Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie Author(S): Harry Cooper Source: October, Vol

Mondrian, Hegel, Boogie Author(s): Harry Cooper Source: October, Vol. 84 (Spring, 1998), pp. 118-142 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779211 . Accessed: 08/09/2013 10:46

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HARRY COOPER

I couldgive all to Timeexcept--except WhatI myselfhave held. But whydeclare Thethings forbidden that while the Customs slept I havecrossed to Safety with? For I am There, And whatI wouldnot part withI havekept. -Robert Frost,"If I Could GiveAll to Time" (1942)

In September 1938, anticipatingwar and concerned for the safetyof his works,Mondrian left Paris for London. In October 1940, bombed out of his Hampstead apartment,he arrivedin New York,which had been his goal all along. But despite the removal, the blitz lingered in his mind. Foghorns on the East Riversounded like air raid warnings,July 4 fireworkslike bombs,and he set about making blackout curtains.1All this betrays age and nerves, but perhaps guilty relief too, for Mondrian's New York years were among his happiest. He had a spacious apartment thanks to his friend and patron Harry Holtzman. He was lionized by artists,both fellowexpatriates and youngAmericans. His belief that "city-cultureis freeing[mankind] fromthe grasp of nature"2was perfectlyreal-

* This essayis based on a talk deliveredat the College ArtAssociation on February15, 1997, and incorporateselements of myPh.D. dissertation,"Dialectics of Painting: Mondrian's Diamond Series, 1918-1944" (Harvard University,1997). Thanks to Yve-AlainBois forguiding mywork on Mondrian, toJoopJoosten and Angelica Rudenstinefor their generous help, to Hester Diamond forallowing me to inspectMondrian's BoogieWoogie, and to Sarah Boxer forher commentson the manuscript.The fol- lowingabbreviations are used throughout:NANL for TheNew Art-The NewLife: The CollectedWritings ofPiet Mondrian,ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986); PM for Piet Mondrian,1872-1944, exhibitioncatalogue (Haags Gemeentemuseum,National Galleryof Art,The Museum of Modern Art,1994-96); and Seuphor forMichel Seuphor,Piet Mondrian: Life and Art(New York:Abrams, [1956]). 1. This information is from Charmion von Wiegand's typescriptjournal of her visits with Mondrian, parts of which have been published in Von Wiegand, "Mondrian: A Memoir of His New York Period," Arts Yearbook4 (1961), pp. 57-65; Margit Rowell, "Interview with Charmion von Wiegand," Piet Mondrian Centennial Exhibition,exhibition catalogue (New York: Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum, 1971), pp. 77-86; and Seuphor,p. 181. 2. Mondrian [Metropolis,c. 1942], NANL,p. 391.

OCTOBER 84, Spring1998, pp. 119-42. ? 1998 OctoberMagazine, Ltd. and MassachusettsInstitute of Technology.

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iMiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii~i iii

278 boulevardRaspail. Summer 1937. (Photo:Cas Oorthuys.) ized byManhattan, and especiallyby boogie-woogie music, a recentlyrediscovered form of piano blues then enjoying great popularity. Holtzman, who knew of Mondrian's long enthusiasmfor popular music,played him some boogie records as soon as he arrived,and Mondrian declared the music (attemptingto render colloquial Frenchinto English) "enormous,enormous."3 Still, no matterhow taken he was with Manhattan, Mondrian must have missed Paris. His exile ended over twentyyears there,including fifteen straight yearsin the studio at 26, rue du D6part, a continuityessential to his workon its abstractinterior. By 1940 he was thoroughlyuprooted, first by a movewithin Paris in 1936, forcedby urban renewal,then by his emigrationvia London to NewYork. He used to strollproudly through the notoriousdouble trafficcircle at place de l'Opera, a latter-dayflaineur. In New York he had trouble crossing the streets, missed the sightof Paris prostitutes,and patronized a cheap French restaurant forits red-and-whitetablecloths.4 Of course, Mondrianwould have dismissedany feelings of nostalgiaor dislo-

3. Holtzman played the recordson Mondrian's firstor second nightin New York.See Holtzman, "Piet Mondrian: The Man and His Work,"NANL, p. 2, and Virginia Pitts Rembert, "Mondrian, America,and American Painting" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University,1970), p. 33. Mondrian owned fiveboogie-woogie albums and frequented,among other clubs and dance halls, the Caf6 Society Downtown,which showcased the music. 4. Theo van Doesburg toJ. J. P. Oud, February4, 1920, quoted in NANL,p. 124: "One could cross the Place de l'Opera onlywith the greatestcaution, but Mondrian did it as calmlyas if he were in his atelier."The informationabout NewYork is fromVon Wiegand'sjournals.

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cation as "individual,""tragic," and "romantic,"not to mention embarrassingto a good internationalist.His anxietiesfound expression in a more allowable concern: namely,that exile mightbreak the flowof time,and thus of painting.If the New York workshave a subject, it is the shape of time or historyas such. Admittedly, this history,like Hegel's, is abstract,lacking the fullgrain of ordinaryreality. Yet Mondrian's picturesbear traces not only of his physicalbody, but of that other corpus, the workitself, which he feltbound to protect,transport, and shape into something that would register his experience. To read these traces, we must considerMondrian's thinkingabout time and change, in historyand in painting.

Hegeland Continuity Mondrian's great subject, in some sense his medium,was time. This is the opposite of the accepted view,that Mondrian was a Platonic idealist who valued "being" not "becoming,"and wanted his workexperienced all at once, in a tran- scendentinstant. As a recentcritic writes, Mondrian's "color planes all need to be seen at once fortheir meditative harmony to registerwith full force.... Mondrian's work seems to sit lotuslike in the harmonious austerityof his apartment. ... Mondrian's art is meant to transcend the material world."5That Greenbergian account would do well for manyan abstractpainter, but Mondrian's idealism was by no means purelyPlatonic. He subscribedto Hegel's critique of Plato, whichhe knewthrough the popular workof the Dutch Hegelian G. J. P.J.Bolland, ifnot also directly.Hegel qualified Plato's celebration of eternal Forms with a Heraclitan emphasison change and flux.6He insistedthat time could be transcendedonly by workingthrough it, and likewise,that the ideal could only be approached along the path of material embodiment. "Spirit necessarilyappears in Time," wrote Hegel, "so long as it has not grasped its pure Notion, has not annulled Time."7 "Beyondtime is the True Reality,"Mondrian paraphrased,but (significantlyswitch- ing the emphasis) "we are livingin time.We have to reckonwith its Changing."8

5. Simon Schama, "Dangerous Curves,"The New Yorker,November 4, 1996. 6. Hegel's Scienceof Logic famously opens bycontrasting the "pure being" of Parmenides(crucial for Plato's theoryof Forms) withthe "becoming"of the "deep-thinking"Heraclitus, and proceeds to derive becoming fromthe dialectic of being and nothing (G. W. F. Hegel, Scienceof Logic, trans. A. V. Miller [AtlanticHighlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1969], p. 83). Significantly,it was the qualityof "becoming" in distinctionto "being" thatTheo Van Doesburg insistedon in his firstreview of Mondrian'swork in 1915. See PM, p. 170. Of course,Hegel can figurein manyways. Annette Michelson argues thatwhat the De Stijlartists heard in Hegel was "the stilledvoice of Becomingin the repose of AbsoluteSpirit, in the place where the Dialectic comes to rest, that point beyond Time, at the end of History,"and that Mondrianmore thanVan Doesburg hoped to "instantiatethe movementof the Dialectic towardIdeality throughthe progressiveelimination of particulardetermination" ("De Stijl,Its Other Face: Abstraction and Cacaphony,or WhatWas the Matterwith Hegel?" October22 [Fall 1982], pp. 8, 11). Withoutat all denyingthe importanceto Mondrianof an idealistteleology, the presentessay emphasizes the material, temporal,"becoming" half of the dialectic in Mondrian,as in Hegel, and the difficultyand resistance thataccumulate as the historicalendpoint of the dialecticis feltto approach. 7. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenologyof Spirit,trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977), p. 487. 8. Mondrian [Life,Time, Evolution,c. 1938-44], NANL,p. 361.

