EWord has gotten around how Piet Mondrian found his timelessly modern “type case pictures” in blue, red, yellow and white with black grids, which were then immortalized by Yves Saint Laurent on his “Cocktail Dress” for popular culture in 1965 – they are nothing other than radically stylized nature, often leafless trees cut down to their black branches. To put it bluntly, Mondrian is the anthrax of modern painting, at least in terms of a painted parallel to nature.
For three reasons, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel-Riehen Mondrian is now staging an overview of his entire oeuvre, including the early figurative-representational works that were simply left out, for example, in the last major retrospective at New York’s MoMA for the sake of a “flawless” teleology. The most pragmatic: Beyeler, as a legendary art dealer, bequeathed the house no fewer than seven Mondrians from his private collection, which in the exhibition present their subtle surfaces without protective glass, which would no longer be conceivable in any major museum in the world. The ultra-fine surface textures with their frequent changes in direction of the brush structure by ninety degrees and the associated different degree of whiteness of the paint through a tilted “play of shadows” are tantamount to a revelation.
The power of simple image comparison
The second occasion is Mondrian’s 150th birthday, which at the same time makes it clear how deeply the artist is, biographically and in terms of his artistic training, still stuck in the Hague School of nineteenth-century landscape painting. The third, most compelling reason, however, is the symbiosis of the first two, namely the unique dramaturgy in Basel, from the earliest works to (almost) the last, the cornerstones of modernism, which Mondrian christened “neoplastic”, which, like in a play, are based on eleven Stage halls (including a cinema hall, in which Lars Eidinger is in dialogue with himself as Mondrian) in order to be able to understand the successive “evolution” – the title of the show – of the artist and his work.
And how it can be understood. Completely without room texts and tedious pseudo-explanations, only through the power of simple image comparisons, which are currently being used particularly strongly in Swiss museums such as Geneva or Zurich-Rietberg. In the first room, there are mainly two counter-images: on the left, the thoroughly Dutch small format “Woman with Spindle” from 1893, on which a Dutch woman with a starched white bonnet is sitting at a table working in an interior like Vermeer’s. However, how the flat horizontal oval of her work surface, the much too wide, diagonally running table leg as an optical crossbar and in particular the pure white tiles behind her, which are not painted with distracting Delft motifs, abstract the entire pictorial space, that is what already shows Mondrian’s will to reduce to the essentials palpable despite the classic genre motif – even his wife with the spindle sits stiffly on her chair like a right angle incarnate, and who knows that Mondrian once called the famous ninety degrees “the perfect relationship of line to surface” in a fifty-page essay understands the geometrization of his working Vermeer wife.
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