Mondrian as Metaphysician Author(s): Albert William Levi Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 13, No.

3 (Summer, 1951), pp. 385-393 Published by: Kenyon College Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333254 . Accessed: 07/07/2013 12:01
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Albert William Levi

MONDRIAN AS METAPHYSICIAN
A RT, he said, should not follow the intuitions relating to tlour life in time, but only those intuitions relating to true reality. Come then, oh metaphysician,since through an unquestionablegrace your inner eye and outward hand were so submissive to the lessons of the real, and let your dead mouth drop its crumbs. Abstract art ... is consciousof the fact that reality reveals itself by substantial, palpable forms, accumulated or dispersed in empty space. He said it with quaint Dutch seriousness,in the stubbornessof a hard-won knowledge. Some certainties are born of the arrogant vision of the single way. But not his. In the beginning, he had too much respect for the integrity of the objects of painting not to have an unlimited openness to them all. In this early openness to wind and rain and climate was love of natural form. At this moment natural form was the daemon in which he participated. But it happens that the lyrical love of particularly flowered in an intellectual love of forms beyond life and beyond particularity. His vision fell into the hands of the serene Greek and new discovery made him friend and companion of Plato. There is something touching in his confidences. It took me a long time, he said, to discover that particularities of form and natural color evoke subjective states of feeling which obscure pure reality. The appearance of natural forms changes, but reality remains constant. To plastic art we must turn for the re-disclosureof what the philosophy of the ancients acknowledged: that time and subjective vision

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veil truth, that in the abolition of all particular form lies truth, and that reality is at bottom form and space. And yet what superb daring. What superb and hopeless daring to grope for the abolition of all particular form. To gnaw like the trapped animal at the steel jacket of the senses and to hope by plastic persuasionto escape the predicaments of sensation. This is not to deny that he was a magician. Form and Space: It is not as though Mondrianhad spent sleeplessnights over the Timaeus. It is not as though space was the eternal receptacle into which forms dive and sport like Dolphins undulating in a sunny sea. It is the artist who through a free creative act makes the dimensionseven the waves upon his sea. The rectangle of the picture plane becomes the sea, becomes the whole world of potentiality for space determination. As natural object the canvas has only two dimensions. If the artists were to simply express space this would indeed be a sorrow. But since his is the power to determine space, he may proceed with light heart in his joyful science. (The action of plastic art is not space expression but complete space-determination. Space determination is here understood as dividing empty space into unequal but equivalent parts by means of forms or lines.) To determinespace the artist must have some of the innocent simplicity of God at the moment of the creation. His forms must be equivalent to his space. He must at the same time be a master of the art of relationship. Relationship is a sense like vision. It is a holding together of many things so that they are felt at the same time together in their separatenessand separatein their togetherness. All this without the sense of tension which explodes the world in fragments though of course not without tension. It is through the sense of relationshipthat the painter determinesspace. For what can this determination have to do with reality unless its source is the desire for equilibrium? ( I mean reality here in Mondrian's meaning - not the ultimate facts of

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cosmology or the events of life but the plastic manipulation of forms.) The sense of relationship finds its mode of expression as the painter contemplates the blank two-dimensionality of the canvas. For, this space is given but not determined as structural and it is determined and not given by vision and through imagination. The painter too inhabits a Kantian universe where space is an a priori form of intuition. This is the meaning of his loneliness before the canvas, his childlike desolationbefore its emptiness. But it is a more ambiguous desolation than this. It dwells upon the act of desecration. Is there any beauty more pure, more unmixed than the luminosity of the white rectangle? Here above all we can no longer doubt that creation is an act of insolence. Mondrian's was a gentle insolence, humble even and submissive. Before the canvas he listened carefully. Listened to the music of its whiteness and rectangularity. Felt its plea. Sensedits demand. (How he defended it from alienation.) Nothing, he vowed, shall happen to it which is not like itself. (How he cooperateswith fate.) This submissivenessbefore the canvas and concern for its intrinsic nature recognizes a metaphysics of two-dimensionality-a metaphysics which is more at home with the manipulation of surfaces than the manipulation of volumes. Paintersare deceptive. For the architecturalmetaphysic one might turn to Cezanne-never to Mondrian. At least not without employing the services of a translator. Space determination means that the artist divides empty space. The divisions are unequal, but they are equivalent. The division and the equivalence are produced by forms and ultimately by lines. The painting of Mondrian suggests the drafting board more than the disordered palette. It is at once a delimitation and a domestication of space. In this way it is superbly the painting of cleanliness. Now, cleanliness is not precisely purity, but with the confused state of the body-mind problem in modern philos-

