Piet Mondrian’s Optimism — Book Excerpt
This article contains an excerpt from the Preface to my new book, Visualizing Politicians’ Personalities: 2019 Incumbents and Candidates, now available exclusively on amazon. Following is a copy of the cover.
The Preface briefly examines Our Chaotic Zeitgeist and the Partisan Tendencies contributing to the chaos.
This lays the foundation for the next section, Seeing Through the Chaos, which starts with the following excerpt, Piet Mondrian’s Optimism.
This excerpt explains my motivation for drawing spiritual portraits in general and for writing the new ebook about politicians’ personalities in particular.
Before World War I, Piet Mondrian painted landscapes. Before long he grew weary of painting the transient and trivial, and turned to painting the permanent and universal.
Mondrian’s art gradually became more and more abstract as he sought to portray the elemental forms underlying all of nature. He was one of the first abstract artists when abstract art was the most avant-garde trend in European art.
The artist eventually progressed to painting only rectangles, using black lines and the primary colors Blue, Red, and Yellow on a white canvas. He considered these primitive elements of color and form to be universal and hence, in his eye, his later work could represent anything and everything that could be broken down into opposing forces. Witnessing the strife and destruction caused by World War I in Europe in the 1910s, his response was to bring equilibrium to his canvasses.
Piet Mondrian finished his book The New Art — The New Life: The Culture of Pure Relationships in 1931, but never saw it published. In 1986 his writings finally found publication in English in The New Art — The New Life, The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, edited and translated by Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James.
In his book Mondrian describes using opposites of color and form in his paintings to represent the opposites present in society as a whole — “the material and spiritual, the masculine and feminine, the collective and individual, etc.” [p.254]. By bringing equilibrium to his paintings, he demonstrated how these opposing forces could co-exist in a single space — and he wrote about how the opposing forces enhance rather than destroy one another.
Art demonstrates that life, through equivalence of its opposed aspects — despite their different nature — can approach real equilibrium.
— From The New Art — The New Life by Piet Mondrian, 1931 [p. 254].
Mondrian’s vision, as manifested in his abstract paintings, convinced him that the natural conflict between opposites did not have to be violent and destructive, but could be — and in fact was destined to be — peaceful and constructive. The resulting images may look simplistic to people who do not understand his internal world — and his mission to express it and thereby help bring equilibrium to his external world — but to those who are familiar with his writings they are profound.
Having intuitively found “equilibrium” in the opposing forces in his paintings, Mondrian was confident that the opposing cultural and national forces creating violence and conflict in European society in the early 20th century would also find their own equilibrium.
Piet Mondrian’s optimism provides the inspiration for producing the images in this book.
The Preface continues to describe the other two fundamental elements of these images by providing some background on Carl Jung’s Archetypes and Wassily Kandinsky’s Visualizations.
After an Introduction explaining how I pull these foundational elements together, the ebook continues with chapters containing images and content for four Incumbents and nine Candidates. The incumbents are Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi. The candidates are Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillabrand, Michael Bennet, and Pete Buttigieg.
There is also a chapter containing Matchup images, one with some details about My Biases, and another with a Bonus Profile of Steve Bannon. This chapter includes a section entitled Team Nat-pop outlining my take on how Steve and Donald combined their contrasting talents to get Donald elected president. The final chapter is entitled “I Have a Dream,” which ends the ebook on an optimistic note. It concludes with three Appendices, a Bibliography, and an Index.
With two exceptions, the profiles, images, and content for each person are based on a book I read about each of them. The exceptions are Donald, whose profile I completed with the help of a friend, and my own profile and image.
I am very excited to offer this ebook to the general public at this time. Having been working on this project since the late 1980s, I finally feel comfortable sharing this work with people outside my immediate circle who may, like me, also be looking for new ways to view our currently chaotic political zeitgeist.
I sincerely hope this article piques your interest and you decide to fork over the measly $5.95 asking price and allow my work to open your mind a bit.
And if you do purchase the ebook and enjoy it, please tell your friends!
