The Afterlife o f

PIET MONDRIAN

NANCY J. TROY

University of Chicago Press | Chicago and London

 n ia iliilk iilih ii

NANCY j . TROY is professor in the

Department of Art and Art History at
Stanford University and the author of
The De Stijl Environment, Modernism
and the Decorative Arts in France:
Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, and
Couture Culture: A Study of Modern
Art and Fashion.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 CONTENTS
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in China
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12345

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00869-1 (doth)

Acknowledgments vii

Note to the Reader xi

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Troy, Nancy J., author.

INTRODUCTION 1
The afterlife of Piet Mondrian / Nancy J. Troy,
pages cm 1 M O ND RI A N AND MONEY
Includes bibliographical references and index. V ictory B o o g ie W oogie 9
ISBN 978-0-226-00869-1 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Mondrian, Piet,
2 (un)becoming art
1872-1944—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
Mondrian’s Furniture and the Walls of
ND653.M76T76 2013
His New York Studio 71
759.9492—dc23
2012033710 3 M O N D R I A N ’ S LEGACY IN NE W Y O R K 127

4 THE M O N D R I A N BRAND 169

@ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper). POSTSCRIPT 229

N o te s 237

In dex 271

Plates follow page 235

V

c c n f^
f j 0 6«DY C o m b eerWEENf NAUCi 4 H£l< ^\P^JDRl A^J
FIGURE 0 . 1 M'\chae\ Crawford, Nobody Comes between Nancy & Her Mondrian,
2004. Ink on paper. Private Collection. © Michael Crawford / the New Yorker
Collection / www.cartoonbank.com.
I NTRODUCTI ON
This is a book about Piet M ondrian after his death in 1944. It exam ­
ines the posthum ous narratives th at have shaped understanding
of the Dutch p ainter’s w ork as it has circulated in both elite and
popular cultural contexts during alm ost seventy years. Rather
th an adopting standard art historical strategies and procedures
to focus on the artist’s work in relation to his biography, his cre­
ative process, or his theoretical commitments, I examine the cir­
cumstances in which M ondrian’s w ork was collected, conserved,
displayed, described, m arketed, and publicized. In studying its
reception, prim arily in the United States but also in The N ether­
lands, I concentrate less on the ways in which M ondrian’s w ork
influenced other artists th an on the ways th at artists, dealers, col­
lectors, conservators, m useum curators, and academic art histori­
ans have participated over the course of well over half a century
in constructing the narratives through which all of us approach
and come to understand the artist and his work.
Another key feature of standard a rt historical practice th at I
challenge is its focus on the realm of fine art, especially w ith re ­
spect to M ondrian and other so-called m asters of m odernist ab­
straction. Typically, the w ider visual culture of nonart imagery
plays a supporting role, brought on stage when, for example, it
is actually incorporated in the work or it is deemed pertin en t to
understanding an artist’s source m aterials. I argue instead th at popular
forms of visual culture are integral to the ways in which M ondrian and
his w ork have been seen and appreciated ever since his death. I also take
the position, antithetical to the tone of m ost art historical scholarship, that
objectivity is impossible to m aintain in situations such as the preparation
of a book in w hich intellectual property rights are at stake and, as in this
book in particular, my own history as a scholar of M ondrian’s work is part
of the story I have to tell. Thus I acknowledge that, like so many others over
the years, I myself have developed a particular understanding of the a rt­
ist’s work, which I seek to defend in the pages th at follow (fig. o.i).
It scarcely needs to be said th at the history of art in general and the his­
tory of individual artists in particular are constructed through discourse
and debate. W hen an artist dies, his or h er life and work does not simply
become available for study in dates, facts, objects, and images th at form a
historical record on w hich all interested parties will agree. In M ondrian’s
case, there is a catalogue raisonne, published in 1998, th at provides a docu­
m entary chronicle of the artist’s life, the provenance (or history of own­
ership) of every work, a catalogue of his publications, a comprehensive
bibliography of publications about him, and a chronological list of all the
exhibitions and m ost auctions in which his work appeared before 1994.'
Although it thus constitutes w hat appears to be an objective record based
on virtually every relevant stand-alone fact that could be gathered about
his life and work (and is therefore indispensable to all subsequent scholar­
ship on Mondrian), the catalogue raisonne reflects certain decisions made
by its authors th at others m ight w ish to challenge. For example, it does
not include, nor does it com m ent on, the series of eight so-called “Wall
Works” that M ondrian’s heir, H arry Holtzman, made in 1982 w ith some of
the colored rectangles he had removed from the walls of M ondrian’s last
New York studio in 1944 (plate 12). The exclusion of “Wall Works” from the
catalogue raisonne thus tacitly disputes M ondrian’s authorship, which
Holtzman and his heirs have asserted, directly or indirectly, each time they
exhibited or reproduced these objects or allowed them to be reproduced by
others.
Rather than adopting the catalogue raisonne’s silent treatm ent of the
“Wall Works,” I look carefully at the creation, exhibition, and attendant
discussion of these objects in order to uncover why and how they were
made, how and by whom their attribution to M ondrian has been sustained,
and the im pact th at their exhibition and publication has had on current
understandings of M ondrian’s work. My discussion reveals constraints
on publication of images of the “Wall Works” th at impinge on the very
possibility of th eir critical exam ination. I also describe my own engage-
introduction
m ent w ith the “Wall Works” ever since I saw them for the first tim e while
Holtzman was in the process of creating them . In doing so, I acknowledge
th at I may have furthered my own interests as a scholar by com m enting
on the “Wall Works” and contributing to debates surrounding th eir sta­
tus w ith respect to M ondrian’s oeuvre. Similarly, throughout this study, I
expose varied interests of m any others who have helped to construct the
m ultiple narratives of M ondrian and his work.
Those who have studied M ondrian’s work and activities during the
three years and four m onths he spent in New York have necessarily re ­
lied on the rem iniscences of his friends and followers. However, scholars
have preferred to overlook ra th e r th an look into the rivalries and seem ­
ingly petty jealousies th at colored these nevertheless valuable, early and
knowledgeable accounts of the a rtist’s New York period. In contrast, I
have endeavored to uncover and understan d the tensions th at existed
betw een those who knew M ondrian best, in an effort to show how th eir
com plicated and often problem -ridden relationships w ith one another
have inflected the chronicle of the artist and his work. The fact rem ains,
however, th at I, like every other scholar of M ondrian’s late work, neces­
sarily rely on the accounts of eyewitnesses, just as we all depend on the
m yriad accounts th at together constitute the art historical literatu re de­
voted to M ondrian.
One of the most conspicuous aspects of M ondrian’s afterlife concerns
the rise in value of his work, w hich was on spectacular display in 1998,
w hen his last, unfinished painting. V icto ry Boogie W oogie (B324; plate
1), was acquired w ith funds from The Netherlands Bank for the unprec­
edented sum of 80 million guilders, or $40 million. Money, value, and the
circulation of M ondrian’s work on the art m arket are critical factors in
understanding many aspects of his posthum ous stature, yet accessing in ­
form ation about the values of works whose purchase prices are not a m at­
te r of public record presents researchers w ith extraordinary challenges.
Collectors often prefer not to share such inform ation, while dealers and
m useum s naturally consider it in th eir best interest to protect the priva­
cy of th eir clients and patrons. The result is a situation in which scholars
study the art m arket but nevertheless tend to avoid the most sensitive yet
crucially im portant issues concerning value.^ I endeavor to confront those
issues directly here in order to reveal how money and value appear to have
influenced not only the circulation of the artist’s work but even the con­
struction of the prevailing art historical narrative itself.
Already during his lifetime, M ondrian was a respected figure in the
a rt world whose im pact on architecture and graphic design was broad­
ly recognized. Like many other artists of the period, his work was also
Introduction 3
 appropriated into the context of fashion m arketing. Thus his characteris­
tic style juxtaposing spare rectilinear forms was linked to women’s clothes
in black-and-w hite photographs of fashion models posed beside his p ain t­
ings. Those photographs were published in 1944, only m onths after his
death. But it was not until a m emorial exhibition at the M useum of Mod­
ern Art in 1945 presented his work in depth th at his stature was secured
in elite art circles and, simultaneously, in the popular realm. Two decades
later, his signature abstract style had become instantly recognizable as a
result of its widespread appropriation, adaptation, and reproduction in
architecture, graphic design, fashion, advertisem ents, and reproductions
in m ass-circulation magazines. I dem onstrate, in w hat follows, not sim ­
ply th at M ondrian’s work resonated across the boundaries th at norm ative
art historical discourse once m aintained betw een m odern a rt and visual
culture, as others have increasingly recognized. More radically, my expo­
sition shows th at his characteristic style of neoplasticism became fam il­
iar not just through the usual art-w orld channels of exhibitions, reviews,
and scholarly articles bu t also through the m yriad ways th at adaptations
made M ondrian and his w ork widely accessible to broad, popular audienc­
es after his death. Moving beyond both the appropriation model and the
trickle-down theory that have governed how high and low are m ost often
believed to relate to one another in m odernist art, I offer a model stru c­
tured by the m utual inflection of elite and popular cultures. I argue th at
these spheres have participated more or less equally and sim ultaneously
in constructing various m eanings of M ondrian and his work that continu­
ously operate on one another. The result is a study that, I hope others will
agree, goes far tow ard dism antling the barriers th at still determ ine how
the relationship betw een high art and visual culture is typically handled
w ithin the discipline of art history.
In the four chapters th at make up this book, I look carefully at selected
them atic episodes in the afterlife of M ondrian to reveal the forces in play
as the artist and his work became discursively detached and eventually
circulated independently from one another. Chapter 1 is devoted to the
genesis and subsequent history of a single painting. V icto ry Boogie W oogie,
w hich was already famous in 1945 for the purchase price paid by its first
owner, a price th at was ten times higher than M ondrian had ever received
for a painting during his lifetime. The extrem e fragility of the p icture—its
surface is covered w ith m yriad tiny pieces of colored sticky tapes (some
originally kept in place by pins and thum btacks) th at almost immediately
began to w rinkle, were in danger of falling off, and in a few cases were ap­
parently reattached in positions other than w here M ondrian had placed
th em —led not only to repeated efforts at restoration but to the creation
Introduction
4
of three copies th at could both docum ent and stand in for the original. I
explore the confusion between original and copy th at ensued, while I also
dem onstrate how concern for the condition of the painting only increased
as its estim ated value rose. The two issues converged around a major ex­
hibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, organized in 1994 to com­
m em orate the fiftieth anniversary of M ondrian’s death. M ondrian’s pain t­
ing was noticeably absent, exacerbating long-held frustrations among
Dutch m useum leaders th at his New York period was not represented in
any public collection in The Netherlands. At the same time, a prom otional
juggernaut th at included the sale of m yriad miscellaneous objects deco­
rated w ith M ondrian imagery was orchestrated to underw rite commemo­
rative exhibitions all over Holland, including the one at the Gemeentem u­
seum. This com bination of factors—a legendary painting by M ondrian, a
scholarly exhibition of his work, and the availability of a vast storehouse
of “M ondriania” destined for popular consum ption—dram atizes the ways
in which high a rt and popular culture have found common ground, often
in soil enriched by the prom ise of money.
The promise of money is also a leitm otif of chapter 2, which traces
the trajectory along which the surviving furniture th at M ondrian built for
his last New York apartm ent out of used fruit crates and other discarded
m aterials emerged in the 1970s from storage and years of scholarly n e­
glect to be publicly exhibited and, eventually, described as sculpture (figs.
2.1-2.3). The treatm ent of M ondrian’s fu rniture is closely related to th at of
the "Wall Works,” which are also examined in chapter 2 (plate 12). W here
the status of V ictory Boogie W oogie became an issue due to its deterioration,
restoration, and occasional replacem ent by one or more of the three early
copies, the status of the fu rn itu re and the “Wall Works" revolves around
w hether the objects should be considered works of art, in the first in ­
stance, and w hether they should be attributed to M ondrian, in the second.
W hat is at stake is not the relationship betw een an original work of art by
M ondrian and copies by others, b u t the relationship between art and func­
tion th at pertains to M ondrian’s furniture, and the attribution to Mon­
drian of objects containing some of the rectangles th at H arry Holtzman
had not simply rescued from the walls of M ondrian’s studio b u t also—and
crucially—reconstituted alm ost forty years later in individual composi­
tions, fram ed and presented as "Wall Works.” W hen the furniture and the
“Wall Works” were brought together beginning in 1983 in exhibitions th at
sought to re-create M ondrian’s New York studio, th eir ambiguous, even
problem atic authorial status was only complicated by the com parison th at
was made w ith photographs taken in the studio in 1944.1 show how the
labeling of these docum entary materials, in ways required by those who
Introduction 5
have controlled their reproduction, has functioned to legitimize the fu rn i­
ture as art and establish the “Wall Works” as creations by M ondrian.
While chapter 2 focuses on the furniture and “Wall Works," in chap­
ter 3, 1 tu rn to the handling of other elem ents of M ondrian’s legacy. Not
only do I examine the disposition and eventual sale to various dealers of
large num bers of paintings and drawings beginning in the late 1950s, bu t I
also discuss the editing of M ondrian’s essays during the decades of gesta­
tion th at preceded publication of his collected w ritings in 1986. In the p ro­
cess, I reveal difficulties, often of an interpersonal nature, th at influenced
the content as well as the publication of the first m onograph devoted to
the artist, Michel Seuphor’s P ie t M on drian : Life a n d W ork of 1956.’ In this
episode as in the handling of all aspects of M ondrian’s legacy, Holtzman
played a central role. His difficulties w ith Seuphor, like his handling of
the w ork itself, dem onstrate th at at least some of those who followed in
M ondrian’s wake m ight have had not only differing aesthetic and intel­
lectual com m itm ents to his work and ideas b u t also personal connections
as well as financial concerns th at contributed to struggles over the nature
and narrative of M ondrian’s legacy. In taking up these topics, my aim is to
show th at the am bitions and desires of particular individuals who knew
the a rtist—indeed, they included some of his closest friends and associ­
ates—were significant factors in how his work and ideas were discussed
and dissem inated in the decades th at followed his death. During this pe­
riod, M ondrian’s work and his w ritings did not simply appear or speak
for themselves. Nor did the historical record emerge in a vacuum th at the
things said or w ritten about M ondrian simply filled. A more apt m etaphor
for the historical construction of M ondrian would describe his life and
w ork as a discursive battleground on which num erous forces and interests
encountered and contested one another.
I look again at how M ondrian’s work resonated in and betw een elite
and popular culture from yet another perspective in the last chapter of the
book. Comparing the career trajectories of two painters for whom M ondri­
an’s example was of param ount im portance, I show that during the 1950s
and early 1960s, Fritz Glarner, today a relatively neglected painter of geo­
m etric abstractions, was far more successful in exhibiting and selling his
work than Barnett Newman, an artist who has been canonized as a leading
figure of the New York school. Glarner was among M ondrian’s closest fol­
lowers; his critical reception repeatedly invoked M ondrian, thereby yok­
ing his reputation and style to M ondrian’s even as Glarner departed from a
strict interpretation of neoplasticism. I suggest th at Glarner in effect stood
in for M ondrian in the critical discourse, in p art because Glarner openly
borrowed or built on the Dutch artist’s limited range of colors and the com-
Introduction
positional strategies characteristic of M ondrian’s late paintings, such as
B ro a d w a y Boogie W oogie (1942-43; B323; fig. 1.7) and V ictory Boogie W oogie.
Newman’s engagem ent w ith M ondrian was just as intense as G larner’s,
b u t w here Glarner developed M ondrian’s model of neoplasticism into a
personal style th at he dubbed relational painting, Newman resisted those
compositional strategies and w hat he took to be the th ru st of M ondrian’s
theoretical commitments. The signature statem ent of Newman’s position
took shape in a series of four paintings titled W ho’s A fraid o f Red, Yellow and
Blue (plate 15). Although these large easel paintings, the first of w hich dates
to 1966, have been interpreted as program m atic responses to M ondrian’s
work, I suggest that they can also be read as comm entaries on paintings by
Glarner, especially several large m urals th at were perm anently displayed
in prom inent public venues in New York (fig. 4.13). More im portant, how­
ever, is my point th at continuous and long-standing debates about M on­
drian, which motivated the w ork of many artists (Glarner and Newman
could be understood as case studies), actually ran parallel to, and in te r­
sected with, M ondrian’s equally pervasive presence in the popular sphere
during the same period. These two cultures converged in the mid-1960s
w hen the appropriation of M ondrian’s style by such pop artists as Tom
Wesselmann (plate 17) and Roy Lichtenstein (plate 18), on one hand, and by
French couturier Yves Saint Laurent (plate 19), on the other, dem onstrated
th at M ondrian’s paintings arguably functioned less as individual works of
fine art than as widely reproduced and instantly recognizable im ages—
iconic examples of w hat m ight be described as the M ondrian brand.
I end chapter 4 by showing how th at brand became associated w ith a
hotel th at opened in West Hollywood, California, in 1985. The hotel was
called Le M ondrian, but the artist whose signed work covered all six sides
of the high-rise building was Yaacov Agam. Agam described his H om m age
a M o n d ria n (plate 22) as a tribute to the Dutch artist, b u t it was in fact in ­
tended to advertise the hotel like an enormous billboard extending across
all of its exterior walls. W hen the hotel changed hands and was reopened
w ith a new design ten years later, the new M ondrian Hotel had a totally
w hite facade and interiors (fig. 4.22) th at bore no sign of the even rath er
rem ote relationship to M ondrian to which Agam’s m ulticolored geom et­
ric abstraction laid claim. By 1995, any references to the historical figure
of M ondrian or his iconic style were gone, just as M ondrian was being
claimed as a brand name for the first of a whole series of hotels. But if this
sequence of events might suggest th at M ondrian had become no more than
an elusive discursive effect, I point out th at of course the artist and his
w ork had not disappeared. At the very m om ent the M ondrian Hotel was
being painted white, M ondrian’s paintings were on display in the major
Introduction 7
 scholarly exhibition that comm em orated his death. The historical n a rra ­
tive th at is created in such an exhibition and its accompanying catalogue
offers a high-art version of M ondrian that, I argue, is only seemingly iso­
lated from the popular domain w here the artist and his work have had an
equally significant afterlife.
Finally, in a postscript, I drive home this point by returning to Yves
Saint Laurent, who, together w ith his p artn er (in life and in business)
Pierre Berge, owned five works by M ondrian, the first of which was ac­
quired in 1972, seven years after Saint Laurent designed his enormously
popular and widely copied M ondrian Look."' I examine the posthum ous
sale of the Saint Laurent-Berge collection in a record-breaking auction
held in 2009 at the Grand Palais in Paris, which was preceded by a spec­
tacular display in which a visitor could easily confuse the specificity of a Mondrian and Money
M ondrian painting w ith th at of a couture dress. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion th at the distinctive stylistic features of M ondrians work, and Victory Boogie Woogie
even his name, are known today as m uch through their popular dissem i­
nation in the world of fashion as through the exhibition of his paintings
or the study of his w ork by artists and others, including scholars like me.
Rather than bem oaning this situation, I present it as a challenge to art his­
torical business as usual as well as an opportunity to develop a fresh alter­ On August 28,1998, evening new spapers throughout The N ether­
native to prevailing disciplinary perspectives and practices. lands reported th at Piet M ondrian’s last painting. V icto ry Boogie
W oogie (plate 1), left unfinished and covered w ith bits of colored
tape and pasted papers w hen the artist died in 1944, had th at
m orning become “the m ost expensive painting ever purchased
in Holland."' In a complicated transaction whose details would
emerge only piecemeal over the ensuing weeks and months, the
National Art Collection Foundation had used money donated by
the state bank of The N etherlands to purchase the pain tin g —
w hich it th en donated to the state—for $40 million, or approxi­
m ately 80 million guilders.^
Bankers, governm ent representatives, arts adm inistrators,
and the director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, where Victory
B oogie W oogie had already been placed on long-term loan, rushed
to prepare statem ents lauding the acquisition of a work they
variously compared to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Rem brandt’s N ig h t
W atch, Van Gogh’s Sunflow ers, and Picasso’s G uernica. But just as
quickly, politicians representing m inority and opposition parties
raised questions about the unprecedented price of the painting
and balked at the use of public funds for its purchase. “What!
Eighty million!” exclaimed Ursie Lambrechts, m em ber of the p ro ­
gressive Democrats 66 Party in the Second Chamber of the Dutch

8 Introduction
 r

were unable to agree on his intentions for finishing the picture. Still more
surprising, neither its deteriorating condition nor its several copies, in­
deed, not even the undocumented changes that the work sustained, were
barriers to its continually rising scholarly and monetary value. Like the
painting, the furnishings that remained in Mondrian’s New York apart­
ment along with Victory Boogie Woogie offer another, heretofore untold
story of how market forces interact with the interpretive process—a story
to which chapter 2 is devoted.

