By Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 reporter
Dallas, TX – Suzanne Sprague, Reporter: You could hardly be chastised for walking through the Kimbell's Mondrian exhibit without recognizing nearly any of the works. The Museum's director, Timothy Potts, readily concedes the serene landscapes Piet Mondrian painted in his early career, during the late 1800's, are a world away from his later, and instantly recognizable, grids and color blocks.
Timothy Potts, Kimbell Art Museum Director: You see these misty views of windmills and barns and sunsets, which are not at all what people associate with Mondrian, but this is the point the exhibition is making, it's only through understanding how that work evolves that you can really understand how he becomes an abstract artist and what he's trying to do in his abstract art.
Sprague: Mondrian's introduction to drawing and painting was humble. Even the artist himself said he began "like everybody else." He watched his father, who ran a religious school, draw for a hobby, then learned oil painting from an uncle. But when Mondrian was 20 years old, he entered the National Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. Although the faculty taught traditional methods, Mondrian soon began pushing the envelope, as evidenced by "Village Church," which he painted when he was 25 years old.
Malcolm Warner, Kimbell Art Museum Chief Curator: It's a watercolor painting of a view from Mondrian's parents' backyard. It's over some meadows looking toward the village church in the distance.
Sprague: Malcolm Warner is the Senior Curator at the Kimbell.
Warner: And in it, Mondrian is really trying to show more than just a snapshot of what happened to be there something a bit more spiritual; and the presence of the church, I think, is meant to suggest aspirations upwards, just like the growth of the trees in the foreground.
Sprague: You can see in those trees, and in the church behind them, stark geometric forms with little added detail. Mondrian flirts with this abstraction throughout his early career, until eventually, shortly before World War I, everything dissolves into patternwork.
Warner: That's what emerges from this exhibition, that all along, even when he was painting realistically, he's thinking perhaps even subconsciously in terms of abstract shapes.
Sprague: Ironically, the owner of "Village Church" agreed to load it to the Kimbell only after learning the museum was located in Fort Worth. As a young boy in Holland, he had received a post-World War II care package from a Fort Worth school, and he felt indebted for the show of kindness.
But aside from showing the technical changes in Mondrian's career, the Kimbell's exhibition also tries to show why they happened. Janis Bergman-Carton, who chairs the art history department at Southern Methodist University, says part of the explanation lies in the incredible advances made at the turn of the last century.
Janis Bergman-Carton, Southern Methodist University Art History Department: There's a tremendous amount of work going on in the sciences, for example. The study of the human eye, of optics. X-rays are invented in the 90's. That there is this interest in a world beyond what we can actually see.
Sprague: So Mondrian's paintings dipped more, as he put it, into abstract-realism, showing the world he saw beyond the naked eye.
Hans Janssen, Curator of the Mondrian exhibition: He was very sure, he was very much aware of the fact that art was revealing all kinds of truths or all kinds of meanings that were deeper or more profound than you can have at face value, looking at images wherever.
Sprague: Hans Janssen likes to think Mondrian was simply the right man at the right time. Janssen organized this exhibition and is a curator at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which owns many of the paintings on view. He says this is a thought-provoking exhibition. And, in fact, the Kimbell will host a symposium in September about Mondrian's concept of reality. But Janssen also hopes, and believes, the paintings will prove a feast for the eye. "Mondrian: The Path to Abstraction" continues at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth through December 8th. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.
To contact Suzanne Sprague, please send emails to ssprague@kera.org.