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As earlyas 1922,Mondrian understood the viewingof his paintingas temporal, even ifa totalimpression was the desiredstarting point and endpoint.Buried in his essay on the possibilityof a "neo-plasticmusic" are some rare instructionsto the viewer:"After the totalimpression, our eye goes froma plane to itsoppositions, from oppositionsto plane. From this arises no repetitionbut continually[telkens] new relationship[s]through which the total impressionis fixed in us."9The passage recalls Goethe's account of afterimagesin his Theoryof Colors,a workMondrian clearlyknew, and fromthere it is linkedto whatCrary has called Hegel's "sweeping repudiationof Lockean perception"in favorof a "dynamic,dialectical account."10 Given its complexity,the passage is worthparaphrasing. Aesthetic synthesis (a "totalimpression") can be deepened and internalized("fixed in us") by a gaze that is dialectical or structuredby dualities ("froma plane to its oppositions"), progressive(getting something "new" fromthe "repetition"of a back-and-forth scan), and continuous or seamless ("continuallynew relationship").Opposition, progress, continuity--theseare the veryqualities that Hegel attributedin his Phenomenologyto the historicalevolution of Spirit.Mondrian's awarenessof thisis signaled in anotherpassage: "A true conception of the essentialmeaning of spirit and nature in man shows . . a continual [voortdurende]sacrifice of inward to outward and outward to inward.., .serving to broaden man's individualinwardness (spirit)toward universal inwardness.""11 In this passage, a constant,progressive inwardnessis won fromthe to-and-froof history;in the firstpassage, perceptual progress is wrestedfrom a back-and-forthscan. The parallelism that Mondrian forgesbetween these twodifferent phenomenologies (of vision,of Spirit) suggests thatfor him, looking at pictureswas a microcosmof human evolution.His ambition was nothingless than to tame our eyes' saccadic motion to the world-rhythmof dialectic. From this fundamentalcrossroads in Mondrian's theory,one could follow manyleads. I will begin witha single word, the inconspicuous "continually"that appears in each of the last two passages. Mondrian regularlyused "continually" (voortdurend,telkens, or aanhoudend)to modifynotions of progressand opposition in art and life.12But the idea that motion between opposites is continuous is counterintuitive,and raises severalproblems. In each case, Mondrianhas recourse to Hegel, explicitlyor implicitly,to statethe problemor tryto solveit.

9. Mondrian, "Neo-Plasticism:Its Realization in Music and in Future Theater" (1922), NANL,p. 162 (translationmodified). 10. "It [the eye] is forcedto a sortof opposition,which, in contrastingextreme with extreme, inter- mediate degree withintermediate degree, at the same time combines these opposite impressions,and thusever tendsto be whole" (Goethe, Theoryof Colours, trans. Charles Eastlake [Cambridge:MIT Press, 1970], p. 13; quoted and discussed in Jonathan Crary, Techniquesof the Observer:On Visionand Modernityin theNineteenth Century [Cambridge: MIT Press,1990], p. 99). 11. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting"(1917), NANL,p. 48 (translationmodified). 12. See, for example, "The New Plastic in Painting,"pp. 39, 48, 53, 55; and "Natural Realityand AbstractReality: A Trialogue (While Strollingfrom the Countryto the City)" (1919-20), NANL,pp. 90, 108, 114.

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What ensures that sharp oppositions will be continuous at all, rather than becoming a series of hiccups or degenerating entirely?In Hegel's words, why don't the "intermittence"and "retrogression"of historythreaten its "continued processes of growth"? Mondrian keenly felt the need for an explanation, a Hegelian "theodicy."'13He explained the tenacious public taste for realisticart by assertingthat "progress... had inevitablyfirst to bring about a degeneration of pure plastic expressionand a perfectingof naturalform."14 But if historymoved in such a perverseway, how was it nonetheless "a gradation-a series of increas- inglyadequate expressionsor manifestationsof Freedom,"as Hegel wrote?15 Historymight stumble, Hegel explained,but each gap or retreatcontributed to a "purerSpirit" because Thought, the latentengine of the process,performed an "annulling... at the same time conservativeand elevatingin its operation."16 This is one of Hegel's cleareststatements of the essential dialectical principle of Aufhebungor sublation, the mutual cancellation, preservation,and elevation of termswithin an opposition.17Whether the peculiar logic of sublation providesa satisfyinganswer to the problem of how historycan be continuous in its very interruptionsis doubtfulat best. What mattersfor us is thatMondrian believed it did: "Opposites in general, in their deepest sense, have no stability. . . . they are destroyedby theirmutual opposition (Hegel; Bolland, Pure Reason)." As a result, "man moves... continuallytoward a new,deeper individualinwardness."18 There is a related problem. How does repetition ("from a plane to its oppositions,from oppositions to plane") lead to development ("continuallynew relationship")?How does "repeated union of the opposites ... bring about the new: progress"?19The problem is only magnified by the fact that Mondrian subscribed to Hegel's sharp distinctionbetween the "perpetuallyself-repeating cycle"of natureand the developingdynamic of cultureor Spirit.20It was a corner- stone of Mondrian's theory:"We see the natural outside of man repeatingitself, for (in this world) nature is bound to the law of repetition;but man's spiritis (relatively)free and-in evolving-abolishes this repetition [heeftdie herhaling op]."21 Given the syncopated, asymmetricalpenchant of Neo-Plastic painting,

13. G. W. E Hegel, ThePhilosophy ofHistory, trans. J. Sibree (NewYork: Dover, 1956), p. 56; on theodicy, see pp. 15, 457. 14. Mondrian, "The New Art-The New Life: The Cultureof Pure Relationships"(1931), NANL,p. 250. Likewise,he assertedthat "civilization ... accomplishesthe task of reducingthe oppressionof the natural-physicalaspect preciselyby cultivating the materialside of life" (NANL,p. 254). 15. Hegel, Philosophyof History, p. 63. 16. Ibid., pp. 73, 77. 17. On Aufhebung,see Hegel, Scienceof Logic, pp. 106-8; and Michael Inwood, A HegelDictionary (Oxford: BlackwellPublishers, 1989), pp. 283-85. 18. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 48 note i. 19. Ibid.,"p. 53. 20. Hegel, PhilosophyofHistory, p. 54. It is possiblethat Mondrian also receivedthis idea via Theosophy. In Rudolph Steiner's1908 lecturesgiven in The Netherlands,a transcriptof whichMondrian owned, the "etheric"(animal) principleof repetitionis contrastedwith the higher,"astral" principle of development. 21. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 48 note g.

