Nicholas Fox Weber at Literary Hub: Approaching the age of twenty, Mondrian painted his most impressive painting to date. It was a still life of a dead hare. The animal hanging from its right hind leg is a feat of verisimilitude. The setting—the space above a wooden plank that recedes into a black background—is a triumph of austere elegance. The contrast between the luminous subject and the rich black presages Mondrian’s later abstractions.
The canvas belongs above all to the tradition of Dutch still lifes as well as to pictures of freshly killed game by the French eighteenth-century painter Jean Siméon Chardin, but it is not a mere pastiche. It has a zing that goes far beyond the slavishness of a copy.
The sharp focus with which Mondrian renders the hare, and the elegance of the matte black background, have assurance without arrogance. With his renewed determination to be a painter, Mondrian had become his own man and developed his capacity to paint with a punch that energizes the viewer.
Mondrian’s confidence shines in several paintings of fruit baskets and earthenware pitchers that he made that year. Adhering to the same historical traditions as when he painted the hanging game, he focused on the art of the past that was the most tough and truthful, imbuing his own painting with that same rigor and candor. He had already developed the attitude toward art-making he would have lifelong.
The young painter concentrated his subject, reduced the elements, and eliminated anything superfluous. He made the straw of a basket the perfect blend of supple and taut, and the skin of an onion microscopically thin. Having mastered weightiness as well as ethereality, he rendered a stone slab so that it is heavy and firm.
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