the making of

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  What I Looked At Today - Mondrian Transatlantic Paintings

  Posted: 31-October-2009, 11:15pm CET

  

  Anyone with an interest in Piet Mondrian's painting technique probably already has Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings, published by the Harvard Art Museums in 2001. It's a fascinating, in-depth, and not-at-all boring look at a unique body of Mondrian's work, based on the scholarship of art historian Harry Cooper and forensic painting scientist Ron Spronk.

  They examine a group of 17 paintings which Mondrian took with him to New York when he fled Paris just before the outbreak of WWII. Mondrian had already shown some of the paintings, but he reworked them so significantly after his arrival in the US, that he gave them all two dates. [The Phillips Collection's Painting No. 9, for example is dated 1939-1942.]

  Cooper and Spronk get deep into the layers of paint to reveal how Mondrian constructed and executed his paintings, and then how he altered them. It's great, geeky stuff, and the book is filled with weird, interesting photos of details--like 40x zooms on brushstrokes, and the messy backs and reshaped stretchers--that people who don't own Mondrians never get to see. And there's X-ray photos and spectral analysis that you usually only see used on Old Masters, rarely on modern art. These images, these paintings, are objects, after all, and they were made by someone. It's a basic reality that is somehow easy to forget.

  Buy Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings for like $40, a third off the $60 cover price [amazon]

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  What I Looked At Today: Theo van Doesburg Edition

  Posted: 31-October-2009, 5:07am CET

  

  It's hard to see Theo van Doesburg's work up close these days, especially paintings. But for this Dutch Landscapes paintings project, the technical and theoretical logic of both Mondrian and van Doesburg is pretty inarguable.

  Though the de Stijl folks were pursuing geometric purity and truth, not deploying abstraction as an obscuring, information-smothering blanket, the boundaries of their color planes and lines are interesting reference points.

  

  And fortuitously, a new, expansive exhibition of van Doesburg and his network of influence across the avant-garde, just opened at the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. It will travel to the Tate Modern in February. Which is as convenient an occasion as any for the release of a beautiful hi-res image of Simultaneous Counter-Composition, 1929-30, which is on loan from MoMA's collection. Just look how the yellow brushstrokes come up right against the black line. And the free edge on that little white wedge up there,