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passages like this have been taken as evidence that Mondrian simplyoutlawed repetition.But in the original,the word translatedhere as "abolish" is the Dutch opheffen,cognate of the German aufheben.While translatorsmay wish to avoid the alarming term "sublation,"only a word that preserves its triple sense (abolish, preserve,lift up) can conveyMondrian's complex attitudeto repetition:Spirit did not banish its natural,repetitive matrix, but sublatedit. Artwas a formalreflection of this process. In a section of the Aestheticsthat maywell have been importantto Mondrian givenits advocacyof straightlines and pure primary colors, Hegel described musical harmony as the sublation of repetition:"This relation advances beyond conformityto law,which has in itself the aspect of regularity,and rises above equality and repetition."22Likewise, Mondrian believed that the "continuous sublation" of pictorial oppositions converted"repetition" into a "rhythminteriorized."23 Sublation solved (or restated) the paradox of repetitionand rhythm/evolution. Mondrian immediatelyadded that this pictorial dynamismalso converted "sequence" into "plastic unity."Which raises another difficulty:How can any rhythmpersist once sequence is compressed into unity? How (recalling Mondrian'sinstructions to the viewer)can we discovera paintingwithout changing our "total impression"?Hegel offereda solution at the level of Spirit. Here the question becomes: How can a universalviewpoint oversee its own development? How does the upward spiral of historyknow where to go next?24The secret behind this "cunningof reason" was a yardstick(Massstab) dwelling within each changing moment. Spiritwas bipolar,both above historyand in it. Its Idea was beyond time,but its agents,will and consciousness,were crucially"sunk in their primarymerely natural life." As a result,Spirit did not exhibitthe "tranquilityof mere [natural]growth" but a "workingagainst itself."25 This conflictwas condensed in a presentthat was also past and future: Nothing in the past is lost for it [Spirit],for the Idea is ever present; Spiritis immortal;with it there is no past, no future,but an essential now. This necessarilyimplies that the presentform of Spirit compre- hends withinit all earliersteps.26 It would be hard to find a better description of the embracing temporalityof

22. Hegel'sAesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1975), pp. 140-41; cited in Veerle Thielemanns, "Mondrian and Hegelian Dialectics: Appropriation or Subjection?" (unpublished student paper, Johns Hopkins University,spring 1990), p. 19. See also Mondrian's correspondence with Van Doesburg in 1919 about the issue of regularity:PM, pp. 184, 375. 23. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 40 (translationmodified). 24. On the spiral, see Charles Taylor,Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1975), pp. 35, 42. 25. Hegel, Philosophyof History, pp. 55, 33. On the "bipolarityof consciousness"in Hegel, see Taylor, Hegel,pp. 135-36. 26. Hegel, Philosophyof History, p. 79.

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Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism."All the art of the past collaborated in building the new art.., .brought it into being." And: "Only that art is trulyalive which gives expression to the contemporary--thefuture-consciousness."27 By splitting"all style"into a "transitoryappearance" and a "timeless content,"Mondrian could find somethingof value in all art, and portrayhis own as both cumulativeand projective.28 Clearly,we have been puzzling over paradoxes that presentno problem to Hegel's omnivorousLogic. But Mondrian, to his credit,struggled harder when the paradoxesdescended from History to the concretelevel of paintingand viewing. The final,lengthy section of Mondrian's "Trialogue" (1920) concerns his new arrangementsof colored cardboard rectanglesand painted furniturein his Paris studio:"Relatively speaking, the room can also be seen [like a painting]as a whole all at once. ... We surveythe room visually,but inwardlywe also form a single image.Thus, we perceiveall itsplanes as a singleplane."29 Here Mondrianproposes the dubious idea thata room can be feltas a singleplane, like a painting.30But in the next breath he raises two momentousobjections: "Is it so desirable to see the plastic expression as a whole? Doesn't paintingstill remain too much a 'thing'?" The firstquestion challenges the architecturalideal; the second projects that doubt back into painting,asking whether the classical pictorialgoals of unityand instantaneitydo not literallyreify (thing-ify) the picture. This is a Mondrian Greenbergnever read, forit is enough to challenge his "all-at-once"at its veryfoundation. Given Greenberg'spictorial essentialism, it is no accident that the challenge comes just where Mondrian blurs painting with another art, even one as apparentlymodest as arrangingcolored squares on the wall. Their presence kept Mondrian aware that the individual picture had a temporalityjust as complex as the decorated room. Not only did it require time and motion to see the room. The abstract interior adumbrated an afterlifeof painting that Mondrian invoked often,a post-Gesamtkunstwerkin which all the arts,and artitself, would be dissolvedinto life,and historywould come to rest. ApproachingHegel's "essentialnow," however, required thatone eye be kept firmlyfixed in the other direction,so that,as Hegel wrote,"nothing in the past is lost." Which brings us back to sublation. Derrida has pointed out (via Bataille's critique of Hegel) that Aufhebung"continuously links meaning up to itself... neverexceeds its closure."31Jean Clay sees all the tanglesof Mondrian's theoryas "a matterof leaving nothing, of surpassing in englobing, in the movementof

27. Mondrian,"The New Art-The New Life,"p. 250; "The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 30. 28. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting,"pp. 30-31. 29. Mondrian,"A Trialogue,"p. 113. 30. Yve-Alain Bois, "Mondrian and the Theory of Architecture,"Assemblage 4 (October 1987), pp. 120-21. Mondrian himselfqualified the idea: "by its verynature ...architecture is not a planar but corporeal plastic.... Both architectureand sculpturewill gain in purityby becoming planar plastic sofar as is possible"("The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 72 note u [emphasisadded]). 31. Jacques Derrida, "From Restrictedto General Economy: A Hegelianism WithoutReserve," in Writingand Difference,trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press,1978), p. 275.

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opheffing."32Clay's amoebic metaphor fitsnicely with Mondrian's double view of painting: like any organism, painting must remain distinctlybounded for the present,but musthave the capacityto assimilatedifference across its membranes in order to surviveand produce its own future. Exile presentedMondrian with the problemof registeringeverything, including differenceand discontinuityitself. His firstworks in NewYork made an effortto mitigaterupture, even whileeagerly responding to new stimuli.But since any such attemptis imperfect,he arrivedat a double stance,exploiting what Adorno calls"the fracturesleft by the process of integration."Adorno goes on to say,in a Hegelian mood, that "the traces of those elementsthat resistedintegration" should not be "erased,"but made to subsistin an "aestheticwhole."33 But what is a nonintegral whole?For thatmatter, what is an interruptedcontinuum? What does itlook like?

