By June 1936, Mondrian had painted the walls of his new studio on the boulevard Raspail the white that was essential to his well-being. He then started to put up the requisite panels of color. He wrote to Winifred Nicholson, “My studio is another part of my painting.” He was, at last, “calm.” He had not yet redone the bedroom above his workspace, but this could wait. He was again so broke that he could not afford to put up some shelves he needed. Everything from lemons and dinner plates to paintbrushes was on the floor, covered in clean newspaper. Winifred Nicholson reported this to Ben. She could not stand Mondrian’s penury for another moment and bought a second painting; she wanted it anyway, but her main reason was to give Mondrian some money.
Then Mondrian said something astonishing to Winifred. He commented on how much he had enjoyed an evening at her house, and volunteered, “I saw with pleasure your work; also your ‘naturalistic’ painting is very pure and true.”
So he was not so doctrinaire after all! Winifred Nicholson brought him great joy as a person; so he told her repeatedly. Her paintings—flowers, portraits, landscapes—are charming, lyrical in tone, almost naïve, somewhat abstract, the imagery treated in an original and very happy manner. It is easy to understand that anyone who cares about what is pure and full of heart would like them. But it is extraordinary that the man who perpetually insisted that geometric art without an iota of naturalism was the only way to paint violated his own gospel.
That August, Carel Mondriaan and his fiancée Marie van den Berg visited Mondrian’s studio on the boulevard Raspail. Mondrian never went to see any of his siblings or other relatives back in the Netherlands, and it was rare for any of them to visit him.
The occasion prompted an especially dour family photograph. No one offers even a hint of a smile. And no individual looks at another. Carel’s fiancée appears to be very much a modern woman, in a new style of dress and jazzy sandals, but her demeanor is forbidding. Everyone faces the camera grimly, with Mondrian seeming especially miserable.
This is our first look at the new studio. The squares of color on the wall echo the faces of the people standing in front of it. But they have more pulse, and Mondrian was forever organizing them according to his own whim. Whenever Mondrian was the one steering the action—and that was most of the time—he could determine the intervals, choose what color went where, and create the animation that was his quarry.
He needed control. In September, Ben Nicholson asked Mondrian to write an article to be included in the book Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art. Mondrian agreed happily. Then, on October 5, he wrote Nicholson in a snit. He had been at the Pevsners’. There he learned that Nicholson had asked Joan Miró to send photos for the book. Mondrian was shocked. He told Nicholson he thought he was writing for a magazine devoted to “constructivism, or, in any case, purely abstract art.” Why did Nicholson feel that Miró belonged there? And how could he put in the Spaniard’s work when he had excluded Hélion and Arp?
It is not that Mondrian disparaged Miró; he went on to say that he considered Miró “a true artist.” The issue was figuration expressed through curves that formed any part of an implicit circle.
Once he sent in the rest of what he had written for the book, Nicholson would understand that Mondrian’s stance was “rightly against all the sentimental tendencies of the art of Miró, Kandinsky, etc.” He asked Nicholson how he could possibly have included this work, and demanded an explanation.
Still, Mondrian could not resist the chance to be heard, whatever he felt about the vehicle that would publish him. Even if Circle disrespected the canon, Mondrian wanted to be in it. Besides, Ben Nicholson was enthusiastic about the essay.
He was again scraping the bottom financially, and he was again saved by a devotee. Nicolete Gray had spent more than she intended on her breakthrough show, but by October she was in good enough financial shape to ask Winifred Nicholson to tell Mondrian that she wanted to buy Composition C (N°III), with Red, Yellow, and Blue, one of the three paintings he had sent to England for the show.
This was the painting that hung below a larger composition of the same width in both the Oxford and London venues. In Oxford, it was squeezed into a corner of the room, with a large Hélion abstraction alongside it on the right. The top two-thirds or so of the Mondrian are in front of a dark brown wall. In museums and galleries in that time period, this was the color often used as background for displaying paintings; it was neutral and lent a certain gravity to the art. The bottom third is above wooden wainscoting that pushes the painting slightly outward, so that its bottom is angled toward us. The corner of the gallery was crowded with artwork. Another large Hélion, a big Nicholson relief covered with glass in which both these Mondrians are reflected, a Calder mobile hanging in front of the Mondrians and casting shadows on them, and sculptures by Hepworth and Moore are packed close to one another. The congestion only accentuates the force of the two Mondrians. Like the second Mondrian composition directly above it, the painting that Nicolete Gray bought held its own power. Exuding a quiet grace and confidence, it was self-assured without being in any way brazen or arrogant. Its form was noble.
Gray could not pay the asking price, but on October 14, Mondrian wrote to Winifred that she should tell Gray how much he appreciated her interest, and that he wanted to sell her “the painting with the three colors” for the same price as the one he had sold to Winifred, fifteen hundred francs, and that she could pay in installments. He realized that even this might be beyond her capability, but he hoped it would help.
