Tableau No. 2 / Composition No. V

Piet Mondrian, 1914 · Gallery 503 · Floor 5

Mondrian is thirty-nine when he moves to Paris. And almost immediately, he drops a letter from his name. Mondriaan used to have two a's. Paris gets one. Small change. But that's the idea. Ya know, New city. New painter. Sure. He gets deep into what Picasso and Braque are doing. Take a face or a guitar apart and spread it across a canvas. But, Mondrian wants to see what happens if you keep going. This painting probably started as a church. Notre-Dame-des-Champs, near Montparnasse. Not the famous Notre Dame. A neighborhood church. But by the time Mondrian is finished, the subject is barely hanging on. Black lines run into each other, stop, and start again. Pink. Dusty yellow. Gray. It's called Tableau no. 2 / Composition no. V. Two titles. Neither one admits it's a church. A critic saw it in March 1914 and called it a map. Or a labyrinth. Fair. Try following a black line from one side to the other. Nobody said church. Then Mondrian picks a terrible summer to go home. His father is sick, so he heads back to Holland for a visit. That same summer, over in The Hague, he gets the first show of his own he's ever had. Sixteen paintings. Somebody buys this one. It closes July thirty-first. Four days later, the war starts. And now he can't get back to Paris. He has no studio. No painting materials. No income. For more than a year, he mostly draws. Down on the Dutch coast, he starts working on the North Sea. Except those seascapes get stripped down too. The water becomes horizontal strokes. The pier gives him vertical ones. He's doing to the sea what he'd been doing to the church. Working out how much of the actual thing he can lose. Check the corners on this one. The middle is packed. Out there it thins down to almost nothing. Just gray canvas. It never makes it to the edge. The visit lasts five years.

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