Piet Mondrian and Sean Scully: Two Political ArtistsAuthor(s): David CarrierSource: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Constructed Painting (Spring, 1991), pp. 67-70Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777090 .

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Piet Mondrian and Sean Scull Two Political Artists

David Carrier

Unless the artist die to the successes of his old work he cannot live in his new. -Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism

M o / ondrian and Scully, could they be political artists?

Many critics would think that question absurd.

They believe that a political artwork is an image implying an attitude toward what it depicts. Guernica is the model of political art that, in different ways, Anselm Kiefer, Leon Golub, and Eric Fishl imitate. I have explained else- where why I mistrust such art. It cannot compete with news

photos or films, and, in fact, does little more than express an attitude that its audience already shares.

I am neither a conservative nor a formalist. Art can indeed be political, and some of the best art today is political, but not in a literal-minded way. Because Sean Scully de-

velops Piet Mondrian's concerns in a different political envi-

ronment, the best way to understand how they both are

political artists is to identify the connections between their

styles. Some formalists treat artistic style as influenced by nothing but artworks. That approach is unnecessarily nar-

row, for whatever influences an artist's work becomes part of his style.

After 1920 Mondrian produced his classical rectangu- lar canvases, on a number of occasions used the lozenge shape, and in his last years in London and New York did

magnificent, innovative work. His was a complex stylistic development. "Few artists in our century have displayed so ardent a growth," Meyer Schapiro has said.2 Sometimes in his writings Mondrian is merely a man of his time, but

although his spiritualism is dated, his marvelous "Two Paris Sketches" (1920) is a reminder that he was a contemporary of Walter Benjamin.

Is the stroller moved or is he the mover? The artist causes to move and is moved. He is policeman, automobile, all in one. He who creates motion also creates rest.

What is brought to rest aesthetically is art.3

These texts anticipate his cityscapes of two decades later such as Broadway Boogie Woogie (fig. 1). Scully has said: "I would have found it difficult to have made [Mon-

67

FIG. 1 Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-43, oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

drian's] classical paintings; I could have made his late ones."4 For Scully, "one of the things that shuts you out [of these classical works] sometimes is that they are so right . there is no room for us."5 Mondrian's goal in Painting I

(Composition in White and Black) (fig. 2), was to extend his

image beyond the frame. The classical Mondrians appear elegant because he wanted to avoid "the past [which] has a

tyrannic influence which is difficult to escape. The worst is that there is always something of the past

within us . . . memories, dreams ... we see old buildings everywhere."6 Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse had a greater range of stylistic resources than Mondrian, who-in part for that reason-broke with the past, which he dreaded, more

dramatically than did they. Scully's earlier paintings, the diagonals with overlap-

ping stripes, such as Amber (fig. 3); the plaids such as Red

(1972, Arts Council of Great Britain, London); or the juxta- posed panels, such as How It Is (1981, Rowan Gallery, London), do not appear to extend beyond the frame. He does

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68 F I G. 2 Piet Mondrian, Painting I (Composition in White and Black), 1926, oil on canvas, 443/4 x 44 inches (diagonal) Museum of Modern Art, New York, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest.

not build directly upon the achievement of Mondrian's classi- cal works. Any stripe can be imagined expanding outward, but neither Tyger, Tyger (1980, Rowan Gallery, London), which opposes two fields of stripes, horizontals against verti-

cals, nor the recent Pale Fire (fig. 4), with a field of stripes broken by a window, suggests an extended field of stripes. Instead, Scully opens up his picture from within. "Now I have paintings with windows in them," he has said; "the inset is suspended in the field," and so, no longer dependent upon the edge, ceases to be an independent panel and "becomes a

figure in a ground ... an inset."7 His pictures have become walls.