On November 30, he wrote Gray again after she responded gratefully. “I thank you greatly for your appreciation of my work, and accept your offer with pleasure if it is not too difficult for you. I believe that a price of 1500 francs is enough for you; you could pay a thousand on the date you indicated, and I will be content: send the rest at a time when it suits you.” At the time, fifteen hundred francs was worth about a hundred U.S. dollars, which, calculated on the basis of an inflation rate of 5 percent annually, would be about $2,200 today.
On December 5, Mondrian sent cleaning instructions to the owner of this treasure:
One can wash it lightly with a chiffon and a little bit of white soap and warm water. It is possible that the red and yellow will give up a little color, but you can continue to clean, because the paint layer is sufficiently thick. The blue stays fixed better, the black and white as well. Ben Nicholson would always be happy to help you if necessary.
Whether or not she ever washed it accordingly, Nicolete Gray would eventually give this painting to her daughter Camilla Gray-Prokofiev, a gifted art historian who specialized in Russian avant-garde art and married Oleg Prokofiev, an artist as well as author of the book The Scent of Absence. He was the son of the composer Sergei Prokofiev, and the couple lived in Moscow. Camilla’s deep understanding of experimental painting made her the perfect person to have it.
In 1971, Camilla Prokofiev-Gray died, tragically young, in the Caucasus. Ever since then, the painting has been on extended loan to Tate Britain. Nicolete died in 1985, but the family members who inherited the Mondrian have always kept it at the Tate, which is why so many of us get to see it firsthand today. It warrants prolonged viewing. At first, with its careful deployment of red, blue, and yellow, separated from one another at gracious intervals over the nearly square canvas, the composition appears to be slightly more balanced and resolved than many. But then we realize that the apparent point/counterpoint is illusory; this is another of Mondrian’s paintings that tickle the viewer by putting into motion a sequence of surprises.
Nothing is quite as it seems. The natural ordering system of the human mind wants to read it as square, but the height, 22⅛ inches, exceeds the width of 21¾ inches by three-eighths of an inch. The black lines at first seem of equal width, but in fact the verticals are mostly narrower than the horizontals. Yet that, too, is not as it initially seems. While the two principal horizontals, which span the canvas, are thicker than the verticals, the one other horizontal, a short one underneath the blue square, has the same width as the verticals.
These sparks of irregularity and unpredictability ignite the painting. Its colors further enliven the plastic action. The red unit appears to be not only the one that is closest to us, but, from its position in an aerie, it actively moves toward us. The longer we look, the more it gallops full charge ahead. The blue is distant, and, for all of Mondrian’s avowed lack of naturalism, it is a sky viewed through an open window.
The vertical slit of yellow is glorious. While one arrogant English critic compared its substance to a dash of housepainter’s paint as applied to building siding by an ordinary craftsman, what Mondrian conceived so impeccably in its rich oil pigment is a geometrical embodiment of optimism. Its location, next to the open space of the larger world to its left and below it, is scintillating. Mondrian causes the yellow to hover—forever—in space, weightless, singing, and radiant. It creates light the way the sun does.
Mondrian had only relocated to the boulevard Raspail because he had no choice, but once he had transformed the studio space and, thanks to the sale to Nicolete Gray, could afford to put up shelves, he was oxygenated. The paintings following the move get physically and emotionally bigger. The 1936 Composition en Blanc, Noir et Rouge, about 40 by 40 inches, is like a simple sequence of notes constituting a musical fanfare. The red band at the bottom of the Mondrian canvas is a euphoric conclusion to the sequence which begins with three horizontal bars above it. At the upper left, a light, ethereal form offers delicious contrast to the boldly triumphant voice of the rest.
It is astonishing that almost all of this canvas is white. The few lines and color are so powerful that we see them first and foremost, and they appear to have far more real estate than does the background. With his refined language, Mondrian chose a few physically unsubstantial elements for a powerful impact. They are like monosyllabic words achieving a crescendo of feeling.
Mondrian was energized to do more in Paris because of what he heard about the success he had had in England. Concurrent with the presentation of Abstraction and Concrete at the Lefevre Gallery in London, the architect S. John Woods organized, at a furniture store called Duncan Miller Ltd., an exhibition called Modern Pictures for Modern Rooms.
Mondrian had happily consented to have his work be seen as an integral part of a new environment, as if it were no more important than a decorative object. In the shop on Lower Grosvenor Place, one of his canvases hung with a coarsely textured raw silk wallpaper behind it. Right in front of the painting there is a round glass-topped table, with a sculpture by Eileen Holding, an ashtray, and a silver fruit bowl on it. A modernist lounge chair next to the table evokes physical comfort and ease, a luxurious sense of repose.
