Wednesday, September 2, 2009

More Mondrian

Piet Mondrian, Composition, 1929, oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

"Some of the most apparently radical aspects of Mondrian's working method in New York he had in fact refined for decades. Take his practice of working on a table and using the easel primarily to display paintings or even simply as a bare architectural element. With Mondrian, as with Jackson Pollock, working on a horizontal surface...was a crucial means of weakening, though not completely denying, the gravitational sense of top and bottom that underpins all figurative painting."
--Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings by Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk, Yale University Press (page 47)

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Double Line and Yellow, 1932, oil on canvas, 45 x 45 cm.
National Galleries of Scotland.



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