tore nordenstam explanation and understanding in the history of art

Gradually Mondrian arrived at the conclusion that the essential features of the motifs can
he brought out by very simple means: arrangements of horizontal and vertical strokes.
The Composition from 1916 (Fig. 17) is one of the so-called plus-minus-works which
stand halfway on the road from Cubism to the purely rectangular works. In 1916 - 17,
Mondrian arrived at what might be described as the take-off stage of his abstract painting.
The simplification of the motifs had been carried so far that the same basic structure
began to emerge in the different motifs. Then it did not matter from which naturalistic
motif one started; the problems that remained to solve were the pictorial ones of how to
balance the forms against each other and how to balance colour against form. For some
years Mondrian experimented with checkerboard pattterns and various ways of
distributing rectangles on the surface of the canvasses (see e.g. Fig. 18), until he settled
for the solution illustrated by the pictures we considered in section 1.1.
Why is it clarifying to look at a sequence of works like the tree sequence from Fig. 8 to
Fig. 18 and from then on the sequence from Fig. 1 to Fig. 7? Richard Wollheim has
suggested that art is essentially historical and that the understanding of art therefore
requires an historical placing of the works of art. One can look at the history of art as a
series of transformations. “As a rough principle it might be laid down that those works of
art which result from the application of the more radical transformational devices will
require for their understanding a correspondingly greater awareness of the devices that
went into their formation.” 18 The principle is indeed applicable to Mondrian who is “one
of those great creative artists of the twentieth century who transformed western painting
in its structures and its objectives,” as Frank Elgar puts it in his book on Mondrian. 19
If art is transformational, then it becomes understandable that the explanation of art so
often takes the form of pointing to sequences, analogies and parallels. But why is art
historical and transformational? Is it just an empirical fact that the art with which we
happen to be familiar is of this nature, or can one find more fundamental reasons for the
fact that art is nourished by art more than by nature? In the background of Wollheim’s
18
R. Wollheim, Art and its Objects. An Introduction to Aesthetics, Harper & Row, London 1968, §§ 60-61.
The quotation is from p. 127.
19
F. Elgar, Mondrian, Thames and Hudson, London 1968, p. 85.