Liverpool Tate Gallery - Mondrian in his studios

Spent a brilliant day at the Liverpool Tate Gallery, on Albert Dock.  The highlight event was a curated exhibition of the works of Piet Mondrian.

I found the whole experience extremely rewarding as my dear wife agreed to come for the day too, so I was able to share my perhaps somewhat limited understanding of Mondrian to someone also keen to learn, at the same time as my own viewing.

I'm really glad that the Tate chose to start the exhibition with a painting that highlighted the roots of where Mondriaan had started his artistic journey, that being originally of a portrait artist, from Holland.  He was quite successful as a 'traditional' artist in his home country of Holland, having painted for some time, scenes around Amsterdam (An example may be Houses on the Gein, 1900, when he was about 28 years old).
Note; This painting was not in the Tate Liverpool exhibition, it is just included here as a reference for grounding Mondriaan's journey.

   The Tate used one of his own portraits to visually articulate the process of abstraction, and so this single piece made it especially easier for me to explain how Mondrian's abstraction process, together with plenty of reference to the context of his thinking at the time; how he was influenced by the Impressionists, Cezanne, Van-Goch, and later,  Picasso and Braque and the "new" advent of Cubism, and all the other artists of the turn of the new century, together with where art was generally going in the culture at that time in history; world events that influenced cultural outlooks of the 1910 to 1920s period; the establishment of the Bauhaus and so on.  It was only after Mondriaan went to live in Paris that he dropped the second "a" in his surname to the familiar version we see today.  The Tate's choice made the explanation of how Mondrian wanted to create something completely new and fresh, yet still relationally connected to everything that was going on around him (both in terms of culture and artistic context AND the physical imagery of his environment, - man made and from nature).  It's so important, in my opinion, to think of why Mondrian was thinking the way he did at the time he started his experiments.  The context, that is, what was happening at the time, is key.

As an aide to explaining what abstraction means to me, I was counting on the exhibition to show one of Mondrian's "Tree" series, a set of works that I had come across some time ago, which would help in the explanation of what abstraction meant to Mondrian at the time, and how it can be used to help general interpretation.  I was not disappointed as we found it in the next room...  Mondrian's awareness of nature and it's continuing influence on man, (particularly at a time of extreme change in the world of his time, - futurism / modernism, communist revolution, the fascist movements, the new American culture and so on), is still entirely relevant today, - especially as the pace of change at this present time continues to be quite relentless.






A work that was also brilliantly exhibited was Mondrian's "Ocean"...
The fact that the Tate had placed this next to a window overlooking the Mersey was in my opinion, no mistake, but very carefully orchestrated.  To the casual observer, they would find it very difficult to understand this painting. However, when I pleaded to my wife to gently squint her eyes, look at the painting with the minimum gap between her eyelids, then the image jumps out at you.  The combination of the abstract, and the merest hint of white paint in between the intermittent horizontal and vertical truncation lines is enough to provide the wonderful illusion of glare bouncing off the ocean waves.  It's almost impossible for most people to see this effect unless they squint their eyes.  The act of doing so reveals a new dimension in a painting which if casually inspected looks lifeless and flat..