Learning the Boogie-Woogie

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February 03, 2000

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Ron Spronk, associate curator for research at the Straus Center for Conservation, comparing x-radiographs of Mondrian's Composition No. 7 (right) and Rhythm of Black Lines, 1935-42, (left).

A picture once wasn’t good enough for abstract artist Piet Mondrian, who spent much of his career in Paris but who died in February 1944 in New York.

In the years after his arrival in the U.S. in 1940, he revised 17 paintings he had finished in Europe years earlier, inscribing each with a double date to signify their two completions.

Mondrian added lines and blocks of color to his earlier works to complicate them and give them "more boogie-woogie," as he put it. He continued this pattern with the first painting he did entirely in New York – painting, exhibiting, revising, and then re-exhibiting the work, with a new title and a double date.

Several of the pictures, known as the "transatlantic paintings," have been brought to the Straus Center for Conservation for study. The paintings will be examined using x-ray and other techniques in an effort to reconstruct Mondrian’s process of revision.

Spronk (right) and Cooper (left) examining photographs showing first states of "transatlantic" paintings. Behind them, a photomural of Mondrian using his gramophone in 1943 (photograph by Fritz Glarner) and Composition No. 7.

The pictures will be available to the public next year in an exhibit, "Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings," scheduled for April through July 2001 at the Fogg Art Museum.

Eleven of these transatlantic paintings were included in the 1995 Mondrian retrospective at the Haags Gemeentemuseum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. While that exhibition shed important new light on Mondrian’s working process, few of the transatlantic pictures have received technical analysis or scholarly attention until now.