This was the same sort of new design for everyday life that was sprouting up in small pockets of modernism almost all over the world. Austin in Hartford had a dashing modern office space; the Modern in New York was displaying advanced design with the latest painting; Alvar Aalto’s Villa Marea in Finland was a showplace of adventurous, intelligent modernism. These neutral, international environments were to some degree the realization of Mondrian’s ideas for how human beings could live with clean geometry and a rich rhythm of universal allure.
At the start of September, Mondrian wrote to Winifred Nicholson: “There is so much confusion in the modern movement, I would like to try and clarify a little the content of art.” His battle cry was more urgent than ever before. He had an agenda well beyond the scope of his own work, and he considered anyone who did not adhere to his beliefs to be a heathen. He counted on Nicholson to understand. He continued, “I too think that I have brought some order to the chaos of the tendencies! Everywhere one seeks and seeks in darkness. Yet it is so simple if only one understands a little the great laws that are more or less hidden in natural appearance.” That was the saving caveat. Mondrian could afford to like Winifred’s landscapes and portraits and flower paintings so long as, in their innocence, their lack of imposition of a style, they revealed, underlying the subject, “the great laws.”
Mondrian was a man on fire when he wrote Winifred Nicholson. He opened with unusual exuberance, underlying a declaration of the joy her last letter had brought him. That continuous straight line underneath his words was usually a way of emphasizing a didactic statement about abstraction, not an expression of personal emotions. From there, he focuses, in a way equally rare, on her well-being, not on his own.
Here is the whole letter. It needs to be read as a continuum, from the start to the finish. The erratic jumps of Mondrian’s mind are like some of the scattered elements of his paintings; structure begets freedom. Mondrian’s mix of awkwardness and confidence, and his ability to move from the intensely personal to the practical (especially when the issue is tubes of paint, his essential means for realizing the eternal), is unlike anyone else’s.
Chère Winifred,
Votre lettre me fait une grande joie. I am happy that you are content with the pictures and that they have arrived all right. Also that you are in good health and that you work so much. I should like to see what you have done and see you in that beautiful country with the mountains. But I shall be as content to see you again in Paris and chez moi. The studio is now good enough; when I have finished a work that is pressing, I shall put in one or two days to better arrange my living surroundings; it is necessary, is it not?…
I did not know that Gabo was marrying, I do not know him so well as his brother Pevsner whom I like a lot…I have not properly understood why you do not see Ben any more in the situation you speak of, but we will speak of it when you are here. Or does Ben want to marry and not Gabo? But in that case I do not understand why you withdraw. But I am not a woman, me, so I can say nothing. Excuse me that I touch this delicate question but I sense your difficulties.
I will not speak to anyone of the marriage of Gabo because perhaps I have misunderstood you. I write you a little in haste because I am tired.
The blue is magnificent and I should very much like it if you would buy a big tube for me and bring it. About the abstract exhibition in London, I should like you to show your picture of mine, but I cannot advise you because I am always afraid that they will dirty it. I should like it better if you kept it at home! au revoir!
The colours interest me a lot: that is to say the red, yellow and blue. I am still not altogether happy with those of Foinet and Cambridge. Can you find for me also a red and a yellow? I prefer it if you bring them because otherwise perhaps I have to go to the customs!
Je vous envoie mes meilleurs pensées et amitiés, votre Mondrian
In the essay for Ben Nicholson, Mondrian rambled similarly. Regardless, the two-part exegesis on abstraction that appeared in Circle, when it came out in 1937, was left untouched. Edited by Naum Gabo and the International Style architect Leslie Martin as well as Ben Nicholson, Mondrian’s text was the longest, although the other contributions to the publication were by many of the major leaders of the modernist movement. Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and László Moholy-Nagy were among the practicing artists; Sigfried Giedion, Herbert Read, and Lewis Mumford among the art and architecture critics; and Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Richard Neutra among the architects. The mandate was to write about “the constructive trend in the art of our day” and its “relationship to the social order.” Circle had great success, particularly in the United States, and became a sort of bible to a generation of abstract artists.
Mondrian made his essential premise clearer than ever before, and “Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art” became his best-known and most influential text. The opening three sentences, which contain the basis of Mondrian’s belief system, are as valid today as they were then. This will be the case for as long as human beings express themselves visually, as they have ever since they lived in caves.
Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself, in other words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively.
There was no question, of course, as to where Mondrian stood.