(Un)Becoming Art
Mondrian^s Furniture and the Walls of
His New York Studio

In 1979, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecti­

cut, devoted an exhibition to Mondrian and six younger, Ameri­
can artists whose work of the late 1940s and early 1950s bore obvi­
ous stylistic similarities to his. The show, which I curated and for
which I wrote the accompanying catalogue, was entitled Mondrian
and Neo-Plasticism in America.^ Many objects were drawn from
Yale’s own collection, while others were borrowed from museums
and private collections. Mondrian’s heir, Harry Holtzman, loaned
works by his own hand as well as a number of photographs,
manuscripts, and documents relating to the period Mondrian
spent in New York, from October 1940 until his death on Febru­
ary 1,1944.^ Holtzman also loaned three pieces of furniture that
Mondrian had made in 1943 for his last New York studio from dis­
carded fruit crates, dismantled painting stretchers, and and other
cast-off materials (figs. 2.1-2.3). None of the documentary items
or the furniture was illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, but
all were numbered and listed there as “Supplementary Materials.’’
The furniture was described straightforwardly as a “Work Table,”
“Desk,” and “Stool”; no information about the materials or the di­
mensions of these objects was provided.^
Fourteen years later, in 1993, the same three pieces of fur­
niture were included in an exhibition entitled Mondrian in New

70 CHAPTER 1
71
FIGURE 2 . 1 Piet Mondrian, Desk, 1943 (B414). FIGURE 2 . 2 Piet Mondrian, Work Table, 1943 (B415).
Photo: Mondrian/Holtzm an Trust. © 2013 M ondrian/ Photo: Mondrian/Holtzm an Trust. © 2013 M ondrian/
Holtzman Trust c/o HCR international. Holtzman Trust c /o HCR International.

FI GURE 2.3 Piet
Mondrian, Stool, 1943.
Photo: M ondrian/
Holtzman Trust. ©
2013 M ondrian/
Holtzman Trust c/o
HCR International.
York that was organized by the Galerie Tokoro, a commercial gallery in To­
kyo, in cooperation with the Piet Mondrian/Holtzman Trust (formed af­
ter Holtzman’s death in 1987 and now known as the Mondrian/Holtzman
Trust) and the Sidney Janis Gallery. This exhibition also included three
oil paintings and three drawings that Mondrian had produced during
the years he lived in New York, but it was dominated by an installation,
created by Harry Holtzman’s son Jason, that attempted to re-create the
environment of Mondrians last New York studio. The installation was
composed of eight "Wall Works” that Harry Holtzman had made in 1982,
incorporating many—but not all—of the colored cardboard rectangles
that had once been pinned to the walls of Mondrian’s studio (l will return
74 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn iture
to these below). In addition, there were numerous items of studio para­
phernalia: paint brushes, palette knives, as well as the tools—including a
miter saw, hand drills, pliers, and a hammer—that Mondrian presumably
used to construct the three pieces of furniture. In the accompanying cata­
logue, however, the furniture was not designated simply as “Work Table,”
“Desk,” and “Stool.” Instead, each of the two tables was titled “Table sculp­
ture,” and what had once been the “Stool” was labeled “Bench sculpture.”
These objects were listed in the catalogue as numbers 1, 2, and 3 under the
rubric “The Three-dimensional Constructions, 1943-1944,” together with a
“Step Stool sculpture” and an “Easel” (nos. 4 and 5), neither of which had
actually been constructed by Mondrian. Nevertheless, the materials and
dimensions (in inches and centimeters) of all five were meticulously re­
corded. Moreover, each item was illustrated individually in the catalogue
on a separate page and in full color (fig. 2.4).'^
A simple juxtaposition of evidence culled from the catalogues of these
exhibitions indicates that between 1979 and 1993, three pieces of Mondri­
an’s furniture (five—if the stepstool and easel are included in the count)
shed the “supplementary” status that they had previously shared with his­
torical documents. Classified as three-dimensional constructions and (ex­
cepting the easel) identified as sculpture, these objects were elevated from
the realm of function to the loftier domain of art.
It could be argued that this change was merely semantic or that it re­
flected an assumption that anything Mondrian made, and even some items
he did not make but simply used in his studio (the stepstool, for example),
should be considered works of art—never mind whether he himself des­
ignated or treated them as such. Alternatively, in contemplating the status
of Mondrian’s furniture, one might refer to other occasions when artfully
made furniture has been treated as a work of art. After all, there are nu­
merous cases in the twentieth century of sculptors who explicitly invoked
furniture in the forms they gave to their work, and the inverse is also true:
there are furniture makers whose work has been described as sculpture.^
Among Mondrian’s younger contemporaries such surrealists as Alberto
Giacometti, Isamu Noguchi, and Meret Oppenheim worked simultane­
ously in both genres, mining the productive crossovers between the two.^
After World War II, many more sculptors became interested in testing the
limits that traditionally separated works of art from functional objects, a
distinction that for numerous contemporary artists may still be significant
even as it is continually subverted in their work and thus made to seem all
but irrelevant.
For Mondrian, who looked forward to a time when the visual arts would
be integrated in everyday life, the distinguishing features of each medium
75
 change, and what was the relation of the transformed objects to the con­
temporary art world in which they were circulating? More important, how
has the treatment of the studio components, including the furniture and
the “Wall Works,” affected the appreciation of the artist and his oeuvre?
It scarcely needs stating that these questions arise within a context
much broader than the work of any single artist. The relationship between
art and furniture has a long and venerable history, and in the modern pe­
riod it was hotly debated from many different perspectives. Where numer­
ous artists active in Europe and America during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries regarded furniture as well as painting, sculp­
ture, and architecture as elements of an encompassing decorative ensem­
ble, others sought to make firm distinctions between an autonomous realm
of fine art and the domain of the decorative, in which art was understood
to be subordinated to a larger framework because it was applied to useful
objects. As industrialization increasingly informed the conception of the
work of art afler the First World War, the relationship between art and
furniture became ever more nuanced. In many cases, artists and architects
designed furniture as prototypes for industrial production and embraced
discourses of constructivism, functionalism, and industrial design that
FIGURE 2 . 4 Step complicated, as they also endorsed, the distinction Adolf Loos famously
S to o l from M ondrian’ s
New York studio,
drew between the decorative ensemble as the despised arena of ornament
catalogued as “ Step and the independent object of functional design that could eventually
Stool sculpture”
and reproduced in
take its place alongside the autonomous work of art, for example, in the
M o n d ria n in N ew York domestic setting envisioned by Le Corbusier as “a machine for living in.”^
(Tokyo: GalerieTokoro, Although Piet Mondrian was first and foremost a painter, he participated
1993). 93 - Photo
courtesy M ondrian/
in these debates, addressing the relationship between painting and the en­
Holtzman Trust. vironment in which it is situated—including furniture, architecture, the
street and the city—in several theoretical essays.® These underpinned and
were inspired by his efforts throughout much of his career to arrange and
furnish the studios he occupied in a manner expressive of the tenets that
nevertheless remained critically important to his theory and practice as also informed his paintings.
an artist. But if we aspire to understand the relationship between art and
furniture that informs his work as we understand it today, we must look A great deal has been written about Mondrians studios in Paris and New
not only at but also beyond what he did or said about it during his lifetime. York, especially since the 1970s. In fact, those carefully arranged spaces
Specifically, we should examine the circumstances under which the trans­ have long been the object of my own scholarship, beginning with the pub­
formation from functional equipment to autonomous work of art occurred lication in 1978 of an article on the studio Mondrian occupied for about
afler his death. How and to what ends did the various pieces of furniture fifteen years at 26, rue du Depart in Paris.^ But until relatively recently, the
and some of the other materials—in particular, the myriad colored card­ furniture that Mondrian used in his studios has not received a great deal
board rectangles—removed from Mondrian’s New York apartment in 1944 of attention. This is not only a function of the fact that the Paris furniture,
emerge during the 1970s from decades of relative neglect to become widely entirely commonplace in its forms, was not designed or made by Mondrian
exhibited objects, and eventually works of art? Who were the agents of this and therefore did not command much interest. Nor is it simply because.

76 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re 77


F I G U R E 2.5 Studio of with the exception of an easel, none of the pieces visible in the many pho­
Piet Mondrian, 26, rue
tographs taken while Mondrian lived on the rue du Depart still exists (fig.
du Depart, Paris, 1926.
Photo by Paul Delbo. 2.5).“ Also significant is the fact that those photographs are all black and
Source: RKD (Nether­ white. Thus, what must have made Mondrian’s otherwise unremarkable
lands Institute for Art
History), Cesar Domela
cabinet for storing paint (seen to the left of the easel) stand out within the
Archive, 0076.299. overall arrangement of the studio—the bright red color he gave it—was
never readily apparent to students of Mondrian’s work.“
Circumstances were different with respect to the furniture that re­
mained in Mondrian’s last New York apartment after his death, several
pieces of which survived for decades. These objects—the work table, desk,
and stool mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—were designed and
constructed by the artist, who also painted them white. Given the distinc­
tive formal features of the table and desk, these in particular were read­
ily identified with Mondrian’s authorial and creative persona.Moreover,
most of the pieces of furniture Mondrian made in New York, to which in
many cases he applied cardboard rectangles of red, yellow, blue, or white,
are clearly visible in color slides (widely known through their publication
78 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becomlng Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn iture
as photographs) and a color film made to document the distinctive ar­
rangement of the apartment he occupied at the time of his death.’’
During the three and a half years Mondrian spent in New York before
he died on February 1,1944, he appears to have devoted increasing time
and energy to arranging the spaces where he lived and worked. The first of
these, for which Harry Holtzman guaranteed the initial year’s rent, was a
small apartment on the third floor of a building at the corner of 56th Street
and First Avenue. Photographs taken there by friends and associates of the
artist reveal very little about the spatial organization of the interior; all are
black and white, and only one or two show any furniture—for example,
a round metal stool topped by a red cushioned seat and the rectangular
wooden stepstool ("I had lent him that,” Holtzman later recalled, “because
he admired it”).’’’ There was also a bed, a canvas deck chair, an easel, an
adjustable drafting table with a tilting top, and a radio/record player that
Holtzman had given him. Although none of these items is pictured in the
black-and-white portrait photographs of Mondrian made by Arnold New­
man in 1942, one of those photos does convey a vivid sense of how Mon­
drian’s easel paintings related to the large rectangular colored planes on
the walls of that first New York apartment, where Mondrian lived from
November 15,1940, until October 1943 (fig. 2.6). Newman later recalled the
distinctive formal features shared by the interior and the paintings he saw
there: “I had been struck by the relationship between his paintings and
the architectural setting. It was a very tiny room and my back was to the
window when I took the photograph. Paintings were leaning against the
wall in front of me and immediately behind those paintings there was a
tiny kitchen. I also remember that there were some storage areas in there.
Then there was a door, reflecting the lines of his paintings. The whole
thing struck me as an echo of his own work and self and that’s why I pho­
tographed it that way.””
In October 1943, four months before his death, Mondrian moved to a
larger apartment on the top floor of a brownstone walk-up at 15 East 59th
Street, where a narrow hallway led to three rooms: a kitchen, a small bed­
room that he also used as a study, and a larger room that he used as his
studio, which had ample wall space and a bank of windows facing north.
Once again he applied rectangles of colored cardboard to many of the off-
white wall surfaces and also used them to cover the projecting forms of
the mantel in the studio (fig. 2.7). In addition, he made quite a few simple
but intriguing pieces of furniture from packing crates for his paintings,
discarded fruit crates he collected, parts of a sling-back chair, and wood
that had originally been used (or was intended for use) as stretchers for
paintings. After painting these homemade items white, Mondrian in some
79
 F I G U R E 2.7 Taboret
and mantel in Mon­
drian’ s Studio, 15 East
59th Street, New York,
February 1944. Photo
by Fritz Glarner ©
Estate o f Fritz Glarner,
Kunsthaus Zurich.
All rights reserved.
© 2013 M ondrian/
Floltzman Trust c/o
FICR International.

FIGURE 2 . 6 Arnold Newman, portrait o f Piet Mondrian,
January 17,1942, New York City. © Getty Images /
Arnold Newman Collection.
cases added his characteristic colored and white rectangles. His friend, the
painter Carl Holty, recalled several of these pieces in a journal entry writ­
ten on March 22,1944, less than two months after Mondrian’s death: “He
built himself two little tables—one of which [fig. 2.1] is the last word in
delicacy of proportion, and the other one [fig. 2.2] is a heavier variation on
the same theme. I just wish he hadn’t built it out of that stretcher I loaned
him, because it is hard to get stretchers. My mistake!’’"^

(Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re 81

 The materials that Mondrian used to make this furniture came from
objects that were cheap, ephemeral, and ready to hand. "Mondrian made a
good deal of the furniture himself," a correspondent for the New Yorker not­
ed in 1944, “partly to economize (in spite of his eminence, he never made
much money) and partly because he liked to tinker, and he showed a lot of
ingenuity in using odd bits of material, such as old orange crates, lengths
of lath, and so on.”"’ Thus the New York pieces Mondrian constructed him­
self were markedly different from the furniture that he had acquired,
presumably also inexpensively, in Paris. Where he had to rely on color (as
well as placement) to integrate those otherwise conventional objects into
the overall arrangement of his Paris studio, in New York, the furniture
he made was uniformly white—colored rectangles were attached, as they
had been to some of the furniture in Paris, but what made the later pieces
noteworthy was the inventive, spare form he gave to many of them. For
example, the open cabinets he constructed for storing paints and brushes
in the studio and books and paperwork in the bedroom/study (plate 6)
were made of two crates standing on end and connected to one another by
strips of wood that spanned an intervening space of equal width to form
an ingenious, tripartite arrangement of rectangular cubbyholes. As Harry
Holtzman noted in 1970, these pieces and the rest of the simple furniture
in the New York apartment befitted not only Mondrians frugal lifestyle
but also his theory of the home: "For Mondrian, the ‘bourgeois’ approach
to ‘furniture’ and ‘comfort,’ among other things, belonged to a mode of life
and values that failed essentially to meet the real human potential of envi­
ronmental needs and satisfactions. He once commented humorously upon
a visitor’s complaint that there were no ‘comfortable’ chairs in his studio.
He had a canvas folding deck chair, a metal stool (with round red top and
white legs), another white [actually gray] rectangular stool which could
also open up to form a short ladder. He said, ‘If it is too comfortable, people
will stay too long! When I want to rest, I lie down on my bed.’’’"®
Mondrian had a few additional store-bought items, but for the furni­
ture he constructed himself—the furniture that fifty years later was pre­
sented as sculpture—he deliberately chose his raw materials from found
objects and items that in many cases would otherwise have been discard­
ed. Holtzman described how this furniture corresponded to the overall
coloristic and spatial organization of the apartment: “Especially the walls
of the studio itself and of the bedroom-study were well developed and in­
terrelated; and each room had a structure of two orange-crates intercon­
nected by horizontal wood strips and rectangular cards of primary colors.
One cluster of orange-crates in the studio was used for storing paints and
brushes and for the white glass palettes. In the bedroom-study [there was]
82 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re
another cluster for books and writing, and a unique writing table entire­
ly constructed by Mondrian, quite reminiscent of his paintings. He also
made another table for the kitchen . . . Both the tables were entirely new
expressions in his work, incidental but important.”"’
Recognizing the significance of this environment, after Mondrian’s
death Holtzman kept the arrangement intact for several months (the lease
was not terminated until June 14,1944), inviting anyone interested to ex­
perience the spaces in which Mondrian had lived and worked."’ He also
relied on Mondrian’s friend Fritz Glarner, who was a painter but supple­
mented his income by working as a commercial photographer, to help doc­
ument the studio, the bedroom and their furnishings in black-and-white
photographs, color slides, a film (also in color), and tracings of the walls.
One image from that effort, showing Victory Boogie Woogie on an easel near
the far corner of the large studio interior (fig. 1.3), appeared in the Museum
of Modern Art Bulletin of spring 1945, the issue that was published during
MoMA’s memorial retrospective of Mondrian’s work.""
According to Holtzman’s recollection in 1967, neither MoMA nor any
other museum had been interested in photographing the studio when he
approached them about doing so after Mondrian’s death."" Yet MoMA did
seriously consider exhibiting a re-creation of the studio, including the
furniture, in its memorial exhibition scheduled to open in March 1945.
The suggestion had been made about a year earlier by Serge Chermayeff,
a Hungarian-born architect educated in England who had practiced there
before immigrating to the United States in 1940."" Chermayeff had gotten
to know Ben Nicholson, Herbert Read, and other members of the so-called
Circle group of constructive artists, architects, and writers with whom
Mondrian was affiliated in the 1930s, especially during the two years he
lived in London; it seems likely that Chermayeff became acquainted with
Mondrian at that time."’ In New York in 1941, Chermayeff explored the pos­
sibility of becoming the first director of a newly established Department
of Industrial Design at MoMA. Although that appointment never mate­
rialized (he became chairman of the Department of Design at Brooklyn
College instead), MoMA hired him to organize “Design for Use,” a section
of its sprawling fifteenth-anniversary exhibition. Art in Progress, with the
help of Rene d’Harnoncourt, who would later become director of MoMA.
The two assembled scores of objects through which they traced the de­
velopment of tools and household implements from simple utensils to
sophisticated instruments and laborsaving devices such as typewriters,
telephones, radios, and other examples of modern equipment whose ma­
terials and design expressed what the show’s two curators regarded as an
appropriate integration of form and function.
83
 In contrast to the examples of modern design showcased at MoMA, in­
cluding industrially produced goods and new kinds of commercially avail­
able functional objects, Mondrian had constructed his own, very simple
furniture by hand from discarded, lightweight, and relatively fragile ma­
terials, and of course the pieces he made had been intended for his own
personal use. Yet it comes as no surprise that Chermayeff, with his cosmo­
politan background and wide-ranging interest in modern design, would
appreciate Mondrian’s work and understand the significance of his studio,
including the furniture it contained. It could have been a visit while the
studio was still intact that prompted him to suggest it be reconstituted in
the Mondrian retrospective at MoMA.^^
"Chermayeff’s idea is excellent," the exhibition curator, James Johnson
Sweeney, wrote to then director of the Department of Painting and Sculp­
ture, James Ihrall Soby, on April 7,1944.
As a matter of fact we (or rather, Fritz Glarner, and Holtzman) have already
taken colored moving pictures, made colored slides and black and white
photographs of the studio. We have also made tracings on white paper of
the placement of the colored cardboard rectangles on the studio walls. With
this as a basis and the building blue-print of the studio space, it would not
be difHcult to reconstruct it.
The idea of making these records struck us immediately after Mon­
drian’s death, entirely aside from any possibility of actually reconstructing
the studio. To have such records seemed worth the trouble needed to make
them. Once the studio would be dismantled we realized this aspect of Mon­
drian’s interest would be completely lost.
After Monroe [Wheeler, director of Publications and Exhibitions at
MoMA] wrote me regarding the decision of the Museum to hold a Memo­
rial Exhibition, it struck us that perhaps a small corner could be devoted to
a reconstruction of this studio. Fortunately, I have also photographs of his
studio in the Rue du Depart [sic] taken by Kertesz and others. These would
bring out the relationship of his earlier interiors to the paintings he was
doing at that time, as they were just as different from his 59* Street interior
as his 1929 pictures were from his ‘Boogie Woogie’work.
However, Sweeney observed, “There is only one difficulty facing us. It
would also be well to keep the furniture which Mondrian made for this
studio last Autumn, it is so close in spirit to his paintings. But we were
faced by the problem of how to store it, particularly in view of the fact
that it is not absolutely certain we will ever make use of it. Perhaps the
84 CHAPTER2
Museum could find a place for these few pieces until next November, in the
possibility we might find use for them?’’^^
Responding to this dilemma, Soby, who supported the idea of recon­
structing Mondrian’s studio, noted that it would be difficult to keep the
furniture at the museum until the opening of the retrospective, since all
available storage space would be filled by its own permanent collection
for the duration of the large, multipartite Art in Progress exhibition, which
would extend from May through October, 1944, and was composed largely
of loans. “If we get a definite decision to reproduce the studio,” Soby wrote,
“then I should think we might arrange to store the furniture in a ware­
house until fall. I would be glad to store it [at my house] in Farmington,
[Connecticut,] but I am afraid it would cost too much to transport the fur­
niture up there and back. In any case, I will talk [the] whole thing over
with Monroe [Wheeler] soon and show him your letter.”^’’
There is no evidence to explain why MoMA ultimately did not recon­
struct Mondrian’s studio in 1945. Several pieces of the furniture visible
in the photographs made of his apartment, including both of the stor­
age units Mondrian built, have disappeared without a trace. According to
Holtzman’s recollection in 1984, offered at a time when interest in the fur­
niture had become widespread, two items salvaged from the studio were
included in an exhibition in 1946: “The tabouret and the shelf case, which
also were incorporated into the overall spatial composition of the east wall
[of the studio; see fig. 1.3] were exhibited with Mondrian’s paintings at the
Valentine Gallery shortly after his death.’’^®That show, Mondrian Paintings,
was held from March 4 to 23,1946, a year after MoMA’s memorial retro­
spective. Yet there is no mention in any of its documentation (including
the checklist and two reviews in the press) of Mondrian’s two pieces of
furniture, which, according to Holtzman, were discarded when the exhibi­
tion ended because “the gallery’s cleaning assistant assumed that the con­
structions were merely disposable boxes.”^‘’
Apart from Mondrian’s store-bought easel and the stepstool he had
borrowed from Holtzman, only three pieces of furniture—the stool, desk,
and work table made by the artist in October-November 1943—survived in
the collection of Harry Holtzman after the mid-i940s.3° According to the
catalogue raisonne of Mondrian’s work, where they are included, in a sec­
tion entitled “Catalogue of the Furniture,” together with a record rack that
Mondrian left behind in Paris, none of the New York furniture made by
Mondrian was exhibited until thirty years after his death. Nevertheless, it
must be acknowledged, already at that time, those who were most famil­
iar with his work and ideas—Glarner, Holtzman, and Sweeney, as well as
(Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re 85
 Sidney and Harriet Janis and Serge Chermayeff—appreciated not only the
significance of Mondrian’s furniture in the context of the apartment envi­
ronment created in 1943-44 but also the affinities between that furniture
and Mondrian’s paintings of about the same period. So, too, Holty’s previ­
ously quoted remark in 1944 that one of Mondrian’s tables manifested “the
last word in delicacy of proportion” indicates a shared understanding very
early on that, as Mondrian scholar Joop Joosten noted in the catalogue rai-
sonne, the desk and the work table are “highly important” objects whose
“value is more than merely functional. In making these pieces Mondrian
was clearly inspired by rhythm in placing the horizontal and vertical lines
next to and above each other.”’*
Joosten underscored his appreciation of the formal features of Mon­
drian’s desk and work table, and his desire to emphasize their composi­
tional similarity to Mondrian’s painted oeuvre, by referring to the verti­
cal legs and asymmetrically positioned horizontal rails as “lines” rather
than pieces of wood, as if to suggest that the furniture was composed like
a painting, not hammered or screwed together for practical use. I make
this point not to take issue with Joosten’s descriptive prose but, instead, to
highlight its interpretive thrust. His recognition of the aesthetic invest­
ment Mondrian made in his furniture corresponds rather closely with
Sweeney’s and Holty’s much earlier assessments. All of them have indi­
cated that a common formal vocabulary links Mondrian’s furniture with
his paintings. In doing so, they may have had a work such as Composition
en blanc, noir et rouge (B269) of 1936 in mind (plate 7). Acquired from the
artist for $300 by the Museum of Modern Art in 1937, this canvas was fre­
quently exhibited and widely reproduced, often in color, during the 1930s
and 1940s.’’
Yet even if Mondrian’s contemporaries and later scholars pointed out
the similar organization of horizontal and vertical elements, the compa­
rable play of space and line in this or another painting on one hand and
the table or desk on the other, they consistently referred to the three-
dimensional objects as furniture. Sculpture was not mentioned in any of
their accounts. Thus a distinction between art and furniture in Mondrian’s
work was operative not only in the mid-i940s, when the notion of recon­
structing the studio and exhibiting the furniture was briefly entertained,
but also during the following decades. Although Mondrian’s paintings
achieved near iconic status and their market value rose sharply during the
heyday of modernist critical discourse between the late 1940s and mid-
1960s, in those years the remnants of the studio and its furnishings—the
few items that had not been discarded simply due to a janitor’s ignorance
or for lack of space in which to keep them—were relegated to storage, they
86 CHAPTER 2
received little or no scholarly attention, and their status within Mondrian’s
oeuvre remained largely unexamined.
This situation began to change after 1970, when the Pace Gallery, New
York, constructed a previously unrealized interior design known as the
Salon de Madame B a Dresden (plate 8) that Mondrian had made for a
German collector and patron of modern art named Ida Bienert. The con­
struction was occasioned by an exhibition, Mondrian: The Process Works, de­
voted to numerous drawings and unfinished paintings that Pace director
Arne Glimcher had recently acquired from Harry Holtzman. As Glimcher
later recalled, “Holtzman had already sold most of the Mondrian estate to
Sidney Janis, retaining a group of drawings and sketchbooks, pages, and
notations on the backs of cigarette packs. There were also some larger
drawings and unfinished paintings, and the intriguing architectural plan
for the Salon de Madame B” (fig. 2.8).” This line drawing in black ink of the
ceiling, floor, and four walls of an interior laid out as flat planes on a large
off-white page includes Mondrian’s penciled annotations (with correc­
tions in white gouache) indicating the colors he intended to apply to each
of the rectangles that together composed the six discrete surfaces of the
room as well as a daybed and built-in cabinet that it was supposed to con­
tain. “In essence,” Glimcher wrote to Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to whom he offered the Process
Works exhibition, “[the design] creates a Mondrian environment of six
complete wall size paintings totaling the whole room. I find this particu­
larly relevant to the moment and I think it will have a great impact on the
art community.”’**Thus it was in order to drive home a connection with
contemporary art that Glimcher decided not only to construct the interior
at nearly full scale for the first time but, also, to do it in Formica.” With
brightly colored Formica covering the walls, ceiling, and floor as well as
the furnishings, Mondrian’s Salon de Madame B was presented at Pace as if
were a contemporary sculpture by Richard Artschwager (fig. 2.9) crossed
with a bedroom ensemble by Claes Oldenburg (fig. 2.10). The large and
dramatically lit construction formed an ineluctable focus of attention for
the exhibition, whose title nodded in the direction of the contemporary
process art movement with which such artists as Eva Hesse, Robert Mor­
ris, and Richard Serra were associated. At the same time the title also sug­
gested that the many preliminary and tentative sketches included in the
show were actually significant works that afforded insight into Mondrian’s
process in creating what were referred to as his “classic” images.’*’ Glim­
cher presumably sought to enhance the impact of the large drawing for the
Dresden project through its realization in the newly constructed interior,
which also functioned as a colorful centerpiece for the display of the many
(Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re 87

