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True Art. A few years later, Mondrian became an enthusiastic convert to Theosophy; he was very much struck by Philosopher Rudolf Steiner's belief that ''occult influences . . . can be awakened by devotional religious feelings, true art, music." But what was "true" art? Mondrian was sure that art got truer to the extent that it provoked meditation and devotion. "In aesthetic contemplation," he wrote, "the individual is pushed to the background, and the universal appears. The deepest purpose of painting has always been to give concrete existence, through color and line, to this universal which appears in contemplation."
Hindsight makes it seem inevitable that Mondrian, believing this, should move away from objects. But in its period, Mondrian's road toward total abstraction was as audacious as it was lonely. In 1911, he first saw some cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque at a show in Holland. His pictorial intelligence could not resist the challenge. But the concrete, specific nature of cubist painting hindered him. Thus Mondrian's paintings after 1911 show him wrestling to keep the integrated pattern of Cubism while dispensing with solid form. Tree (1912), with its sober tones of gray, green and brown, preserves the rhythm of branches in its arabesque of lines but remains as flat as a stained-glass window.
In 1912, Mondrian moved to Paris, where he changed his life and his art. The "real" image gradually sank. Composition #7 (1913), still kept a few legible clues of the facades and city roofs; but by Composition (1916), even these had vanished, and a fully abstract dance of signs and patches replaced them. Not even these were stable enough; Mondrian wanted to achieve a Platonic essence of structure. He now pushed reduction almost to the limit—nothing but right angles and primary color. This lean scaffolding was to occupy him from the '20s until his death. His geometric abstracts are the most systematic investigation of flat pattern in all modern art, and they have the clarity and finality of laboratory proof. No print can do justice to paintings like Composition with Red and Blue (1939-41), for one of the startling characteristics of such work is its traditionalism as painting. Within the radical statement it makes, the warm, silky glow of the layered paint held in its finely adjusted grid is almost Vermeer-like.
Rich Gravity. Had it not produced such interactions, Mondrian's austerity would have had its comic side. He hated green because it reminded him of nature. In restaurants, he would sit with his back to the window to avoid seeing any trees. His main pleasure was ballroom dancing, but, according to one of his friends, "he carried out his steps in such a personally stylized fashion that the results were frequently awkward." His solitary rooms in Paris, and later in New York, were kept with fussy precision, down to the exact placement of ashtrays. His life was a masterpiece of sublimation in art's interest.