In his text, the recent convert to the Hay Diet does not mention its proscriptions, yet it is only with a knowledge of the specifics of Dr. Hay’s regime that we can really understand Mondrian’s “Plastic Art.” Hay’s emphasis on relationships, of the impact of one ingredient on another, on the need for separation but also combination, sheds light on what Mondrian writes about the effect of one form on another, and of one color on another. And Hay’s fidelity to pure ingredients, so familiar to everyone today with the interdictions against processed and modified foods, increases the grasp of Mondrian’s insistence on primary colors and on straight lines confined to the horizontal or vertical:
We will gradually realize that we have not hitherto paid sufficient attention to constructive physical elements in their relation to the human body, nor to the constructive plastic elements in their relation to art. That which we eat has deteriorated through a refinement of natural produce. To say this appears to evoke a return to the primitive natural state and to be in opposition to the exigencies of pure plastic art, which degenerates precisely through figurative trappings. But a return to pure natural nourishment does not mean a return to the state of primitive man; it means on the contrary that cultured man obeys the laws of nature discovered and applied by science.
Mondrian at Whole Foods!
At the start of 1937, eighteen works by Mondrian were shown in a large show at the Basler Kunstverein. Just over the border, in Germany, they would have been considered unacceptable, but in neutral Switzerland, they were welcome, and of the three canvases the artist himself sent, which were hung alongside the fifteen from private collections, for the most part Swiss, two sold.
The sales kept him financially afloat, but barely. Still, he was now regarded as a living master. In February, the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed one of his compositions in an exhibition of recent abstractions that were gifts from the Advisory Committee. The press release from the Modern said that Mondrian was “generally considered the foremost living master of Abstract geometrical design in painting.”
Ben Nicholson wanted to organize a solo show in London; Valentine Dudensing implored Mondrian to send as much work as possible to New York. Slijper was impatient to see recent work, to which Mondrian responded that although he was spending more time than ever painting, he wasn’t finishing things. In any case, even if he did complete the work in time, he wrote the organizers of a show in London that summer called Constructive Art that he would not participate—not because he didn’t have work to send but because Arp, Taeuber-Arp, Gorin, Vantongerloo, Hélion, and Moss were all excluded. He went out of his way to inform people that he and Vantongerloo were no longer friends, but he still did not think the artist’s absence was right. And he was fiercely loyal to Arp, who had bought one of his works.
By spring he was feeling that pressure was coming from every direction for him to finish new canvases, yet he could not bring any of them to a point where he was completely satisfied, and he was glad when a large show planned in New York was postponed, giving him more time to develop his latest paintings.
On June 1, Mondrian wrote his brother Carel something completely out of character. He would, he said, “take some time to enjoy the beautiful summer weather which has been upon us for a few days now. When I looked over the terrace roof today I saw a real Winterswijk sky!” He had always loved nature, and still did, even if he had stopped reproducing it in his work. And even if his friends and the general public did not know it, Mondrian allowed himself both nostalgia and memories of his childhood. In private, to his brother, he could drop his doctrine. He forbade himself backward glances in either his art or his writing, but the attraction to the infinite and cosmic which had always been there was connected to memory. What Mondrian evoked with straight vertical and horizontal lines and unblemished colors was an abstracted version of those skies at which he had marveled from a very young age.
In London, New York, and Paris, Mondrian was increasingly coveted by collectors eager for him to finish paintings. But in Germany he was now officially demonized. That summer, two of his paintings were featured in the Degenerate Art show in Munich. One had been seized from the museum in Hannover, the other yanked from the Folkwang in Essen. They would never be seen again.
France was yet to fall to fascism, although it would do so in less time than anyone imagined. On July 30, a show opened at the Jeu de Paume called Origins and Development of International Independent Art. Mondrian wrote Carel that his painting on view in it stood “completely apart and is more something for the future; it doesn’t belong in such an old French building,” but he was still pleased. After all, this was “recognition. At the moment, it is only of moral use because nothing has been sold. But I’m still living from what I sold in the spring.”
Mondrian’s writing, as well as the commentary about it, was appearing more and more in English. Following the publication of “Pure Art and Pure Plastic Art” in Circle that June, the American painter George L. K. Morris wrote about Mondrian’s work in Partisan Review. Morris, having bought an important Mondrian composition two years previously, knew the subject well.
George Lovett Kingsland Morris, thirty-two years old, was a privileged American blueblood—a direct descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence—who had attended the Groton School, the most elite of the New England prep schools, and then Yale College. In 1929, he had gone to Paris with A. E. Gallatin, a Philadelphian from a similar aristocratic American milieu, and there he studied with Léger and Ozenfant. Partisan Review, a left-wing magazine which published a lot of Marxist writers, founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in February 1934, offered an alternative to the more strident New Masses, published by the American Communist Party. Morris’s two-page review of Circle appeared in one of the issues of the so-called literary monthly published that year, with essays, articles, and poems by Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, and Lionel Trilling. The anti-fascist text and drawings of Picasso’s Dreams and Lies of France were in this compendium of work by many of the most brilliant individuals of the era. Morris’s text, which was about the overall content of the magazine, was for the most part stinting in praise—he wrote of the “lapses in the editors’ discrimination” and groused about the art reproduced and essays by “painters who write abominably”—but Mondrian’s essay fell into the category of “essays by creative artists of the first rank who can also express themselves verbally—a feat that is rarely accomplished. The long essay by Piet Mondrian on ‘Plastic and Pure Plastic Art’ is the most lucid key to a painter’s intentions that this reviewer has ever encountered.”
