Mathematical Art

The TLS reviewer of a recent Mondrian exhibit observes that Mondrian spent the final years of his life attempting to “eradicate any trace of the organic world from his art and surroundings.” Not surprisingly, he was unsuccessful: “Mondrian would remain vexed until the very end by what he regarded as nature’s insidious tenacity.”

Behind this was a form of nihlism: “‘I think,’ he wrote shortly before his death in New York in 1944, ‘the destructive element is too much neglected in art.’ ‘My conception of abstraction,’ he claimed, ‘is based on belief that this very space has to be destroyed.’”

But the nihilistic assault on the organic, natural world was in pursuit of an ideal world: “‘Compositions A, B, and C’ are among the very first to demonstrate Mondrian’s capacity to break completely with the sensibilities of preceding styles and to eradicate from their surfaces any semblance of the perceivable world. Instead, the three canvases, which share a jigsawing of quadrilaterals divided by fine mullions of varying intensities of black and grey (far busier than the more minimalist grids that would soon follow and for which he would become best known), seem plucked from an intellectual realm where mathematical principles and artistic values exist in synchronicity. Mondrian believed precisely in such a realm,” having become a devotee of Theosophic speculation some time before.