FLW Inspired Mondrian To Change His Artistic Style?

[Wrightgeek]

Below is a link to a story posted on PrairieMod this morning. I read the story, and at the very end I came across this final paragraph, which is quoted below as well.

Has anyone here ever heard that Piet Mondrian was so influenced by his exposure to the Wasmuth Portfolio that it caused him to forsake representational landscape painting for the grid-style paintings that would eventually become his trademark and would make him a world famous artist?

I must say that this was news to me, if in fact it has any substance to it.

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37324 ... -of-space/

I went to Unity temple with [New York Times architecture critic] Nicolai Ouroussoff. I was obsessed with photographing ceiling grids at the time. When I saw this ceiling, I said, "Didn't Mondrian come after this?" And he said, "Yes, well after. Don't you know about the Wasmuth portfolio?" He explained that a German guy named Wasmuth came to Chicago, met Frank Lloyd Wright in 1904 or 05. He became so interested in what Wright was doing he published a portfolio of Wright's work that was distributed in Europe. Mondrian saw the portfolio and abandoned the landscape for the grid.

[peterm]

Wright definitely influenced the Dutch De Stijl movement as a whole. J.J.P. Oud, Theo van Doesburg, Rietveld, and probably Mondrian as well all were aware of the Wasmuth portfolio. Wright's influence on European non objective abstract art is something worth looking into. In De Stijl, the distinctions between painting, sculpture, design, and architecture were blurry.
Of course, the area where they broke from Wright was in the use of color, limiting themselves to the primaries and black, white and grey (no autumn earth tones for the Dutch modernists...)

[DavidC]

Wikipedia on Piet Mondrain


David

[peterm]

From Wikipedia De Stijl:

"Van Doesburg also knew J.J.P. Oud and the Hungarian artist Vilmos Huszàr. In 1917, the cooperation of these artists, together with the poet Anthony Kok, resulted in the founding of De Stijl. The young architect Gerrit Rietveld joined the group in 1918.
During those first few years, the group was still relatively homogeneous, although Van der Leck left in 1918 due to artistic differences of opinion. Manifestos were being published, signed by all members. The social and economic circumstances of the time formed an important source of inspiration for their theories, and their ideas about architecture were heavily influenced by Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright."

Mondrian was another important member of De Stijl.

Rietveld:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/11/16212 ... 2a570a.jpg

Mondrian:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/mond ... _plane.jpg

Oud:
http://www.mimoa.eu/images/2196_l.jpg

van Doesburg:
http://www.minusspace.com/wp-content/up ... esburg.jpg

I would agree that Wright set the stage for all of this, though it's an oversimplification to say that Mondrian went directly from landscapes to grids. His landscapes were very systematically and gradually becoming more and more deconstructed and abstract before he moved to the grid paintings. Google Mondrian tree paintings to see the progression towards total abstraction...

[SDR]

http://www.google.com/images?client=saf ... =en&tab=wi

[Reidy]

The visual similarities alone are a post hoc fallacy, not enough to convince. Standard practice among scholars is to require written evidence that one figure (Mondrian in this case) was aware of the other (Wright). Do we have this - i.e. did Mondrian ever mention Wright?

Alofsin, in The Lost Years, documents that the Wasmuth Portfolio sold badly in Europe, most of the press run ending up in storage at Taliesin. He argues that the notion that the publication set Europe on its ear is a myth. In that case, we can't conclude that every European architect, artist and designer of the era was famliar with it. Wright had a few imitators, but European modernism for the most part grew up independently. Ritveld was one of these imitators, and Mondrian knew him, but this doesn't add up to the conclusion that Mondrian even saw the Portfolio, much less that he took it to heart. His later paintings are reminiscent of Wright's glass designs (the Coonley Playouse in particular), but these designs barely figure in the Portfolio, and Wright didn't build the Playhouse until after he returned to the US.

My own theory is that most everybody in art or design in that era (Wright, Mackintosh, Mondrian and his circle, Cubism, Futurism, Art Deco and so much further on) was responding to the rise of machinery and working to turn machine-tooled lines and textures into something of aesthetic merit. This is what Wright talked about in The Art and Craft of the Machine in 1894, decades before the Europeans got into it. As far as I know the lecture wasn't published in Europe (or anywhere else until the Princeton Lectures of the early 30s).

[peterm]

1921:

http://www.dhub.org/object/157543,design+network

It's important to remember that during the era of the isms and manifestos, members of the European avant garde would share information. Here we have El Lissitsky (Russian constructivist) doing the cover.

[Roderick Grant]

I've always preferred Mondrian's early work to his "Broadway Boogie Woogie" phase. But the connection between his grid work and FLW's architecture is not very convincingly shown. I bet he knew of Wright, but that his art was minimally if at all influenced by it.

The evidence of Reitveld knowing FLW's work may not be well-established, but De Stijl achitect Robert van't Hoff's Huis ter Heide in Utrecht (1916) could not have been done without familiarity with FLW's Prairie work. I would suggest that it is likely that De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg was well aware of FLW, and thereby made his cohorts aware of him.

In Germany, Gropius definitely knew FLW's work, and probably promulgated it as well.

[peterm]

Excuse me for speaking in such a literal fashion about non objective art, but to me, the earlier Mondrian is about the singular "elevation", and the paintings of the "Broadway Boogie Woogie" era seem to be more about "plan" and the city as a whole...

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/mond ... _plane.jpg

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/m/mond ... oadway.jpg

Rietveld was absolutely aware of and influenced by Wright:

"A commission to copy from photographs furniture designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a client of the Dutch architect Robert van't Hoff brought Rietveld into contact with de Stijl (the Style), founded in 1917. De Stijl advocated a "pure" artistic expression based upon the interrelationship in space of rectangles of primary colors. Rietveld was a member of this group from 1919 to 1931, but already in 1917-1918 he had designed the so-called Red-Blue chair. Composed of a modular grid of square or rectangular sticks painted black and with a sustaining seat and back of red and blue rectangular plywood planes, this design enabled each element to maintain its own absolute identity because of the color scheme and the joinery. It was the first executed object to exhibit the artistic principles of de Stijl."

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/gerrit-rie ... z1JdkIALR0

[SDR]

Mondrian wasn't the only one painting "Mondrians"; following are pages from a Rietveld monograph by Daniele Baroni, "The Furniture of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld" (Barron's, 1977, 1978).


p 14
P Mondrian, "Composition with Lines," 1917

p 15

p 18


This excerpt mentions Mondrian and Wright, and also that the "Rood Blauwe" chair was designed initially to a 10 cm. grid:

p 41

p 42

p 43

[Palli Davis Holubar]

As we have said above, taking bodies of an artist's work out of the flow of their life's work is hard; over-reaching conclusions miss the subtle transitions. Not only do artists share ideas, as Peter relates, but they speak in conversation. Great gaps in any one artist's work often signify this. The artists looking and reading each others activity skip over "passages of thought" explored by another artist whose work they understand. Here is the Mondrian landscape that I am most familiar with:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt ... 9,r:14,s:0

[Reidy]

The text that SDR quotes above bears out Alofsin's point. It says that van't Hoff came to the US and observed Wright's buildings in person and not that he learned about Wright from the Wasmuth Portfolio.