The political context of the thirties made the belief in the unfolding of a better world even more trenchant. The interwar years were marked by an ever-increasing escalation of hostilities. Communism was ranged against Fascism with the democratic nations of the west caught in between. In the visual arts this was reflected in a polarisation between abstraction and figuration. On one hand, abstraction, with its history of progressive disengagement from historical and traditional subject matter, favoured a universal and international perspective resulting in the adoption of a formal syntax, through line, colour and shape, which was in principle accessible to all, whatever their station or background in life.  Based on an understanding of art as determining intellectual and social life, it justified the notion of the artist as an agent of historical change. Rebutting this was the notion, held by Communists and Fascists alike, that art was itself determined by these social and political factors and therefore subordinate to the state and to society’s needs. As a result, modern art with its emphasis on autonomy was viewed as a symptom of decadence and decline and labelled ‘degenerate’ in the eyes of the Nazis and ‘formalist’ in the eyes of the Communists. Both sides of the political divide, Communist and Fascist favoured a more accessible art practice based on traditional and nationalistic themes expressed through naturalistic figuration; from this perspective, abstraction was no more than a retreat from reality. Mondrian, on the contrary, viewed his paintings as embodying a higher reality. Nicholson, too, described his own work as evoking a superior reality and observed that ‘what we are searching for is the understanding and realisation of infinity - an idea which is complete, with no beginning and no end and therefore giving to all things for all time’ (Unit One, 1934).

As this exhibition demonstrates, however, there are many differences between Mondrian and Nicholson despite their sharing this quasi-religious outlook that vindicated geometric abstraction by proving it was more than merely decorative-- the great danger for all abstract painters. Nicolson’s reliefs impart a quiet stillness, and however rectilinear his paintings are they still convey a poetic mood. Mondrian’s paintings, though meditative, possess a dynamic quality that is surprisingly hard hitting. What comes through is a didactic element that is foreign to Nicholson. Mondrian’s paintings communicate resolution. They defy phantasy or whimsy of any sort. They are the realisation of a strictly held belief in a universal plastic language that could only be arrived at through the progressive purging of all extraneous elements, in other words anything foreign to painting’s intrinsic make-up. Consequently nothing could be taken from the natural world.  It was for these reasons that painting had to be geometric and to be abstract. These principles were fundamental to the De Stijl movement, of which Mondrian was a founder member, and formed the basis of a reductive analysis of painting into its fundamental components: planes; horizontal and vertical lines; the primary colours, red, yellow and blue and the non colours, white, grey and black; and their integration into a non-hierarchical whole. The crucial factor was that ideally, despite distinctions, no one element would be more important than another. On the contrary, contrasts made each element stronger while still contributing to a dynamic equilibrium. Consistent with this was the determination to destroy the opposition between figure and background, bringing everything--lines and colour and non-colour planes--to the same level and thereby accentuating the painting’s flatness. It might seem from this programme that Mondrian was unaware of what was happening in the world around him. But this was far from true.

Of all the British artists of his generation Nicolson responded most positively to the art of the modern European masters and was able to absorb their influence and ideas without compromising his own integrity and vision. He owed his receptivity to continental ideas partly to the fact that due to ill health he had spent much of his early years on the Continent. He responded very positively not only to Cezanne but also to Cubism and instinctively understood the new syntax that meant that a painting was made up of a network of relationships. This was also Mondrian’s understanding of painting which prioritised neither lines nor colour planes but the various relationships to which they gave rise. Mondrian was 22 years older than Nicholson but had not opted for avant-garde status till relatively late in his painting career.  Up till 1911 he had a reputation as a passably good landscape painter whose work was if anything rather old-fashioned. A change took place when he became interested in Theosophy around 1900. With its fusion of world religions, Western and Eastern, its occult mysteries and, perhaps surprisingly for us, its positive attitude to scientific developments including Darwinism, Theosophy provided Mondrian with a spiritual and philosophical basis for his art.  He viewed it as a spiritual science that looked not back but forward into the future and was therefore appropriate as a vehicle to express his belief in the immaterial through formal means. In 1911 after a trip to Paris he decided to return there leaving behind in Holland a safe career, family, and a fiancée. 

By 1913 Mondrian had already jettisoned titles that related to a visual motif. Moreover, as was also the case for Nicholson, Cubism had functioned as the catalyst in his search for abstraction. Mondrian considered that even Picasso and Braque had failed to follow Cubism through to its logical end. According to Mondrian, their experimental work was never fully abstract per se, never pure abstraction. For while a mark or shape in a cubist work could perform literally as an index of an internal pictorial value it could at the same time continue to function mimetically as a representation of something in the three-dimensional world.  He was therefore never tempted to emulate their collage experiments that bridged art and the outside world. Nicholson, on the other hand, based his earlier still lifes on  the cubist rendering of non-recessional space, and this preference can be seen in his compositions, many of which are based on overlapping colour planes that nestle around a central motif, for example his 1937 Painting with its central red square. 

Mondrian did not take that much from Cubism apart from the idea of differentiating line from colour but methodically worked through various problems that Cubism had given rise to so that by the mid-1920s the stage was set for his classic period. His abstract compositions were characterised by interplay of variables (position, the dimension of the primary colour and non-colour planes and vertical and horizontal lines) and invariables (the right angle or the meeting of the vertical and horizontal lines that was crucial since it expressed equilibrium between contending forces). Like Nicholson, he considered his work as something not calculated but intuitive so that the end product was the result of a process of very gradual readjustments in terms of weight, colour and position in which manual touch was very important. Charles Harrison compares this process to the fine-tuning of an instrument ‘in pursuit of a perfect aesthetic pitch.’ (Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, The Open University, 1993) Once we interrogate Mondrian close up, we see that facture (the brush mark) is very important and make his paintings more object-like, as does his framing of them.

Anna Leung is a London-based artist and educator now semi-retired from teaching at Birkbeck College but taking occasional informal groups to current art exhibitions.

Mondrian||Nicholson: In Parallel is at the Courtauld Gallery in London from 16 February - 20 May 2012.