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difficult to effecttheirseparation. ophyit is sometimes Nor doesit seemto me thatMondrian is withouta metaphysics of purityalthough that findsitself expressed not so much in cleanliness asin order. Themedievals called it (orthecondition of heart which is its consequence) claritas.It troubles us todayverymuch. Perhaps because it is aliento ourdeepest confusion.In that Picasso and Kandinsky, Kafkaand Mann,symbolize contemporary prophecy, whatis not equivocal hasalmost been from the tablesof the aesthetically banished permissible. Canyouhearit ringing in yourears? "Mondrian? A good painter of course. But limited. Onemightbe tempted to saythathe hasgoneas far as anymodern painter couldgo withoutrecourse to the textureof ambiguity." is a repeatable order whichliescloseto theheartof ultimate reality.Repeatable but inherently unchangeable. And unchangeable onlybecause in thisfinalnexustheforces within space andeventhe forces of space havereached equilibrium. Odd but whollycharacteristic that this metaphysical core shouldhave determined the very plasticmeanswhich he employed, should havebrought into beingtheeconomy, the
veritableeleganceof his style. Here is the Occam'srazor Mondrian's purity liesin his passionate belief that there

for the art of painting; hereis the law of parsimony to be

placedabovethe austereportalsof the academies of design.

The moreneutral the plasticmeans are,the morethe unchangeable It has expression of realitycan be established. takenEuclida thousand to sayas much. years This brings us to the geometry of the planeand the of thestraight mystique line. In themlie the fixedlawsof the plasticarts. The straight line is the essence of two-di-

mensionality. In space it performsan act of separation,

curve to its natural conclusion. It turns in upon, returns

forever keeping apartwithoutat the sametime confining. Curvature is another mindforcesthe matter. A projective linelead excesses uponitself. Theemotional of thestraight

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to loneliness as those of the curve to claustrophobia. The functional rightness of the straight line is division. The right functioning of the curve is enclosure. (Here my neatness outdoes itself.) Now, if you begin by conceiving your field as the pure potentiality of a two-dimensional empty space which it is your pleasure and your glory to determine through the divisive quality of the straight line, as your senseof the complication of spatial separation develops, your lines multiply

and you find yourself with a little covey of intersections. The middle canvasesof Mondrian often exhibit this quaint cross-hatching. As pure design they are not always convincing, but as a welter of intersections growing from purity

of purpose in space determination, they move even as they delight. Mondrian'sarticulation of space did not stop here. It is not easy to say whether this was a matter of physics or of metaphysics. As the straight line is the first determination of space, and the right-angled intersection is the next, there is imminent in these beginnings the forms of rectangularity. Extension of right-angled intersections presents the projective potentialitiesof a sea of rectangles. The stubborn reinforcement of some of these and the light understatement of others, always in the service of a sense of spatial relationship and the balancing of the neoplastic growths (forms) within the extensive continuum is what makes one of Mondrian's spaceographs. Since we have come this far together I feel more candid. It is hard for me to call them any longer pictures. And this is not simply because in putting them beside the designs of Matisse or the atmospheric portraits of Monet, they resist reduction to the same medium. This type of experience is so commonplace, so generic within the flux of technical vision as to be suspect. It is our innocent response
to any new art slowly assimilated. I think my reluctance

is more than this. I think it is becausethe painting of Mon-

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convendrianis almosta violationof the unacknowledged

arein spiritmurals; tionsof easelpainting. His paintings

that this meistersinger But thisis foolish. Canone believe embrace the wall?
of space did not know that he would have done better to
No, this is not exactly
it.

do they not cry out for the matrixof the great white wall?

What I mean about out-

growing the customaryformulationof easel painting has

frame. Do we not the ideaof the picture to do morewrith theconunderlies metaphysics allknowthatthemostsubtle

of illuwhichwe are drawndown the corridor through uponwhichthe paintsionistic space? Is it the platform passionately imagery, of the painter's the garden rounding of woodor all the intransigent properties through denying, or chrome that it is of this world,yet asserting moulding life of its that independent that it is-guarding jealously
own which every work of art declares? to its unlikeness ing surfacerests,beforethe wall, asserting to us? Is it the fencesurthe wall andits functionalnearness

cept of the picture frame? Is it the window cut into the wall

stand out from the wall-simply assertingtheir independof spacewhichhavegiven necessities ence from the practical

do not wish to be of Mondrian The spaceographs by the artificial anddestroyed theyareembarrassed framed; theymust to givethemspatial depth. If anything, attempt us walls,ceilings,floorsin the first place. I have often from suspended thoughtthat they mightbe free hanging,
the ceiling perhaps or placed upon partitions or tables of

but the pure effortsof two-dimensional space expression demonstrations even,if onemay determination, geometrical
speak so quaintly of a work of plastic art. This is why I

glass. For they are not the productsof space transparent

call themspaceographs. hasfor Mondrian thanthis,rectangularity But further universe.If the valueof a stabilized the private symbolic
of the formswithin true contentof realityis an equivalence

