Mondriaan and Photos (1)

Months ago I mentioned Dutch 20th century painter Piet Mondriaan a few times in this blog series. Famous—or notorious?—for his ultimately abstract pictures with squares and rectangles in red, blue and yellow, what has he got to do with photography, and of landscapes to boot? That is a long story. Mondriaan (outside the Netherlands also spelled Mondrian) started out, around 1900, as a pretty conventional painter. He lived in very interesting times, however, when painting was being revolutionised, not least because of the invention of photography, over half a century before. Cézanne, whom I also mentioned a few times for his problematising the relation of the painting as a canvas with depicted reality, was only the beginning. Fauvists and Cubists followed the (post-)Expressionists and then this other Dutchman, Theo van Doesburg, invented De Stijl. Mondriaan's extremely pure application of the Stijl principles make up his most famous paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, with rectangles in only the primary colours (for paint): red, yellow and blue, on a fond of white with black stripes.

I guess that I was like many people who at first could not find any sense or beauty in these utterly abstract paintings, but after reading a little and especially after seeing—quite a few years ago now—a chronologically organised overviews exhibition of Mondriaan's paintings in The Hague, I started to find them fascinating and, yes, beautiful. The big fascination was to see Mondriaan struggle for finding beauty in the landscape and trying to express beauty without the viewer being distracted by the representation. I plan to get back to this movement later on, but let me here look at an early stage of his quest.

You can paint—or photograph, for that matter—the windmill in Domburg against the evening sky (see these and a few more of his paintings at the website of the Domburg tourist agency). Mondriaan did that in 1909 in a more or less naturalistic style (first picture), although the blue colour of the mill as a suggestion of the late evening light could not have been made ten years earlier in the history of painting. I wonder, by the way, if that blue was a correct representation of how our eyes work: in dark circumstances, the receptors for colour (cone cells) in the retina are almost inactive and we only see light-and-dark (rod cells) —any strong colouring then is fantasy, I'd say. But let's look at how he painted the same mill in 1911: against again a night-blue sky there is a red shape with details in the sky's blue (a window and the axis of the mill's wings). In the tints of blue we see a vague differentiation between sky and earth; similarly, a darker shade of red suggests some volume in the mill. This is not yet an abstract painting, but clearly Mondriaan made a lot of steps in his thoughts in those two years. No longer even an effort at more or less naturalistic colouring: the blue of the sky is way too blue for that and the earth should not be the same hue of blue and just a bit darker. And most of all, of course: the mill has turned red! We have two of his later three primary colours here, with much contrast. It is all about strong shape and strong colour; the viewer must be struck at the very first moment by a strong impression. It is not about being true to what the painter's eye saw. For me, that was the eye-opener about this painting: think of what the viewer will experience!

Bonus puzzle for you, dear readers (and to me!): interesting that Mondriaan chose to keep the sky coloured close to nature and to think that the man-made addition to the landscape was the more mutable one, of which he could change the colour. Why did he not do it the other way around: a darkish, bluish or perhaps black mill against a red sky?

Another bonus, as an aside: does Mondriaan's red mill show influence of photography in the strong perspective as if the mill was photographed through a wide-angle lens? Ans dhat about his cutting of the wings, is that not also in imitation of an 'error' of photography? Or am I anachronistically over-interpreting things here? For instance, did they have such strong wide-angle lenses in 1911?

2D 2nd time: flat pictures

A few more examples of Cézanne's lesson that paintings (and photos) are flat. The lesson does not only apply to landscapes (also think of Martin Kers's remark that landscape pictures should not include the horizon if you don't really need it) or cityscapes, but also to architectural details, or all kinds of objects.
(Of course there is much more that can be learned from Cézanne, but one thing at a time, please!)





Using this trick makes for photos with a different theme than most standard pictures: they direct attention away from the landscape, building or object itself and towards structures, patterns, repetition, rhythm. They become less of a representation and more of a 2D-plane which should please the viewer with its colours, lines, etc. And I like if it also sets a bit of a riddle to he viewer: What do I see? On the one hand, I like it to see such riddle solved. On the other hand, it does not really matter what is being represented. The only photographic question is how it--whatever 'it' is--is brougth into the picture. Somehow, in such pictures I often have a preference for verticals and horizontals--from Cézanne to Mondriaan. But he'll have to wait to another time.

