TABLEAU NO. 2 / COMPOSITION NO. V
PIET MONDRIAN, 1914
Soft pinks, dusty yellows, grays. A whole wall of little blocks, with black lines trying to box them in. Nothing hard yet. No pure red, no pure blue. If you didn't know, you'd say Cubist. Picasso, Braque, that broken-up world. And good guess. Because that's pretty much what he's up to. He's living in Paris, a couple blocks from those guys, watching them blow the world apart and put it back together in little planes. And he's copying them. This is as close as Mondrian ever gets to straight-up Cubism. A really good student. Then comes the dumbest, most important accident of his whole life. Summer, 1914. He goes home to Holland to see his dad, who's sick. And while he's there, the war breaks out. Borders slam shut. He can't get back to Paris. A quick visit turns into five years stuck in his own country. No Picasso down the street. No Braque to bounce things off. Just him, alone, with the thing he's been chasing and nothing left to copy. And here's the funny part. With nobody to imitate, he finally quits imitating. He keeps stripping it down, past Cubism, past anything those Paris guys are doing, till he hits the black lines, the three colors, all of it. The whole rest of him. So this is the last one before. The end of the apprenticeship. You can see the grid right here, half-built, like it's about to snap into place. He just doesn't know yet it's going to take a war, and five years alone, to get it there.