TransatlanticConstruction

Revision had always been part of Mondrian's method, but it became an obsession in New York. In the three and a quarter years he lived there,he only finishedthree of the paintingshe started,leaving a fourthunfinished at his death in February1944. Let's call these his all-Americanworks. He also got the strange idea of revisingseventeen works completed in Europe between 1935 and 1940, whichKermit Champa has dubbed the transatlanticpaintings.34 The early state of several transatlanticpictures is nicely captured in the photograph of Mondrian's studio at 278 boulevard Raspail fromthe summerof 1937. Take the work to the right of center, which reappeared with ten other transatlanticworks in Mondrian's one-man exhibition in January 1942 at the Valentine Gallery,his firstmajor show afterarriving in New York. (The picture, Compositionwith Yellow, Blue and Red [1937-42], whichis reproducedat the beginning of this essay,was bought shortlyafterward, and todayit is in the Tate Gallery.)If we compare its firstand finalstates, the characteristicNew Yorkadditions are easy to spot: free-floatingbars and blocks of color, unbounded by black outlines, always near the periphery.Mondrian also added black lines (one at left,two at right)and a large color plane (the yellowrectangle filling the upper leftcorner).35 And he made some of the whiteareas more painterlyand the black lines glossier. Mondrian said all this gave the works"more boogie-woogie,"referring no doubt to the resultingincrease in visualvariety and excitement,but thatis not the

32. Jean Clay,"Presentation [de Piet Mondrian, 'Le jazz et le neo-plasticisme'],"Macula 1 (1976), p. 78. 33. Theodor W. Adorno, AestheticTheory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 10. 34. KermitChampa, MondrianStudies (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press,1985). 35. Since the plane is yellow,it is possible thatOorthuys's black-and-white photograph simply does not capture it. But it seems likelythat Mondrian added it later,based on the pictureRhythm of Straight Lines (1937-42), a close cousin of the Tate painting.In this case, Mondrian added a blue plane in New York,also in the upper leftcorner, as provenby a 1938 photo in whichthe plane is clearlyabsent (PM, p. 276, fig.a).

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whole story.36Something more conservativeis happeningas well.In the Tate painting, the added color carefullylinks the new black lines to the old ones. Take the verticalline at left,which Mondrian added midwaybetween its neighborand the leftedge. It is not reallya memberof thatgroup of three lines to the right-not untilthe blue bar at lowerleft links them together, and suddenlythe threeintervals make harmonicsense. The same verticalis tied to the leftedge bythe yellowplane in the top leftcorner. At lowerright, Mondrian uses a shortred bar to bind another added black line to the edge of the canvas,but also to the leftof the composition: the red bar connects to the blue one along an impliedline of latitude.As in other transatlanticworks, these color bars act as spacers and binders,helping us read intervalsand securingthe structurewith a kindof visual orthodontia. In two unusual verticalworks, the bridgingdevice nearlyrises to the level of a theme. Mondrian showed CompositionNo. III White-Yellowat the Museum of Modern Art's"Cubism and AbstractArt" show in 1936 and revisedit forhis 1942 exhibition.The additionscarefully multiply the linksbetween the twosides of the paintingwithout violating the emptyvertical shaft that was the raison d'etre of the small series to which the workbelongs.37 Mondrian showed another member of thisseries in England in 1936 and revisedit along exactlythe same lines.38The revisedversions play a game in whicha line on one side of the divide is continued on the otherby one thatis thickened,colored, or (like the interruptedtabletop of a Cezanne still life) misaligned. These works meditate on exile, offeringan abstracticonography of its dialecticsof riftand continuity. What I mean by that last phrase is just that a bridge, in joining two shores, inevitablymeasures their separation. This explains an odd, seeminglymarginal detail. At the bottomof the Tate painting,three lines fromthe right(thus on an original black line), is the date "39/42". Rather than either change the original year or not, Mondrian inscribed two years,the way for example Joycedid at the end of Ulysses.39In a painting,this is veryunusual.

36. Mondrian's comment is reported by SidneyJanis, "School of Paris comes to U.S.," Decision2 (November-December1941); reprinted in Mondrian in theSidney Janis FamilyCollections, New York, exhibitioncatalogue (Haags Gemeentemuseum,1988), p. 10. 37. A differentreading of the revisionsis givenby MeyerSchapiro, one of the fewcommentators to have addressed the changes Mondrian made to the transatlanticpaintings. See his "Mondrian:Order and Randomness in AbstractPainting," Modern Art: 19thand 20thCenturies: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller,1978), p. 243. 38. This work is CompositionA (No. 1) (1935-42), Seuphor, catalogue no. 387 (reproduced upside down). For an installationphoto showingthe 1936 state on exhibitionat "Abstractand Concrete" in London, see Circle:Constructive Art in Britain 1934-40, exhibition catalogue (Kettle's Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 1982), p. 20 (top). The third member of the vertical series is CompositionNo. I (C) (1934-36; dated 1936), Seuphor,catalogue no. 385. Mondrian could not reviseit, as it had been sold in 1936. 39. On this "conventionof signingoff novels" considered as an "illocutionaryact," see Quentin Skinner,"A Replyto MyCritics," in Meaningand Context:Quentin Skinner and His Critics,ed. JamesTully (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 285. My thanksto Louis Cooper forthis reference.It should be noted thatMondrian had double-dated once before:he revisedthree 1921 worksto fillout a 1925 exhibitionin Dresden, and dated them "21-25".

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 10:46:28 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Above:"Cubism and AsbractArt, " The Museumof Modern Art. 1936. With CompositionNo. III White-Yellow.

Compositionwith Red, Yellow and Blue. 1935-42.

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Mondrian's motivewas certainlynot record-keeping.His memoryfor dates was bad, and in the Tate pictureas in other transatlanticworks, the firstdate is wrong.He must have painted over the original inscriptionduring the course of revision, then simplyforgotten it. The main thing was to have the two dates, howeverapproximate, so that the worksbecame bridges to the New World,dec- larations thatexile was no obstacle to the evolutionof Artand Spirit. The double date, then,is a cipher of the transatlanticproject, a microcosm of the way these picturesstate theirself-division in order to assert the wholeness won from it, a whole in which obviouslynew elements are integratedwithout losing theirresistance, as Adorno mightput it. But the high price of thiscomplex ambition,a price Adorno would not have acknowledged,is the idea that an art workis the manifestationof a single,continuous intention.After all, Mondrian's double date does not reflecta span of work,as one mightexpect, but two completions,one of whichretracts the other. In this structure of difference-in-continuity,I have been emphasizing continuity,but later transatlanticworks indicate that Mondrian was increasingly aware of the difference.In PictureII (another work for which there is a photo showingits initial state, under the title No. III: Oppositionof Lines, of Whiteand Yellow),a small red block at the middle of the rightedge of the pictureseems to have slipped out of place, disturbingrather than binding the structureof black lines. Anotherlarger red block, at left,violates the peripheral rule for the place- ment of such elements,showing up near the center.These hints of motion and disturbanceare magnifiedin Place de la Concorde(1938-43). A patternof colored bars moves along the bottomand up and down the rightedge, snakilysubverting the black grid byoffering "false" colored extensionsto the black lines. The picture is furtherruptured by a dizzyingdrop in scale fromthe large yellowplane at the top to the two tinyred accents at left.Some of the same devices recurin Trafalgar Square(1939-43). Most of Mondrian's workon the transatlanticpaintings took place between March 1941, when he received the invitationfrom Valentine Dudensing to have the one-man exhibition,and January 1942, when the exhibition was held. But these last three works,as their second date of 1943 indicates,form a relatively distinct group. Unlike the other transatlantic works, they were revised for Mondrian'sMarch 1943 show (his second at the ValentineGallery), which suggests thatMondrian revisedhis revisionismduring the course of 1942.40 Whyexacerbate the veryfractures that other transatlanticworks had sought, howeverimperfectly, to mend? For a Hegelian, it is no greatturnabout. Mondrian simplybegan to emphasize a differentpart of the meaningof opheffing,not preservation but cancellation,not continuitybut destruction.Exploiting the marginof differenceleft within the transatlanticworks, he shiftedthe gears of the dialectical engine. 40. Von Wiegand notes that Mondrian had startedrevising both Place de la Concordeand Trafalgar Squarein 1941, but did not finishin timefor the January 1942 exhibition.