Mondrian's panels are never windows. Although his

paintings seemingly are reproduced easily, it is important to see the originals, for they reveal what photographs usually do not show: how far his lines extend around the front edge of the canvas. Scully's numerous interviews point to the obvious differences between the concerns of early modernist artists and 1980s painters. Scully says his horizontals carry land-

scape references and the diagonal "doesn't have the symbolic weight . . . of the horizontal and vertical."8 Unlike Mon-

drian, he is unwilling to attribute any esoteric symbolic meaning to his works. Nevertheless, neither he nor Mondrian is a formalist. Mondrian said: "Art is the aesthetic establish- ment of complete life-unity and equilibrium-free from all

oppression."9 His work provides a model for the world outside art. "The essential value of each individual entitles him to an existence equivalent to that of others."10

"New York painting continues at its upper levels," the critic Carter Ratcliff says, "to show how the aesthetic touches the political. Scully's part in this demonstration has been

central during the 1980s.""l Schapiro made a similar point about Mondrian when he described his vision of "the beauty of a big city as a collective work of art [with] its promise of

greater freedom and an understanding milieu."12 Today, however, it is natural to ask whether this "perpetual move- ment of people, traffic, and flashing lights" is actually a sign of freedom. Scully's earliest work picks up where Mondrian left off, but offers a more pessimistic view of the modern city. In place of Mondrian's extension of his image beyond the

frame, Scully's (much larger) picture functions as an archi- tectural element.

Scully's Backs and Fronts (fig. 5), a large sequence of

panels, has the place in his stylistic evolution that the

lozenges had in Mondrian's. 13 When he adopted that format, "Mondrian [found] himself able to entertain a number of structural options that [had] no . . . prior existence in his . . .work."14 Once Scully did Backs and Fronts, he too was able to develop a number of options that had had no prior existence in his work. At a time when there was little interest in his art, Scully chose not to retreat, but to make this big, very ambitious work. Looking back, we can see that in

slightly earlier works he appears to have simplified his style, as if in preparation for that leap forward. With Backs and Fronts his concern with architectural scale first emerges. Although Scully had, by 1981, long lived in the United

States, only in this work did he draw the full implications of his move from London. Now he was influenced less by the

style of American painting, or by Mondrian's classical work, than by his urban environment. He incorporated direct refer- ences to the outside world inside the painting.15 Once this shift was made, the direction of his development in the 1980s

FIG. 3 Sean Scully, Amber, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 inches. Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, England.

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FIG. 4 Sean Scully, Pale Fire, 1988, oil on canvas, 96 x 147 inches. Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

could be anticipated. Heart of Darkness (1982, Art Institute of Chicago) and Paul (1984, Tate Gallery, London) juxtapose three panels horizontally. A Happy Land (1987, Collection of Janet Green, London) and Pale Fire place inserts within a field of stripes.

Scully's 1980s art helps us understand Mondrian's

strange-sounding statement: "From the very beginning, I was

always a realist."16 Mondrian responded to the grid of Man- hattan, seeing it as a realization of that vertical and horizon- tal order which had already appeared in his art made in Paris, a place, however, that could not give him the model of a modernist city he required. Compare Scully with another artist who, when young, was also a poor boy in London. This

painter "could endure ugliness which no one else . .. would have borne for an instant. Dead brick wall, bland square windows, old clothes, marketwomanly types of humanity . . .had a great attraction for him."17

J. M. W. Turner, Ruskin goes on to say, "devoted

picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture ... all the soilings and stains of every common labor." Scully said of New York: "You can tell from the way a large plywood sheet has been nailed into place on a construction site that no one is reverent."18

He, like Turner, learns from the environment an attitude that defines his artistic style. In this way he is like Mondrian, whose "realism," his desire "that his works present reality as

directly as possible," is derived from another urban artistic tradition, Impressionism.19 It is there, in "Monet, Degas, Seurat" and not in Cubism, Schapiro argues, that we "find

precedents for the pronounced asymmetries in Mondrian's

paintings and his extension of foreground lines to the bound-

ary . .. with their implied continuation beyond."20 Mondrian's and Scully's abstract works are the product

of very immediate visual experiences. Scully says: "There are certain parts of London ... in which I don't feel comfort- able as an artist. I prefer the coarser parts . . . the docks [and] railway arches. They're the places that reveal the most beautiful abstract compositions."21 His experience supports

