Trajectories: Mondrian, Diebenkorn, Wain

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Occasionally, artists will devote their careers to extended explorations of one particular technical problem or question of aesthetics. It can sometimes take years, even decades, for an artist to develop their mature style and find the solution to the problems they have set themselves to solving through their art. This process is often only visible in hindsight; only when compared to their later work does the object of their early explorations become clear.

Today I’d like to showcase three such artists. The works we will examine exist on trajectories, coming ever closer to solving one particular problem of art and eventually reaching a solution in the end. Look with me, then, at some paintings by Piet Mondrian, Richard Diebenkorn, and Louis Wain.

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MONDRIAN: NETWORKS OF LINES

Piet Mondrian is the archetypical modernist painter. His flat primary-colored grids are recognizable instantly as modern, even more so than Picasso’s cubism. Mondrian’s art did not begin that way; he began as a painter of landscapes, but even at the very start of his career his pictures would sometimes betray his preoccupation with traceries, grids, and networks of lines. This interest grew until it consumed his work and he became the foremost proponent of an abstract style made of rectangles and straight lines interrelating to each other. Curiously, while Mondrian was taking the decisive steps towards his mature style during the twenties, he also painted flowers in a highly naturalistic style to pay the bills, and wouldn’t show them to his friends in the avant-garde.

The Village Church. 1898. Here, the tree branches provide a portent of Mondrian’s later development; they slice through the picture in all sorts of wild directions, dividing the background into innumerable small facets. Mondrian’s life as a painter was spent ordering these unpredictable lines.

The Red Tree. 1908. Still a naturalistic painting but the relationship between the figure (the branches) and the ground (the sky) is becoming much more important.

The Grey Tree. 1911. The naturalistic element of this painting serves only as a pretext for Mondrian’s lines and planes.

Still Life with Gingerpot 2. 1914. Even more than the last painting, this one is about edges. In fact, that’s almost all it is. Mondrian is also in the process of severely restricting his color palette.

Composition with Oval in Color Planes II. 1914. There are no recognizable objects at all in this picture; Mondrian is now settling into an art of pure edges, and he is refining his palette more narrowly.

Composition with Grid IX. 1919. “With” grid? It’s all grid!

Composition No. 10. 1939-42. Mondrian finally finds his mature style; he has also reduced his colors to the three primaries plus black and white.

Broadway Boogie-Woogie. 1942-43. Interesting to note how Mondrian went from figures of trees through pure abstraction to this, perhaps his most famous painting: a metaphor for city life. As Robert Hughes says, “Once one has seen Broadway Boogie-Woogie, the view from a skyscraper down into the streets is changed forever.”

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DIEBENKORN: THE PICTURE PLANE

Richard Diebenkorn started his career as a painter of colorful and blotchy abstract expressionist paintings. At some point he became unsatisfied with this, even though he was accruing a degree of success; he returned to figurative painting in 1955 and continued in that mode for twelve years. Yet his figures and landscapes disclose a preoccupation with the forms of the picture plane and not with a naturalistic reproduction of three-dimensional space. After seeing Matisse’s French Window at Collioure in 1966 he had an epiphany, and it became possible for him to create figurative paintings which were almost entirely abstract; the requirement to be faithful to the source disappeared, and Diebenkorn was able, once again, to focus on the surface effects of color, shape, and line. After settling into this paradigm, he never looked back.

Untitled. 1946. A good example of Diebenkorn’s earliest mature work.

Berkeley #13. 1954. Diebenkorn’s expressionist paintings of this period are full of visual interest; but for the artist, they must have presented a less than satisfactory way of working, because he abandoned the style the year after making this painting.

Girl on a Terrace. 1956. The way the figurative elements of this picture blend into the background is highly reminiscent of his pictures from a few years before. “Figure” and “ground” are, here, barely distinct.

Sleeping Woman. 1961. Adding the mirror’s reflection to this picture serves to complicate the image and push it towards abstraction. In some of Diebenkorn’s other figurative paintings from this period the titular subject can be hard to see.

Ingleside. 1963. Diebenkorn, looking out at a landscape, sees colors and planes. The amount of detail in the foreground is the same as that of the background; there is therefore barely any three-dimensional space in this picture, despite our eyes “knowing” there ought to be.

Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad. 1965. By focusing on only a small particle of his field of vision, Diebenkorn makes an abstraction out of what is a depiction of real-life objects.

Ocean Park #18. 1968. Painted the year after his epiphany in front of Matisse, this picture shows Diebenkorn finally achieving his signature style.

Ocean Park #132. 1985. He spent the last quarter-century of his life painting in this manner, producing nearly 150 paintings in the Ocean Park series and several others of similar style.

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WAIN: CATS AS PURE ENERGY

Early-twentieth-century England was, like our own time, besotted with cute animals doing funny things. The paintings and drawings of Louis Wain (mostly depictions of anthropomorphized cats acting like humans) were immensely popular in Edwardian England. Wain himself was not a shrewd businessman; he failed to secure the copyright on most of his works and therefore remained in poverty throughout his life. He also suffered many nervous breakdowns and was eventually committed to a mental hospital. He continued making works of art while at the hospital; in 1939, the psychologist Walter Maclay found several of his images of cats in a junk shop and proclaimed they evidenced Wain’s deteriorating grasp on reality as he descended into madness. Since it is impossible to sequence the images with certainty (Wain didn’t date or title any of the works he made during his latter years), Maclay’s theory remains conjectural; but perhaps instead of evidence of increasing mental debility, Wain’s pictures could be seen as a record of the artist’s sharpening focus? Wain’s cats were always full of verve and spunk—his work could be read as a progressive refinement of his technique as he drew cats that were more and more electrified until, in the end, they become creatures of pure energy. During the day cats are notoriously slothful, spending much time lolling about in sunbeams; but at night their energies are released and they run around the house with wild abandon. How to describe this in paint? Wain’s pictures do so remarkably well.

These cats are depicted relatively straightforwardly but there’s something uncanny about them; their ears, especially, seem off. All the cats I’ve ever known only lay their ears back like that when they are in a bad mood.

In the Vineyard. N.D. The colors and patterns of the cats’ fur are much more vibrant in this picture. Also, the background is pulsing with latent energy.

This cat looks positively electrocuted. The background is beginning to abandon any pretense of reality.

Kaleidoscope Cats IV. N.D. The background from the previous picture has become a halo / aura in this one.

Here, the cat exists as a vector for some kind of force field or static-electrical flux. As it stalks across the carpet, charged ions float out into the ether.

Now the cat has been completely subsumed into the electrical / energetic field, reeking of malevolent energy.

As it says on the r/imsorryjon front page, the cat “has abandoned his limited form and he is beautiful.”

This cat, calmer than the previous two, is somehow more terrifying to behold: it has transcended this earthly plane and become a being of pure energy, fully detached from the realm of mere matter. Actually that’s how most cats seem to behave—like disdainful deities; as if the world isn’t good enough for them. It seems Wain has expressed, in his art, a fundamental truth about cats.

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