FIGURE 2 . 8 Piet Mondrian,
D raw ing f o r Salon de M a da m e
B . . . , a D resden, 1926. (B168).
Photo; Ferdinand Boesch cour­
tesy the Pace Gallery. © 2013
Mondrian/Holtzm an Trust c/o
HCR International.
F I G U R E 2.9 Richard Artschwa-
ger. Table w ith P ink Tablecioth,
1964. Formica on wood. Gift
o f the Lannan Foundation,
1997-133- The Art Institute
o f Chicago. © 2012 Richard
Artschwager / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
disparate, relatively small, and monochromatic objects in the show, which FIGURE 2 . 1 0 Claes
Oldenburg, B edroom
he had initially considered to be “the dregs of the estate."’^
Ensem ble, 1963.
Even if Glimcher had in the back of his mind recent objects in Formica Wood, Formica, vinyl,
by Artschwager or sculpture that referenced furniture or interior design aluminum, paper, fake
fur, muslin. Dacron,
by Oldenburg and other contemporary artists when he arranged for Mon­ polyurethane foam,
drian’s drawing to be realized in Formica, he was also motivated by a de­ lacquer. Collection
National Gallery of
sire for historical integrity. With this in mind he commissioned American
Canada. © Claes
Cyanamid, the parent company of the Formica Corporation, to produce its Oldenburg.
signature laminated panels in colors exactly matched to samples of Mon­
drian’s paints taken from the palette and tubes remaining in Holtzman’s
possession. Moreover, both Glimcher and Holtzman were convinced that
the pristine character and mechanistic uniformity of Formica correspond­
ed perfectly with Mondrian’s call, in an essay titled “Home—Street—City’’
(originally published in 1927, it was reprinted in English in the catalogue
accompanying the Pace exhibition), for the denaturalization of architec­
tural materials, for smooth, bright, and easily cleaned surfaces in pure col­
ors or noncolors (black, white, or gray) that would do away with any sign
of naturalism or individual expression.’*About the interior of the home in
(Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n 's F u rn itu re 89
 particular, Mondrian declared, “[this] can no longer be a conglomeration
of rooms—four walls with holes for doors and windows—but a construc­
tion of planes in color and noncolor unified with the furniture and household
objects, which will be nothing in themselves but which will function as construc­
tive elements of the whole."
The decision to build in Formica was daring but also understandable,
given Mondrian’s description of the neoplastic architecture and interior
design he envisioned for the future. At the same time, however, it seems
clear from photographs and descriptions of the installation that the in­
terior built for Pace Gallery actually resonated at least as tellingly with
contemporary sculpture as it did with any of Mondrian’s studios, which
were the interiors he had actually realized during his lifetime. Discussing
the Salon de Madame B in his review of the Pace show, art historian Albert
Boime pointed out qualities that called pop art to mind, and although Bo-
ime did not mention Oldenburg’s 1963 Bedroom Ensemble in particular, he
might well have been thinking of it. "The effect is somewhat vulgar,’’ Boime
wrote of the full-scale model at Pace, “and the spectator is apt to recall the
kitchens and bathrooms for which the Formica plastic is mainly intended
. . . As it now stands, the room may easily invoke impressions of Howard
Johnson’s highway motels, and even bear allusions to the Hollywood ideal
of modern design in the thirties. In short, it has a slightly campy flavor, re­
calling ironically both the period which first felt the impact of Mondrian’s
streamlined vision and the contemporary Pop insights into this period.’’^’
Reviewing the exhibition in the New York Times, critic Hilton Kramer
also alluded to the connection with contemporary art as he speculated
about the meaning of the show’s title: “I have an uneasy suspicion that it is
meant to signify some relationship between Mondrian’s achievement and
the work of younger ‘process’ artists on the current scene. Such instant re­
visions of art history are nowadays very common, and are simply comical
where they are not downright opportunistic. Any day now I expect to read
an account, complete with the ritual references to Wittgenstein, explain­
ing the ways in which Mondrian prophesied the vision of Robert Morris.’’'^”
One reason for the anachronistic effect of the Pace model is the fact
that Holtzman and Glimcher failed to incorporate information about the
Salon de Madame B that could have been gleaned from three other draw­
ings Mondrian had made for the same commission in 1926 (B167.1-3). These
had been published several times after their first appearance in 1927 in the
French journal Vouloir, and Holtzman was aware of the black-and-white
reproductions included there. But apparently neither he nor Glimcher
knew the current whereabouts of the original, colored gouache drawings
and they overlooked both black-and-white and color reproductions in pre-
90 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n 's F u rn iture
paring the Pace model.'*' One of the drawings is an exploded box plan like
the ink drawing shown at Pace Gallery; the other two are axonometric per­
spectives showing views of the interior and its furnishings projected into
three-dimensional space (plate 9). Here it is evident that an oval on the
floor of the exploded box-plan, which in 1970 was mistakenly interpreted
at Pace as a bedside rug (though executed in white Formica), was actu­
ally meant to represent a table on which a cylindrical lamp would stand.
Moreover, in all three of these drawings, which since 1950 have been in the
collection of the Kupferstich Kabinett, Dresden (a museum not easily ac­
cessible to art historians in the West in 1970, in the midst of the Cold War),
Mondrian had used gouache pigments—not penciled words—to indicate
the colors of his design.'**' As I observed when I wrote about the Dresden
drawings in a short essay published in 1980, the primary colors Mondrian
judiciously distributed around the room were matched by as many as three
different tonalities of gray to achieve a complex design of color in space
whose subtleties were not conveyed by the brightly lit, gleaming Formica
veneers used in the 1970 model.'*’
All of this is to say that the characteristic features of Formica—the
rigid uniformity and reflective quality of the surface, indeed, the utter ar­
tificiality of this mechanically produced material—could not do justice to
the spatial and coloristic nuances of Mondrian’s conception of the Bienert
interior, any more than reproductions of his paintings are able to repre­
sent the careful attention he paid to the details of his brushwork. Precisely
these qualities have recently come to be especially appreciated in Mondri­
an’s work, even though, as we have seen, in the 1920s the artist evidently
disclaimed them in his rhetoric about the architecture of the future.
By opting for Formica in 1970, Glimcher and Holtzman chose to privi­
lege the strong visionary aspect of Mondrian’s essay “Home—S treet-
City,” thereby downplaying the fact that Mondrian himself understood
that his ideas for a socially transformative architecture of the future were
impossible to realize in the present: “I have always fought the individual­
ist in man and have tried to show the value of seeing in a universal way,”
he wrote in this essay, “but this does not mean I believe in full collectivism
for the present. This is the dream of the future.” While he described the
character of the abstract, neoplastic environment he envisioned in terms
that, years later, seemed to call forth the material qualities of Formica, he
also acknowledged that he could not prescribe how his vision might even­
tually be realized: “In this article I have discussed certain ‘ideas’ and their
embodiment in basic laws. I have said little about the details of execution
because I know that external life is forever changing .. . The demands of
the new life will modify all details of execution; but these are insignificant
91
 before the new conception, which is paramount.” Here Mondrian himself
minimized the importance of execution, stressing instead an idealist read­
ing of his formal innovations, embodied in neoplastic laws that, he wrote,
“determine the pure plastic means and how they are used.”
From this perspective one might assume that Mondrian would not
have been bothered by—indeed he might have welcomed—the fact that
the interior shown at Pace lacked the provisional character, the sense of
experimentation, as well as the intimacy due to the use of handmade ele­
ments that helped to make his Paris and New York studios especially ap­
pealing. But, in fact, the artist himself believed that a certain degree of
personal involvement was indispensable to the success of his work (even
as he dreamed of overcoming any hint of individual subjectivity). As he
explained to a friend and colleague, the architect J. J. P. Oud, he had been
unable to realize the Salon de Madame B because “the financial compensa­
tion was too little for me to go there [Dresden] myself for the execution.
I do not think that someone else can direct it.”'^ These are telling words,
indicating the potentially problematic nature of any attempt to construct
a work like the Salon de Madame B without the consent or involvement of
the artist who designed it. Yet, much can be gained from a fully spatial-
ized experience of a design intended to be realized in three dimensions.
Architects often build models of their projects in order to provide just such
an experience, and reconstructions of historically significant interiors
have frequently been featured in museum exhibitions. El Lissitzky’s Proun
Room, Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau, and Kurt Schwitters’s
Merzbau are prominent examples of works dating from the 1920s and early
1930s that were reconstructed many decades later. In 1994, Mondrian’s Rue
du Depart studio was reconstructed for the first time as a nearly full-scale
model that formed the centerpiece of one of the many exhibitions orga­
nized in The Netherlands to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the
artist’s death. Such reconstructions can be appreciated not only for their
value as art historical reproductions that attempt to re-create the viewing
conditions of the original interior but also as popular attractions not un­
like those found, for example, in wax museums. In fact, the exhibition fea­
turing the exhaustively researched re-creation of Mondrian’s studio was
inaugurated in the great hall of H. P. Berlage’s Amsterdam Stock Exchange
building by the appearance of a Mondrian impersonator whom the BBC
filmed as he posed alongside a wax likeness of the artist that was destined
for installation at the Amsterdam branch of Madame Tussaud’s.'^^
While the Formica used in the Pace model of 1970 caused that interior
to be compared with bathrooms, kitchens, and banal Howard Johnson’s
motels, its features nevertheless correlated in significant respects with the
92 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn iture
way in which Mondrian’s paintings were appreciated for decades after his
death, particularly by those who responded to the graphic power of his
style, which comes to the fore in reproductions of his work. In this con­
text it is often rumored (but for obvious reasons rarely explicitly stated
in public) that an alarming number of paintings by Mondrian were post­
humously treated to what today would be considered drastic, even harm­
ful, conservation processes in an effort to return their cracked surfaces
to the pristine condition—uniform and undifferentiated—that the best
preserved works appeared to enjoy, especially in reproduction, if not in
actuality. Both dealers and museums engaged in such practices, in the first
instance to improve marketability and in the second to enhance stability,
thereby erasing crucially important evidence of the works’ original condi­
tion. (As Harry Cooper has pointed out, “The fact that this ‘conservation
often involved the disposal of Mondrian’s original frames is also signifi­
cant, and ties into [the] concern with studio furniture; it is ironic that the
frames, also made of sticks of wood, were often discarded [as secondary
to the paintings, whereas in fact they were an integral part of Mondrian’s
conception], while the furniture was preserved and celebrated.”)'*^ Never­
theless, there were always some who acknowledged Mondrian’s attention
to coloristic nuance and surface detail and, particularly, to the careful fac-
ture of his paintings. Not surprisingly, artists were among those most at­
tentive to Mondrian’s facture, as Mark Stevens has observed: "In the fifties,
painters enjoyed analyzing the distinctive character of Mondrian’s brush­
stroke. They would admire the slight waver of an edge, for example, or the
no-nonsense application of a field of paint. In doing so, they were mount­
ing an implicit defense: Mondrian was not, as some fools believe, a ‘me­
chanical’ painter of abstract geometric forms.”'*^One of the most articulate
exponents of this view was Allan Kaprow, whose Master’s thesis, written
in 1952 at Columbia University under the direction of Meyer Schapiro, in­
volved a sustained effort at close visual analysis of Mondrian’s paintings.'*®
Kaprow began his text by declaring that widespread “confusion and
misunderstanding” of Mondrian’s work was “the result of a pervasive in­
ability (or lack of patience which would rectify this) to see his pictures
correctly.” Acknowledging that commonplace comparisons with “linoleum
designs, ornament, magazine layouts and floor plans” were understand­
able in view of the “desire to see art in some vital relation to human expe­
rience,” he argued nevertheless that locating Mondrian’s accomplishment
in a functionalist, nonart context stressed what were actually superficial
similarities and ultimately compromised the profound nature of the art­
ist’s work: “It is important now to realize that such references have pre­
vented people from really examining the nature of Mondrian and it [sic]
93
 has resulted in their looking at the paintings in a wrong way.” “Mondrian
reproduces very poorly,” Kaprow observed; “the reduced scale of the re­
production, the fact that Mondrian’s whites in his more mature pictures
are often built up higher than the blacks and give the effect of very opaque,
solid stuff, while the blacks are varnished and reflect a great deal of light,
the fact that sometimes the black curves around the edge of the picture
which projects out from a backboard, thus increasing the effect of the
‘sinking in’ of the line—all these do not show in a reproduction. Color . . .
also suffers greatly in facsimile.” Kaprow aimed to overcome the problems
inherent in reproduction by paying careful attention throughout the the­
sis to the specificity of Mondrian’s facture, his deliberative choice of col­
or, and the delicate equilibrium of forms that enabled the artist to create
seemingly simple pictures that actually involved what Kaprow described
as “a great complex of qualities or sensations.” Explaining his commitment
to close examination, he suggested that, “if people only give themselves up
to really examining a Mondrian, the resultant experience can be extreme­
ly engrossing, and it may be a clue to understanding how a man could de­
vote a career to such apparently sparse painting.”
Despite his plea that viewers should make a concerted effort to see
Mondrian’s paintings correctly, the attention to facture that Kaprow dis­
played was relatively rare. Writing in 1957, Martin James lamented that de­
spite recent exhibitions and publications devoted to Mondrian and De Stijl,
“we still ignore the issues thus raised as to the means, the nature, the aims
of art, preferring instead to measure the style’s contributions by linoleum
tiles or Kleenex boxes!”'’'*In the catalogue of the exhibition marking the fif­
tieth anniversary of Mondrian’s death, the curators (Angelica Rudenstine,
Yve-Alain Bois, Joop Joosten, Hans Janssen, and John Elderfield) described
“a problem of perception” that corresponds to the problem Kaprow had
identified forty years earlier. “Mondrian’s early partisans,” they wrote,
“praised his work as a blueprint for modern architecture or typography,
as ‘formal experimentation destined to be ‘applied’ in various fields; and
his neoplastic work has often been characterized (admiringly) as that of a
geometric designer.” The widespread emphasis on Mondrian’s relationship
to design not only misleads viewers to imagine that the work was geomet­
ric or mathematical in its origins, they cautioned, but it also accounts for
an equally widespread failure to appreciate the quality of Mondrian’s fac­
ture, or, in their words, “the painterly subtlety of surface differentiation,
[which] was generally overlooked.”’*'’
Building on these observations, art historian Harry Cooper has identi­
fied two strains in the reception of Mondrian’s work, one “materialist” in
nature, concentrating on the physical qualities of his paintings and cre-
94 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re
ative procedures, the other “idealist,” focusing on the conceptual genesis
of the work.5‘ Ironically, Cooper suggests, “Mondrian’s followers seem to
have been among those least interested in the quality of his surfaces.” He
includes Holtzman in this assessment, noting that Holtzman was “divided
between two views of Mondrian, one influenced by his intimacy with Mon­
drian’s working methods, the other perhaps a product of Holtzman’s own
idealist leanings.” This, Cooper suggests, would account for Holtzman’s
laudable role in documenting Mondrian’s New York studio and preserving
some of its design elements, on one hand, and his problematic willingness
to replace loose or faded tapes in order to freshen up Mondrian’s unfin­
ished paintings, on the other. Holtzman’s idealist proclivities also provide
a raison d’etre for sanctioning Formica in the Bienert interior constructed
by Pace Gallery, which marked the apotheosis of a pristine, hard-edge in­
terpretation of Mondrian’s work that in retrospect seems entirely appro­
priate to the art historical moment, dominated by minimalism, in which it
was realized.
The Pace exhibition inaugurated a period during which Mondrian’s ar­
chitecturally related work began to be better known and more widely ap­
preciated. Although Holtzman had already published the essay “H om e-
Street—City” in English in Transformation, a short-lived journal he edited
in the early 1950s, and Mondrian had for years been regarded as a major
influence on modern architecture and design, his own aspirations in this
arena had not been widely acknowledged. This changed as a result, in part,
of the Pace exhibition, which traveled to museums in Los Angeles, Chi­
cago, and Cincinnati, as well as to commercial galleries in Paris and Dus-
seldorf. In the show’s catalogue, alongside Mondrian’s essay, Holtzman
published a short essay devoted to “Piet Mondrian’s Environment” (from
which quotations were cited above). In it he discussed the Salon de Madame
B and mentioned Mondrian’s various studios, describing the apartment in
New York and, especially, its furnishings in some detail.
By 1974. when Sidney Janis exhibited furniture Mondrian had con­
structed for the New York apartment, there was not only a growing aware­
ness of Mondrian’s design work but also a contextual framework firmly in
place in the larger art world to support this aspect of the artist’s interests.
This is to say that during the 1960s and early 1970s, dozens of contempo­
rary artists, including not only Artschwager and Oldenburg but also Scott
Burton, Robert Morris, and Lucas Samaras (to name only a few of those
whose work was gathered together in a 1977 exhibition entitled Improbable
Furniture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary
Art) were exploring what Robert Pincus-Witten described in his catalogue
essay as “the furniture paradigm.” Referring not to actual furniture but
95
 instead to “the ways in which the forms of furniture have meaning for
twentieth-century pictorial and sculptural consciousness,” Pincus-Witten
highlighted “the ways in which modern artistic consciousness has been
stamped by notions of furniture.”^' The point for my purposes is not to sug­
gest that Mondrian himself would have shared these conceptual frame­
works or the formal strategies of artists who were active decades after
his death, nor even that his functional objects explored the relationship
between sculpture and furniture in the same manner as they did in their
work. In fact, as cheap, functional objects made from wooden boxes and
other discarded materials, Mondrian’s desk, table, stools, and storage units
may have had less in common with sculptures that explored “the furniture
paradigm” by prominent artists of the 1970s than they did with the furni­
ture that Louise Brigham, a largely forgotten American social worker and
craftswoman active in the early twentieth century, assembled herself from
ordinary wooden packing boxes that she found just about everywhere she
went, from the island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean to the streets
of New York City.^^ w hat should in any case be noted is that, at the mo­
ment Janis decided to exhibit two pieces of Mondrian’s furniture, many
contemporary artists were making sculptures that incorporated or other­
wise explicitly referenced furniture, thereby creating a discursive context
for renewed interest in this aspect of Mondrian’s creative output. These
circumstances can be compared to the way in which, a generation earlier,
Claude Monet’s large, freely brushed, late paintings enjoyed renewed at­
tention and greater appreciation (just as they also attained a significant
position in the art market for the first time) during the 1950s as a result of
their formal similarity to the work of the rising stars of abstract expres-
sioniam.^"*
In 1974, Janis displayed Mondrian’s desk and table in an exhibition
with a seemingly straightforward, descriptive title: Paintings, Drawings,
Constructions and Documents by Mondrian.^^ In fact, the show featured only
one finished painting, but there were also four unfinished works and five
drawings. However, the bulk of the show was given over to dozens of pho­
tographs, unpublished manuscripts, and other materials that Holtzman
had saved from Mondrian’s apartment and studio.^^ These were catego­
rized in the gallery’s catalogue as photographs of Mondrian, his family,
his friends, his studio; official documents; manuscripts; books, catalogues,
and gramophone records; printings; typescripts; and artist’s equipment.
Each of these exhibited items was numbered individually, like the works
of art on display. The pieces of furniture (both titled Table) were assigned
numbers 11 and 12 in the catalogue, where their dimensions but not their
materials were noted. The furniture thus occupied a mediating position
96 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn itu re
between the paintings and drawings (numbers 1-10), on one hand, and
the documentary and historical materials (numbers 13-256). Their func­
tional nature and presumably also their nonart status were acknowledged
in their labeling as tables, although the parenthetical note that they were
“designed and constructed by the Artist” (note the capital A) seems to have
elevated them to a position in which they were poised to be considered
as something other, or more, than mere functional furniture. This strate­
gic wording was paralleled by the terminology of the exhibition title, in
which “Constructions” imparted artistic overtones to the furniture on dis­
play. It is noteworthy that these subtle modes of enhancing the status of
Mondrian’s furniture were introduced in the context of its exhibition in a
commercial art gallery, where the objects displayed are normally assigned
a monetary value. The documents, drawings, and many of the other ancil­
lary materials Holtzman loaned for the occasion were insured for a total of
$48,500; unfortunately, however, the desk and table were not included in
the list of loans that survives among his papers, so the value he claimed for
them at the time of their first public appearance is not available.^^
Soon after the Janis Gallery exhibition closed on March 9,1974, it be­
came evident that the show had stoked new interest in Mondrian’s New
York apartment, including the surviving furniture. On July 7, Paris-based
curator Malitte Matta (former wife of the surrealist painter, Roberto Matta
Echaurren) wrote to Janis in connection with the organization of Paris-New
York, an exhibition under the curatorial direction of Daniel Abadie that
would open at the Centre Pompidou in the summer of 1977: “Your beautiful
Mondrian show is still trotting around in my head,” she told Janis. “Do you
think we could reconstruct Mondrian’s atelier in New York for the show?
We would like to reconstruct a certain number of important places (the
[Gertrude] Stein apartment, for example) and I think the Mondrian studio
would be very beautiful to have.’’^®In fact Matta would have preferred to
reconstruct Mondrian’s Paris studio on the rue du Depart, but, she later
confided to Holtzman, “I’ve been unable to find enough material to do it
properly.”^’ That little other than black-and-white photographs survives to
provide visual documentation of the furniture in Mondrian’s Paris studio
is, as previously noted, hardly surprising given the conventional structure
of the miscellaneous objects he assembled there, using placement and es­
pecially color (which is of course not distinguishable in the photographs)
to transform and integrate them into the environment as a whole.
As formal statements, Mondrian’s small wooden cabinet and other Par­
is furniture, such as a drop-leaf table to which he may also have applied
bright colors, differed in crucial respects from the highly self-conscious
icons of modern design produced by fellow De Stijl member Gerrit Riet-
97

