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Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man
A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century.
MONDRIAN: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute, by Nicholas Fox Weber
The painter David Salle once wrote — he was quoting a friend — that you could recognize one of Alex Katz’s canvases if it fell out of an airplane at 30,000 feet. The same is true of the Dutch-born painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). His grids and super-luminous yellows, reds and whites are instantly identifiable.
Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography, “Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute,” is a big and especially beautiful book from a publisher, Knopf, that has been making beautiful books for more than a century. To glimpse “Mondrian” is to want to own and display it. What’s inside is of more varying merit.
Weber, who has previously written lives of Balthus and Le Corbusier, has delivered a necessary book, in the sense that this is a rare full-dress biography of Mondrian, the reclusive painter who drifted from figurative painting to geometric and boldly colored abstractions, becoming in the process one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century.
The common reader — as Samuel Johnson called you and me — may find that 600 pages of Mondrian is a lot of Mondrian. This is especially so because Weber’s prose is monochromatic. Painting after painting is described in detail. These descriptions are literary chloroform.
This reader began to feel that he was chewing through a block of wood. Every moment is held a beat too long. But Mondrian was a deeply eccentric man, and the details of his alienlike existence keep you turning the pages.
His father was a school headmaster, a strict and severe Orthodox Protestant, who didn’t want his son to become a painter. But one of Mondrian’s uncles was a successful commercial artist who gave him lessons and set him on his way.