Appreciation of this sort for Mondrian was on the rise among Americans more than with people from anywhere else. In July, James Johnson Sweeney translated three statements by Mondrian in issue 26 of Transition, a lively avant-garde American periodical published in Paris, and the Composition in White, Black, and Red owned by the Museum of Modern Art was reproduced. But interest was still substantial in the Netherlands. Late that summer, in the August 28 Hollandsche Weekblad, Henry van Loon, who had, for over a decade, been providing readers in Mondrian’s native land with lively portraits of its most unusual and influential native son, regaled readers with a charming portrait of the sixty-five-year-old artist.
To convince the good Dutch bourgeoisie that someone who painted as outrageously as Mondrian was not a swindler, Van Loon resorted to the tactic that many generalists use to spoon-feed modernism to the masses: he makes the case that Mondrian is really a legitimate painter who knew his trade. “He started out as an ordinary painter,” Van Loon writes, before explaining that Mondrian wanted to paint because his uncle did, had received academic training and teaching certificates,
followed the path of impressionism, and if he had kept it up he would have gone far, because he not only had talent but also developed his talent. And after the great evolution towards abstract art, he still sought relaxation now and then in making drawings and watercolours of flowers. Things of sheer fragility.
Van Loon defends his subject as being a decent and honest person in spite of turning to abstraction. “He veered more and more towards the subject-less painting, and those who doubt the good faith of this development demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of this man. If there is anyone free from attention-seeking, vanity and pretention, it is Mondriaan.”
Then Van Loon, possibly because at last he was confident that he had won over his readership to someone they would have considered a madman without some sugarcoating, stops the apologies. At that point, he focuses on the man he has known for many years, and provides a portrait that is as accurate and insightful as almost any contemporaneous account of Mondrian at this moment in his life when he was at last being regarded as a living master.
But he abhors anything that resembles social ambition, or, in other words, snobbism. He lives alone and has restricted his needs…. He rejects those who claim to see tragedy in the art of this or that artist. Falsity in colour and attitude to life fills him with physical revulsion.
Van Loon is trenchant and captures Mondrian’s essence:
The philosophy of Mondriaan is that he sees unity in everything. Thus it can come to pass that he considers dissimilar things as being on the same line. There is no other example of such a self-contained life. The man and the artist are truly one and the same. Whether you listen to him, read him, watch him painting, share a meal with him, witness him in convivial company, he is always true to himself.
Van Loon’s Mondrian carries that consistency into his love for American jazz, his masterful writing about the modern city, everything he does.
By the start of 1938, the Third Reich had succeeded in nearly wiping out unemployment in Germany. Loyalty to Hitler was soaring. The Wehrmacht—the German army—had, in the previous year, increased its ranks to many millions of soldiers. They were openly preparing for the annexation of Austria.
Italy, meanwhile, had pulled out of the League of Nations. Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, they were laying the groundwork for racial laws like Germany’s. In Spain, General Francisco Franco, whose fascist party’s bid for legitimate power in 1936 had failed, had been behind a coup that July, and a violent civil war was raging. The fascists were edging their way toward ultimate victory.
Life in Paris, however, had changed little despite the developments in its neighboring countries. Elaborate preparations were underway for the FIFA World Cup, which the city would host that June, and for the Tour de France in July. Samuel Beckett, André Gide, Eugène Jolas, and Djuna Barnes were writing masterpieces; Django Reinhardt was recording his exuberant music. In the midst of this, Mondrian wrote Winifred Nicholson in January to ask her to come to his studio to see four canvases he was about to send Dudensing in the United States. He was forging links with America; he had developed the idea that it could be his haven. After all, it was the birthplace of the African-based music he knew through jazz. He had no plans on how to get there, but by sending these paintings, he was like someone shipping his personal effects in advance.
At age sixty-five, Mondrian had renewed energy. But most of his work from 1937, the last full year he would remain in Paris, is gone, buried beneath the artist’s own later revisions.
The large paintings that Mondrian had finished by the end of the year would, for a while, remain as they were—since four had been shipped to New York, there was nothing more he could do to them—but Mondrian would, after he found refuge in the United States in 1942, repaint them. Three were to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art that year, and he would alter these and two other compositions with changes to their layout and to the choices of what primary color to have where. Thanks to period photographs, we can see what these paintings looked like in their first state. The major paintings begun in 1937 that we can see today—at the Tate, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Museum of Modern Art, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute’s Museum of Art in Utica, New York—were realized in their current form in 1942.
