(2 of 2)
When Mondrian sorted out his own style and theory (in the early years of World War I), he resolved to simplify all nature in vertical and horizontal (masculine and feminine) strokes, make asymmetry his basic rule, keep the painting flat on the surface. "When one does not represent things, a place remains for the Divine," he jotted in his notebook. He later simplified his palette to primary red, blue and yellow, then, working with charcoal, ruler and strips of paper, bound and balanced the areas with a grid of black lines that became his trademark.
A Gigantic Fugue. Adopting evolution as his religion, Mondrian made a cult of the new, preferred man-made scenery to nature, turned his back on the Bois de Boulogne to avoid seeing the trees, furiously danced the Charleston (when The Netherlands banned it, he announced that he would never return home to Amsterdam). His ascetic dryness kept women at a distance. The only feminine touch in his studio was an artificial tulip, surrounded by leaves painted white.
Mondrian reduced painting to its barest bones in 1931 when he painted a canvas composed of only a white background with two black lines. He was moving toward more complicated designs when, with World War II inevitable, he went first to London, then in 1940 to New York, where he finished his study in balanced imbalance, Place de la Concorde (see color page). Entranced by the glitter of Manhattan, he then set to work on his last two major paintings, Broadway Boogie-Woogie and the unfinished Victory Boogie-Woogie, which sparkled with segmented, syncopated color. They made a bright closing movement to Piet Mondrian's multi-variations within the rectangle, a constant, single theme, which Biographer Seuphor aptly calls "a kind of gigantic, plastic fugue, which it took twenty-nine years to play."