I am not a painter.
Piet Mondrian [Dutch, 1872-1944>
The Mondrian Exhibit, now at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, is well worth the admission. Funny, I used to chase a girl in Ft. Worth and never made it to the museum, but then, she left town, and I’m there a lot. And I finally got to see the museum, too. And I’m not even sure what \\that\\ proves, but I’m sure it proves something about women and Ft. Worth.
The Kimbell’s exhibit is called “Mondrian 1892-1914: the Path to Abstraction.” Before we go \\any\\ further, let’s get a few points cleared up. I know fuck-all about art, modern art, postmodern art, impressionist, perspective, realists, linear, non-linear, whatever they teach them kids over in the Art History Department. Got that? Hate to be crude and vulgar, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to express my intimate lack of knowledge about this topic. I couldn’t tell an abstraction from a modern from a cubist or a cubicle. Zilch. Zero. Nada. Dada.
I am not a painter. Nor, for that matter am I a studied critic in these circles. I’ve been to the Louvre, I kind of dig the National Gallery in London, and the last time I was at the new Tate Gallery, I had one of those “art” experiences that shook me up a little. There was a Jackson Pollock painting, about 15 feet long, maybe 20 or 25 feet long, and for the first time – ever – I could understand why – and how – his “dribble” paintings made sense. There was a flow, action, some sense of feeling involved with that one painting. It got up and rocked and rolled right along. No, I didn’t “get it,” but I did get something, a sense of activity, like a timeline, or like the painting had a plot, sort of. After looking at the painting, I had a sense that my world-view had been enlarged, changed, and I was different for the experience, emotionally richer.
So I saw the sign for the Mondrian Exhibit, and I went back for it. Well worth the trip. After covering something like 600 miles of Texas in an afternoon, going back just to see some stuff ont he walls of dusty museum was no big deal.
The title said, “The Path to Abstraction,” and that’s what it’s about. It starts with his earlier paintings. Some of them are fairly realistic impressions of scenes from the Netherlands. Same trip I saw the new Tate, I also saw Amsterdam for the first time. Pretty cool. We included the art museum there – I think it was Van Gogh. Maybe Picasso. It was one of those guys. Anyway, whichever painter it was, he was a running buddy of Piet Mondrian, and had some influence over the guys life. With the show in Ft. Worth, I was able to see, step-by-step, how the abstraction idea came to work.
First, there’s a series of landscapes and other similar images from Amsterdam and the surrounding countryside, windmills, water, farms, water, trees, water, and so forth. Lots of water, and even in his earlier works, Mondrian had a way of making water appear wet, almost fluid, right there on the painting. Get up close, and scrutinize the painting, and you can tell it’s just oil paint or crayon or charcoal, but step back, and it looks like the water is moving. I remember one charcoal sketch, out of series of three images of the same farm, done at different times, and even with the limits of burnt charcoal, the water appeared to move. [Around here, charcoal is used as an art form in a completely different way – BBQ.> Throughout the display of the earlier works, often there would be series of different mediums used on nearly identical images. Same setting, different stuff. Almost as if he – as the artist – was trying to refine the image to get to its essence.
The later stuff started with a tree. I got that postcard and sent it to Sagittarius buddy, matter of fact. The tree itself was clearly visible, but the background was a wash of colors, creating the beginning of his steps into abstraction – be my guess.
Influences from Picasso – I think – and cubists were evident later in the exhibit. One painting particularly caught my eye, sort of grey-purple thing with lots of black lines and patchwork colors, and all I could think of was his earlier work with trees. What it looked like to me. The little fine print that went with that one painting was what really got me thinking, see, they art history aficionados had x-rayed the painting, and Mondrian had worked on that canvas for a while, there was a picture underneath it. Obviously, that he’d been doing was trying to get at the very essence of whatever it was he was painting.
By the end of his career, and yes, Ft. Worth owns one of those masterpieces, it’s nothing more than a white canvas with black lines, a couple of red squares, and – I think – two yellow squares. There’s a similar one of his, I’ve seen it either at one of the museums of modern art [NY, SF, London, Dallas> or just in picture, but to me, it’s a cityscape. Like my “art” experience with the Jackson Pollock, this one image has stayed with me for most of my life.
The picture, that image, the painting, the artwork, captures the feeling of a cityscape in a few lines. The movement, the bustle, the action of an inhabited place. Movement. In a few short squares of color.
I can’t even begin to paint like that. I am not a painter.