FiG U RE2.il Gerrit Rietveld, Red-
B lue Chair, 1918-23. New York,
Museum o f Modern Art. Digital Im­
age © the Museum o f Modern A rt/
Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource,
New York. © 2012 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York.
veld beginning around 1918. Where the spatial and sculptural qualities of
Rietveld’s armchair, for example, as well as its primary colors (added sev­
eral years later, probably in 1923 [fig. 2.11]), have helped to make his furni­
ture the object of unparalleled admiration and sustained scrutiny, engen­
dering scores of exhibitions as well as numerous publications (including
two books that catalogue his complete work in this medium), few people
have suggested that Mondrian’s Paris furniture deserves scrutiny at all.^°
As early as 1919, Mondrians colleague and the editor of De Stijl, Iheo van
Doesburg described Rietveld’s radically simplified armchair in the follow­
ing terms: “To the question of what place sculpture will occupy in the new
interior, this furniture, through its new form, gives an answer: Our chairs,
tables, chests and other practical designs are the (abstract-real) images in
our future interior.’’*’' By contrast, the forms of Mondrian’s Paris furniture
provoked little or no interest. As individual objects the furniture had an
impact only through its incorporation into the coloristic arrangement of
the studio interior as a whole, which remained a mystery to scholars until
98 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: M o n d ria n ’s F u rn iture
1
Frans Postma set out to discover the actual colors in the 1980s. Thus Matta’s
proposal to re-create the Paris studio was impractical because she lacked
not only the actual furnishings but also the crucially important color
scheme that would be necessary to impart at least a veneer of verisimili­
tude.
Compelled to give up on the possibility of showing the studio on the
rue du Depart, Matta set out to re-create Mondrian’s last New York studio
environment, including the walls of colored rectangles as well as the fur­
nishings (though Mondrian had used the three surviving pieces not in his
studio but in the other rooms of his apartment). The reconstruction was
envisioned as an appropriate adjunct to the Pompidou’s ambitious plan to
present all the paintings Mondrian had initiated in New York, (in the end
it proved impossible to be entirely comprehensive; for example, the Tre­
maines declined to lend Victory Boogie Woogie, which was represented in
the exhibition by Perle Fine’s first copy [discussed in chapter 1], loaned by
the Tremaines in place of the original.)^^
By the fall of 1975, Alfred Pacquement had been charged with oversee­
ing the studio reconstruction and Matta was in the process of assembling
related documentation while helping to secure the loan of Mondrian’s
New York work. One of the unfinished New York paintings (New York City 3
[B289.303]), untitled at the time, when it was still in Holtzman’s collection,
had never been exhibited due to its "poor and unstable condition, the tapes
having become loose and faded and—particularly at the sides and in the
center—scuffed and torn.’’^^yet despite its dilapidated state, Daniel Abadie
hoped to secure the painting for his exhibition. He wrote to Holtzman in
November 1976, "I do not believe that its poor condition would be sufficient
cause for not exhibiting it and I think that it must be possible to return it,
under your direction, to the state in which it was found when Mondrian
died.’’^'*When Holtzman responded in late December, he expressed “great
reservations about ‘restoration of the ‘New York City’ painting by Mon­
drian,’’ but promised to “do all I can to restore the missing pieces of paper
tape.’’^5
Meanwhile, however, Matta worried about the high insurance values
that Holtzman wanted to assign to the work table, desk, and stool that the
French were hoping to include in their exhibition. She reported on her
summer 1976 visit to the States: “Holtzman is asking a fortune for the in­
surance of the furniture—it will be necessary to negotiate [with him].’’^*’
Matta took up the matter in a letter to Holtzman in September: “Consen­
sus seems to be that the insurance values on the furniture are much too
high and that we would do well to copy the desk, stool, and work table here
with our own workmen.’’*’^Although exact copies may have been intended.
99
 the objects executed for inclusion in Paris-New York departed significantly
from the originals—so much so that Holtzman would later complain that
"the Paris-N.Y. exhibition made a mess o f the opportunity” to exhibit Mon-
drians studio, including reconstructions of the surviving furniture that
were supposed to be based on photographs in Holtzman’s collection.'’* A
sense of what was actually presented can be gleaned from a short sequence
of shots in Ping Pong, a documentary film directed by Teri Wehn-Damisch
in which Mondrian’s reconstructed studio makes a b rie f appearance.
Pared down in scale and drained of the sense of Mondrian’s presence that
pervades the empty studio as conveyed in the documentary photographs
taken there by Holtzman and Glarner, the truncated interiors installed in
the exhibition featured none of the tools, painting materials, or personal
objects that had been neatly arranged in the original space. Thus a cabinet
constructed to imitate Mondrian’s crates painted white, was entirely emp­
ty; similarly, the reconstructed desk in the bedroom lacked the eye glasses,
clock, and other accouterments belonging to Mondrian that personalize
everything one sees in the period photographs. Oddly, too, although col­
ored cardboard rectangles were included in the interiors, these were not
pinned flat to the walls but instead propped up against them or on top of
the furniture, resting on the mantle, and in some cases even on the floor.
Given these departures, which signal the absence of Mondrian’s unmistak­
able aura as it comes across in the 1944 photographs, it is no wonder that
Holtzman considered the reconstruction of what he called “this last mas­
ter work” to be “a disaster. . . a great disservice to history, to Mondrian + to
Beaubourg [by which he meant the Centre Pompidou]
The insurance values Holtzman assigned to Mondrian’s three pieces of
furniture put the cost of borrowing them beyond the budget of the Centre
Pompidou, and he was sorely disappointed by the reconstructed elements
of the studio and furniture produced in their stead. But Holtzman over­
came his initial reservation about restoring one of Mondrian’s unfinished
tape paintings when the Paris-New York exhibition gave him an incentive
and curator Daniel Abadie encouraged him to do so. Rather than hiring a
professional conservator to carry out the requisite work, Holtzman decid­
ed to do it himself w ith the help of Bill Steeves, a representational painter
who worked locally, in Lyme, Connecticut, where Holtzman lived.^° Just
months before the Paris-New York show opened, Holtzman replaced almost
all of this painting’s original tapes w ith entirely new materials (plate 10).
Thus restored and shipped off to the exhibition, the picture, christened
New York—New York City for the occasion of its first public presentation,
was insured for $200,000— quite a change from the zero value Holtzman
had assigned it when, because of its poor condition, he had left it out of
100 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian's Furniture
the inventory of Mondrian’s estate.'^ Two years later, the canvas appeared
in another exhibition, my own Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America.
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I was still a graduate stu­
dent when I organized that show and was not involved in its finances. I
therefore have no recollection about whether the value Holtzman attached
to the painting now known as New York City 3 came up as an issue in the
months preceding its 1980 sale to Sidney Janis. Three years later, in May
1983, Janis sold the painting to Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza
for $1.5 million.
This was not the first time that Holtzman made significant changes to
an unfinished painting by M ondrian that he was poised to put on the art
market. He removed an original tape from a canvas he sold to M arlbor-
ough-Gerson Gallery in 1963 (B297), later citing as justification that the
tape had been merely a temporary expedient for Mondrian. “Because it
interfered w ith the structure of the work,” he explained, “I removed it.”^^
This might sound cavalier, but Holtzman was presumably convinced that
his action was taken out of respect for M ondrian’s intentions. Yet the res­
toration of a painting before putting it on the market almost inevitably in ­
troduces the temptation for heavy-handed intervention. Some of the most
notorious treatments involve Old Master paintings that passed through
the hands of the dealer Joseph Duveen in the 1920s, but there are also nu­
merous paintings by Mondrian that have been damaged by overzealous
efforts to ready the works for sale.” In 1965, two years after Holtzman re­
moved the offending tape from the painting he then sold to Marlborough-
Gerson Gallery, a desire to exhibit (rather than necessarily to sell) New
York City 3 prompted him to order new rolls of tape from 3M Company
so that he could “refurbish” the painting.7‘^By 1977, when he finally did
replace almost all the tapes attached to this picture, he must have been
aware that such an aggressive restoration could be controversial and that
the attribution of the restored painting to Mondrian might be cast into
doubt. Getting the painting authenticated would address this potential
problem.
In 1979, a year before he would sell New York City 3 to Sidney Janis,
Holtzman solicited w ritten statements of authentication not only from
Robert Welsh, a professor of art history at the University of Toronto who
was a widely published scholar and connoisseur of Mondrian’s work, but
also from his own longtime colleague and collaborator, M artin S. James.
Letters from both of them offered Holtzman the justification he was pre­
sumably seeking for his aggressive treatment of the canvas, although their
reasons for supporting his effort were different, corresponding to their
respective relationships w ith Holtzman.
101
 M a rtin James had met Holtzm an while working as a secretary and
translator for the Swiss historian of architecture, Sigfried Giedeon, who
spent the period between 1938 and 1947 in the United States. James was
eight years younger than Holtzman, whose forceful personality was quite
different from his own. In any case, Holtzman hired James to teach in a
cultural studies program he was running at the Katherine Dunham School
of Cultural Arts on West 43rd Street. By the early 1950s, both of them
were teaching at Brooklyn College, where they remained on the faculty
for decades. The two developed a complex intellectual and professional
relationship, collaborating on a number o f editorial projects including
the collected writings of Mondrian, a volume on which they labored for
more than forty years before it was finally published in 1986, a year prior
to Holtzman’s death. As Mondrian’s friend and heir, Holtzman naturally
assumed greater prominence than his younger collaborator, but he actu­
ally depended on James in certain crucial respects. Not only was James a
scholar of Mondrian s work who earned a Masters degree at Columbia U n i­
versity in 1962 w ith a thesis on Mondrian’s early paintings, but he also read
German, Dutch, and French, which made him indispensable in dealing
w ith the linguistic hurdles and the research involved in preparing M on­
drian’s writings for publication.^^
Given his close relationship w ith Holtzman over many years, it is un­
derstandable that James would respond positively when called on to justify
the restoration of New York City 3. This he did not only by explaining that he
had actually encouraged Holtzman to undertake the restoration but also
by embracing the picture’s authenticity once the work was done: “His deci­
sion [to restore the work] is, in my opinion, entirely justified by the high
quality of the result, which must rank as an authentic and integral part of
Mondrian’s oeuvre.’’^®James’s statement must have been shared w ith oth­
ers, since it appears in the entry devoted to the painting in the catalogue
raisonne. Welsh, in contrast, was not invited to comment on Holtzman’s
plans in advance, and although he offered two authentications of the pic­
ture, Holtzman chose to destroy the version that took the form of a typed
statement, apparently retaining only the one Welsh wrote by hand, which
does not appear in the catalogue raisonne.^^ However, both versions Welsh
composed are preserved among his papers in the Netherlands Institute for
A rt History. His effort to provide an authentication that would reflect his
reservations about the postrestoration state of the painting is almost pain­
fully evident in a comparison of the two statements, both dated November
22,1979. In the typed version, Welsh provided a detailed description o f the
painting’s preconservation “state o f disrepair (including one or more pa­
per strips torn off and thus shorter than those extending fully across the
102 CHAPTER 2
height or width of the canvas, as I recall) relative to other unfinished ver­
sions o f the New York City theme,’’ but, he concluded, “I never doubted
that all of the charcoal lines, two painted colour rectangles or paper strips
in five colours (or non-colours) were added to the canvas by the hand of
Piet Mondrian.’’^®In the handwritten version, Welsh dispensed w ith the
description of the painting’s sorry preconservation state and used wording
in his conclusion that subtly strengthened the authentication: “I consider
it (i.e. charcoal lines, painted colour areas & paper tapes) to have been ex­
ecuted by the hand of Piet M o n d r i a n . ’’^^ n q wonder Holtzman favored the
second version and chose to discard the first.
The day after composing his two authentications, Welsh wrote a let­
ter to Holtzman in which he conveyed his concerns about the restoration
o f New York City 3, but in doing so he tempered any implied criticism of
Holtzman’s intervention. Welsh obviously knew that Holtzman controlled
the copyright to Mondrian’s work and understood that it would benefit his
own scholarship to maintain good relations. “I hope that one or both of my
‘authentications’ of the New York—New York City [now titled New York City
3] is satisfactory, but, i f my memory was inaccurate [presumably a refer­
ence to his description of the painting before Holtzman commenced treat­
ment] in the typed version, please destroy it. I cannot imagine that any­
one would question the basic authenticity of this uncompleted painting,”
he assured Holtzman. “On the other hand, I might anticipate that some
authors w ill choose to view your restoration as something more than that,
even when admitting its need. Namely, some might say that, for example,
your own or Steeve’s [sic] colour sensibility would inevitably have been
involved no matter how careful the attempt at matching. Perhaps others
w ill fault you for using acrylic rather than either oil based paint or stained
paper [in place of the original colored tapes that Holtzman removed].” A f­
ter asking i f Holtzman had not made even a black-and-white photograph
to document the “somewhat tattered condition” of the unfinished paint­
ing before starting work on it, Welsh requested that Holtzman “not take
my willingness to ‘authenticate’ the New York—New York City as a sign that
I necessarily approve of similar restorations in other unfinished works
w ith papers attached.” Thus, at the same time that Welsh confirmed M on­
drian’s authorship of the restored picture, he also took pains not to en­
dorse any other conservation efforts by Holtzman, which his acceptance
o f this work might otherwise appear to encourage. Finally, he wrote,
“Perhaps I ’m getting more paranoic w ith the passing o f years, but I do feel
that both your single restoration and my authentication could easily be
used in justification of other restorations o f which neither o f us would
approve.”®”
(Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian's Furniture 103
 Three weeks later, Holtzman responded to Welsh’s ambivalence about
the issue of restoration. In a letter dated December 14,1979, he acknowl­
edged the problems Welsh had raised, w riting, “I ’m entirely in accord w ith
you re: any restorations. (l suppose you too have noted that some authen­
tic paintings have been turned into ‘fakes’ by bad repainting and ‘restora­
tion.’) I regret my stupidity in not photographing the new state before I
began the work. This was, and w ill be, my only undertaking of this kind.’’®'
But Holtzman nevertheless presumably regarded his restoration of New
York City 3 as a success, not only because James and Welsh acknowledged
it —grudgingly or not—as such but also because it resulted in the exhibi­
tion and eventual sale of a painting for which neither had previously been
possible.
W ith the work on New York City 3 having been accomplished, in 1982
Holtzman took up another reconstruction project: the designs on the walls
of Mondrian’s studio. Although the studio re-creation at the Pompidou had
been a frustrating disappointment, that experience nevertheless prompt­
ed Holtzman to undertake something like it himself. Since he still owned
everything that survived from the original space, which he had known
well from personal experience, he was in a much better position than any
museum employee in Paris to create a convincing reconstruction. Further­
more, the desire of the Pompidou curators to include environments such
as M ondrian’s studio in their exhibition showed that that there was sub­
stantial art-world interest in the relationship between art and the envi­
ronment in which it is situated. By the mid-1970s, a context had developed
for appreciating the environmental aspect of Mondrian’s work. Holtzman’s
decision to reconstruct some o f the color designs of Mondrian’s studio
walls, like his earlier contributions to Pace Gallery’s construction of the
Salon de Madame B, emerged in response to, and as part of, that context.
One salient example o f the visibility of environmental art was the
Venice Biennale of 1976. In the Giardini di Gastello, a large international
exhibition titled Ambient/Art presented a historical overview o f environ­
ments created by major European artists of the early twentieth century
who had actively explored the relationship between works of art and the
spaces they occupied. This sweeping historical display established an intel­
lectual and aesthetic foundation for the show’s further development of the
environmental theme in works by thirteen contemporary artists to whom
individual galleries were devoted. Ranging— according to its subtitle—
“From Futurism to Body Art,’’ Ambient/Art included not only the 1970 For­
mica version of Mondrian’s Salon de Madame B, as well as the related plan
drawn in ink, but also a printed copy of his essay “Home— Street— City’’
104 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture
and a suite of photographs of his Paris studio.®' Holtzman was aware of
this exhibition and also knew about my research for a dissertation (com­
pleted in 1979) on the environmental work of De Stijl artists, including
Mondrian. Thus Holtzman’s decision to reengage w ith the environment
that Mondrian had made in his New York studio corresponded to multiple
developments in the contemporary art w orld—to interest on the part of
museums and exhibition curators, to the work of contemporary artists,
and to the research of art historians.
As a close friend of Mondrian who spent much of his life dealing in
one way or another w ith Mondrian’s legacy, Holtzman eventually came
into contact w ith every serious scholar of Mondrian’s work. So my interac­
tions w ith him were not unusual, except for the fact that my research con­
cerned not only Mondrian but also his American followers. Among them,
Holtzman was obviously an especially prominent figure due to his status
as Mondrian’s heir, if not to the (rather scant) recognition accorded to his
own work as an artist. Holtzman had innumerable opportunities to affect
the way Mondrian’s life and work were narrated, and in the 1970s and early
1980s, some of them involved me. M y participation as well as my invest­
ment in this process must therefore be acknowledged.
In 1976, 1 was completing a Masters thesis on abstract artists active in
New York during the 1930s. Holtzm an was significant for my research in
that context, and I therefore interviewed him on more than one occasion,
either at his home in Lyme, in New Haven, or in New York City.®® We re­
mained in contact for about six or seven years, a period during which I
researched and wrote my dissertation, prepared the 1979 exhibition I cu­
rated at Yale, and continued to work on related projects as I launched my
academic career. In an interview on March 29,1979, while I was organizing
Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America, Holtzman recounted how he had
gone about restoring New York City 3 (which I planned to borrow for the
exhibition), and he gave me a sample of the kind of tape he used to replace
the original tape that Mondrian had applied to the canvas. Several years
later, when I visited him in Lyme in fall 1982, Holtzman showed me what
he was then doing w ith some o f the colored cardboard rectangles he had
removed from the walls of M ondrian’s studio thirty-eight years earlier. Us­
ing as a reference the tracings he and Glarner had made of selected wall
surfaces in Mondrian’s apartment (plate 11), Holtzman was creating a se­
ries of eight individual compositions that he christened “Wall Works.’’ This
involved attaching Mondrian’s colored rectangles to planar surfaces made
o f varying sizes of plywood that Holtzman had covered in white acrylic
paint, using a roller in an effort to suggest the texture of the studio wall.
Each so-called “Wall Work” was then individually protected behind Lucite,
105

FIGURE 2 . 1 2 Installa­
tion view, Brancusi +
Mondrian, December
2 -3 1 ,1 9 8 2 . Sidney
Janis Gallery, New
York. Photo: © Allan
Finkelman.
106
and given a number (initially Holtzman used Arabic numerals but later “Wall Work” to the 1917 painting, both of which are small in size and dis­
changed these to Roman numerals), from I to V III (plate 12). play colored rectangles distributed asymmetrically across a white ground.
I
Holtzman proceeded to lend one or more of these newly created works The effect of this unavoidable comparison was to bathe the “Wall Work”
to exhibitions that included paintings by Mondrian. For example, a De­ in an aura of authenticity. The proxim ity of New York City 3 made a similar
cember 1982 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery entitled Brancusi + Mon­ point by underscoring the materiality common to both objects: the tapes
drian included two “Wall Works” in the list of “paintings, drawings and o f New York City 3 clearly gestured to the collage-like character of the “Wall
watercolors” by Mondrian, according to the accompanying catalogue. The Work” hanging nearby.
show also included the tape painting restored by Holtzman, authenticated The authenticity of the “W all Works” was reinforced in the catalogue,
by James and Welsh, and purchased by Janis, here titled New York City, New which deliberately conflated the second “Wall Work” in the show w ith a
York. In the catalogue, each of the “Wall Works" was indicated by a number documentary photograph from 1944 (fig. 2.13). That is, the caption identi-
and a location in Mondrian’s studio (“North W all” for no. 5, “West W all”
for no. 6). Dimensions for these objects and their materials (described as
“Color cardboard”—no mention of a painted plywood surface) were also
FiGURE 2 .13 Page
provided. And crucially, the “Wall Works” were dated 1943-44. There was from the catalogue,
Brancusi + Mondrian,
no reference to Holtzman’s role in creating the “Wall Works” just a few
Sidney Janis Gallery,
months earlier.
1982, using the term
W hen it came to installing the exhibition, Janis chose to display a “Wall “Wall Work” in the
caption to identify a
W ork” between Mondrian’s Composition in Color Planes V of 1917 and New
1944 photograph of
York City 3 (fig. 2.12). This drew attention to the formal sim ilarity o f the Mondrian’s New York
studio in 1944.
4 5 Wail Work # 5 (North Wall) 1943-44 Color cardboard
CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture 107
 fied what is shown in the period photograph as a “Wall Work.” Moreover,
this “Wall Work” was dated 1943-44, its location was specified as the north
wall of the studio, and its medium was given as “Color cardboard.”*'^The ef­ MONDRIAN
N E W Y O R K STUDIO COMPasiTONS
fect of such an act o f naming and labeling is to suggest that what one sees
on the walls in the photographic documents of Mondrian’s studio is iden­
tical w ith the series of “Wall Works.” In fact, however, there is a crucial
difference between the studio wall composition that is represented in the
period photograph as an integral component of a holistic environment and
the corresponding “Wall W ork” in which a fragment of that larger studio
environment has been plucked from history and isolated on the painted
plywood surface, thereby giving it the compositional unity, physical inde­
pendence, and portability of easel painting.
H arry Holtzman showed me the “W all Works” while he was still in
the process of finishing them, in the fall of 1982.1 had reservations about
their status but kept those to myself because, I feared, they might offend
or alienate Holtzman. At the time, I was preparing a text about him, one
of several biographical entries I was commissioned to write for the cata­
logue of an exhibition. Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America, 1927-1944,
scheduled to open at the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh
in November 1983. Enthusiastic about that project and excited to share my
insights w ith the artist himself, I invited Holtzman to read a drafl o f my
essay. To my surprise and disappointment, he very much disliked what photographs were also in the show. In addition, Dabrowski borrowed an­ FIGURE 2 .1 4 Installa­
tion view, Mon­
I wrote about him and especially objected to my observation that he had other drawing from H arry Holtzman and four more from the Sidney Ja-
drian: New York Studio
not been active as an artist after Mondrian’s death. W hen he threatened to nis Gallery, plus New York City 3 (by then in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Col­ Compositions, the
w ithdraw his promised loans from the exhibition i f my essay were pub­ lection). But the focus of the M oM A show was an installation inspired Museum of Modern
Art, New York, July 1 4 -
lished, it was rewritten and signed by one of the exhibition curators.*^ The by M ondrian’s last New York studio that included the ensemble of “Wall
September 27,1983.
episode was disconcerting but the resulting break w ith Holtzman freed me Works,” supplemented by two pieces of furniture from Holtzman’s collec­ Photo: Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
of any qualms I had previously had about commenting publicly on what tion, all shown in a single gallery together w ith Victory Boogie Woogie, on
Digital Image © the
I regarded as problematic aspects of the “Wall Works.” W hile they were loan from Emily and Burton Tremaine. Museum of Modern
being prepared for exhibition in the summer o f 1983 at the Museum of Although Holtzman would later present the “W all Works” in a com­ Art/Licensed by SCALA
/ Art Resource, New
Modern Art, where it seemed to me that the “Wall Works” would be given mercial gallery as a suite o f eight individually framed objects distributed York.
a hugely valuable institutional stamp of approval, I wrote a short article, around the interior so as to evoke their placement in M ondrian’s studio
published in the journal October, in which I pointed out some of the issues (fig. 2.15), the Museum of M odern A rt installation, orchestrated by Dab­
I raise again here.®^ rowski, was intended to approximate the arrangement of the colored rect­
At M oM A in 1983, the eight “W all Works” formed the nucleus o f an angles in Mondrian’s New York studio even more closely.®^ To that end,
exhibition titled Mondrian: New York Studio Compositions, which was orga­ the In c ite was removed so that the “Wall Works” could be installed flush
nized by assistant curator of drawings, Magdalena Dabrowski (fig. 2.14). w ith the walls. W ith the discrete character of each “Wall W ork” thus dis­
She brought together five paintings by Mondrian in the museum’s collec­ guised, the colored cardboard rectangles looked more or less as i f they had
tion and two drawings on anonymous extended loan. These were owned been attached (though not pinned) directly to the gallery walls. Further
by Arnold Newman, who had received them from M ondrian in 1942 in ex­ to suggest the original studio environment as conveyed in the period pho­
change for several portrait photographs of the artist; examples of these tographs and film made by Glarner and Holtzman, Victory Boogie Woogie