Most artists simplify and reduce the elements of their art with age. Mondrian did the opposite. The paintings he made in 1937, subsequently repainted but known in that earlier form from period photographs, were leaner than what he eventually turned them into. It would be as if Mondrian used the earlier versions as scaffolding to which he added elements in their second phases in the United States. While one of the earlier ones had a large horizontal yellow rectangle in the upper left, and a small red one in the lower left as the only elements of color, and was nothing but black and white except for a single small slightly vertical blue panel toward the lower right-hand corner, it and the other New York reincarnations have more going on.
When the paintings had fewer elements in 1937, they were less balanced. A pronounced disequilibrium, like an atonality, prevails in the few 1937 paintings that remained as they were then and in the photographs of the canvases taken prior to their 1942 reworking. We will never see firsthand the painting which Mondrian, in 1937, called Blanc et Rouge, because he would repaint it in 1942, when he renamed it Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow. But we do know the way it looked initially, as much as we can discern from a black-and-white photograph taken in Mondrian’s studio on the boulevard Raspail and from the information afforded by the original title. The main difference is the addition of blue and yellow to the palette that included, besides the usual white background and black lines, only red. Originally, that red was confined to a single slim vertical element running along the top five-eighths or so of the left-hand boundary of the painting, and touching the top. All of that changed with the New York revision, which, although it adheres to the essential format on top of which it was painted, has many small sparks of the red as well as the two new colors, some new linear elements, and changes in the widths of the lines. With those visual alterations came a different feeling.
It is not a reach to conclude that these paintings which Mondrian was so eager for Winifred Nicholson to see in January 1938, his production of the year just ended, had less equilibrium and resolution than his redos of them in New York in 1942 because, in 1937, he, too, was less resolved and balanced than he would be five years later. Rather than being in the midst of strife-torn Europe, Mondrian would, once he got to the United States, feel at a safe remove. And he would be surrounded by more enthusiastic supporters of his work than ever before.
The dissonance that reflected his inner emotional state during that difficult time in Paris was intentional. In these periods when he was unsettled, Mondrian wanted his art to irritate. This was not in the sense of emotional irritation which borders on anger, but the sort of irritation a trout feels when excited by a fly on the surface of a river, or the human eye feels when facing bright light that causes it to blink. He sought a deliberately discomfiting quality in the work he did on the boulevard Raspail, both because of what was going on inside him and because it increased its power of diversion. The distraction from other concerns, like the stimulus of atonal music, was essential. Mondrian’s art in this difficult time period was restless in part because he was restless.
That February, Mondrian wrote Ben Nicholson with one of his usual refrains that he was not yet achieving everything he wanted in his work but was getting close. Several months later, he wrote him again about an entirely different matter. Mondrian told Nicholson that, until now, he had believed without question that there would be “a peaceful political solution” to what was happening in Europe. Now he had lost his confidence that this was so.
He needed to leave Paris soon. But the very thought of returning to the Netherlands “disgusted” him. He dreamed of going to America, but it was too far away and too expensive. Moholy-Nagy had said he would like to have him at a school he was forming and would call “the Chicago Bauhaus,” but that institution was not yet underway. By early September 1938, Mondrian had decided that he wanted to go to London. He was sure that bombs would fall there as well, but from London he hoped eventually to make it to New York, and for now it was urgent to make that first step.
Just as Mondrian was becoming determined to get out of Paris, Antoine Pevsner told him that his brother, Naum Gabo, who had moved from Paris to London in 1936, would be visiting him in Paris and might have some ideas on how Mondrian could make the move.
Having failed to recognize what lay ahead when he left Paris in June 1914 for what he thought would be a two-week holiday and ended up as five years of exile, Mondrian in 1938 did not want to repeat his mistake of not anticipating imminent war, and he could no longer wait. He hoped that Nicholson would give him some advice quickly. Certain that a studio would be too expensive, he expected Nicholson to tell him at what price he might have a room in London where he could cook. Mondrian was in a frenzy with his wish to move.
Mondrian desperately instructed Nicholson to send him an invitation to go to London. Even before he knew where he would stay; this was essential in order for him to get a visa. “Send it to me if you counsel me to come; tell me also if I should come quickly with only a few necessities with me, or in several weeks. In the latter case, I will have time to arrange to move with a few kitchen utensils, canvases, paintings, etc.”
That same day, Mondrian wrote letters to Harry Holtzman, Kiesler, and Jean Xceron. Xceron, a Greek-born abstract painter a generation younger than Mondrian, was a geometric abstractionist who periodically visited Paris and lived in New York. Mondrian beseeched these three people in America also to send the invitation essential for a visa, this time for the United States. Whichever visa he could get first—for America or England—Mondrian would simply board the next ship. What the world situation meant to others was beside the point. “I am so deeply saddened that I must interrupt my work here in this way, brutally forced by necessity. I have only just found the solution to two paintings that are each a meter square, and three others.”
