Mondrian – Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3)

Finding clues to the composition process in written sources

Paris – London – New York
Mondrian changed his place of residence many times during his lifetime and worked in more than ten different studios. After leaving Holland for good in 1919, he first moved to Paris, later to London, and finally to New York. He enjoyed life in the big city, and the three metropolises provided important stimuli for his art. The painting Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) accompanied and occupied him over a lengthy period in all three cities, as revealed by historical sources such as letters, statements by contemporary witnesses, and other documents. These sources of information are important components of every conservation project and can provide valuable insight for an artwork and the process of its creation.

Paris
In March 1935, on a visit to Mondrian’s Paris studio at 26 Rue du Départ, László Moholy-Nagy’s wife Sibyl recalled a large white sheet of paper on the floor, and how Mondrian and her husband enthusiastically worked out a composition using strips of black paper and a small piece of red paper, looking down at the results from a ladder. Even if not explicitly named, this could have been the genesis of Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3). This first-hand account also sheds valuable information on how Mondrian developed ideas for compositions. Several contemporary witnesses likewise report that the artist often experimented with the positioning of strips of paper, both to try out compositions before he painted them and also to rework compositions already on canvas.

Thanks to a letter of 29 December 1935 from the British artist Ben Nicholson to the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, written after a visit to Mondrian’s studio, we know that Mondrian had started painting Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) by this date, and that the composition already closely resembled the one we see today. Nicholson namely not only gives a description of the painting, but includes a small sketch which even highlights the red triangle (see ill.). At the start of 1936, James Johnson Sweeney, then director of the Guggenheim Museum and the painting’s first owner, also saw the work and recalled charcoal lines and a red piece of paper on the canvas. This would indicate that Mondrian was at that time already in the course of making changes to the composition. His creative process was intuitive and involved constant adjustments to his compositions. In the case of canvases he had already begun, he used charcoal lines or paper strips to experiment with new compositional variations. Only then did he decide to revise and repaint certain areas.

We can assume that Mondrian was still working intensively on Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) in the summer of 1938: In June 1938, he wrote to Winifred Nicholson that he was glad she liked the “large work” on which he was currently engaged. On 19 August 1938, he writes again, “I think I have finally finished the big lozenge. It was difficult.” (Piet Mondrian. 1872-1944, Yve-Alain Bois u.a. Herausgeber, Milano, 1994, Seite 277))

London
In September 1938, Mondrian moved to London. Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) also made the journey to England, as evidenced by a label, attached to the back of the stretcher, of the London fine art shipper James Bourlet & Sons. The painting bears the date “1938” both on the front and the verso. Since Mondrian was in Paris and in London in 1938, it is unclear where he actually finished and dated the painting. He may have continued to paint in Britain, since in October 1938 he informed Winifred Nicholson that the large paintings had finally arrived in London and that he still had to finish them.

New York
Mondrian remained in London for two years. The war in Europe, however, convinced him to move to New York. The metropolis on the American East Coast had long been one of his dreams, and Mondrian felt very much at home in this lively and modern city. Among his many new acquaintances and admirers was Charmion von Wiegand, who spent a great deal of time with the artist in his studio and recorded her visits in her journal. In a diary entry of September 1941, she describes a painting that can only be the Fondation Beyeler Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3):

Then back of the door, he pulled out a very large square about
40 × 40 inches [101 × 101 cm] and turned it; there was one
enormous diamond shaped canvas. It too had black bars, very heavy,
but the effect was different. In particular I say how turning of the square
greatly increases spatial feeling…it is the only diamond shaped one
he has and in large size […] he began to see he could fix the canvas –
there were charcoal marks where he wanted to broaden and
thin them.

(A Sameness Between Us, The Friendship of Charmion von Wiegand and Piet Mondrian, Stuttgart 2020, S. 81)

Whether Mondrian reworked the painting one more time in New York, or simply wiped off the “charcoal marks” mentioned by von Wiegand, could not be conclusively determined over the course of the conservation project. Whatever the case, the finished painting can first be seen in a photograph taken at the start of 1943 in the artist’s studio at 353 East 56th Street in Manhattan. In March that same year, the painting was then exhibited for the first time (at the Curt Valentin Gallery, New York): on the final day of the show, it went directly to the Manhattan apartment of James Johnson Sweeney, the first and only owner of the painting before it was acquired by Ernst Beyeler in 1986.

On the basis of all these sources, we therefore know that the present composition was already largely established from a very early date, but that Mondrian continued to refine and work on the painting for three years, possibly even eight years. But what, if anything, did Mondrian change?