108 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture 109


FIGURE 2.15 Installation view, Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works, 1943-44,
October-Novem ber, 1984. Carpenter + Hochman Gallery, New York. Photo
by EEVA-INKERI \n Art News 8 4, no. 1 Qanuary 1985): 144.
FIGURE 2 .1 6 Installation view,/Morrc/r/or?; The New York Studio Composi­
tions, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, )uly 1 4-S ep tem ber 27,1 98 3 .
Photo: Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © the Museum of
Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.
was hung on the wall at one end of the gallery (fig. 2.16) in (very) roughly F I G U R E 2 .1 7 Installa­
tion view;, Mondrian:
the position it had occupied when, after Mondrian’s death, visitors to the
The New York Studio
studio saw the painting on his easel (fig. 1.3). The two pieces of Mondrian’s Compositions, the
furniture, labeled as a desk and a stool (which period photos show in M on­ Museum of Modern
Art, New York, July 1 4 -
drian’s bedroom study, not the studio), were exhibited on a low platform in
September 27,1983.
front of the opposite wall (fig. 2.17). Photo: Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
In the exhibition at M oM A , viewers reached the approximate studio
Digital Image © the
reconstruction after passing through two galleries where the drawings Museum of Modern
and most of the paintings in the show {Victory Boogie Woogie was the p rin ­ Art/Licensed by SCALA
/ Art Resource, New
cipal exception) were displayed, and a wall text explained how the Paris York.
and New York studios related to those works. However, the arrangement
involved a peculiar inversion o f that relationship insofar as paintings were
hung so as to create a setting or conceptual space for appreciating the stu­
dio—not the other way around. By establishing a progression o f exhibi­
tion spaces that culminated in the studio reconstruction, the installation
achieved the goal of dramatizing the significance of Mondrian’s environ­
mental aspirations w ith in the context of his work as a whole. But it did
so by greatly enhancing the status of the “Wall Works’’ and the furniture
(presented as i f the desk and stool were sculptures, on a low pedestal) w ith
respect to everything else in the show. The paintings functioned in the dis-
(Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture 111
 play at M oM A as i f they were projects leading up to the environmental
work, to which they were subordinated as a result of their prelim inary
status. Or, one might argue, they were treated as comparative, supplemen­
tary materials that documented the importance of the studio and helped to
secure an especially prominent position for it in Mondrians oeuvre. How­
ever, the reconstructed studio was itself a document, useful for its approx­
imation of the original space, but at the same time, because it included
original materials (colored cardboard rectangles) and furniture made by
the artist’s hand, as well as his last, unfinished painting, it also laid claim
to its own authenticity.
Complicating the character of M ondrian’s studio as reconstructed at
M oM A is the fact that the ensemble was put together from discrete ob­
jects: Victory Boogie Woogie, the two pieces of furniture on the pedestal,
and the eight "Wall Works” temporarily imbedded in the museum’s walls.
Displayed in this manner, the furniture’s functional nature was minimized
and the status of the “Wall Works” became ambiguous. On the one hand,
the "Wall Works” partook of the aura o f authenticity conferred by the
original cardboard rectangles of which they were composed. On the other
hand, at M oM A the “Wall Works” became part of what was obviously only
a partial and fragmentary reconstruction, a space that functioned like a
document to provide an approximation of what Mondrian’s studio had
actually been like. By complicating the relationship between original and
document, the studio reconstruction recalls the conservation history of
Victory Boogie Woogie in which, as related in chapter i, the original painting
switched roles w ith its documentary copy.
In the last gallery of the M oM A show. Victory Boogie Woogie and the two
pieces of furniture provided unequivocal examples of M ondrian’s author­
ship that validated what was on the walls around them. W hen the exhi­
bition was dismantled and the “W all Works” were once again framed in
isolation behind Incite, their status as works created by M ondrian would
be much more difficult to sustain, notwithstanding the im prim atur of the
Museum of Modern A rt that the 1983 exhibition conferred. (Significantly,
the “W all Works” are not included in the Mondrian catalogue raisonne.)
Sidney Janis must have recognized that the “Wall Works” were more con­
vincing when shown together w ith the furniture in a presentation like the
one at M oM A , and he saw a potential for money to be made on this basis.
In late December 1984, Janis urged Holtzm an to work w ith him to sell a
reconstruction of Mondrian’s New York studio to one of several American
museum directors who, he declared, “would drool to have such a presenta­
tion at their museum.” The project he envisioned, an installation “in exact
dimensions, together w ith color squares arranged on walls together w ith
112 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture
furniture in place,” would “cost millions,” but Janis justified the huge price
by insisting that “it needs to be done for art and historical reasons.”*®
Something along these lines had already been proposed in 1945, when
M oM A first entertained the idea of reconstructing the New York studio,
and in 1977 the curatorial team at the Centre Pompidou had also tried to
pull off a studio reconstruction o f this sort. The frustration Holtzman ex­
perienced w ith that effort eventually prompted him to take matters into
his own hands and make the “Wall Works.” As he recalled in the draft of a
letter to Daniel Abadie, probably w ritten early in 1983, “Unhappily, the Par-
is-N.Y. exhibition made a mess of the opportunity, as you know, to properly
exhibit this last master work. A year before the exhibition, when M alitte
M atta came to see me in N.Y., I told her that I had the tracings of the wall-
works and the original cards that composed them. She asked i f I would as­
sist in their reconstruction. I agreed. But then you know what a disaster it
was.”*^ Nevertheless, in 1984 Sidney Janis was still optimistic that the stu­
dio could be reconstructed more permanently in a museum. He also made
his interest as a dealer explicit, declaring that any museum would have to
spend a great deal of money in order to acquire what Holtzman claimed
was “Mondrian’s last work.”^°
Janis’s exhortation to Holtzman makes it impossible to isolate M oM A’s
exhibition of the “Wall Works” in the guise of “Studio Compositions” from
the larger art world, especially the context of the art market, in which
this museum project was squarely situated. Holtzman, having already ex­
hibited two of these objects at the Sidney Janis Gallery before they were
shown at M oM A, in 1984 showed all eight “Wall Works” at another com­
mercial venue. Carpenter + Hochman Gallery. This time, as previously
mentioned, they were installed in roughly the same spatial relationship
to one another as at M oM A , but displayed as individual compositions ac­
companied by all three surviving pieces of Mondrian’s fu rn itu re —here
arranged w ith more respect for their functionality, due to their placement
on a very low pedestal that elevated the objects only an inch or two from
the floor (fig. 2.15). As at M oM A , the installation at Carpenter + Hochman
was amplified by a display o f historical photographs and the film o f M on­
drian’s studio made in 1944. A reviewer for Art News sensed the conflicting
messages thus conveyed: “The supporting materials lent a feeling of au­
thenticity to the installation. However, framing each image under In cite
and backing it w ith a heavy plywood panel painted off-white to simulate
the original wall was confusing. Treated this way, the works impressed as
paintings, which was certainly not M ondrian’s intention. Still, they have
much art-historical value as articulate statements of Mondrian’s rigorous
sensibility.” The review concludes w ith a comment reminiscent of Janis’s
113
 1
rem ark (which was presumably prompted by seeing the Carpenter + Ho-
chman exhibition, as well as the one at M oM A): "What is needed is a col­
lector w illing to recreate the entire contents of M ondrian’s studio, wall
works and all."”’'
For the catalogue published on the occasion of the Carpenter + Hoch-
man show, Holtzman wrote an introductory text in which he explained
that he intended the "Wall Works” designation to distinguish these objects
from M ondrian’s paintings. However, although he stated that he himself
had constructed the "Wall Works,” he also explained that he had done so
on the basis of compositional structures he said Mondrian developed as
individual units on the walls of his studio.^" Thus, according to Holtzman,
the "Wall Works” differed from Mondrian’s paintings even as they m im ­
icked the compositional self-sufficiency of easel painting. The distinction
between the two mediums had already been destabilized when two of the
"Wall Works” were shown as individual objects in close proxim ity to easel
paintings at the Janis Gallery. The pendulum swung in the other direction
when they were imbedded flush to the gallery walls at M oM A. Now, back
in the commercial arena, each of the "Wall Works” was once again treated
as an object w ith an individual integrity that could potentially allow it to
exist as an independent work of art.
Describing the decisions he had made in selecting which parts of M on­
drian’s walls to isolate for re-creation and how the process subsequently
unfolded, Holtzman indicated that expedience had compelled him to break
up the wall designs into smaller, more manageable elements; "Some de­
cisions were necessary to make ‘The Wall Works’ portable and practical
for exhibition and transportation. . . . I determined the delimitation of
the surrounding space for framing each composition by spreading them
over the tracings [made from the walls of Mondrian’s studio in 1944] on my
large studio floor. M y decisions were based upon the complex asymmet­
rical plastic structure, to maximize the rhythm and equilibrium of each
unit.” He further explained that some of the compositions "were realized
independently of each other, although interacting in proportion w ith the
total adjoining s p a c e . ” '’ ^
I f we are to believe what Holtzman was claiming in the 1980s, M ondri­
an arranged the colored rectangles on his studio walls not so much as ele­
ments of an indivisible, holistic environment in which all the components
were inextricably interrelated but more as independent, though related,
compositional units that corresponded to the numbered “Wall Works.” By
Holtzman’s account, the individual “W all Works” made explicit Mondrian’s
focused process of composition; “The first unit he worked on was #2. . . .
114 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture
The second panel he made (#3),” and so on.*^'^ To drive home the point that
the “Wall Works” were identical w ith Mondrian’s studio walls as docu­
mented in the 1944 photographs of the studio, not only did the Carpenter
+ Hochman catalogue captions identify those views of the studio as num ­
bered “Wall Works,” but the position of each “Wall W ork” was also called
out by number on a reconstructed floor plan (the same floor plan is shown
in fig. 2.i 8).55 qhe subtle play of reciprocal authentication might be under­
stood as unfolding roughly in the following manner; individual fragments
(the original colored rectangles) of the studio walls’ arrangement were re­
used in a series of individually framed objects whose claim to authenticity
enlisted as evidence the vintage photographs of the studio that illustrated
the catalogue. (The tracings Holtzman had actually relied on to compose
the "Wall Works” were neither exhibited nor reproduced by Carpenter +
Hochman.) But in the catalogue the 1944 photographs were not treated as
documents of a total environmental design that had been given “up to ‘his­
tory,’” to borrow the words Holtzman had used in his 1970 text for Pace Gal­
lery. It was instead as i f those vintage photographs were being marshaled
to constitute the "Wall Works” as a category that had long ago been cre­
ated by Mondrian himself. Indeed, a press release circulated by Carpenter
+ Hochman claimed that M ondrian had been making "Wall Works” since
the early 1920s, thereby conjuring a long and impressive pedigree for the
recently created objects on display.^^
A similar strategy of mutual reinforcement and authentication was
activated in 1986, when Holtzman and M artin James published their long-
awaited volume of Mondrian’s collected writings. Not only were the 1944
studio photographs once again called on to legitimize the recently created
“Wall Works,” but also the studio visible in the photographs was itself ac­
tively reinterpreted in the process of comparison (fig. 2.18). Here, as in ­
deed in the Carpenter + Hochman catalogue, the “Wall Works” did double
duty as works by Mondrian and as historical documents that retroactively
conferred "Wall W ork” status on isolated areas of Mondrian’s studio seen
in the 1944 photographs and identified by corresponding Roman numerals
in the accompanying floor plan. Holtzman discussed the “Wall Works” in
his introductory text as well, claiming that these “are the only composi­
tions he [Mondrian] did on an environmental scale, and the desk and stool
and worktable are his only three-dimensional constructions. The studio,”
he declared, "was Mondrian’s last work.”’^Not only do these assertions ex­
aggerate the rarity of the surviving pieces of New York furniture w ithin
Mondrian’s production (the artist had of course made other pieces of fu r­
niture) and suggest that the “W all Works” were compositions unlike any
1 15
 M ondrian had previously designed or assembled (thus ignoring what he
had done in other studios and the Salon de Madame B), they also destabi­
lize Victory Boogie Woogie's conventional position in accounts of Mondrian’s
NORTH
work. Left unmentioned is the tentative and, like Victory Boogie Woogie, pe­
■ ■ rennially unfinished nature of the New York studio. In the gap between
the historical documents and the studio reconstruction, the surviving
fragments of Mondrian’s New York environment assumed a character and
status they had never been granted before.
An apparent effort to embed not only the "Wall Works” but also the
remaining furniture from Mondrian’s studio more firm ly than ever among
the accepted works of art in Mondrian’s oeuvre continued after Holtzman’s
death in 1987. In 1993, on the occasion of the exhibition at the Galerie To-
koro mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Holtzman’s son Jason, a
young architect who graduated that year from Pratt Institute, designed an
250 Mondrian’s studio,
15 East 59th Street, Studio, 15 East 59th installation of the “Wall Works” and the furniture that was presented as
New York. West Street, New York,
wall, with W all 1943—44, showing an even more accurate reconstruction o f the last New York studio. Where
W orks V I and V II. location of the W all there had been a checklist but no published catalogue at M oM A in 1983,
Works.
253 W all W ork IV , 19 43-44.
for the Tokyo gallery’s profusely illustrated, full-color publication a de­
cade later, there were new photographs of virtually every item, including
striking arrangements of M ondrian’s painting equipment—palettes, pal­
ette knives, and brushes—as well as the covers of some o f his gramophone
records. The same objects had been shown by Janis in 1974 but never be­
fore illustrated. In the Tokyo publication, the color illustrations transform
these prosaic materials, which still retain signs of their use by the artist,
into evocative, even desirable objects by displaying them in pleasing geo­
metric arrangements that emphasize abstract design at least as much as
they convey the functional nature of the individual items.
A comparable treatm ent o f the furniture, each piece photographi­
cally highlighted in splendid isolation against a dark ground, assured that
these items appear to be precious objects, despite the sometimes rather
crude nature of their materials and construction, including, for example,
the nails that are evident as they protrude from the surface of Mondrian’s
work table. As laid out in the catalogue, each furniture illustration is jux­
254 W all W ork V I, 19 43-44.
taposed w ith a documentary photograph showing the same piece as it had
been photographed in Mondrian’s apartment in 1944. (The single exception
is the w ork table, which had been in the kitchen, of which no photographs
FIGURE 2 . 1 8 Floor plan of Piet M ondrian’s Studio,
had been made. The work table is instead juxtaposed w ith a view o f the
15 East 59th Street, New York, in February 1944, by
Flarry Floltzman, circa 1984, as illustrated in Piet studio’s long, east wall.) As mentioned previously, the desk, work table,
M ondrian, The New Art—the New Life: The Collected and stool are illustrated w ith captions that identify the first two as "Table
Writings o f Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. Flarry
Holtzman and Martin S. lam es (Boston: G. K. Flail,
sculptures” and the stool as “Bench sculpture.” A fourth item visible in the
1986), opp. p. 325. studio photographs, the step stool, also received the sculpture designation

(Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian’s Furniture 117

 in 1993, though Mondrian had had nothing to do w ith its facture. Never­
theless, for the Tokyo catalogue this item, which Holtzman had loaned to
the artist, was photographed in full color against a monotone background
in a manner that could be expected to enhance its sculptural qualities and
thereby help to secure its identity as a work of art (fig. 2.4). Presented as
i f it were one of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, its caption identifies it as
“Step Stool sculpture.”
Recalling what was said above about the furniture in Mondrian’s Paris
studio on the rue du Depart, one might compare this recently christened
“Step Stool sculpture” w ith the colored furnishings that Mondrian inte­
grated into that space. All of these objects clearly share the same incidental
qualities due to their status as miscellaneous, cheaply acquired pieces of
furniture that the artist borrowed or purchased for functional purposes.
Handled and used by the artist, they can be understood as studio equip­
ment that he may have admired for its ingenious design, as Holtzman re­
ported M ondrian did in the case of the step stool. But what are the circum­
stances under which they could convincingly be described as sculptures,
as works of art? Such designations are not made in a vacuum, unaffected
by the pressures of the art market. Yet there are powerful factors that
discourage scholars from carefully exploring or even acknowledging the
commercial forces at work in the deployment of these categories. And
when the literature, including the presentation of prim ary source mate­
rial on which everyone must rely for knowledge o f the furniture and its
studio settings, appears to be inflected by the commercial context in which lationship between the walls o f M ondrian’s last studio and his paintings FIGURE 2 .1 9 M on­

it was produced, it becomes difficult to construct a disinterested histori­ drian Estate/Holtzman

o f the same period. But the brochure did not simply point out the fam iliar
Trust, sales brochure
cal account of Mondrian’s surviving furniture or the other remains of his connection between Mondrian’s environmental aspirations and his art, it for the “Wall Works,”
environmental designs. Moreover, the role I myself have played in the his­ also announced the availability o f the reconstruction for sale: “The M on­ 2007.

torical narrative recounted in this chapter further dramatizes the impos­
sibility of locating an entirely objective position from which to address the
works discussed here and the issues they raise. A look at the current sta­
tus o f M ondrian’s furniture and o f the “Wall Works” helps to drive these
points home.
Between 1983, when some of Mondrian’s furniture and “W all Works”
were shown together for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art, and
1995, when M oM A exhibited them again in a re-creation of the studio that
accompanied the retrospective commemorating the fiftieth anniversary
of M ondrian’s death, these materials were shown publicly a total of six
times. In 2007, Jason Holtzman once again configured the “Wall Works” as
a reconstruction of M ondrian’s studio, this time for an exhibition at the
Akademie der Kiinste, Berlin.’®On this occasion, he produced a striking,
full-color brochure (fig. 2.19) that called attention to the compositional re-
drian Estate/Holtzman Trust is proud to offer the: [sic] Mondrian ‘Wall
Works’ studio compositions. I f you are interested in purchasing this work
for your collection, please contact us at. . . .” However, there was a c riti­
cally important but unmentioned discrepancy between the photographs
that illustrated the brochure (showing the studio in 1944 as well as its 1995
reconstruction at M oM A) and the version of the reconstruction on view in
Berlin. Unlike all the previous reconstructions, at the Akademie der Kiin-
ste none of the furniture was included. The presentation therefore lacked
the aura bestowed by objects that had actually been made by Mondrian.
His brushes and some other studio paraphernalia were displayed, and the
rectangles on the walls were ones he had used in his studio, but in the ab­
sence o f the furniture, Mondrian’s authorial presence was no longer self-
evident and the historical significance of the reconstruction was, arguably,
considerably diminished.

118 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becomlng Art: Mondrian’s Furniture 119