Nicholson was the first to respond. It took less time for letters to get to and from England than the United States, and he answered by return mail. He assured Mondrian he would be able to find a room where he could work and cook, and told him what the rent would be. On September 11, a Sunday evening, Mondrian wrote thanking him but lamenting the expense; his London refuge was going to cost more than the Paris studio, where he also had his own bath.
Regardless, first thing the following morning, Mondrian made arrangements with the shipping company of Lefebvre-Foinet to send all of his paintings to London. There were far fewer than most artists have in their studios. He had little more than the dozen or so canvases in progress; Mondrian had managed to sell, or in a few cases give away, all of his earlier work. Within three days, they were en route to England.
He had given the incomplete paintings a priority. The shippers could send blank canvases and Mondrian’s clothing later. Because Mondrian had little need for variety in the well-cut suits he wore in public and never held on to anything once it lost its shape or was threadbare, and invariably painted in clean white smocks, his entire wardrobe fit into a couple of suitcases. He also sent a trunk of manuscripts, and a second trunk with magazines and books, his phonograph, a few of his jazz records, the room screen, a single folding chair, and a handful of other personal effects. He would write Carel from England, “The rest which I’m leaving behind is really just ballast. I already have the standing work lamp; your teapot too. I sold an easel to acquaintances in Paris. I had to leave the other one on the ship.”
On Wednesday, September 14, 1938, just as Mondrian was packing up the last boxes and suitcases for his move, French radio broadcast the news from London that Neville Chamberlain had decided to pay a visit to the German chancellor. The larger public was overjoyed that the British prime minister would go to Munich to strike an accord with Adolf Hitler. The Princess of Wagram wrote: “We ought to raise statues to Mr. Neville Chamberlain in every town in France.” The hero worship on the part of an esteemed noblewoman with one of the finest houses in Paris was echoed throughout the land.
Millions of mothers of young men who might be recruited into the army publicly blessed the British leader. Sophisticated political observers in Le Figaro and other leading newspapers applauded Chamberlain’s gesture as well, and soon the enthusiasm became nearly unanimous. When the French prime minister Daladier met with Chamberlain in London to signal his country’s approval, he was praised even before he arrived back in Paris. The consensus was that violence had been avoided through diplomacy more effective than any military response to German aggression.
Mondrian did not share the public opinion about the pending pact between England and Germany. Unlike many of his fellow Parisians, he saw Chamberlain’s plan and the wholesale support of it as the kiss of death to any hope for peace. On September 15, the day after Chamberlain’s intention to meet Hitler was announced, he wrote Ben Nicholson to report that he had shipped his large paintings to an address in London provided by his shipping company and that he was ready to follow them as soon as he could.
Mondrian thanked Nicholson profusely for all his help in arranging the move he would now hasten to make. Nicholson had had Winifred’s brother, his former brother-in-law, the Liberal MP Wilfrid Roberts, issue the invitation to England that had enabled Mondrian to get his visa quickly and easily. The room about which Nicholson had already written to Mondrian was one he had rented in 1931 when he left Winifred for Barbara Hepworth; despite Mondrian’s grousing about the cost, the moment it became available, Nicholson had booked it, assuming that Mondrian would take it soon enough. It did not have a bath, and Mondrian would have to buy or borrow furniture, but Nicholson planned to help him out.
Knowing that he had a place he would be able to make his new home, different though it would be from his Paris studios, Mondrian was immensely reassured. He now decided to leave France so rapidly that he would arrive even before he could take the new place; he could stay in a cheap hotel until it was ready. He was calm and matter-of-fact, and grateful for the help of friends. Naum and Miriam Gabo had written him to say that they had organized the hotel room which he could use for a few days until his own place was ready.
In 1936, Gabo and his wife, the former Miriam Israels, had moved to London, possibly because, being Jewish, they had felt the perils of remaining in Paris earlier than other people did. Mondrian was supremely grateful for their help in organizing his London life both in advance and once he got there; he kept his anti-Semitism at bay in anything he wrote about them. He was unequivocally appreciative of everyone making his move possible, writing Carel and Winifred Nicholson and Gorin and others about the Gabos’ kindness.
Mondrian was giving himself three more days before leaving Paris on a day when he would be able to travel with Winifred Nicholson. Nicholson had made her decision to leave her lovely flat overlooking the Seine when a friend in England had advised her to buy bicycles so that she and her son and two daughters, one of whom was still a toddler, could pedal to the coast once the Germans entered Paris. She was sorry to leave behind a period of her life that had been “chaotic, revolutionary, inspiring, intense, enlightening,” but she also knew that the reality of an escape from Paris by bicycle with enemy troops all around was not a risk worth taking. By the time she and Mondrian were heading to London, she had already sent the three children. Mondrian made a point of telling Ben how glad he was that they were safely out of France and that Barbara Hepworth could help take care of them until their mother arrived from Paris.