Mondrian's claim that "it is precisely from . .. visual reality that [the nonfigurative artist] draws the objectivity which he needs in opposition to his personal subjectivity."22 In turn, such artists teach us to see that world differently. Charmion von Wiegand, initially uninterested in Mondrian's art, re-

sponded thus after meeting him in his studio: "My eyes were transformed. When I went out into the street again, I saw

everything differently from before: the streets, the buildings, my total visual environment."23 As Scully has said about his work:

I want it to leak out into the world.... What one has to do is tie abstraction into one's life in the way that Rothko managed ... in the way that Suprematism was tied to the utopian political outlook of the Russian Revolution. That connection must be rebuilt.24

For Mondrian, as for Mark Rothko, abstract painting could

embody a utopian social vision, a critique of the present social order. For Scully this is not a viable option.

Mondrian was excited by the grid of New York, which five decades later seems oppressive. Scully, for all of his visual pleasure in New York and London, is not unaware of the problems of those cities, which cannot be solved within the studio. But unless abstract painting possesses the power to demonstrate awareness of those problems, projecting a vision beyond the frame, it will be what its worst enemies

falsely accuse it of being: mere decoration.25 Mondrian

thought of the grid as liberating-a belief unlikely to be shared by most office workers in midtown Manhattan. Of course, he was aware that Times Square was no utopia. "How beautiful," he said of it, "if only I couldn't read English!"26 Mondrian's hope that art might have such a power, as much as his theorizing about that problem, sets him apart from most artists of Scully's generation. Nowadays it is impossible to believe that art could have such power, and hard to imagine an art world in which such power was attributed to it. "While not a conventionally political person, Mondrian was very much a social idealist who saw art working ultimately to

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FIG. 5 Sean Scully, Backs and Fronts, 1981, oil on canvas, 96 x 240 inches. Collection of the artist.

celebrate human betterment," Kermit Champa writes.27 T same is true of Scully, but what has now changed is how tl

70 belief can be expressed in art.

Scully faces another problem. How is it possible make abstract painting in an age of postmodernist ai Mondrian dedicated his essay "Neoplasticism" to "the men the future," the only audience, it seems at present, for hi and Scully's, political art.28 Mondrian's art presents a "gre and touching utopia . . . based not on political or soci tenets but on aesthetic experience."29 Painting does r change the world. We need but contrast the pretentio posturing of our "political" artists to the extraordinary ret world events of the past year to know how absurd is their goc But painting has another power. It can change how we see tl world. In the past it has done that. Revealing to us how o world might be, art offers a radical critique of the world as is. In Mondrian's time it was possible to think of the artwo as a model for the larger social world. Today it is not possit to do that. Most of Scully's paintings are much bigger th< Mondrian's works, but the scale of Scully's art is alwa smaller. His use of architectural elements implies no belief art as a mode of utopian social planning, yet he too aims

get us to see our world as it is, and as it might be. Aft

remarking on his pleasure in seeing the windows of Victoria London houses, he describes American windows: "A windc set in a concrete wall is so beautiful, unlike a skyscraper, Mies Van der Rohe-type building which is all window, ai eliminates that play between keeping you out and letting y( in."30 His paintings, like such windows, both keep us out ar let us in, showing us how to see that urban world who, structures they mirror, and thus criticize.31

