Shape shifters

Someone asked me recently whether I actually liked Mondrian’s paintings. The implication being that his form of geometrical abstraction was too pure — or too antiseptic — to contain the necessary germ of human warmth required to engage the emotions; and that though one could admire his work intellectually, it was difficult to be passionate about it. There’s plenty of passion in Mondrian, but it is controlled fire, banked down to burn with a white-hot flame. Perhaps it should be termed the Higher Passion, as it does not immediately affect the ordinary emotions, but inspires instead to the spiritual ecstasy of the saint. Looking at a handful of his pictures is a remarkably uplifting experience, as can be determined from a visit to the Courtauld’s excellent exhibition. And when juxtaposed with the paintings and reliefs of Ben Nicholson, the effect is doubled rather than halved.

The trouble is — as T.S. Eliot pointed out — humanity cannot take too much perfection, and is apt to find it dull. Perfection is regarded as a dead end, a state of grace ill suited to daily existence. Yet the Modernist project was very much involved with reforming (or improving) man’s brute nature with shiny buildings of regular and unblemished form, and for a time abstract art followed suit. Mondrian’s geometrical abstraction, though never made simply by calculation and ruler but always by means of intuition, was regarded as a high point in this urge towards a supposedly improved version of human nature. His work was even admired by architects who would normally have had conniptions at the mere thought of untidy paintings sullying the purity of their walls. But Modernism itself changed and developed, and by 1935 some curators saw Mondrian’s hard-edged idiom as old-fashioned. For them, biomorphic abstraction (the curvy shapes of Arp, for example) was the way forward.