This week’s “Digging Daura” post is the last in our subseries of excerpts from the letters of Louise Blair Daura to her family. Here she describes a visit to Piet Mondrian’s Paris studio in April of 1930. Her description of the studio’s design, which is, in effect, an extension of Mondrian’s canvases, illustrates the artist’s desire “to establish international unity in life, art, culture, either intellectually or materially.“[1] A photograph of Mondrian’s New York studio in the 1940s is often pictured in art historical texts to demonstrate the same strategy. Louise’s description of Mondrian’s photo album, with which he explained his gradual embrace of a totally abstract painting style, is even more significant, supporting, as it does, the now classic lecture on Mondrian in which art history professors do the same thing with images showing his progression from early works to his mature style.
When I left Jean, I went to join Pierre at Mondrian’s studio.[2] Mondrian is the founder of the Constructivist movement in art, and works with the simplest of elements; red, blue, yellow, black and white, unmixed, are the only colors he uses, and squares, rectangles and black lines the only forms. He is 58, and showed us an album of photos of his paintings from the age of seventeen, clearly showing the evolution which he has undergone from Academicism, through Cubism, to his present form. He has written numerous books on the “neo-Plasticism” as he calls his art, and has paintings in the museums of Holland, Prague, and Germany. His studio is as interesting as his paintings. The walls, chairs, tables and easels are painted with white Ripolin, and all the accessories, such as boxes, victrola, etc. are painted in red, blue or yellow Ripolin, and placed so carefully that nothing must be moved out of its proper place.[3] The walls are decorated with different sized squares of red, blue and yellow, placed at calculated but not symmetrical distances. On the white cupboards and tables would be painted a small rectangle of color, and all so calculated that it was impossible not to admire it, though I had never seen anything like it before. The floor was very dark and highly polished, with grey rugs scattered about, and the divan was grey also. With all of those colors at their maximum intensity, the proportion of each in reference to the whole was so perfect that it was at once gay and restful. He showed us his paintings, one of which is square, and hung by one of its points, in diamond shape, with only four lines on its perfect, white surface. As we discussed it, he explained how long he had worked on it, how difficult it had been, because the slightest increase in size of the top line or change in position made the picture too “tragic.” He works for weeks on one picture, to get a surface as united and perfect as if it had been painted with one stroke of a large brush dipped in Duco, and he is as pre-occupied with the proportions of one square in reference to another as ever Rubens was to suspend the chariot of Victory in air above a riotous scene of battle.[4]
(Louise Blair Daura letter to family, April 17, 1930, Pierre Daura Archive, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia)
Next week’s “Digging Daura” post will present some of the Christmas-themed items in the archive.
[1] “De Stijl: Maifesto 1,” first published in De Stijl, V, no. 4 (Amsterdam, 1922), reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory: 1900-2000 (Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA, 2003) p. 281.
[2] Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Dutch painter, founder of De Stijl movement and creator of a style of abstract painting he named Neo-Plasticism, which was both a source for and a subset of the larger Constructivist movement in Europe in the 1920s.
[3] Ripolin remains a popular, French brand of enamel paint.
[4] Duco is an industrial paint invented in 1923 by GM for automobiles.
Above: marginalia drawing by Louise Blair Daura illustrating a painting by Mondrian.
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