution to the wind.