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No. III: Opposition of Lines, of Whiteand Yellow. PictureII. 1937-43. 1937.

Place de la Concorde. 1938-43.

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Boogie-WoogieDemolition The firststep was to expand the revisions,making them more than "grace notes"in James Johnson Sweeney's phrase.41 Mondrian's first all-American painting is an honorary transatlanticwork, or, better,a critique of one. It mimics their double completion and double-dating, but its revisions go far deeper.42The picture was firstshown under the title New Yorkin February1941 (Mondrian's firstexposure afterhis arrival) at the annual exhibitionof the AmericanAbstract Artists,which had just welcomed him and Leger into its ranks. Mondrian then revisedit and showed it a year later at hisJanuary 1942 exhibitionunder the title BoogieWoogie, which is the picturewe knowtoday. There is no photographic record of the firststate, but according to all reportsit was stunninglysimple. This is surprisingin retrospect,given the complexity of the other all-Americanworks. Mondrian's devoted friend Charmion von Wiegand,who saw the picturein the studio a monthafter the show,described it as "a square withblack lines," probably much like the presentpicture minus the colored elements.43I suspect Mondrian intended this state, consciouslyor not, as somethingof a blank slate. As soon as it was returnedto him,he declared it "emptyas Hell."44He revised it while workingon the transatlanticpictures and showed it withthem a yearlater at his 1942 show. Whetherit was because he purposefullyleft room on the surfaceto be filled in later,or because the firststate of the picture,begun in NewYork, was less foreign to his currentgoals, Mondrian was able to make much bolder additions than in the transatlanticworks. The spanningred lines of BoogieWoogie are unprecedent- ed in his art (except forthe curious diamond paintingwith yellow lines of 1933). They seem to move on another plane and at another speed than the black lines, despite the fact that the eight peripheral bars of color attemptto bind the red and black lines equally to the frame.But the red lines willnot be bound. They are like a new,faster-firing nerve cell on the surfaceof Mondrian'sart.

41. Sweeney,"Piet Mondrian,"Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 12, no. 4 (Spring 1945), p. 12. 42. Its double-datinghas a somewhatdifferent meaning, indicating continuous work for over a year rather than separate completions. But Mondrian had worked before on paintingsthat long without ever double-dating them, e.g., Compositionin Line (1916-17; dated 1917), PM, catalogue no. 72, or CompositionNo. I (C) (1934-46; dated 1936), Seuphor,catalogue no. 385. 43. Von Wiegand, "Mondrian:A Memoir,"p. 57. SidneyJanis,on the other hand, recalled thatNew Yorkhad fourblack lines and one red one at the AAA show,and thatAndre Breton,noticing the red one, mockinglydeclared "la revolution"(Janis, "Reflexions of an ArtDealer," in Mondrianin theSidney JanisFamily Collections, p. 19). ButJanis's recollectionsare from1987, and his storyseems designed to deliverthe colorfulBreton anecdote. If the paintinghad a red line at thatpoint, Von Wiegand would have noted it in herjournals. The three red lines and some of the colored elementshad been added bythe fallof 1941,when EmeryMuscetra took threephotos of Mondrianin his studiowith the painting (the top red line does not yetextend fullyto the right).See PM, p. 291, fig.a, and PM, p. 78, fig.21. 44. Carl Holty,quoted in Rembert,"Mondrian," p. 49. In his "Mondrian in New York:A Memoir," Arts (September 1957), Holty adds that Mondrian went to work on the picture "as soon as it was returnedto him,"and that he made the "emptyas hell" remark"as though anyone should have seen thisfault at firstglance."

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Boogie Woogie. 1941-42.

NewYork City. 1941-42.

This content downloaded from 204.147.202.25 on Sun, 8 Sep 2013 10:46:28 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BroadwayBoogie Woogie. 1942-43.

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Mondrian's second all-Americanpainting was New YorkCity (1941-42).45 Here the blacklines still retained in BoogieWoogie are gone,yielding to a composition made entirelyof canvas-spanningcolored lines.In short,the colored line segments of BoogieWoogie have been extended into a new,all-purpose element. This was to be the firstof a grand New York Cityseries, but the project never materialized. Afterthe January 1942 show,Mondrian leftat least three similarworks unfinished and turned to a pair of paintings, BroadwayBoogie Woogieand VictoryBoogie Woogie.46At exactly 50 by 50 inches each, theyare Mondrian's largest abstract worksever. He managed to "finish"the formerin time for his March 1943 show. (In the end he considered it insufficientlyadvanced and too yellow,but it was

45. It is simplyinscribed "42" ratherthan double dated, whichmay reflect the factthat the picture did not go throughas manychanges as the three other all-Americanworks, although some colored rectangleswere presentat the beginning(see PM, p. 291). 46. The unfinishedworks are Seuphor, catalogue no. 435; PM, catalogue no. 184; and a heavily restoredpicture in the Thyssen-Bornemiszacollection. These are conventionallytitled New YorkCity Nos. 2-4. Two more works,PM, catalogue nos. 181 and 182 (both charcoal on canvas), mayalso belong to the series.Von Wiegand writesthat Mondrian put these paintingsaside "around the time of his first exhibition at Valentine Dudensing's (1942), and afterthat exhibition he began work on the two Boogie Woogie pictures.He worked on both of them simultaneouslyand finishedBroadway Boogie Woogiefirst" (Rowell, "Interview," p. 82). The pair relationshipof Mondrian'slast twopictures has been neglected, perhaps because Von Wiegand's account of their making is not well known, perhaps because their identical size is not obvious given the fact that a square looks bigger in a "diamond" orientation.