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ALBERTWILLIAM LEVI

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space congruent with the formal properties of space, this equivalence finds its perfect metaphor in the rectangular figure. All art dominated by two-dimensionality is expressive of the relationshipof the rectangle. This for Mondrian is an axiom of technique as well as a statement of metaphysical intelligibility. Since the relation of the rectangular Position is constant, it will be applied whenever the work demands the expressionof stability. And when will a work of art demand the expression of stability? Whenever it seeks to go beyond what is evanescent in experience and to symbolize the fixity behind experience. Mondrian'sPlatonism make the timeless answer to the Modern Sophist: One realizes more and more the relativity of everything and therefore one tends to reject the idea of fixed laws, of a single truth. This is very understandable,but does not lead to profound vision. For there are made laws, discovered laws, but also laws-a truth for all time. The plastic means chosen to illustrate the truth for all time suggest by their cleanlinessa veritable participation in the truth itself. There are no muddy earth colors here, no ambiguousgreys and blues, no color harmoniesseducing the mind from its simple apprehensionof contour into a kind of dreamy chromatic forgetfulness. The sharp lines are black against white. The parsimony of color yields only to a sparing placement of primaries,red, yellow and blue. Everywhere there is lucidity. Everywhere there are the clarities of simple opposition. The opposition of forms and their colors gives to the canvas its own peculiar dynamism. This is heightened by the effect of straight lines crossing and intersecting at right angles. Lines whose primary function is the division of space, still indicate the more mobile concept of direction. The suggestiveness of Mondrian may lie in the emotional attention which his canvases direct toward a pure spatiaeity, and it is not a dead spatiality but one instinct with life and motion. Still, it is not restless, and this calm which

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falls upon the sea of space, this sunset of two-dimensionality gives in apperceptionthe tranquility of the final absolute. It is a tranquility which has nothing more to do with the dizziness of everyday life and perhaps for this reason it has earned from some a quasi-resentmentsustainedby the senseof practicality. A mind docile to the insight that matter in motion presupposesthe sense of spatiality and that all of the artifacts of perception are but the witness to our practical necessity to carve out space, may grow impatient with an interest in pure spatiality which issues in the creative activity of carving out space. For it may find here not only what its own language calls an obsession toward escape, but much that casts a dim light upon its own everyday theatre of operations. And perhaps it does. Perhaps in this way it derives its supplenessand its strength. Perhaps it is there that the painting of Mondrian derives its assertive character. (Let us grant that it is an art wholly without moral humidity.) One statement gives the whole show away. Here is what he said: Art is only a substitute as long as the beauty of life is deficient. It will disappear in proportion as life gains in equilibrium. In some possiblerealm of unconscious intention the mists of interpretation clear a little. At this point each shining spaceograph takes its chin in its hands and opens its mouth to whisper: Where else is peace? This is why the most smiling canvas can be so moody: because it always asks at the very moment that it answers. Simultaneously a statement about reality is a question about life. The paintings of Mondrian carry with them a classic truth, beauty, and intellectual peace. They suggest a higher realm of fixed reality, of a spatiality which is outside time and without history and beyond decay. They invoke with ritual ease the universal and the invariant. In this formality lies Mondrian'sdisclosureof the real. (This is not to deny that he was a crochety man.) He was indeed crochety. He loved straight lines and

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for him an he cared lessfor people. Naturefinallybecame

affront-it was too unreal. He disliked particular move-

in action. Alsohenever married.How mentsuchaspeople

of every woman'sbreast could he? Was not the roundness

Towardthe end he was a challenge to his metaphysics? very lonely. Also towardthe end a new elementseemsto have
enteredhis painting. It would be foolish to call it confu-

aliento the qualityof sion. Confusion was intrinsically It is as his vision. Bettercall it a kind of restlessness. of his earlier canvases cadences were thoughthe ordered
forced to give way before a kind of plastic syncopation. In

the yearor so beforehe diedhe did a series of Broadway

Boogie-Woogies.The structureremains the same,the white background of the canvascut and cross-cutby the parallels of demarcation. But the verticalsand horizontalsare no

longerblack. They are composed of minutesquares and of juxtaposed rectangles primaries, mostlyred and yellow. Theeffectis incredible.Movement is everywhere. Lines of simpledivisionbecomeaxesof energetic vibration. Jazz
has mated with geometry. Pure spatiality has been invaded

by dizziness. ity and orderbasedupon a universe of two-dimensional beforea bleating spacetrembling trombone and a frantic drum? Had the timecometo qualifythe dignityof space by an infusionof pureenergy? Was the newervisionto be that of a dynamic universe of purevitality? He died thenat a moment of newyouthfulness. Who wouldhave thoughtthe old man had so much bloodin him?
Did the change in the plastic expressionindicate a changein the realityconceptof the artist? Was the seren-

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