 No one could have been more acutely aware of this than Jason
Holtzman. When he learned in November 2004 that Mondrian’s furniture
had been lost by Christie’s, the auction house and art brokerage firm to
which he and his family had consigned the studio reconstruction for sale
in 1997 (after the second M oM A showing ended the year before), the young
Holtzman surely understood that monetary as well as historical value had
been lost. This was true despite the fact that an exact value was difficult
to determine, since neither Christie’s nor the M ondrian Estate/Holtzman
Trust had managed to sell the studio components or the reconstruction as
a whole during more than a decade of repeated attempts to do so.'^’ N u­
merous museums had been solicited, but none had taken up the offer. I f
museum directors fervently wished to acquire the studio reconstruction,
as Sidney Janis had predicted, they were unwilling to do so at the price set
by Holtzman’s heirs.
However, the loss by Christie’s o f the studio furniture (and the loss at
the same time of the 1944 studio wall tracings on which H arry Holtzman
had based the “W all Works’’) created an opportunity for Holtzman’s heirs
to make money from the studio, even though no buyer had come forward.
That opportunity was presumably realized when the heirs sued for dam­
ages due to the alleged breach of contract, conversion, and negligence of
Christie’s for losing two of the eight crates in which the materials associ­
ated w ith M ondrian’s studio had been stored.“ ° Arguing that the loss of
the “Sculptures” and the “Tracings” damaged the studio re-creation as
a whole and resulted in its depreciated value, the Holtzman heirs de­
manded compensation in the amount of almost $5.5 million, plus prejudg­
ment interest, in addition to punitive damages of not less than $5 million.
Because the suit was settled out of court and the terms o f the settlement
were not made public, the size of the Holtzman heirs’ compensation is not
known.
Throughout the eleven-page complaint filed on February 26, 2010, on
behalf of the Holtzman heirs, Mondrian’s furniture is described as sculp­
tu r e -o n ly twice are the terms “desk,” “stool,” or “table” even mentioned.
Moreover, the complaint points out that the reconstructed studio, includ­
ing the “Wall Works” and the “Sculptures,” had twice been shown at M oM A
in addition to numerous other public exhibitions, “reflecting their signifi­
cance in the art world.” Thus, when they were lost, the items M ondrian
made from discarded fru it crates and canvas stretchers may have been in ­
advertently returned to their original condition as ephemeral, disposable
things, but in the narrative told to the court on behalf of Holtzman’s heirs,
they continued to be referred to as sculptures. One might therefore argue
120 CHAPTER 2
that the furniture had an afterlife of its own, one in which the individual
pieces were ultimately accorded the status, and the value, of works of art
by Mondrian.
But what about the “Wall Works”? W hat is their status? In the absence
o f the furniture as well as the tracings made from the walls of Mondrian’s
last studio, the “Wall Works’” claim to authenticity as works by M ondrian
is now founded even more firm ly than before on their incorporation of
Mondrian’s colored cardboard rectangles, on statements H arry Holtzman
and others made about these objects, and on the documentary photographs
and film of the studio interior dating from 1944. (The stamp of approval
resulting from their exhibition at the Museum of Modern A rt also contrib­
utes to the sense of authenticity w ith which the “Wall Works” have been
endowed.) I write from personal experience in noting that the Mondrian
Estate/Holtzman Trust has carefully controlled the publication o f images
relating to this subject. For a 2006 essay in a book published by the Getty
Research Institute in which I discussed Mondrian’s studio and illustrated
"Wall Work II,” trust representative H ilary Richardson mandated that cap­
tions for two documentary photographs identify the 1944 studio views by
reference to the so-called “Wall Works” visible in each image. According
to Richardson, commenting on the category of the “Wall Work” in general
but w ith reference to my example in particular, “From the point of view
of the Trust, Wall Work II is a design that Mondrian created on his wall.
W hether on the wall or removed and fastened on a panel, it is still the de­
sign in shapes of colored cardboard he made on the wall.”*”
Despite the fact that over the years Mondrian’s paintings have often
been reproduced in black and white, especially in scholarly publications,
in 2006 Richardson further required that all paintings by M ondrian illus­
trating my essay be reproduced in color. “We just don’t perm it the black
and white reproduction o f Mondrian images,” she wrote to Getty editor
Michelle Bonnice. “Color is one of the most important aspects of his paint­
ings, particularly Broadway Boogie Woogie. A whole color page is devoted to
New York City. Broadway must also be in color.”*°^ In an ideal world, one in
which cost is not an issue, such a policy would pose no onerous constraints
on scholars or their publishers, and doubtless readers would benefit enor­
mously from seeing a plethora of full-color illustrations. But, contrary to
what many might have imagined would be the case at the Getty in 2006,
the Research Institute was operating on a budget that could not accom­
modate the production costs associated w ith even one more color repro­
duction than originally planned. Broadway Boogie Woogie was therefore
not illustrated alongside my essay. But there was an additional problem.
(Un)Becoming Art: Mondrian's Furniture 121
 also involving the cost of illustrating my essay, in the form of what Bon-
nice described as the “stunning fees" demanded by the M ondrian Estate/
Holtzman Trust. For copyright permission to reproduce the ten images that
were originally proposed to accompany my essay (five in color and five in
black and white), Richardson initially quoted a fee of $4,395, or about $440
per image—far higher than anticipated or customary for the vast major­
ity of artists’ permission fees for comparable publications. “We asked for
a reduction,” Bonnice explained at the time, “pointing to the scholarly and
nonprofit nature o f the publication, the small p rin t run, and the lim ited
number of books we sell overseas___We do have some money in the edito­
rial budget—but not that much.”“ ’
Although each of these problems encountered in bringing my essay to
publication was eventually resolved, together they indicate the kinds of
constraints that scholars of Mondrian’s work have routinely encountered
in recent years. Artists’ estates are well w ith in their rights in placing de­
mands on those wishing to publish images under copyright, but the nature
and impact of such constraints, whether customary or egregious, most of­
ten remain invisible because they are rarely discussed in the context of
art historical scholarship.'®'* Yet they can have a profound effect, not only
on an individual essay or book but also on the larger narrative that is told
in the subtle juxtaposition of images, captions, and words. The history of
Mondrian (or any other artist) that winds up being published is structured
not only by what can be included but also by what is necessarily excluded,
whether for lack of permission, lack of funds, or other comparable obsta­
cles that seemingly have no direct bearing on scholarly interpretation of
the artist’s work.
W hile the Getty volume was at an early stage of its preparation, on
September 18, 2004, Richardson sent me the telephone number o f Jason
Holtzman who, she said, very much wanted to get in touch w ith me. (l first
met him when he was a child growing up in Lyme, Connecticut, but we
had not been in contact w ith one another for many years.) In one o f the
first communications that ensued, Holtzman told me about his continuing
efforts to improve the reconstruction o f Mondrian’s studio, using each suc­
cessive exhibition as an opportunity to approximate ever more closely the
dimensions and, he hoped, also the spatial experience of the original. This,
it seemed to me, was a quixotic goal, given that no measurements or floor
plan had been made in 1944, parts of the interior w ill always be cloaked in
mystery since they are not shown in any of the documentary images, and
all of the studio furnishings disappeared long ago (the surviving pieces,
as noted above, had been in M ondrian’s bedroom or his kitchen, not his
122 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art; Mondrian’s Furniture
studio). Despite these challenges, Jason Holtzman had devoted a great deal
of time and energy to this project over the course of more than a decade.
His continuing engagement w ith the studio reconstruction not only drew
on his architectural expertise but it also reinforced his attachment to his
father’s legacy, which he seemed to enjoy discussing w ith me.
After our conversations began, Holtzman eventually asked me to pro­
vide a statement about Mondrian’s studio for the brochure he was prepar­
ing in connection w ith the Berlin Akademie der Kiinste installation. (l did
not decline, but neither did I fulfill the request; I wanted our dialogue to
continue.) He also confided that Mondrian’s furniture would not be shown
in Berlin because it had been lost while in storage administered by Chris­
tie’s. Eventually, he asked me to w rite a more formal statement about the
New York studio that could be used in Trust negotiations w ith Christie’s.
In June 2007, he sent me an e-mail message in which he described what he
had in mind as follows;
A short essay on the nature of the Mondrian “Wallworks,” that is the wall
compositions and their setting in Mondrian’s last studio.
As I believe you are aware, the essay will be used in negotiating with
Christies in respect to the portions of the Studio which were lost by them.
(The furniture—two tables, and crates).
For this purpose we would like to be able to put the studio in perspective
in relation to the following:
1. Its status as a Mondrian work of art;
2. Its status as an art-historical archive; and
3. Its status as the culmination of a series of studios which served as
a matrix, building block or template for Mondrian’s works of art.
We hope that you will be able to address these issues.'®^
As a long-time scholar o f M ondrian’s work w ith a reputation that I
did not want to compromise, my first instinct was to decline this invita­
tion. But on further reflection it seemed critically important to my on-go-
ing research and w riting that I embrace rather than avoid a proposition
that promised to plunge me into the very issues at the heart of this book.
One of my principal goals has been to expose the variety of interests that
have shaped the art historical narrative of Mondrian and his work, and
I thought it would therefore be disingenuous to hide from the fact that
my own interests might also be embedded in that narrative. Allowing
myself to be involved, even peripherally, in negotiations over the value
123
 of M ondrians furniture would make it impossible for me to maintain the
conventional facade of scholarly distance from my subject. Knowing how
expensive Mondrian copyright fees could be, I decided to ask the Trust to
waive those fees for the publication of this book in return for the statement
I would provide. I also asked to be allowed to include black-and-white il­
lustrations of Mondrian’s work, rather than be lim ited to color illustra­
tions, which would make the book much more costly. As a result of this
agreement, I stood to benefit financially from w riting for the Trust. But
as I composed my statement, which dealt w ith Mondrian’s studios in Paris
and New York, including their furnishings, it proved difficult to maintain
my desired focus on the historical significance of the environments and
objects involved, to acknowledge their unique visual elements, without de­
fining or otherwise describing them as works of art. The ambivalence w ith
which I approached the task of characterizing Mondrian’s work without
offering myself up as a tool in the court case that I knew was being contem­
plated is reflected in the tortured ambiguities of my text.
“Although the studio was not a conventional work of art,” I wrote of the
studio on the rue du Depart, “it is clear not only from Mondrian’s formal
w ritin g about the home, about the artist’s studio, and about architecture
in general, but also in light of the time, energy, and care he devoted to the
arrangement of his studio (frequently mentioned in his correspondence),
that this environment must be appreciated as a highly significant expres­
sion of his aesthetic, theoretical, and creative interests.” W hen it came to
the last New York studio, Iwrote that the arrangement as we know it from
documentary images “shared the vitality of Mondrian’s last paintings.
. . . The vintage documentation of the apartment indicates the profound
degree to which M ondrian considered his New York living and working
environment (like his studio on the rue du Depart in Paris) to be a space
in which the fundamental aesthetic implications of his paintings, in con­
junction w ith the furnishings and the arrangement o f colors on the walls,
could be conveyed in three dimensions.” Finally, Iindicated that the pieces
o f furniture made by M ondrian “are especially important [more im por­
tant, that is, than the studio paraphernalia or the colored rectangles re­
moved from the walls] because they were actually conceived and created
by Mondrian, they embodied his only extant designs in three dimensions,
and their physical presence therefore lent authenticity to the reconstruct­
ed studio. The vibrancy and the density of the original space is perhaps
best conveyed by the visual documentation, but the furniture contributed
an aura of authenticity as well as a trace of historical embodiment that
enhanced our appreciation of the studio as a space otherwise given up to
history in 1944.”” ^
124 CHAPTER 2 (Un)Becoming Art; Mondrian’s Furniture
Rereading this statement as I complete the present book, I doubt that
I was able to achieve the arms-length distance that I was after. W hile I
still endorse what I wrote, I realize that the distinctions I thought I was
preserving are less clear-cut than I might have wished. I also w orry that
I m ight have been naive in thinking that I could provide any statement
at all that would not be compromised by its potential use in support of
a legal case whose goals I knew were not in sympathy w ith my under­
standing of the historical specificity o f M ondrian’s work. I would like to
believe that my statement was not mentioned in the complaint filed by
Holtzman’s heirs because nothing Iwrote would have been especially use­
ful in buttressing the claim that the studio was, in Jason Holtzman’s words,
“a Mondrian work of art.” But what Iwrote does come close to saying pre­
cisely that, and whether I managed in the process not to compromise the
integrity of my scholarly standing seems in retrospect to be more debat­
able than I would like. At the same time, the historical significance of the
studio seems to me undeniable, and i f that is what Holtzm an meant by
his reference to the studio’s “status as an art-historical archive,” I would
support his point.
The problem Ifind myself in is comparable to the one that Robert Welsh
faced when he authenticated New York City 3 after H arry Holtzman’s res­
toration and he asked that Holtzman “not take my willingness to ‘authen­
ticate’ the New York-New York City as a sign that I necessarily approve of
similar restorations in other unfinished works w ith papers attached.” The
rem ark reveals Welsh’s awareness of his conflicted situation in providing
a scholarly opinion that could be used for purposes he would not want to
endorse. It becomes all the more poignant when we realize that Holtzman
filed Welsh’s letter away, discarded one of his authentications while appar­
ently ignoring the other, and it was M artin James’s unqualified authentica­
tion that wound up being published in the catalogue raisonne.
In 1979, when I curated the exhibition at Yale w ith which this chapter
began, I may have imagined that it would be possible to build a scholarly
career on disinterested research, but today, as I look back over more than
thirty-five years of involvement w ith M ondrian as a subject o f study, I
cannot escape the fact that objectivity is not a viable possibility. Not only
do I share a history of interactions w ith some of the principal players in
the construction of Mondrian’s story, but my point of view on many of
the relevant issues has also developed through dialogue and debate w ith
those people. In this chapter, I have shown that the way M ondrian’s work
has been presented, for example, the way in which his furniture became
sculpture and the compositions on the walls of his studio became “Wall
Works,” can be fully appreciated only by asking whose interests these
125
 r WWT
f - f

transformations served. By exposing the interests of others, however, I

have also exposed my own investment in seeing Mondrian through a par­
ticular scholarly lens. Mondrian and his work emerge here as the product
not simply of the artist’s own making but of competing narratives and in ­
terests inflected by forces that have generally been ignored as they shape
the terrain of art historical understanding.

Mondrian’s Legacy in New York

Mondrian has been described by scholar and curator Michael

Auping as “the towering presence of geometric abstract painting”
whose death marked an unmistakable divide between two very
distinct episodes in m id-twentieth-century American art history,
“what might be thought of as a secular version of the old and new
testaments.”' On the one hand were the activities and aesthetic
commitments of the American Abstract Artists (AAA), an organi­
zation founded in New York in 1936 by H arry Holtzman and sev­
eral other painters committed to cubist-derived abstraction for
whom M ondrian was a hugely inspirational figure. On the other
hand were the tendencies associated w ith abstract expressionism
and the New York school, the dominant groupings of post-World
W ar II American art represented, for example, by Jackson Pollock
and W illem de Kooning as well as Barnett Newman and Ad Rein­
hardt. M ondrian was arguably no less important to the latter two
painters than he was to the members of the American Abstract
Artists, but Newman, for example, did not so much embrace his
work as resist it. “Historically,” Auping notes, “the contributions
of the AAA artists have tended to be buried between the break­
through achievements of M ondrian and the emergence of Ab­
stract Expressionism, which we often mistakenly think of as ‘the
beginning’ [of abstract art in America]. These early pioneers of

126 CHAPTER 2 127

A MONUMENT |
TO
CONTEMPORARY
ART

L« Mondrian is an obvious departure from

one's expectations of a hotel. The speclocubr
painting th at envelops the building mtroduces
the d ram a th at is Le Mondrian.
M ore than onything else, Le M ondrion
captures the pulse, the very essence of
Los A n g eles...o n e of the worid's g re a t cities.
Located a t the highest point of Sunset Boule-
vord, in the h e art of the entertainment ond
design communities, Le M ondrion stands a s a
momHitenf in the midst of the Los Angeles city­
scape, defining Hie hotel a s Contem porory Art.

PLATE 21. Advertising brochure for the

NOTES
hotel Le Mondrian, 1984. Photo: RKD
(Netherlands Institute for Art History).
Herbert Henkels Archive, 0620.424.

PLATE 22. Yaacov Agam, Hommage

d Mondrian, color design for exte­
rior o f the hotel Le Mondrian (model),
1983-85. © 2012 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

L I S T O F A B B R E V I A T I O N S IN T HE N O T E S

Barr Papers: Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, Museum of Mod­

ern Art Archives, New York
Catalogue Raisonne: Robert P. Welsh and Joop M. Joosten, Piet
Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonne, 3 vols. in 2
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998)
Dreier Papers: Katherine S. Dreier Papers/Societe Anonyme
Archive, Yale Collection of American Litera­
ture, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library
EHT: Emily Hall Tremaine
Glarner Archive: Glarner Archive, Kunsthaus, Zurich
Holtzman Papers: Harry Holtzman Papers, General Collection,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
[The Holtzman Papers were uncatalogued
for more than a decade before 2011, when the
collection was described in the finding aid
of the Beinecke Library as having received
"a basic level of processing," and former
call numbers Uncat MS Vault 850, Uncat
MS Vault 856, and Uncat MS Vault 859 were
changed to GEN MSS 819. The original call
numbers are retained in the citations in the
present book.]
 Housley, Tremaine: Kathleen L. Housley, Emily Hall Tremaine: Collector on CHAPTER 1

MoMA Archives:
Mondrian, Collected Writings:
Mondrian in New York:
Mondrian Papers:
NIAH:
Public Information Scrapbooks:
Seuphor Papers:
Seuphor, Piet Mondrian:
Transatlantic Paintings:
Tremaine Interview:
Tremaine Papers:
Wittenborn Papers:
I NTRODUCTI ON
1. Catalogue Raisonne. See, esp., vol. 2, Joosten, Catalogue Raisonne of the Work of
1911-1944, and vol. 3, Appendix.
2. However, see Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of
the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
3. Seuphor, Piet Mondrian.
4. This acquistion date is based on the Catalogue Raisonne entry for B142 (2:305), how­
ever, 1978 is given as the date of acquistion in Collection Yves Saint Laurent et Pierre Berge, 5
vols., ed. Christiane de Nicolay-Mazery (Paris: Christie's en Association avec Pierre Berge
& Associes, 2009), 1:160.
the Cusp (Meriden, CT: Emily Hall Tremaine Founda­
tion, 2001)
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York
Piet Mondrian, The New Art—the New Life: The Col­
lected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. Harry
Holtzman and Martin S. James (Boston: G. K. Hall,
1986)
Mondrian in New York (Tokyo: Galerie Tokoro in coop­
eration with the Piet Mondrian/Holtzman Trust,
Connecticut, and the Sidney Janis Gallery, New York,
1993)
Piet Mondrian Papers, General Collection, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksbureau
voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie), The Hague
Public Information Department Records (followed by
microfilm reel and frame numbers)
Michel Seuphor Papers, Archief en Museum voor het
Vlaamse Cultuurleven, Letterenhuis, Antwerp
Michel Seuphor (pseud, for Fernand Berckelaers), Piet
Mondrian: Life and Work (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1956)
Harry Cooper and Ron Spronk, Mondrian: The Transat­
lantic Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press;
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums,
2001)
Emily Hall Tremaine, interviewed by Paul Cummings,
January 24,1973, transcript. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution
Emily Hall Tremaine Papers, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution
George Wittenborn, Inc., Papers, Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York
1. Jhim Lamoree, “Tachtig miljoen voor Mondriaan,” HetParool, August 28,1998. This
and subsequent citations about the acquisition are from clippings in the Library, Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam.
2. See L. L. M. van Kollenburg, “Victory Boogie Woogie: Reconstructie van een omstreden
aankoop,” Masterscriptie Algemene Cultuurwetenschappen, University of Tilburg, n.d.
3. Ursie Lambrechts, quoted in Lamoree, “Tachtig miljoen.” See also Lambrechts, “Bij
aankoop Mondriaan zijn veel regels overtreden,” NRC Handelsblad, August 31,1998.
4. For a detailed study of the painting’s condition and its history, see Inside Out Victory
Boogie Woogie: A Material History of Mondrian’s Masterpiece, ed. Maarten van Bommel, Hans
Janssen, and Ron Spronk (Amsterdam: Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed/Amsterdam
University Press, 2012).
5. Bob van der Goen, quoted in Rene Zwaap, "Nooit meer boogie woogie,” De Groene
Amsterdammer, September 9,1998.
6. Reporters caught on to the fact that there was a copy in the Stedelijk Museum after
Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd published an account of how it had come to be made: “Sand­
bergs geheime Boogie,” HetParool, September 5,1998,15.
7. See “Toestemming voor schenking door De Nederlandsche Bank,” Tweede Kamer,
vergaderjaar 1998-1999,26 248, nr. 2, at http://www.rekenkamer.nl/Actueel/Onderzoeks-
rapporten/Bronnen/i998 /io/Toestemming_voor_schenking_door_De_Nederlandse_
Bank/Rapport.
8. “Acquisition of the century” was a characterization made by, among others, Jhim
Lamoree, “Boogie woogie in Gemeentemuseum,” Het Parool, September 1,1998.
9. S. M. Reussien, letter, Het Parool, September 5,1998.
10. Hans Locher, quoted in Jhim Lamoree, “Prijs zonder precedent voor een Mondri­
aan,” HetParool, October 9,1999.
11. Marianne Vermeijden, “Ook kopie van Mondriaan in Den Haag,” NRC Handelsblad,
September 7,1998. Van Kollenburg, “Victory Boogie Woogie: Reconstructie,” 90, describes
List’s involvement in negotiations with Newhouse.
12. “Schilderij van 80 miljoen,” Algemeen Dagblad, August 29,1998.
13. "Wei andere kopers van Mondriaan,” NRC Handelsblad, October 13,1999. See also
David Ebony, “Ganz sale dominates fall auctions,” Art in America 85, no. 1 (January 1998): 31.
14. Elsbeth Etty, "Geldzucht,” NRC Handelsblad, September 5,1998.
15. Jan Bor, “Blokjes,” Algemeen Dagblad, October 5,1998.
16. B. Smalhout, “Euro Boogie Woogie,” De Telegraaf, September 5,1998,7.
17. Herman Stevens, “Al lusten we Mondriaan niet, we krijgen hem wel,” Het Parool,
September 4,1998.
18.Ibid.
19. W. E. Krul, quoted in Maartje den Breejen, “Elite-kunst wordt voer voor de massa,”
Het Parool, October 20,1998.
20. “Doe de boogie woogie,” NRC Handebblad, September 4,1998.
21. Mirjam Keunen, “‘Het is net lego!’ Museum-bezoekers over Mondriaans Victory
Boogie Woogie,” Algemeen Dagblad, October 30,1998.
22. Hans den Hartogjager, “Alleen dike meisjes wilden met Mondraan dansen,” NRC
Handelsblad, September 7,1998.
23. Two paintings by Mondrian were included in Entartete Kunst, the notorious 1937
exhibition of modern art reviled by the Nazis. See Catalogue Raisonne 3:40-41.
24. Arthur Lehning, quoted in Frans Postma, 26, Rue du Depart: Mondrians Studio in
Paris, 1921-1936, ed. Gees Boekraad, trans. Michael Gibbs and Dawn Mastin (Berlin: Ernst
& Sohn, 1995), 52.