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already sold).47 The latter occupied the nine months that remained until his death. I willnot dwellon New YorkCity, which Yve-Alain Bois has treatedextensively.48 But what happened to the New York Cityseries itself?It is not like Mondrian to leave a seriesof worksunfinished.49 Perhaps he had foundout all he could fromit, and feltno need to clean his plate. "I don't wantpictures," Mondrian's friend Carl Holty recallshim replyingto a general question about his obsessiverevisions and consequent drop in productivity."I just want to find things out."50But Holty reportedthis in 1957, and it sounds like Mondrian filteredthrough the Pollock- colored rhetoricof the time. WhatVon Wiegand remembersMondrian sayingin response to her similarquery about VictoryBoogie Woogie seems more plausible: "It

47. "AfterMondrian saw 'BroadwayBoogie-Woogie' hanging in the Modern Museum, he feltits effectwas weakened by the preponderance of yellow" (Rembert,"Mondrian," p. 85, based on her interviewswith Holty, 1968-70). "[Mondrian]died, feelingof his lastcompleted work: 'I am onlysatisfied insofaras I feel BroadwayBoogie-Woogie is a definiteprogress but even about this pictureI am not quite satisfied'" (JamesJohnson Sweeney,"Art Chronicle," Partisan Review11, no. 2 [Spring 1944], pp. 173-76). 48. Yve-AlainBois, "Piet Mondrian,New YorkCity," in his Paintingas Model(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 157-83. 49. The only other instance is a group of worksfrom 1934, includingPM, catalogue nos. 171-74, and thisbatch is likelyexplained bya serious illnessthat kept Mondrian from painting during the first halfof 1935. In Septemberhe resumedwork and finishedfour pictures, but was readyby then to move on ratherthan completethe rest(see PM, pp. 66-67). 50. Holty,"Mondrian in NewYork," p. 21.

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Left:Victory Boogie Woogie. 1942-44.

Right:Charmion von Wiegand. Sketchof Victory Boogie Woogie. 1942.

is not importantto make manypictures but thatI have the pictureright."51 This fixationon finishinga picture,no matterhow long it took,was incompatiblewith the multiplelogic of the series,which had long been the mainstayof Mondrian's practice.So Mondrian quietlydropped the New York Cityseries, indeed the very idea of seriality,deliberately taking up a pair of worksthat would allow him to make a definitivestatement about the twoformats that had preoccupiedhim since 1925, the square and the diamond. At this point, to understand Mondrian's various moves it is necessary to understandboogie-woogie, which, Mondrian wrote,"I see as homogeneous with myintentions."52 (He did not explain much further.)The essence of piano boogie is the vigorouslycompeting rhythmsof two hands, and sometimestwo or even threepianos as well. It is a competitionof likeness:the leftand righthands nearly abandon their traditional roles of harmony and melody,instead sharing one repeated rhythmicmotif and offsettingit between them to create a virtuoso polyrhythmictexture. The sound of good boogie-woogie,as early critics recog- nized, is a single mesh whose elements cannot easilybe teased apart into "right" and "left,"a dazzling acoustic Moire patternwhose elements seem to eat awayat

51. Rowell,"Interview," p. 82. 52. Mondrian, note to JamesJohnson Sweeney,May 1943, published in Sweeney,"Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl,"Art News 50, no. 4 (Summer 1951), p. 62. For some reason, a differentversion is givenin NANL,p. 357.

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one another. "If you can detect, withoutlooking at the piano, what hand plays whatnote (in crossed-handpatterns), you are listeningto a bad player."53Boogie- woogie is the verymodel of a collapsed dualism,or rathera collapsingone, since the two hands remain distinctdespite theirsimilarities: the lefthand is (more) repetitive,the righthand (more) discursive. Mondriantakes an uncharacteristicstab at illustratingthis music in Broadway BoogieWoogie, with its Albers-likeblocked chords (pounding righthand) and, at lowercenter, its similar patterns of alternatingcolors that run along parallelhorizon- tal tracks at differentrates (polyrhythmof simultaneous lines). But the more importantrelationship to the music lies at a higherlevel of abstraction.Here we can be guided by an observationabout New YorkCity made by Masheck,who finds in that picture"a continuityof artisticand physicalform that had been blocked by an older,dualistic notion of composition."Bois extendsthis thoughtabout the paintinginto a full-blownaccount, finding a deconstructionof the drawing-painting hierarchyin its braided, colored lines.54 In short,the guiding axiom of Neo-Plasticism,"the equivalence of the dis- similar,"55which had justifiedMondrian's classic dualism of black lines bounding color planes, got ditched in the 1940s with the help of boogie-woogie (a model Mondrian could not have understoodwithout having already assimilated the beat- syncopedualism of classicjazz, but thatis anotherstory). Oddly, this decisiveshift is not readily apparent in Mondrian's late writings.56But there is a negative indication that, once noticed, looms large: the masteropposition of "position" versus"dimension," or standversus maat (the constancyof the vertical-horizontal relationshipversus all the variabilityof composition),quickly fades fromthe New Yorktexts.57 When Mondrian writesto Von Wiegand thatall his oppositionshave become confused,the commentis an agenda, not a complaint.58

53. Ernest Borneman, "Boogie Woogie," in JustJazz, ed. Sinclair Traill and Gerald Lascelles (London: Peter Davies, 1957), p. 40. Mondrian's writingscontain littlemusical analysis,but he did commentthat "boogie-woogie is pure rhythm"(Rembert, "Mondrian," p. 80, based on 1967 interviews withMr. and Mrs. FritzGlarner). This was a criticalcommonplace: "The testof a good piece of boogie music is whether it will still hold your attention when it is played on a single note" (Borneman, "Boogie Woogie,"p. 14). See also WilliamRussell, "Three Boogie-WoogieBlues Pianists,"in TheArt of Jazz:Essays on theNature and DevelopmentofJazz, ed. MartinT. Williams(New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 95-108; William Russell, "Boogie Woogie,"in Jazzmen,ed. Frederic Ramsey,Jr., and Charles Edward Smith (London: Sidgwickand Jackson,1957); and PeterJ. Silvester,A LeftHand Like God:A Historyof Boogie-Woogie Piano (New York:Da Capo Press,1989). 54. Joseph Masheck, "Mondrian the New Yorker,"Artforum 13, no. 2 (October 1974), p. 61; Bois, "PietMondrian, New YorkCity," passim. 55. Mondrian,"No Axiom But the PlasticPrinciple" (1923), NANL,p. 179. 56. One reason is that,as Bois has noted,Mondrian had begun to writein termsof pluralityinstead of dualityas earlyas 1930,just before the explosion of multipleblack lines in his work (Bois, "The Iconoclast,"PM, pp. 356-57). This explosion was a greatchange, but nothinglike the restructuringof his language in NewYork. 57. One late iterationof position-dimension,in 1942, turnsout to be taken word forword froma 1930 essay (compare NANL,pp. 343, 242). This staleness is verifiedby the total absence of position- dimensionfrom the voluminousNew York notes Mondrian leftat thisdeath (NANL,pp. 358-92). 58. Mondrianto Von Wiegand,June27, 1942, transcribedby Von Wiegand,unpublished typescript.

