(piano playing)
Dr. Beth Harris: Here we are at
the Museum of Modern Art and we're looking at
Mondrian's Composition No. II with Red and Blue
and the date is 1929.
Dr. Steven Zucker: Even now the canvas actually says
1925 with a little initial by the artist incorrectly.
Beth: Well, you know, artists do that sometimes.
They make mistakes.
Steven: They do and that especially happens
when artists go back later and try to date
paintings that they had done earlier.
We're looking at a really tough painting.
I mean, here's a painting that,
and the title certainly is a perfect reference.
This is rectilinear form.
It's this rectangle that has white and blue
and red and black and that's it.
This is a kind of incredible, pure abstraction.
Beth: And it's a wild thing to see after walking
in from the previous room, which has Monet's
Waterlilies and paintings by Vuillard and Bonnard ...
Steven: Which is all naturalistic.
this right, figurative, western tradition
and then you walk in here and it's in modernism.
Steven: It's so austere.
It is modernism and it's seemingly ...
Beth: And the white walls of the gallery
look different. Everything looks different.
Steven: Even the frames are incredibly spare. Incredible.
Beth: I don't know that they're even framed,
in a way.
Steven: Yeah, they're almost platform.
How does a viewer get access to the meaning
of a painting like this?
I mean, can you just look at it and sort of
feel a certain way about it?
Is that enough or is this something that
we really, sort of, want to pull apart
in an artist-orical matter?
Beth: I think probably both.
I mean, I think the presence of the earlier
Mondrian's in the gallery, the ones
that look more like analytic cubism shed some light
on Mondrian's use of a grid here.
Steven: Yeah, because in fact, Mondrian
did start out replicating nature in a much
more direct way.
Sometimes with wild symbolist color,
but it actually does help when you look at
these, sort of, grids that Mondrian ends up with
to understand that he began by really looking at
analytic cubism and looking at the relation
of the way an object falls over a ground
and a way in which the ground between forms
actually becomes evermore present, evermore powerful.
There are those fabulous images.
Beth: Trees?
Steven: Yeah, exactly.
Beth: The trees, yeah.
Steven: The flowering apple trees, for instance,
where the sky between the bows takes on
a kind of physicality and a kind of presence
that is actually overwhelming of the branches themselves.
Beth: I think that began with Picasso
with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, when the space
between the figures is, and maybe even
with Sezand is just this palpable as
the volumes themselves.
Steven: So the conversation is really not
with the apple tree ultimately, but with
what's happening in the canvas.
This sort of, very formal discussion.
So, this is a system that he called neoclassicism, right?
And we have this incredibly reduced kind of pallet,
obviously, pure.
Beth: Primary colors.
Steven: Right and black and white.
Although if you look at the bottom right corner,
the white, the rectangle is ...
Beth: It looks a little grey.
Steven: It's a little off-grey
and I don't know if that's original,
if that's intentional, but Mondrian was very careful.
You know what's interesting is actually
when you're up close looking at this canvas
it's very much like the Malevich.
It's actually got the human touch to it.
He's not obliterating his brush strokes.
Beth: No, you can see the brush strokes.
It's not painterly.
Steven: No, but within the very, sort of,
simplified format of the canvas it does actually
seem like it's got a bit of factor to where
it is kind of painterly, even in this context
where as in a dellaquila, of course,
this would not be. You know it's ...
Beth: It's not an Andy Warhol print.
Steven: No, it's a made thing.
Beth: So, why choose the primary colors?
Why is he using black?
Steven: I think it's about purity.
I think he's trying to get to an elemental
kind of purity and a kind of elemental balance as well.
I mean, when I see this, I see that blue
in some ways, held in place, and the red
held in place by those black bars
almost as if it's the grid of a stained glass window,
but at the same time, I see other things,
much more complex things begin to happen
where the blue pushes forward, the red can,
in a sense, see back into a rather deep space.
I think that there's an incredible kind of
play of harmony that exists, not only
as a left right balance, but as a vertical balance
and perhaps even a balance that has to do with
what moves towards us and what, in a sense,
creates the illusion of space.
Beth: Moving back. Black usually recedes, doesn't it?
Steven: It does, but in this case it can recede,
but it can also be a kind of forward armature
in which those planes of color are placed.
Except that those planes refuse, also,
to be planes.
Beth: In what way?
Steven: Well, I can see that red as having
real volume, having the kind of volume
that goes back in space, which is interesting
because in Matisse's case, red often pushes forward.
Here, it can exist forward, but it could also have,
it has a kind of wonderful ambiguity and a
kind of plasticity visually, so that I think
it can really move back.
Beth: So, let me ask you. Why is Mondrian
so interested in purity at this moment in 1925
or '29, so interested in balance,
so interested in reducing things to their
basic elements.
Steven: Well, think about what's going on
in the world in the '20's.
Europe had just ... Here we have a Dutch artist.
He's just come out of the first world war.
Europe had been devastated.
Steven: And I think that there was this incredibly
Utopian notion that art could have a kind of
agency that could help to actually
create harmony in the world.
Beth: To, sort of, rebuild the future
in a better way.
Steven: It's really Utopian.
That is, if we can construct balance and harmony
in our surroundings, in our architecture
and our painting, in our visual and physical world ...
Beth: Environment.
Steven: Then perhaps we can have that harmony
in politics and in life throughout.
Beth: I guess that vision makes sense,
but it's so hard to recapture.
I feel like we're so jaded now.
Steven: We are. There was a kind of heroism.
A sense of possibility.
Beth: And that artists could be part of
that transformation, now seems a little bit
misplaced in a way.
Steven: It's an extraordinary hopefulness
and it's extraordinarily ironic considering that
this man lived through, not only the first
but ultimately the second world war in part as well.
Beth: Yeah.
(piano playing)