Almost exactly a year after his boat had docked on the Hudson River, Mondrian filed his application to become a U.S. citizen. This “Declaration of Intention” had to be submitted in person at the Federal Building on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. Holty went along to help; there was no way that Mondrian would have been able to grapple with the system on his own.
They waited in a crowded, airless room. It was one of those spaces where people desperate for official approval are herded as if discomfort in grim surroundings is a requisite for the allowance being sought. Mondrian was seated with the group of people packed together under a hanging large cardboard sign with the letter “M.” Whenever an Italian name was called, if it slightly resembled the name of a Renaissance painter—like Botticelli or Signorelli—Mondrian would say “Almost a great name.”
He and Carl Holty sat there for six hours. Throughout the wait, Mondrian, afraid to miss his moment of summons, not daring even to go to the bathroom or grab something to eat, showed no hint of impatience. Rather, he was intrigued by everything. But when his name was called and it was time to go to the desk to register, Mondrian became tense. Having presented his birth certificate, he was adamant not to use the “Cornelis” as part of his official American identity. He told Holty he had “always hated that name.” It proved not to be a problem. A middle name could be stricken out. But then “the young, brown-skinned girl” recording his information said she was not all right with “Piet.” “Pete ain’t no name. It would be Peter,” she informed Mondrian.
It took Holty’s intervention to win her over. Holty told the woman that the artist was so famous that there was an entry about him in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and that there he was “Piet.”
“No kidding?” she said. Holty had succeeded in convincing the clerk to let the artist’s name stand in its pared-down, refined form as he wanted. Having reduced and simplified his name from Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan to Piet Mondrian, Mondrian was pleased. But Holty felt that the artist’s main preoccupation was how “graceful and beautiful” the woman’s arms were.
After Mondrian was registered at last, he and Holty met Charmion von Wiegand for coffee at the Jumble Shop, a landmark Greenwich Village restaurant on Waverly Place just off Sixth Avenue. An old-fashioned establishment favored by artists, rumored to have been a speakeasy when it opened in 1930, it served tea and crumpets in keeping with its design as an old English inn. It had a large square bar and a dining room with windows painted by the society portraitist Louis Bouché and murals by the Ashcan School painter Guy Pène du Bois. These artists belonged to the very tradition Mondrian wanted to break, but he was delighted to be in a place so quintessentially American. Having invited Holty and Von Wiegand to thank them for all they had done for him, he insisted on paying the bill.
This was, Mondrian quietly said, a momentous occasion—perhaps more than they imagined. In a soft voice and with the slow cadences he used in English, he told Holty and Von Wiegand that he had dreamed of going to America for longer than anyone else realized.
From the start, Holty had been impressed by the ballast with which Mondrian handled life’s difficulties. In his everyday existence as in his art, he did his utmost to dismiss, or at least overlook, all that he labeled “the tragic.” New York had become a haven for him following the bombardment of London. He had been “considerably shaken up” when he arrived, weakened by one of his periods of poor health during the crossing by ship. But even on his first evening at Harry Holtzman’s after reaching the new continent, revived from his long nap in the hotel, Mondrian had focused on all that made New York a different city. He lived in the here and now.
When Mondrian did speak to Holty or others of his young friends about the past, it was to reminisce about the first exhibitions of Cubism and his debates with fellow artists “as they ‘scooted along in the new motor taxis’ to and from the cafés and the Grand Palais where exhibitions were held.” He never bemoaned his penury, his isolation, the vicious attacks on him from art critics, his perpetual health problems, or anything else that marred his Parisian existence. He did not refer to the struggles of his five-year exile in the Netherlands, his lack of a home or studio. To Holty, he “refused to discuss…the disagreeable…If evil could not be avoided, one could at least ‘refuse to extend it through remembrance,’ he said.”
This is why the single occasion of Mondrian bemoaning an event made a strong impression on Holty. One afternoon at Holtzman’s apartment, the people gathered were startled by an explosion. Someone across the street had turned on the gas jets in his apartment to commit suicide. While waiting to be asphyxiated, he had lit up a last cigarette. It caused much of his apartment to be “blown out into 57th Street with a loud bang.” Word quickly spread as to what had happened, and the people at Holtzman’s were even more shocked by the story than they had been by the explosion. Having heard the loudest noise of their lives, they were visibly stunned by the bang and the circumstances. “Mondrian was standing alone rather unhappily…he…disapproved of the morbid excitement the rest of the people were displaying.” Holty approached him, and Mondrian simply said, “It wasn’t so loud. The noise in London was worse.”
Mondrian described London during the war to Holty.