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But if boogie-woogieinspired Mondrian to shifthis pictorialand theoretical vocabularyaway from duality and opposition,and towardplurality and similarity, whythen the 1942 abandonmentof seriality,why the returnto dualityin the pairing of the last two pictures?The answercan be found along another axis of boogie- woogie. If the simultaneousrelation of rightand lefthands (the verticalaspect of the music) suggestedto Mondrian all the excitementof an abrasivesimilarity, with its promise of a terminalfusion of elements,the temporal (horizontal) structure indicatedthe price to be paid. Whateverthe particularbass-line motif chosen by the pianist,boogie-woogie nearlyalways had an eighth-noterhythmic feel originallymeant to pump along throughan all-nightdance or rent party,hence the nickname"eight to the bar." In this virtuallyendless format,success depended on moment-to-momentor chorus-to-chorusinventiveness, not on the abilityto shape a compositionalwhole. But whenJohn Hammond broughtboogie-woogie into the recordingstudios, the three-minuteform of the 78 rpmrecord made new,arguably inappropriate demands on the music.Above all, it made the ending much more prominent,exacerbating the problem of how to finish a music characterized by driving repetitiveness. One sly solution was the ironic flourish,complete with rallentando and mock- classical harmonicresolution.59 So if Mondrian responded to boogie-woogieby fusinghis pictoriallanguage in the swingingplaid of New YorkCity, his subsequent abandonment of seriality was inspiredby a collision of the repetitivenessof boogie-woogieand its new need to end, a collision that caused Mondrian to doubt his Hegelian faith in the possibilityof sublatinga repetition.Homogeneity or similarityof elementscould functionwithin a givenpainting as a new technologyof unity,suggesting a single, active texture.60But between paintingsin a series,it onlyheightened the sense of repetition.Whether or not Mondrian was familiarwith Hegel's criticismof the Romanticideal of endless strivingas a "bad infinity,"he had a musical model of it in frontof him.

Victory In 1942, at the age of seventy,Mondrian began to face the prospect of his

59. See, for example, Meade Lux Lewis's 1936 Decca recordingof his showpiece, "Honky-Tonk Train Blues." 60. When MOMA acquired BroadwayBoogie Woogie in 1943, Greenbergcomplained thatits unitywas too easily won: "at no point does the rhythmthreaten to break out of and unbalance [the square pattern of the picture] enough to justifythe latter'sfinal triumph."With his aestheticsof struggle, Greenbergwas still hankeringafter the contrastsof Mondrian's 1920s style,and didn't understand thatwhat he called the picture's"floating, wavering quality" was a new kind of unity.In "Crisis of the Easel Picture"(1948) Greenbergseems to grasp this,using Mondrian's term"equivalence" to describe new "polyphonic"painters like Pollock who "weavethe workof artinto a tightmesh whose principleof formalunity is contained and recapitulatedin each thread" (see ClementGreenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism,ed. John O'Brian [Chicago and London: Universityof Chicago Press, 1986-93], vol. 1, p. 153; vol. 2, p. 223).

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own ending. He had sufferedrespiratory problems for years, and had had a bad scarein 1935.Von Wiegand,who knewMondrian as intimatelyas anyone,concluded in retrospectthat his behavior in his last months indicated a premonition of death. This is an odd contextfor Mondrian's exuberant last picture-or is it? For a teleologist, the end is everything.Mondrian often repeated his belief that art progressed to a final goal, when it would be superseded in a fusion of all the (former) artswith the environmentand lifeitself. So the end of painting,which was queen of the arts, implied the end of art, too. In VictoryBoogie Woogie, Mondrian linked his own imminentend with that of painting,which made the pictureboth ecstaticand tragic. Of course, to argue thisis to riskmaking the historian'sretroactive mistake, takingwhat turned out to be the last paintingfor a Last Painting.But the size and pairingof Mondrian's last twoworks, his age and health,his teleologicalbent, his august self-image (could he have failed to read Hegel's magisterial self- Assumptionat the end of the Phenomenology?)-allthese argue fora summarizing ambition, a big finish.With VictoryBoogie Woogie,the time was finallyripe, to borrowand negate a favoriteexpression from Mondrian's Theosophical lexicon.61 But the greater the pressure to conclude, the more second thoughts he had. Juding fromphotographs, he "finished"the picture at least twice,once in late 1942 and once in January1944, just ten days before his death frompneumonia. Each time he began a new campaign, sketchingfuriously with bits of paper and tape over the paint until the surface became the battlefieldit has remained- revengeof the repetitionhe had triedto eliminateby dropping the series. Everynarrative is haunted by the end, the feared/desiredgoal thatbrings to a crisiswhat Barthes calls "thediscourse's instinct for preservation."62 This problem is one that Hegel's narrativeboth acts out and reflectson (and it is this,rather than his famousbut meagre speculationson the end of art, thatis relevantto the case of Mondrian). Spiritis infinite,totally free, and movestoward self-perfection. How then can infiniteSpirit reach an endpoint, or total freedomconfine itself? Hegel's tentativeanswers (the circularimage of a "good infinity"in the Logic,the definitionof ultimateknowledge as endless progressin the Phenomenology)did not concern Mondrian,if he knewof them.63Instead, he thrashedout the problem of ending an evolutionarynarrative on the surfaceof VictoryBoogie Woogie. Here it is time to say that there is nothinganti-Hegelian about the collapse of oppositions:quite the contrary.Just as Hegel envisionedthe end of his narrative as the prodigal returnof Spiritout of worldlyexile back to itself(the masterplot

61. Mondrian: "Insofaras the time is not yetripe for the complete unificationof architecture,the new plasticmust continue to be manifestedas painting"("The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 37). 62. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay,trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 75-76, 135-35, 171-73. See also Peter Brooks,Readingfor the Plot: Design and Intentionin Narrative(New York:Alfred A. Knopf,1984), pp. 90-112. 63. Taylor,Hegel, p. 240; Hegel, PhenomenologyofSpirit, p. xiv.

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of the Phenomenology),so Mondrian imagined the end of art as a return to an "originalunity" that appeared "in time as a duality."64The goal of evolutionwas the eventualand gradual cure, as ifby a time-releaseddrug, of all opposition. The point of dialecticswas its own collapse,in whichduality itself was notjust cancelled but kept and transformed,sublated: "Hegel is neithera monist nor a dualist. If anynumber is to be assigned to him,it is the number3."65 Hence Mondrian's final articulationof dialectical opposition as something other than binary.Where he had alwaysrelied on oppositionsto undo visual fixity (withits baggage of geometryand symbolism)and to producedynamic equilibrium, in NewYork he struggledfor other, nonbinary terms: "We have to destroythe entity throughcomplexity."66 Boogie-woogie came as close as possible to takingsimilarity, not difference,as the basis for dialectics.Mondrian grasped it as a wayof seizing his pictorialdialectic at its mostadvanced point,where the elementswere so near synthesisthat theycould barelybe differentiated.In Mondrian's last work,that point arrives.The picture'smess of revisions,with bits of paper and tape stacked up to eight layers thick, is like a sonic boom, the pile-up of waves as a jet approaches the sound barrier and runs into its own noise. Mondrian finally allowed himselfto catch up to the historicalsignal he had been sending ahead (but not to pass it, not to finishthe painting). In the blast,all the oppositionsthat Neo-Plasticismcherished and keptdistinct are fused. This degree of fusionis what reallydistinguishes Victory Boogie Woogie from BroadwayBoogie Woogie. In Victory,one can no longer tella thickmosaic line froma column of planes,or a group of adjacent lines froma checkeredgrid. And whereas in Broadwaythe grayremains within either the lines or the large planes connecting them,leaving white to functionas sole background,in Victorythe size and position of grayis deregulated,allowing gray planes to get big enough to functionas background as well. As a result,white areas pop out in relation to theirless obtrusive grayneighbors. The centralwhite planes even promotethemselves in frontof the parti-coloredlines around them,suggesting the "ghostof a ground ... appearing above the figure."67Adieu to the principalopposition and favoriteplaything of De Stijl painting.

