"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"Museums are indeed the churches of progressive-minded people, since they celebrate just the qualities that fanatics and dogmatists want to quelch..."

"... the vigorous acceptance of uncertainty that lets us ask new questions and leaves us unsure about which way is up. Not knowing which way is up is indeed part of the point. 'If I turn the work around, I risk destroying it,' the curator in charge of the exhibition where the Mondrian was to be shown said... adding that 'maybe there is no right or wrong orientation at all?'... Abstract art was meant to interrogate premises... The reason that pictures of Mondrian’s kind are inestimably precious to the human spirit... is that they are the last place where individual purpose and human pluralism are so ferociously honored. The values that are most important—and ones which progressives are most inclined to honor—are those which empower the greatest range of people to self-expression with the greatest possible individuality."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "The Case of the Upside-Down Mondrian/A great work of art always produces a vital disorientation" (The New Yorker).

Why does Gopnik keep saying "progressive"? It doesn't sound like the so-called "progressives" in American politics today.

To view the "vigorous acceptance of uncertainty" as the central quality of progressivism runs directly counter to the idea Biden proclaimed in his speech last night. Am I progressive if I vigorously accept that we can never really know who won the 2020 election or am I a dark demon of chaos? Is Biden a fanatic or dogmatist for wanting to quelch those who won't embrace the "right" answer?

You're looking to buy a new home, you begin with high hopes, you're clicking through photos on Zillow...

... and you get to this:

What you think is...

Hell no.

Weird, but I'm weird.

Fantastic! Mondrian!!

I get it, I do care about art, and I appreciate idiosyncrasy, but it just seems... unwise.

 

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Mondrian kept an artificial flower, painted white, in his studio to express the feeling of "the lack of a woman in his daily life."

According to the card stuck to the wall in a London museum next to a 1926 photograph by André Kertész, which you can see here. The white paint — we were told by some curator — was "to banish entirely any recollection of the green he found so intolerable."

I copied those words down in my notebook in 2002 — the last time I was in London — along with a sort of diagram of the composition of the photograph:



That scan comes from a notebook I found, a notebook that — back in 2013 — I had talked about losing:

I have a notebook of drawings/writings done at a big Paul Klee show, done in London in about 2003, just before starting this blog. I'd like to copy the pages and blog it. I was analyzing/riffing on the... ideas that he used.

Wonder where I put that.

Back then, betamax3000 had said: "NOW you are teasing me. I want that post." Okay, I will get around to that. I have 9 pages of notes, which, if I remember correctly from 12 years ago, were intended to be the code-broken instructions for how to draw/paint like Paul Klee. But for now, you'll have to consider the womanlessness of Piet Mondrian.



Expressed by Yves Saint Laurent:

Camille Paglia on our "strange and contradictory culture" where our "primary aesthetic experiences" — iPhones and such — have "no spiritual dimension."

In the Wall Street Journal:

The routine defamation of capitalism by armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time....

Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design.... But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.

Drive-by photography — L.A.

It wasn't all fisheye photography in L.A. I don't always have my big SLR camera at hand, but I do always have my Sony DSC-T9 at hand and often in hand — where it fits as easily as a deck of cards. It was fun to use the T9 from the passenger seat. Yes, on my trip to L.A., I had the benefit of never driving. So I was always looking at the scenery — fascinating, because we avoided the freeway — and seeing things to snap. Here are my 4 favorite drive-by shots:

1. (Enlarge.) A chance collage that seems to have everything: Marilyn, Elvis, the Beatles, a dog, an ATM machine, a traffic light, Thai food, Mexican food, a smiling guy waiting for the Metro, graffiti, "sop," "flo," "order now," a manly arm receiving a California tan. Yes, of course, it's cropped. (Uncropped.)



2. (Enlarge.) Like Madison, Wisconsin, and unlike NYC, L.A. has signs telling you the names of the neighborhoods. Here you see a sign for Thai Town. Under the sign are 2 women. Neither appears to be Thai. They look like hardworking individuals — do they have jobs that require white shirts and long blue pants? — waiting for the bus. The apt words "Working World" appear on a newspaper vending box. There's also the L.A. Times, and 2 women in shorts and flip-flops who don't seem to have to go to work. I love the colorful buildings — ocher and pink on one side and white-orange-blue Mondrian-inspired on the other. I love the checked sidewalk in pink, white, and 2 shades of gray. Fruit, palm trees, street lights, quintuple traffic lights. A very blue sky resonates with a blue sign that says "Western." There's a smaller sign that says "Hollywood/Western" and I know those are the intersecting streets, but it makes me think of a Hollywood western, and then I notice the black and white photographs of actressy models in the windows in the lower left corner and return to the rock-solid women waiting for the bus.



3. (Enlarge.) I only wanted to drive by Grauman's Chinese Theater, so my feelings vibrated with the pink-haired girl who was just trying to slurp up some caffeine and get home with her groceries. I love her squinty sneer as she slump walks past the Jack Sparrow impersonator and toward the hands (like mine) pointing a tiny camera at the scene. In a differently pink shirt, to the right of the shot, we see a woman who's happy to play the tourist and take a shot of her friend who's about to attempt a movie-star pose while standing on a sidewalk star. (And it would have been a better picture if we could see the friend posing, as we can in the next shot.)



4. (Enlarge!) On our way to LAX, we pass a famous icon, the giant doughnut at Randy's Donuts, that Wikipedia informs me — in a ludicrously somber tone — "dates back to a period during the mid-20th Century that saw a proliferation of programmatic architecturely designed buildings throughout Southern California that were made in the shape of the products they sold." And I'm not going to perseverate —or proliferate any programmatic perorations — about the proper spelling of "doughnut." It's "doughnut." I established that rock-solidly — architecturely? — here.