It is a surprising experience to see the early avenues Piet Mondrian (1872 – 1944) explored in his art, something I recently discovered while wandering through “The Figurative Mondrian” at Musée Marmottan-Monet in Paris. At times, I felt like I was crossing paths with a few sleepy cows in their pasture or happening upon a silent, peaceful farm. The early paintings asked for quiet contemplation on how creation and humanity intersect.
Artists have wrestled with concepts like human spirituality in their work since the beginning, but Mondrian’s transition from physical to ethereal embodiments of spirituality especially interest me. As I wandered through the beautifully-curated exhibition outlining Mondrian’s development from realism to neoplasticism, I couldn’t help but think of how, in its distinct focus on the spiritual realm, his work is consonant with the writing of Wendell Berry
Berry and Slijper
As a young man, Wendell Berry traveled through Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship and taught in New York City before moving back to his hometown in Kansas to write. While the rest of the efficiency-focused world prized forward momentum, Berry took a route that prized living in response to the seasons. His writings now focus on sustainable agriculture, and his poetry contemplates human spirituality and quiet scenes from life on his farm. If his words were visual art, they might be Mondrian’s early, realist paintings.
Saloman Slijper was the most important collector of Mondrian’s work. He purchased many paintings at a time when Mondrian was struggling to make ends meet, and his favorites of all of Mondrian’s paintings were always the figurative ones. Slijper was more than a client to Mondrian: he was a close friend. He purchased works without looking at them and single-handedly provided enough business for Mondrian to live in Paris for about a year. Towards the later part of Mondrian’s career, Slijper bought three neoplastic works that are the compositions typically associated with the artist’s oeuvre. Not long after that, he asked for another “old fashioned” painting, but Mondrian refused. The catch for the artist was that his later works dabbled in a purely spiritual realm, completely abandoning content rooted in material reality. For Slijper, and I imagine in some capacity for Wendell Berry, such purely abstract images miss the point.
Spirituality in Realist Nature
In the beginning of his career, Mondrian was influenced by the Hague and Barbizon schools of art, which sought to capture the “spiritual experience of nature itself,” and which the beginning of the exhibition explores. Although these works, like Crépuscule (1906), are far from Mondrian’s most famous compositions, they share their blocky elements, as they emphasize the geometry of the cows, trees, and structures he depicts. Unlike his later works, this early work focuses on atmosphere, weather, and lighting to signify the wonder that anyone who spends time in nature eventually experiences.
Despite his tendency towards experimentation, throughout his entire career Mondrian kept a daily practice of painting flowers. The exhibition concedes that part of his motivation for the practice was market-driven, since not many people in the early 20th century were keen on buying his graphic, geometric paintings. The clients he painted the flowers for were perhaps more in the Wendell Berry school of thought. They valued what Mondrian thought was an “old fashioned” view of art’s ability to depict the spiritual.
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
[Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”]
Spirituality Through Luminism
As the exhibition collects all of Mondrian’s figurative works together, the earlier, realist landscapes are not the main focal point. Instead, the next section in the exhibition focuses on paintings influenced by theosophist and luminist schools of thought, which act as gateways from the spirituality glancingly perceived in the natural world to the capacity of art itself to communicate the spiritual.
I found Mondrian’s luminist period aesthetically interesting in a way that was different from the early work. The earlier paintings took my breath away with their cool, quiet calm. The next phase of paintings use color and texture as if to engage more senses than sight alone. They feel like windows into the world through Mondrian’s eyes rather than having him depict a reality we both live in. Light filtering through trees, or a still-life of dying sunflowers, images that are palpably spiritual, feel beautifully in line with Berry’s poetry, which is focused on small-scale sustainable agriculture and an almost timeless lifestyle. Mondrian’s Bois près d’Oele (1908) is a large work, and although it depicts a composition of the natural world, it seeks to capture the light and luminosity radiating through the trees, instead of the world as it appears to the naked eye. In other words, the focus shifts from the seen to the unseen.
Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground
Underfoot. Be it lighted by the light that falls
Freely upon it after the darkness of the nights
And the darkness of our ignorance and madness.
Let it be lighted also by the light that is within you,
Which is the light of imagination. By it you see
The likeness of people in other places to yourself
In your place. It lights invariably the need for care
Toward other people, other creatures, in other places
As you would ask them for care toward your place and you.
[Wendell Berry, from Leavings]
Spirituality in Humanity
Portraits show up in multiple artistic movements throughout Mondrian’s career. In fact, the portraits unite the show from beginning to end, as he completed portraits influenced by theosophy, luminism, and cubism. Theosophy focuses on Eastern religions, philosophy, and science to find the truth of all things, and Mondrian’s self-portraits from 1908 show his engagement with that group of thinkers and include him in the symbolist art movement. Again, the spiritual element—that is, the abstracted, imagined aspects included in the portrait—take emphasis over seen reality.
In his Portrait d’une Jeune Fille and Devotion (1908), the young woman’s face is glowing, as if in a state of religious euphoria. So too the cubist portraits deeply-rooted in the figures that seek to depict, if obliquely, recognizable human forms, instead of focusing primarily on abstraction. The abstraction is a means to an end, instead of the end itself. While Mondrian apparently did not adhere to any traditional religion to flesh out his understanding of spirituality, the idea that humanity processes the physical world through the spiritual is obviously as relevant to his work as it is to Berry’s. Mondrian at this stage of his career appears to acknowledge the existence of something more than the physical realm through the vibrant colors and brush strokes of his portraits. In the same way, Berry at every stage of his career acknowledges that what he does for a living is much more than the physical elements of agriculture. While their art is expressed in vastly different mediums in different time periods and for different end goals, the work of both Mondrian and Berry communicate experience with and understanding of human spirituality.
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
[Wendell Berry, “A Spiritual Journey”]
Even though Mondrian eventually made abstraction the subject of his work, instead of a means to depict a spiritually inflected reality, and thus becoming a leading artist of the neoplastic movement, the earlier works in Mondrian’s development that include realistic subject matter still held weight for people like Slijper, and as a result of this exhibition, they do for me, too. Like Slijper, Wendell Berry understands the visceral connection between humans and nature as a source of spirituality, which allows him to connect to his particular, and devoted, audience. The spirituality woven throughout Mondrian’s figurative compositions resonated deeply with Slijper, which made “The Figurative Mondrian” possible for a wide and new audience to connect with so many years later.
