Mondrian: Windmills to Tableaux

Pictures at the Stedelijk…

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The Mill 1917

Francesco: It started from reality. He painted himself. He painted windmills. Then he began to explore the nature of beauty.

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Sirin: His modernism was about reduction. Reducing beauty to pure form.

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Francesco: Yes. To horizontal and vertical lines.

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Tableau 1938

Sirin: And pure colors. The primaries. Red, blue, yellow.

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Francesco: And yet.

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Sirin: And yet?

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Francesco: Antoni Gaudi.

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Sirin: Yes. There are no straight lines in nature.

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Francesco: So there we are.

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Voice-over

Mondrian went from the curved lines of nature to reducing them to straight lines.

Gaudi went from the straight lines of architecture to embellishing structures with curves.

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Pictures at an Exhibition

Two critics discuss the works at the Out of Doubt exhibition…

Cavillor: Why is it called “Furniture Art”? Because there actually isn’t any furniture in it. There are hands, and I can see a rhinoceros or two. It reminds me of a play by Eugene Ionesco, Rhinocéros, in which two people in a café are having a conversation while a rhinoceros runs back and forth along the street in front of them. But at least the artist could draw.

Katherina: The buckets of cement with wires coming out I liked. Perhaps the artist meant to invoke a sense of space. But I also felt the arrangement produced a sense of clutter, much as we navigate our way through the clutter of an urban environment. With these kinds of installations, you're never sure if the artist has any graphic skills or not.

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Voice-over

Inverse Proportion between Graphic Art Skills
and Level of Absurdity and Reductionism in Modern Art

The reference to Ionesco makes a link between some examples of modern art and the theater of the absurd.  Sometimes might there even be a correlation between the lack of graphic skills such as drawing or painting the greater degree of absurdity? Or perhaps reductionism. But maybe this hypothesis could also be challenged as a reductio ad absurdum.

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