(And sorry if the three pictures do not nicely line up at the left margin as I wanted them; I'll have to learn a bit more about lay-out tricks in blogging...)

Landscape is hot

It's summer (in our Northern hemisphere), but that is not what makes the landscape hot--or: it's not the only thing that makes the landscape hot. There also is a lot of interest in the landscape, including the landscape in the Netherlands. At least that is what my newspaper says. Journalist and historian Jan Blokker is my source, and his sources are several books as well as the theme of the First International Triennial in Apeldoorn: 'Nature as artifice'. For the Dutch landscape, although enjoyed and heralded as 'nature' is largely 'artifice'--and changing at that! Rightly, Blokker writes that the Dutch landscape keeps changing. What our grandparents saw, was very different from what our famous 17th century painters saw, and we we see is vastly different again. In his article (alas not [yet?] online in the NRC Handelsblad site), two pictures are reproduced from re-issues books by Cas Oorthuys--more like our fathers' generation--and mention is made of Gerco de Ruyter--a current photographer. Now that is landscape as I like it! In one of the books Blokker reviewed, De Ruijter is characterized as someone who 'most loves pictures that seem abstract but that are composed of recognisable elements on second view' [my translation]. Have a look at his website to see what that means! He is the guy who invented the camera-kite and to take random(?) landscape pictures.

That made me remember one of the pictures from my balloon trip this May--not made random but very much on purpose and very much with the abstraction idea in mind. Dutch landscape, especially when shaped by humans, is a Mondriaan painting (Blokker referred to the famous painter, too) and all you need to do to make it a modern version of Mondriaan is ensure that the lines are not vertical/horizontal but have a bit of a diagonal slant. Mondriaan would not like it for it is not 'pure' enough, but I think that my picture here does capture the Dutch landscape, Mondriaan's spirit, and Gerco de Ruyter's as well. Wish he saw it!

At the same time, it is also a picture of the changing landscape in our time: the plastic on the field to protect the young crop is something our parents and grandparents would not have seen. And what about our children and grandchildren? Moreover, there is change at a smaller scale: some of the fields are still bare but the top-left bit has some beginning growth in green. That was spring arriving.


By the way, the book supplement of the NRC Handelsblad containing Blokker's reviews opened with a tremendous picture of a volcano--impossible to take a photo like that in Holland. With a little searching I found the source of the photo and the name of the volcano, the Tungurahua in Ecuador. the photo seems to be in the public domain, so I don't hesitate to copy it. The contrast of the lava on fire, the cold starry night, the white cloud and the black fume! Nothing abstract about it, no strange perspective, but pure nature that needs no artifice.

Close-Up and (Im-)Personal

Getting close to my idea of what makes a picture worth showing, is picturing a (little) bit of reality, something you and I and everyone may walk past daily, but that you never looked at in this way. Close-up and macro photography of inanimate, impersonal objects holds this type of charm for me. 'This way' and 'charm' are meant to avoid the word 'beauty'. Of course, an object may be beautiful in obvious ways, but I think I often prefer the hidden beauty of decay, of past glory.



Take this close-up of some kind of agricultural machine, shot in the neighbourhood of an old shed in a rural part of Holland. You maybe never saw how it had 'lived' and worked, grown old, used, worn-down, and rusted. It may be paradoxical that this has to do with the passage of time: how can you show time in a still picture? The stillness and restfulness of this machine part is emphasised in the simple and quiet compostion: in a single plane, parallel to the plane of the picture and with diffuse natural light. Two bolt-like things form an imaginary, visual, practically horizontal line. To the right there then is a vertical line to break--and in that way at the same time stress--the horizontal main line in the composition. A little bit of Mondriaan in a real-world object.

Yet the rust and wear show clearly that this thing has been out and about for a long time. The bolts or axes or whatever they are, are completely rusted and can never be undone anymore. Moreover, in the composition, the imagined horizontal line between the bolts is not quite horizontal and that gives some movement to the picture; movement is time. So both object and composition tell about time, its passage, and what this has done to the object.

That, in turn, makes the inanimate object something personal to me, worth looking at, worth showing to you.