Mondrian calculated that, once he covered his moving expenses, he would have, at most, six thousand francs remaining. He wrote Ben Nicholson for advice on whether he should take an easel and mattress and pots and pans with him, or buy new ones in London. Cost was not the only factor. He was worried about how the customs officials would look at him if he traveled with so many household items that they realized that he was not just going to England for a visit, which was what his formal invitation indicated. If the authorities thought he wanted to become a permanent resident, they might deny him entry.
He decided to sell one of his two easels and take the other. Henry and Maud van Loon bought it. Mondrian gave the Van Loons those of his phonograph records he was not shipping, as well as his record rack. He had constructed this piece of furniture out of wood and painted it white. Nearly seventy-nine centimeters high, thirty and a half across, and about twenty-eight deep, it was simply a three-sided box, open on the fourth side. Closed at the top, it had five shelves at even intervals, with a space of some five centimeters between the bottom plank and the ground. Looking like an ordinary, functional object, almost like a straightforward packing crate, to modern eyes it is a sculptural piece of furniture—resembling to a remarkable extent work by Donald Judd. Maybe it is only because we know it was Mondrian’s that this record rack seems almost noble, but its candor and the straightforwardness of its unadorned elements are exceptional. The proportions are perfect, the intervals just right, the balance of lightness with adequate strength sublime. Fortunately, the Van Loons treated it as the rare gem it is, and left it to the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.
On September 20, Mondrian and Winifred Nicholson boarded the train for Calais at noon.
On the first leg of journey, Mondrian was happily transfixed. Winifred Nicholson’s account of him on that clear and balmy September afternoon is, although idiosyncratic in its sentence structure, breathtaking:
Mondrian on the other side of the carriage was gazing rapt on to the Somme country as we sped past it on our way to Calais…. The grass was lush and green, the poplars were green and soft. The sky was evening yellow, sunlight, a green peace lay over the marshy lands. “How beautiful and peaceful it is,” I thought, “and you see Mondrian does not hate green, or the country, his eyes are full of its marvel.” “Isn’t it wonderful,” he murmured. “Yes, isn’t it,” I said.
“Look,” he continued, “how they pass, they pass, they pass, cutting the horizon here, and here, and here.” My hand moved as if to touch them, as they passed by out of the window of the flying train, and I realized that what delighted him were the telephone poles—the verticals that cut the horizontal of the horizon. The fundamental of his art of space, its perception, its comprehension. No superficial pleasure of lush flowering green countryside, no light of materially visible sunlight. The enlightenment of the harmony of opposites—the great two opposites horizontal and vertical—expressed in the two fundamental opposites of white and black—white space by black line. But duality, duality leads to madness, they must resolve with a trinity—so above the two paths of opposites, white versus black, horizontal versus vertical, sings the trio of blue, pure blue, yellow, purest yellow and red, vividest red—and if only one of these in the picture, why then it sings and calls for its complement like a lonely artist hermit in a sparse upper studio, a spirit searching for a new realism like a scientist in outer untrodden space. How lonely those on the frontiers of outward bound thought.
Once they reached Calais, the travelers switched to the ship to Dover. It was either at the dock or on the ferry that Mondrian had to abandon the easel he managed to take that far. He would write Carel that he left it on “the ship,” but other sources say that he was not allowed to take it on the ferry because of its dimensions. Regardless, he managed to keep his standing work lamp and the teapot Carel had given him. Winifred Nicholson had already sent her furniture, of which she had a lot, so she was able to lend a hand.
The weather was fine on the ferry crossing from Calais to Dover, the English Channel calm. The pair continued from Dover on a second train that got them to London that Tuesday evening at about 7 p.m. It seems likely that the reason Winifred Nicholson had stayed behind after dismantling her household and dispatching her children was to accompany Mondrian. Thirty years later, when she reminisced about this, while allowing that her memory was hazy—“those were confused days”—she wrote that it was possible that friends had suggested that she and Mondrian travel together since he had not left Paris for so many years, and the journey would be too much for him alone.
Ben Nicholson had told Mondrian that, upon arriving in London, he could have a bed in the house Nicholson shared with Barbara Hepworth. Possibly because it was Nicholson’s ex-wife who had accompanied him on the trip—but more likely because he could not imagine ever living with other people, even for a few days—he opted instead for the hotel the Gabos had suggested, the Ormonde at 12 Belsize Grove, in Hampstead, not far from where the Gabos themselves lived.