He told me that he had been bombed out twice, and that he had feared more for his health—he caught a severe chest cold because of exposure—than for his life. Once after a particularly bad night, with bombers coming over London in wave after wave, Mondrian went to his doctor only to find the ruins of his doctor’s house roped off by fire wardens. It turned out that the doctor was unharmed, so “that” wasn’t as bad as it might have been. In one raid he lost his bed, a bed Ben Nicholson had loaned him, and he was much embarrassed at not being able to restore the borrowed property. “And Nicholson liked the bed very much.” Mondrian said he was lucky that the janitor of his building (the twice-bombed one) was a Russian who “knew what suffering was” and who made tea in the basement after the raids and generally knew how to conduct himself. “He didn’t get all excited and neither did his wife.” He didn’t tell me more and apparently felt no need to speak of this period at all. His reminiscence of the events was spotty and his telling of it in fragments that he didn’t even try to organize into a coherent story.
The only thing worth constructing with care was artwork.
In early December, Von Wiegand realized that, whatever their relationship had been, it was over. She stayed away for a two-week hiatus.
When she returned, she saw how hard Mondrian had been working, making significant changes to all the pictures. Von Wiegand was impressed but did not allow herself the usual transport she felt in front of his work; she looked at the paintings “quite freshly, although not emotionally because of M’s presence and our disharmony which seems still unhealed.” Noticing that some disturbing black spots were now gone in all but one painting, she decided that it was a remark she had made “about those black spots that really angered him most. Or at least, they offered the excuse for breaking up our intimacy.” She also consoled herself into thinking that the issue was that Holtzman had been away and was now back. Von Wiegand believed that because of Holtzman’s return to New York, Mondrian
no longer needed me, and secondly because he will not let anyone get to [sic] close to him or will he let himself go.
I was upset at his coldness and to take his mind off things, asked him why he put those black lines at the bottom of all the canvases lately. “How do I know why I do things?” he said very crossly. “I just want to understand them.” “I don’t know” he said curtly. “I like to be alone. You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.” His tone is so harsh and his words sting like a wasp bite…. We had come too close and he was withdrawing—breaking things up, the way he breaks up his composition when it gets too personal.
Von Wiegand was wrong, however, in thinking that everything was over. By the start of 1942, she was again seeing Mondrian regularly. She wrote in her journal that on January 6 they spent an evening when he was painting and she was working on his “suppression” essay. At 10:30, he warned her that she would miss her bus, but still she did not leave.
I love to be in the room with him, we can sit quietly and both working and time evaporates and there is such a wonderful soft humming vibration between us, that gets stronger as the night outside gets quieter and later.
They each had a single cigarette—Mondrian had been ordered to stop—and she left at ten to one in the morning. Mondrian promised to go to bed, as he had been up till four the night before.
It was a bitter cold night. Von Wiegand indeed missed the last bus and so took the subway. “I was in a daze, but I did not feel lonely or unhappy, but warm inside.”
The following evening, they got together again to work on one of the essays.
Mondrian looked so tired, his face seemed thinner and his eyes heavy, but he was in a very good mood and that sweet tenderness which is in him seemed to emanate and radiate through the room.
He went into the bathroom to wash his hands, their thin fragile elegance, their precise and exact articulation, the heavy blue veins that now grow stronger with age, the polished curved nails. Tonight they were scarred and the paint and sicativ [sic] had hardened on them and he dislikes that very much. I said my hands were worse and the typewriter had taken all the red lacquer off the edges of the nails. “It should be all the way down, I suppose” he said and added “and I like it very much”—meaning he likes the lacquered nails, which most men don’t. He scrubs his hands so hard with sopa [sic] and dried them on towel that I thought was so coarse. He showed me the package of sheets that Mrs. Holtzman had sent instead of the red towels he got for Xmas and would not accept because they made him think of blood. “I am too sensitive to have that color in the bathroom” he had explained and was afraid he had hurt my feelings. I assured him he had not. “And now you have percale sheets and should sleep well in them.” And he laughed. And I teased him saying that he had Kandinsky compositions all over his smock which had become bright with paint recently.
Few people in Mondrian’s life understood him that well.
On March 20, 1942—two months after his seventieth birthday—Mondrian wrote Von Wiegand:
To day [sic] I saw the doctor. I have still some injections to take but it is getting better. He said the dentist could do only the necessary and leave the cists [sic] in. So I have probably no operation now. Since long I would answer you on your former letter. There is no question of less sympathie [sic] but I like to retake my lonely life as it was before I knew you. Of course it is egoist of me but it is a need. I have nothing to explain because I did this from the beginning. The translations have caused a confusion. You know I have only short visites [sic] of my friends and so I would suggest you to come only from time to time in the afternoon when you are in the neighbourhood or feel inclined to come. When you think logical you will find me logical also and remain in the same friendship.
Best wishes from Mondrian.
The relationship would continue at this new pace for the rest of Mondrian’s life. Von Wiegand periodically hoped to rekindle a different level of passion; Mondrian stayed politely distant.
On January 15, 1943, Mondrian wrote her:
Dear Charmion,
I just got your letter. In answer on this, I can only repeat that I can not see friends often. So it can not do pleasure to me when you so often come to me as you did. [left unsigned]
The point was clear.