Stephen Smith at Literary Review: There’s a chain of upmarket hotels that share their name with the artist Mondrian, though it seems unlikely that their ‘offer’ is based on his lifestyle. If it were, the reviews on Tripadvisor would include some stinkers. Guests would complain about cold, cramped rooms and comfortless furniture. And that would be without mentioning the dining options. For a time, Mondrian seemed to live on nothing but lentils. On the plus side, there would be jazz and dancing and handmade artworks.
The maker of abstract grids enclosing lozenges of colour, Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) was one of the two or three epoch-shaping artists of the last century. But his life story isn’t widely known and few of us would be able to identify him from a photograph. Because his work seems cool and smart, and designers have sampled it ad nauseam for that very reason, we tend to imagine that he was probably cool and smart too.
The reality is rather more complex and curious, according to Nicholas Fox Weber’s assiduous and sensitive biography. Mondrian lived alone in a series of rented flats which weren’t much more than bedsits. They were in crowded corners of big cities: Paris, London and New York. He could seldom afford to heat his digs, and he ate sparingly, even when he was entertained by his few loyal supporters. He was a hypochondriac (to be fair to Mondrian, he also enjoyed poor health). He expected his long-suffering friends to console him, but he could be glassily unavailable to them. As with a number of artists, there were difficulties with girls: broadly speaking, Mondrian avoided them, though he appreciated their company as dance partners. This frowningly serious man liked to comb out his toothbrush moustache, climb into an ensemble perilously close to a zoot suit and cut a rug to the latest dance style – the Charleston or the boogie-woogie, say. There’s not much evidence that he preferred men to women. One hangover of Mondrian’s paralysingly strict upbringing in the Netherlands, where his father was a Calvinist schoolmaster, was a fastidious distaste for matters of the flesh. His father also put Mondrian off God. He became a convert to theosophy, which teaches that there is a spiritual reality beyond everyday existence, out of reach of the more established religions.
More here.
