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That Mondrian Look
| Article
# : |
19180 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
1,551 Words |
| Author
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Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler
Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler write on the arts from
Berlin, Germany. |
In one form or another, you already know the ad well. For at least a decade, the familiar primary color design has been popping up everywhere. Whether you're buying cassette tapes or hair spray or even bicycle accessories, the Mondrian look is there in the packaging. It is eye catching, even if it is not authentically De Stijl.
L'Oreal, a major cosmetics company, advertises its line of hair care items by fusing the product name and its design--"Studio Line Styling Mousse." We are invited to buy into the studio and the color and line styling of Piet Mondrain when purchasing mousse. If we can't afford one of the artist's classic Modernist compositions of the 1920s, at least we can be reminded of his work every day, on our bathroom counter.
The Stiftung fur konstruktive und konkrete Kunst (Foundation for Constructive and Concrete Art) in Zurich recently presented a provocative exhibition: Mondrain on the Tube: Popularization and Trivialization of the Ideal. As curator Margit Weinberg Staber notes in her introduction to the catalog, the exhibition approaches its subject with no moral condemnation of those who may have commercialized the artist's work. Mondrian on the Tube poses the problem of what can happen to a work of art in an age of mass reproduction and democratization of style.
For instance, the exhibition and the catalog make a conscious point of reversing the normal presentation of subject matter and its chronological ordering. Results appear before causes. Mondrian's imitators and their products are presented first in a kind of window or warehouse display, which occupies the entire length of a hall. A visitor walks along the aisle of neatly arranged Mondrian wares like a potential shopper. The second hall contains blowups of photographs and miniature models of Mondrian's studios in Paris and New York in the 1930s and '40s. The third hall showcases primary and secondary literature and materials about the Neo-Plasticist master: magazines, catalogs, postcards, and posters. Finally, the viewer comes to the iconic summit--an original masterpiece of Piet Mondrain's classical period, Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow (1930).
One might think there is no sense to this reverse order. Normally, it would seem logical that the actual original work of Piet Mondrian should take precedence, followed by the mass marketers, secondary plagiarizers, and banal trivializers. But one can read this in the opposite manner. For the fame of a Mondrian relies precisely on the fact that there are so many imitators. This peculiar logic works
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