Thanks to modern imaging techniques, it is possible to follow the development of the composition in more detail. As with the other paintings in the Piet Mondrian Conservation Project, a compilation of all images of Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) obtained with various technical imaging techniques is presented in the loop above right.

The examination in infrared reflectography in transmitted light provides the clearest picture of where changes to the composition were made. The infrared image reveals several lines today hidden beneath the white paint surface. The horizontal lines in the bottom section of the painting were originally positioned much lower; in the top area, there may originally have been two horizontal lines. The vertical lines on the right-hand side of the painting were also shifted back and forth.

Pinholes

The paintings were also all examined with X-radiography. Interpreting an X-ray image is complex; in general, however, light areas mean that the X-rays have hit a particularly dense material, such as metal, which they are unable to penetrate. The more permeable the material, as in the case of organic matter, the darker the corresponding area of the X-ray image.

The conservators studied the X-ray image of Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3) in great detail. They noticed clusters of small white dots, barely visible, in a number of places (see ill.). These represent small holes in the canvas, which in the course of the painting process filled up with lead white (a traditional white pigment, that Mondrian used extensively), and which consequently appear white in the X-ray owing to the high density of the lead component in lead white. They resemble prick-marks left by pins or tacks. But why are these pinholes in the canvas?

An answer is suggested by the location within the composition where the holes are grouped: they are found only around the perimeter and at the ends of the black lines (see ill.). We are therefore probably looking at holes that were made when Mondrian pinned strips of paper onto the painting, in order to try out possible compositional changes—a way of working observed, as already mentioned, by visitors to his studio. The artist could thus have used black and white strips of paper to help him visualize the black lines in their shifted positions, and a red piece of paper (as mentioned by Sweeney in 1936) to experiment with the location of the red triangle.

Reference lines
In the X-ray image, the conservators were also able to discover that two of the lines in the composition were defined from the beginning, and remained unchanged throughout the long period over which Mondrian worked on the painting. The two lines in question are the inner vertical and horizontal lines intersecting lower left. They appear as the darkest areas in the X-ray, which means that the paint layer here is very thin, thus implying that they were not subsequently shifted, changed or overpainted. Of course, how exactly Mondrian assembled his compositions remains the artist’s secret. However, in the literature it is suggested that Mondrian may have begun his compositions with so-called “reference lines”, fixed starting points or anchors, so to speak from which the further compositional elements are worked out. These two lines could well be such reference lines: if one compares all sixteen lozenge paintings by Mondrian, these same lines are a frequent compositional feature and can thus probably be interpreted as an important starting point for the artist’s lozenge compositions.

Moving lines
Unlike the two “reference lines”, the other six lines in the painting were moved up, down, right and left several times during the creation process. An example of these shifts can be seen in a detail of the X-ray of the middle line running horizontally across the lower part of the canvas. We can interpret the image of this area as showing that the line was originally positioned further down (step 1) and then incrementally shifted upwards to its current position, and lastly increased in width (step 5). The X-ray image thus points to altogether five changes to this line.

Looking at the same detail in infrared reflectography (transmitted light), however, we can see that the process by which Mondrian arrived at the definitive position of this line was even more complex. The line was not only shifted upwards five times, but also downwards in the other direction at least three times. The thin dark contours at the top of the line each correspond to the fine ridges of paint that form at the edge where the white plane meets the black line.

In other words, for the case of this middle lower line, Mondrian made a succession of many small changes to its position, mostly only in the range of millimeters. Similar numerous but minute shifts can also be observed in the other lines of Lozenge Composition with Eight Lines and Red (Picture No. 3).

The illustration on the right presents a schematic summary of the evolution of the composition, based on all the findings yielded by the examination of the painting with technical imaging. Primarily, the lines were shifted inwards (arrows) rather than outwards.

As we can see, and as the above-mentioned written sources also suggest, the basic composition in fact changed very little. The results also confirm the hypothesis that the “reference lines” remained almost unchanged. Mondrian nevertheless made numerous alterations to the groups of lines, moving their position and modifying their width. It is important to note, that shifting an entire line, even if only by a few millimeters, each time involved a great deal of technical work: Mondrian had to scrape off the existing paint, and then locally carry out his changes making sure they matched precisely in terms of color and surface structure and then wait for the new paint to dry. The fact that he was repeatedly willing to undertake this laborious task testifies to how important he considered even the smallest shifts from a compositional point of view, and once again to the guiding role played by his intuition.