Postscript But VictoryBoogie Woogie does more than criticizethe residual dualism and musicaliconographics of BroadwayBoogie Woogie. It reaches much fartherback, for

64. Mondrian,"The New Plasticin Painting,"p. 48. See also "A Trialogue,"pp. 95, 98. 65. Inwood,A HegelDictionary, p. 296. 66. Mondrian [A Folder of Notes, c. 1938-44], NANL, p. 381. This idea is foreshadowedby an unusual passage in the "Trialogue"where Mondrian hesitatesbetween dualityand multiplicity:"every- thingthat is regardedas a thingin itself,as one, mustbe viewedas a dualityor multiplicity-asa complex" (NANL,p. 86). 67. Bois, "The Iconoclast,"p. 361.

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it comes aftera series of ten diamond paintingsexecuted between 1925 and 1938, of whichit is the criticalpostscript. Mondrian had two rules for this diamond series, unspoken but empirically derivable:all lines mustcross the entiresurface, and, in a kind of pictorialagora- phobia, the central area must be avoided. Never mind the significanceof these rules here, nor the place of the diamond and diagonal in Mondrian's thinking. The important thing for our purpose is that VictoryBoogie Woogiebegan by deliberatelyviolating both rules.As shownin the sketchof it made in Mondrian's studio by Von Wiegand on June 13, 1942, when it was still a stripe paintinglike New YorkCity, its two longestlines crossed almost at the center and a shortblue vertical at rightdid not reach the edge in either direction.Judging from Von Wiegand's parallel writtenreport, this second violationwas well considered: "The rightcorner gave the most trouble: a blue cross withenclosing red horizontals. He found a solutionin cuttingoff the blue line top and bottomand leavingempty space above and below the cross."68This violation of the spanning line rule was not onlycarefully pondered; it was prepared by the penultimatediamond, Picture No. III of 1938 (the largestwork of the series at 40 inches per side). This picture, like a Freudian dream, condensesthe preceding nine diamonds on its surface, combining the two-, three-, and four-linesubtypes of the series, and in the process displacesall theirstructures. As a result,two of its eight lines fail to reach the edge, blocked by a red triangle.As Bois writes,"A red triangle steps in to knockover the house of cards thatour eye triesto construct."69Significantly, it was the onlyrecent painting from Europe that Mondrian had in New Yorkand never transatlanticized.70He needed it just as it was, facing backward and forward, memorandum and precedent. Its red wedge drives an opening into the rule- bound fieldof the diamondsfor VictoryBoogie Woogie to enter. The last pictureended up lookingvery different from the wayit started.71A riot of blocks has replaced the stripesof the original.A verticalsymmetry around the totem-likestack of central white planes, slightlyoffset to the right, has replaced the exact horizontalsymmetry of the sketch.72And whilethe plaid of the original was fairlyevenly distributed, now the picture is densely structuredby

68. Rowell,"Interview," pp. 83-84. 69. Bois, "The Iconoclast," p. 359. He continues: "This irruptionof color produces an ongoing disruptionin all the formalconcatenations that we tryto imagine on the basis of the interwovenlines in the painting." 70. He discussed revisingthe work for the one-man show withVon Wiegand, according to her journals, but apparentlyhe neverdid, forit was neithershown nor double-dated.And the revisionshe consideredwere not of the "trans-atlantic"type, just changes in line thickness. 71. In his carefulstudy, E. A. Carmean instead emphasizes the continuityin the evolution of the picture (Carmean, Mondrian: The Diamond Compositions,exhibition catalogue (Washington D.C.: National Galleryof Art,1979), pp. 59-66. 72. The fact that this verticalsymmetry in the final state has never been noted can perhaps be explained by the fact that Mondrian was forced to use bits of tape whose colors did not match his paint. As a resultthe paintingin its mixed-mediastate is more confusingthan it would have been if finished.

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PictureNo. III. 1938.

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15 E. 59thStreet. 1944.

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crossinglines at the center.This strongcentering contradicts all the afocal,asym- metricaltendencies of Neo-Plasticism,indeed floutsthem, for what is revealed at the center,flanked by two isolated crosses (a formMondrian explicitlyabhorred), is the triad of colors (red-yellow-blue)that it had been the business of Neo- Plasticismto keep apart.73 This heretical centering seems to have engrossed all the energies of the picture,for the compositionis fragmentedand graylyfloating toward the edges. At the top and bottomcorners, a strangegrayish-green plane entirelyescapes the Neo-Plasticcolor canon.74At the leftcorner, two wandering pairs of red and blue rectangles,revised up and down, seem to call to a pair of rectangles,red and yellow,that swimon the wall to the leftamid largerwhite planes (as shown in a posthumousphotograph of the picturein the studio). Reading furtherleft along the wall, the colored cardboard rectangles line up under the influence of the horizontal mantlepiece which theyhide. Another photo shows them dispersing again as they approach the opposite wall, ending with a color triad below the window,and thus concluding the narrativethat originatedat the verycenter of the painting.75 This "failure"of structureat the edge of VictoryBoogie Woogie, then, has more than a negativesignificance: it draws our eye past the frame.Contemplating the newhistorical stage of art-as-environmentmeant breaching not onlythe structuralist enclosure of the diamond series, and not only the grammarof Neo-Plasticism itself,but the literal enclosure of painting.As Mondrian oftenwrote, no doubt thinkingof Hegel (or, withHegel, of the Hindu god Shiva), no creation without destruction.He took a similarlesson fromthe transatlanticpaintings-no crossing withouta chasm,one mightsay--and withthe help of boogie-woogie,applied it to the next looming exile-the end of life,career, painting--in order to registerits finalitybut deny its fatality.No ending withouta beginning.76As Hegel wroteof Spirit,"We may compare it withthe seed; forwith this the plant begins,yet it is also the resultof the plant's entirelife. But... the commencementand the result are disjoined fromeach other."77In VictoryBoogie Woogie, the discontinuousresult of more than twentyyears of work,Mondrian burstthe pod of paintingand dis- seminatedits elementsacross a brokenborder.

73. As Bois writes,in Neo-Plasticismthe color planes "willtend to be at the periphery,and the function of non-colorplanes willbe to separate them" ("The Iconoclast,"p. 325). 74. It has been suggestedthat this is a resultof discoloration,but Von Wiegand'sjournals indicate thatthis odd color was originallypresent. It is morevisible in the originalthan in reproductions. 75. For complete photographicdocumentation of these "wallworks," as well as a list of Mondrian's boogie-woogierecords, see Mondrianin New York,exhibition catalogue (Tokyo:Galerie Tokoro, 1993). 76. "The account of the end of a time is told in a new time thatconserves this ending and, even in that way,presents itself as a beginning" (Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Being Done with Narrative by Cubism and Andr6 Malraux," in Centuries'Ends, NarrativeMeans, ed. Robert Newman [Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1996], p. 79). 77. Hegel, Philosophyof History, p. 78. On Hegel's use of the seed as metaphorfor the development of Spirit,see Inwood,A HegelDictionary, pp. 79-80.

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