Notes This version of a longer article, to appear elsewhere, has been edited to meet A Journal space requirements. 1. See my "Art Criticism and Its Beguiling Fictions," Art International 9 (Win 1989): 36-41, and my Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Prei 1987), chap. 5. 2. Meyer Schapiro, "Mondrian: Order and Randomness in Abstract Painting," re]

in his Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 235. 3. The New Art-The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. H. Holtzman and M. S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976), 127. 4. "Sean Scully Interviewed," in Kazu Kaido, Sean Scully, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Ruki Television Gallery, 1988), n.p. 5. Mari Rantanen, "Interview with Sean Scully," Scully/Quaytman, exh. cat. (Helsinki: Helsinki Festival, 1987), 13. 6. The New Art, 325. 7. Scully, in an interview with Constance Lewallen, View 5 (Fall 1988): 6. 8. "Sean Scully," in Kaido, Sean Scully, n.p. 9. Mondrian, quoted in E. A. Carmean, Jr., Mondrian: The Diamond Compositions, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1979), 66. 10. The New Art, 267. 11. Carter Ratcliff, "Sean Scully and Modernist Painting: The Constitutive Image,"

he in Sean Scully: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1982-88, exh. cat. (London: White- chapel Art Gallery, 1989), 11.

hat 12. Schapiro, "Mondrian," 257, 258. Joseph Masheck supplements that account: "To the extent that Broadway Boogie Woogie suggests either a map or the facades of skyscrapers it refers back beyond the cubist involvement to Mondrian's lighthouses

to and church towers of 1909-1910" (Masheck, Historical Present, Essays of the 1970s rt? [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984], 83).

f 13. It has been exhibited only once, in the room curated by Joseph Masheck at P.S. 1, in New York, an exhibition entitled "Critical Perspectives," in the winter of 1982. See

iS, my "Color in the Recent Work," Sean Scully, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, at Carnegie Institute, 1985), 22.

14. Kermit Swiler Champa, Mondrian Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ial 1985), 71.

not 15. Carter Ratcliff has earlier made this point, in an account from which I have learned: "I believe that he intends his compositions to be understood as emblems of

US order in Western culture generally-in its facades, its . .. boulevards . . . its al- interiors" (Ratcliff, "Sean Scully," 27-28). The blind point in his subtle rhetoric is in

his claim: "I believe that art as we know it . . . is capable of representing in an al. effective way only one institution, that of the artist's public self" (Carter Ratcliff, he "Longo's Logos," Artforum 28 [January 1990]: 106). He makes similar claims in his

Scully catalogue (n. 11, above), and elsewhere. 16. The New Art, 338.

; it 17. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols. (Boston: Aldine, n.d.), 2:364.

k 18. Ratcliff, "Sean Scully," 20. 19. Carmean, Mondrian, 48.

)le 20. Schapiro, "Mondrian," 239.

n 21. Scully, in an interview with Paul Bonaventura, December 8, 1988, handout accompanying the 1989 London exhibition Sean Scully: Paintings and Works on

ys Paper, 1982-88, n.p. in 22. The New Art, 299.

23. Interview of Mondrian with Charmion von Wiegand, in Piet Mondrian, 1872- to 1944, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971), 78. She also er notes that in Mondrian's last work he "transgressed his classical European heritage by

integrating the American environment" (p. 85). 24. Handout accompanying the exhibition Sean Scully: Paintings and Works on

)W Paper, 1982-88, n.p. 25. On the relation between art and its environment, see my "The Aesthete in the City," Arts Magazine 64 (April 1990): 67-73.

nd 26. Carmean, Mondrian, 57. oU 27. Champa, "Mondrian-de Stijl and After," forthcoming, n.p.

28. The New Art, v. The argument here is borrowed from my forthcoming Poussins nd Paintings, in which the connection between the Baroque and what, following Guy

Debord, I call the society of the spectacle is explored. 29. Hans L. C. Jaffe, Piet Mondrian (New York: Abrams, n.d.), 54. 30. Interview with Lewallen, View, p. 12. 31. Thanks are due to Sean Scully for generously answering my queries, and to Kermit Champa for allowing me to see, and cite, a prepublication draft of

t "Mondrian-de Stijl and After."

DAV I D CA R R I E R is a contributing editor to Arts Magazine. His books include Artwriting (1987), Principles of Art History Writing (1991), and Poussin's Paintings, forthcoming.

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