Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [110]
Klee, “Blue Night,” 1923, Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Kunstmuseum, Basel. Klee went beyond realism in humorous, childlike paintings designed to plumb the depths of the subconscious.
HITLER’S ART SHOW
First the Nazis banned jazz from the airwaves, then they burned books by Hemingway, Thomas Mann, and Helen Keller. “Where books are burned, people are burned,” warned the writer Heinrich Heine. Artists felt the atmosphere of terror and oppression acutely, causing painter George Grosz to flee Germany in 1933. “I left because of Hitler,” Grosz said of the frustrated artist become dictator. “He is a painter too, you know, and there didn’t seem to be room for both of us in Germany.”
Those modern artists who stayed sow their works confiscated and, in 1937, exhibited as objects of ridicule. Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, organized a show of what they called “Degenerate” art (Entartete Kunst), consisting of masterpieces by the century’s most brilliant artists: Picasso, Matisse, and Expressionists like Kandinsky, Klee, Nolde, Kirchner, Kokoschka, and Beckmann.
The object was to discredit any work that betrayed Hitler’s master race ideology; in short, anything that smacked of dangerous free-thinking. Nazi leaders considered Modernist art so threatening they prohibited children from the show and hired actors to roam the halls loudly criticizing modern art as the work of lunatics. They scrawled derogatory slurs on the walls beside the paintings, which were grouped into categories like “Insults to German Womanhood” and “Nature as Seen by Sick Minds.” Price togs displayed how much public museums had paid for the works with signs: “Taxpayer, you should know how your money was spent.” Despite the effort to suppress “offensive” modern art, with on estimated three million in attendance, the exhibit may hove been one of the biggest successes ever.
MONDRIAN: HARMONY OF OPPOSITES
While German Expressionists wallowed in angst, a Dutch group of Modernists led by painter Piet Mondrian (pronounced MOWN dree ahn; 1872-1944) tried, from 1917 to 1931, to eliminate emotion from art. Called De Stijl (pronounced duh STEHL), which means “The Style,” this movement of artists and architects advocated a severe art of pure geometry.
Mondrian came from a neat, Calvinist country where the severe landscape of interlocking canals and ruler-straight roads often looked mechanically laid out. During the chaos of World War I he concluded, “Nature is a damned wretched affair.” Mondrian decided to jettison “natural,” messy art for a new style called Neo-Plasticism. The goal: to create a precise, mechanical order lacking in the natural world.
LINING UP. Mondrian based his style on lines and rectangles. Theorizing that straight lines do not exist in nature, he decided to use straight lines exclusively to create an art of harmony and order — qualities conspicuously missing from the war-torn world. When De Stijl was transferred to architecture, it would supposedly bring all chaotic forces into line, achieving a balance of opposites as in the Cross.
For Mondrian, vertical lines represented vitality and horizontal lines tranquility. Where the two lines crossed in a right angle was the point of “dynamic equilibrium.” In his trademark paintings, Mondrian restricted himself to black lines forming rectangles. He used only the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow and three noncolors: white, black, and gray. By carefully calculating the placement of these elements, Mondrian counterpointed competing rhythms to achieve a “balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.” Although his grid paintings look similar, each one is precisely — and differently — calibrated.
BRANCHING OUT
Mondrian arrived at his mature style through progressively simplifying natural forms. In a famous series of tree paintings done in Paris in 1911-12 under the influence of Cubism, his advance from description to abstraction is clear. In both paintings shown, the motif