kbreathnach:

(Composition with Red, Black, Blue, and Yellow, 1928)

Leader of the De Stijl movement in Holland, Piet Mondrian was one of the fathers of abstract painting. Interested in universal pictorial truth, the object is gradually abstracted from figuration in his oeuvre. By the early 1920s, his work had ceased to consist of anything beyond blocks of colour within of series of grids. These later paintings, which pointedly eschew any sense of individualism, were said famously by Michel Seuphor to render the ephemeral eternal. 

You needn’t look too closely to see that some of Mondrian’s most famous tableaux are heavily veined with cracks in the paint. These blemishes have come about as a result of the impatient Mondrian’s frequent rejection of oil in place of petroleum, a solvent which dries much quicker but is disastrous in conservatory terms. 

(Composition (B) in Blue, Yellow and White, 1936)

The image of Mondrian acting out of impatience is one that seems completely at odds with the image Brother Piet presented of himself — austere, stoic, steadfast in his ambition to take painting to its absolute limit. But the cracks continue to deepen; they snake across his canvases in strong counterpoint to the straight horizontals and verticals upon which they encroach. They are marks of human weakness which, although charming, seem to me ultimately to represent the failure of Mondrian to fully remove the individual or subjective from his art. 

“The surfaces are extremely difficulty difficult to clean,” writes Susanne Deicher. “Many look dirty and tend to crumble away to pieces.” It would be churlish to suggest that, while rendering the ephemeral eternal, Mondrian also rendered the eternal ephemeral. Their eighty-plus years cannot be considered ephemeral by any means. But it might just turn out that eternity is not quite as long a time as we had originally been led to believe.