By
The Associated Press
Mondrian exhibit shows how artist's paintings were altered
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - When Piet Mondrian traveled from London to New York in 1940, the energy of Manhattan inspired him. He decided to revise 17 paintings he had completed in Europe, and began scraping away old paint, adding new lines and colors, and inscribing two sets of dates on each one.
After he died, however, all those changes made Mondrian's work a little confusing. Experts had no way of knowing what the paintings originally looked like, and little hope of finding out.
Now they do.
"Mondrian: The Trans-Atlantic Paintings," which opens tomorrow at Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger Museum and runs through July 22, examines those paintings using technologically sophisticated tools including ultraviolet light, infrared light, X-rays and digital imaging. The exhibit allows visitors to compare the original and final versions of 11 of the 17 paintings.
Kermit Champa, who teaches the history of art and architecture at Brown University and who is author of "Mondrian Studies," said the high-tech research provides groundbreaking information about Mondrian.
The show includes computer kiosks on which visitors can compare images of both the original and final paintings. They can also examine photographs taken through a powerful microscope that reveal the different layers of paint.
The exhibit's catalog details the research, which was completed by Harry Cooper, the museum's associate curator of modern art, and Ron Spronk, the associate curator for research at Harvard's Straus Center for Conservation.
Some of the paintings have visible traces of removed lines and color that have only become apparent as the works aged.
"Over time, it has no doubt become more pronounced," Cooper said. "So in some cases, the painting is giving away its own secrets."
Many of the paintings kept their secrets hidden until Cooper and Spronk started examining them. Their work took two and a half years to complete, and had been evolving since Cooper's arrival at the museum three years ago.
"The first day he was here, before he even got to his office, I said to him, 'I've always wanted to work on Mondrian,'" Spronk said. "He quickly came up with the idea of concentrating on the trans-Atlantic paintings. And we've been working on it ever since."
Though Cooper and Spronk wanted to have all 17 Mondrians in the exhibit, some of the paintings' owners declined to lend them because they were too delicate to travel.
Through their research, Cooper and Spronk discovered some of the dates on the paintings had also been altered. They think the original date probably represents the year Mondrian finished the first version, while the second date indicates when he began it.
The show provides so much new information because Mondrian did not keep detailed records about his work, and many of the paintings were not photographed after they were finished the first time.
The only clues about some of the original compositions come from records kept by Charmion von Wiegand, an art critic and artist who sublimated her unrequited love for Mondrian by chronicling his career.
Not everyone, though, was as enamored with Mondrian's work. The trans-Atlantic paintings did not cause critical accolades when they were first shown. Harriet Janis, the wife of a prominent art dealer, wrote that they "inadvertently demonstrated the conflict resulting from the attempt of any artist to merge two periods of his work."
The exhibit also includes one painting that was unfinished at the time of Mondrian's death in 1944 that clearly illustrates how the artist altered his work.
The paintings are surrounded by photographs of the artist, and one picture of his studio decorated with colored rectangles. He wanted to make what Cooper called a "tonal environment" in which to create and alter his work - even though Mondrian believed that all painters would one day become irrelevant.
"He felt that at some future, Utopian point there wouldn't be painting at all," Cooper said. "You wouldn't need it. Everything around you would be beautiful, and that would be it."