238 Notes to Pages 2-9 Notes to Pages 9-21 2 3 9

 connection with your work on the original”: H. L. Harrison (manager, Advertising and
Public Relations, Miller Company) to Mrs. Sheldon (Caroline) Keck, March 15,1949, ibid.
138. Caroline Keck to EHT, May 3,1949, ibid.
139. Report to the Miller Company by Sheldon and Caroline Keck, attached to a letter
from Caroline Keck to EHT, April 15,1949, ibid.
140. Fine to Mrs. Vandersloot (Gladys Vandersloot, secretary to EHT), January 6,1959.
I am grateful to Hans Janssen for providing a copy.
141. Fine, invoice for restoration work on Fine copy of Victory Boogie Woogie, March 1,
1959, folder: Restorations re: Victory Boogie Woogie, Tremaine Papers.
142. Fine, invoice for restoration work on Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie, February
7,1959, ibid.
143. Burton G. Tremaine Jr. to Nelson A. Rockefeller (president of MoMA), December
27,1951, mf 2180: 95, Barr Papers. This letter highlights the fluidity of the Tremaines’ col­
lecting and corporate activities and indicates that MoMA played a role in both.
144. See above, n. 103: Miller Company memo to S. R. Naysmith and M. L. Harrison,
January 5,1949, folder: Restorations re: Victory Boogie Woogie, Tremaine Papers.
145. Vandersloot to Mrs. Sydney Barton (M oM A), December 31,1958, folder: Restora­
tions re: Victory Boogie Woogie, Tremaine Papers.
146. Vandersloot to the Museum of Modern Art, Attn. Miss Dudley, May 31,1961, ibid.
147. Burton G. Tremaine Jr. to Donald S. McBride, June 29,1971, folder: 1972 exhibi­
tions, Tremaine Papers.
148. A document (May 8,1974) in ibid, mentions a loan to the Guggenheim for four
months, while the Tremaines’ apartment was being painted. The insurance value was $1
million. Housley, Tremaine, 88-89, discusses the reasons for the Tremaines’ disenchant­
ment with Barr and the Museum of Modern Art.
149. Around 1978-81, EHT maintained a small six-ring binder containing entries on
each object in the collection, many annotated with multiple appraised values supplied by
various dealers (Tremaine Papers). Subsequent references to such appraised values are
based on these materials.
150. Steven W. Naifeh, Culture Making: Money, Success, and the New York Art World,
Princeton University Undergraduate Studies in History, no. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1976), 58.
151. Dinitia Smith, "Art Fever: The Passion and Frenzy of the Ultimate Rich Man’s
Sport,” New York Magazine 20, no. 16 (April 20,1987): 36.
152. Grace Glueck, “The Mania of Art Auctions: Problems as Well as Profits,” New York
Times, November 26,1988.
153. Robson, Prestige, Profit, and Pleasure, 3i7ni70.
154. Anna M. Sevier (Springbok Editions) to EHT, October 19,1967, folder: Requests for
publications re: Victory Boogie Woogie, Tremaine Papers. No one involved seems to have
realized that although the Tremaines owned the painting, Holtzman owned the intel­
lectual rights to its reproduction and therefore should have been approached to provide
copyright.
155. See the page devoted to Victory Boogie Woogie in the six-ring binder (n. 149 above),
Tremaine Papers.
156. The Tremaines’ often ambivalent relationship to the art market is discussed by
Housley, Tremaine, esp. 188-93; see 200 for their sale of highly valued paintings, 1979-80.
157. Thomas Armstrong, interview (1996) quoted in Housley, Tremaine, 203.
158. Housley, Tremaine, 208-9.
159. See the unauthorized biography by Carol Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse: Portrait of
a Media Merchant (New York: Seven Stories, 1998).
246 Notes to Pages 60-65
i 5 o. Glenn Lowry (director of the Museum of Modern Art), quoted in David D’Arcy,
'“Warm but distant’: Museum of Modern Art’s Relations with Former Trustee,” Art News­
paper 11, no. 105 (July-August 2000): 8.
161. Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse, 47.
162. See Hans Janssen, Mondriaan in het Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague: Haags
Gemeentemuseum, 2008).
163. See correspondence, 1960-65, documenting unsuccessful attempts by Gemeen­
temuseum director L. J. F. Wijsenbeek to acquire Mondrian’s Composition with Blue, Red,
and Yellow (B311) of 1937-42: BNR 515, inv. nr. 649, Haags Gemeentearchief, DSK, Haags
Gemeentemuseum. See also, there, inv. nr. 654, correspondence, 1980, between Theo van
Velsen (then director of the Gemeentemuseum) and Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler concern­
ing another failed attempt to acquire a New York period work: New York City 1 (B300).
Beyeler’s price was $1,250,000. My thanks to Hans Janssen for referring me to this cor­
respondence.
164. Hans Piet, “De overstelpende logistiek van een mega-tentoonstelling,” Haagsche
Courant, Cultuur, December 16,1994,5. See also ‘“Mondriaan aan de Amstel is een mooie
opening,”’ Quartier (Spring 1994): 14-15; “Frits Becht over mega-kunstmanifestaties: ‘Ik
geef Mondriaan body en impact,”’Management Team (December 12,1994), 94-97.
165. “Een goed Mondriaan-jaar,” Vrij Nederland, December 17,1994,39.
166. Piet, “De overstelpende logistiek,” 5.
167. Victor Tiebosch, quoted (25-26) in Hans den Hartog Jager, “Meesurfen op Mondri­
aan: De marketing van een wereldberoemde kunstenaar,” De Tijd, February 18,1994,24-29.
Subsequent quotations of Tiebosch and Rob Tania are from this article unless otherwise
noted. My thanks to Victor Tiebosch for an interview, October 15, 2009.
168. Willem Verbruggen, quoted in Frank Hitzert, “Van kunst tot koopwaar,” Haagsche
Courant, Cultuur, December 16,1994,4.
169. Toon van Severen, “’Het gaat niet om ‘t geld’: Tania en Tiebosch verwerven alle
rechten van Mondriaan,” Adformatie (September 16,1993), notes that ABC screened all
proposals for Mondrian-related products, but “the Mondrian heirs have the final say, that
is, the right to veto.”
170. Willem Verbruggen in ibid.
171. US trademark registrations filed November 9,1993, covered paper goods, printed
materials, housewares, and glass products. See www.trademarkia.com/piet-mondri-
an-74455695.html and www.trademarkia.com/piet-mondrian-74455777.html.
CHAPTER 2
1. Nancy J. Troy, Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer­
sity Art Gallery, 1979).
2. Holtzman lived in Lyme, Connecticut, forty miles from New Haven, where I was
a graduate student at Yale between 1974 and 1979. During that period, I got to know
Holtzman, visited his home, met his children, and talked with him on numerous occa­
sions about Mondrian and about his own career as an artist. My graduate studies con­
cerned both Mondrian and Holtzman and culminated in the exhibition I curated at Yale.
3. Troy, Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism in America, 60. These pieces of furniture are in­
cluded, with the same titles, in the Catalogue Raisonne as B415, B414, and B413, respectively.
4. Mondrian in New York, 118. These objects are illustrated on pages 87, 89, 91, 93, and
95 -
5. See Barbara Bloemink, “On the Relationship of Art and Design,” in Design /Art.-
Functional Objects from Donald Judd to Rachel Whiteread, ed. Barbara Bloemink and Joseph
Notes to Pages 66-77
 Cunningham (London: Merrell in association with Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Mu­
seum, Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 15-34.
6. See Ghislaine Wood, ed.. Surreal Things: Surrealism and Design (London: V&A Publi­
cations, 2007).
7. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, intro. Jean-Louis Cohen, trans. John Goodman
(Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 87. 1 have explored these issues in Nancy J.
Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
8. See Yve-Alain Bois, "Mondrian and the Theory of Architecture,” Assemblage, no. 4
(October 1987), 102-30. See also, Mondrian, Collected Writings, in which these themes recur
throughout.
9. Nancy Joslin Troy, "Piet Mondrian’s Atelier,”Arts Magazine 53, no. 4 (December
1978): 82-87.
10. Mondrian’s easel, two wood stools, and a rack for storing gramophone records
were salvaged when he was preparing to leave Paris in 1938 by his friend, Maud van Loon,
who donated them to the Haags Gemeentemuseum in 1981. See Hans Janssen, Mondri-
aan in het Haags Gemeentemuseum (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 2008), 259-60. For a
discussion of the formal and coloristic adjustments Mondrian made to the easel, see Carel
Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, trans. Barbara Potter Fasting (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1994), 152-54.
11. This changed with the publication of Frans Postma, 26, Rue du Depart: Mondrians
Studio in Paris, 1921-1936 (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1995). Postma’s book presents a research
project that culminated in a scale model of the studio specifying the colors of the walls
and furnishings, which had never been so carefully worked out before.
12. Mondrian built his Paris record rack, but as Joosten noted (Catalogue Raisonne,
2:450), this object (B412) was “merely functional," unlike the furniture Mondrian made in
New York, which had noteworthy formal characteristics.
13. The work table was an exception, since the kitchen in which Mondrian had placed
it was not photographed or filmed in 1944.
14. Harry Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian’s Environment," pt. 2, in Mondrian: The Process
Works (New York: Pace Editions, 1970), 4.
15. Arnold Newman, interview by author, June 6,1980.
16. Carl Holty, Journal, March 22,1944, quoted in Joosten, Catalogue Raisonne, 2:451.
17. “Studio,” New Yorker 20, no. 9 (April 15,1944): 21.
18. Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian’s Environment,” pt. 2,4.
19. Ibid., 4-5.
20. Regarding the lease, see chap. 1, n. 73.
21. “Piet Mondrian,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 12, no. 4 (1945): 12.
22. “No museum I phoned was interested in documenting it photographically. I had
to arrange that myself.” Harry Holtzman, introduction to Piet Mondrian: A Portfolio of 10
Paintings (New Haven, CT: Ives-Sillman, 1967).
23. See Alan Powers, Serge Chermayeff: Designer, Architect, Teacher (London: RIBA
Publications, 2001).
24. Regarding the Circle group, named for the publication in which both Mondrian
and Chermayeff were included (Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, ed. J. L.
Martin, Ben Nicholson, and N. Gabo [London: Faber and Faber, 1937]), see Jeremy Lewison,
ed.. Circle: Constructive Art in Britain, 1934-40 (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard Gallery, 1982).
25. See Serge Chermayeff, “Mondrian of the Perfectionists,” Art News, 44, no. 3 (March
1945): 14-16. In 1980, Robert Motherwell recalled that he, too, had wanted to salvage
Mondrian’s last studio: “After Mondrian’s death, I tried to persuade Alfred H. Barr, Jr. to.
248 Notes to Pages 77-84
instead of buying a painting from Mondrian’s estate, buy his small studio itself, with its
red, blue, and yellow squares, and the thousands of pinholes in the white walls where
Mondrian had obviously pinned the primary-colored squares again and again, in different
configurations, and which, to a young artist, was a most moving and illuminating insight
into his working procedures.” Motherwell to Yve-Alain Bois (October 13,1980), in The
Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 240.
26. James Johnson Sweeney to James Thrall Soby, April 7,1944, Exh. #282, Department
Material, MoMA Archives.
27. Soby to Sweeney, April 10,1944, Exh. #282, Department Material, MoMA Archives.
28. Harry Holtzman, introduction to Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works, 1943-44 (New
York: Carpenter + Hochman, 1984), 4.
29. Ibid.
30. Regarding the dates of furniture construction, Joosten quotes a postcard from
Mondrian to Holty (November 10,1943), in which Mondrian invited his friend to visit, tell­
ing Holty, “My new place is now arranged.” Catalogue Raisonne, 2:181.
31. Catalogue Raisonne, 2:450.
32. Ibid., 388, lists seven reproductions between 1937 and 1949.
33. Arne Glimcher, quoted in Mildred Glimcher, ed.. Adventures in Art: Forty Years at
Pace, with contextual recollections by Arne Glimcher (Milan: Leonardo International,
2001), 106. My thanks to Jon Mason, archivist at Pace Gallery, and to Arne Glimcher for
personal communications regarding Pace’s reconstruction, December 2007.
34. Glimcher to Maurice Tuchman, August 5,1969, Pace Gallery Archives, New York.
Shown first in New York and then successively at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Columbus Gallery of Fine Art, in 1972-73 the exhibi­
tion also traveled to Denise Rene’s galleries in Dusseldorf and Paris. For the show’s tour,
the drawing for the Salon de Madame B ... , d Dresden was explicitly coupled with the For­
mica scale model by the single insurance value they were given ($100,000—$30,000 more
than the next most valuable object in the show, a charcoal drawing for Composition Tableau
I of ca. 1921.) Judy Harney (Pace Gallery) to Anne d’Harnoncourt (Art Institute of Chicago),
November 5,1970, box 12,20th Century Painting and Sculpture, A. James Speyer Collec­
tion, Institutional Archives, Art Institute of Chicago (hereafter cited as Speyer Collection).
35. Formica is the trade name for a plastic laminate made of composite materials that
was used in industrial contexts after it was patented in 1918. With the introduction of
melamine resin in 1938, the Cincinnati-based Formica Company was able to offer not only
simulated wood grain but also brightly colored surfaces that were heat resistant, easy to
care for, and widely applied in domestic kitchens after the Second World War. See Susan
Mossman, Plastic Fantastic: Product Design and Consumer Culture (London: Black Dog Pub­
lishing, 2008), 86-89. My thanks to Vanessa Schwartz for this reference.
36. See Fred Mueller (Pace Gallery), letter to James Speyer (Art Institute of Chicago),
July 23,1969, box 12, Speyer Collection: “We’ve recently acquired from Harry Holtzman the
entire Mondrian estate, the most important aspect of which is the existence of the rela­
tively unknown process drawings for the classical paintings, including 26 small matted
drawings, 5 large framed drawings, 1 very large drawing on canvas, and 3 notebooks with
drawings and ideas.”
37. Glimcher, ed.. Adventures in Art, 106.
38. Piet Mondrian, “Le Home—La Rue—La Cite,” Vouloir, no. 25 (1927). The essay also
appeared at about the same time in Dutch in ho, no. 1 (January 1927): 12-18, reprinted in
translation as “Home—Street—City,” Transformation: Arts, Communication, Environment,
no. 1 (1950), 44-47-
Notes to Pages 85-91 249
 39- Albert Boime, “A Visit to Mondrianland,” Arts Magazine 44, no. 8 (Summer 1970): 30.
40. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Room That Piet Didn’t Build,” New York Times, April 18,1970,
25.
41. See, for example, the color reproductions in Meubles: L’art international
d’aujourd’hui (Paris: C. Moreau, 1930), vol. 7, plate 50.
42. Blotkamp has noted (Mondrian: The Art of Destruction, 155) that Mondrian’s “ideas
were interpreted more rigorously here than in his own studio,” a view shared by El
Lissitzky, who described the project as “a still-life of a room, for viewing through the key­
hole.” Blotkamp observes that this was "precisely what Mondrian was aiming for: a total
repression of the temporal and spatial aspects of architecture.” See Lissitzky to Sophie
Kiippers, March 2,1926, in Sophie Lissitzky-Kiippers, El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, trans.
Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968),
74-
43. Nancy J. Troy, “Piet Mondrian’s Designs for the Salon de Madame B ... , d Dresden,”
Art Bulletin 62, no. 4 (1980): 640-47.
44. Piet Mondrian to J. J. P. Oud, May 22,1926, inv. nr. 1972-A. 426, Institut Neerlandais,
Paris.
45. Erik Quint, “Mondriaan even terug op aarde,” Haagsche Courant, Cultuur, Decem­
ber 16,1994, 6.
46. My thanks to Harry Cooper for emphasizing the relevance and importance of
Mondrian’s frames, in a personal communication (June 1, 2011).
47. Mark Stevens, “Dream Weaver,” New York Magazine (June 19,2000), 61, quoted in
Harry Cooper, “The Surface in Time: Notes on an Aspect of Mondrian’s Critical Reception,”
in TransatlanticPaintings, 17.
48. Allan Kaprow, "Piet Mondrian, a Study in Seeing” (MA thesis, Columbia Univer­
sity, 1952), accession no. 980063, series I, box 2, folder 9, Allan Kaprow Papers, 1940-1997,
Getty Research Institute, Research Library.
49. Martin James, “The Realism behind Mondrian’s Geometry,” Art News 56, no. 8
(December 1957): 35-36.
50. Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Yve-Alain Bois, Joop Joosten, Hans Janssen, and John
Elderfield, introduction to Piet Mondrian: 1S72-1944 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1995),
xviii-xix.
51. Cooper, “The Surface in Time,” 7-23.
52. Robert Pincus-Witten, “The Furniture Paradigm,” in Improbable Furniture (Phila­
delphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1977), 8-16.
53. Louise Brigham, Box Furniture: How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home
(New York: Century Co., 1910). My thanks to Wendy Kaplan for this reference. See also
Neville Thompson, “Louise Brigham, Developer of Furniture,” in The Substance of Style:
Perspectives on the American Arts and Crafts Movement, ed. Bert Denker (Winterthur, DE:
Winterthur Museum, 1996), 199-211. Victor Wiener pointed out in conversation (April
2010) the similarity between Mondrian’s New York furniture and Gerrit Rietveld’s crate
furniture, the earliest of which was designed in 1935. This was “delivered as a do-it-
yourself kit and had to be assembled by the customer,” according to Marijke Kiiper and
Ida van Zijl, Gerrit Th. Rietveld, 1888-1964; The Complete Works, trans. Richard Denooy et al.
(Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1992), 155.
54. 1 am grateful to Michael Leja for drawing my attention to this parallel with the
developing interest in Mondrian’s furniture. See Leja, “The Monet Revival and New York
School Abstraction,” in Monet in the Twentieth Century, ed. Paul Hayes Tucker with George
T. M. Shackelford and Mary Anne Stevens (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; London: Royal
Academy of Arts, 1998), 98-108, 291-93.
250 Notes to Pages 91-96
55. The show opened on February 7 and closed on March 9,1974. The accompanying
sixteen-page publication includes a two-page preface by Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian’s Per­
sonality,” as well as a catalogue of items in the exhibition. Holtzman is acknowledged on
the last page “for his devoted efforts as guest-director in assembling of the exhibition.”
56. The show also included “blow-up photographs” of Mondrian and his studio, plus
the film that Holtzman made there in 1944. The catalogue does not mention Glarner’s role
in producing the photographs. (Glarner had died two years earlier, in 1972.)
57. See the undated, typed “List of Documents, Drawings and Objects relating to Piet
M O N D R IA N , property of Mr. Harry Holtzman, Bull Run Hill, Joshuatown Road, Lyme, Con­
necticut, being lent to the m o n d r i a n Exhibition with individual values,” in uncatalogued
manuscript vault 850, box 11, Holtzman Papers. Presumably the two tables were assigned
high insurance values, if we are to judge by what would be the case three years later,
when—as discussed below—Holtzman set the insurance values of Mondrian’s furniture
so high that the Centre Pompidou could afford to borrow his easel but none of the items
Mondrian had made himself
58. Malitte Matta to Sidney Janis, July 8,1974, 92022/082, folder: Correspondance
Malitte Matta, 1973-1976, Centre Pompidou Archive, Paris.
59. Matta to Holtzman, April 24,1975. vault 850, box 11, Holtzman Papers.
60. Regarding Rietveld’s furniture and when he added color, see Kiiper and van Zijl,
Gerrit Th. Rietveld, 1888-1964,76.
61. Theo van Doesburg, “Aanteekeningen bij een leunstoel van Rietveld,” De Stijl 2, no.
11 (September 1919).
62. See the exhibition brochure (92022/080, Centre Pompidou Archive, Paris): galler­
ies 14 and 15 were devoted to “Mondrian a New York,” displaying, respectively, works by
Mondrian and by artists in his New York circle.
63. Martin S. James, statement dated August 29,1979, in Catalogue Raisonne, 2:407.
James here describes the condition of the painting around 1965, when he first saw it in
Holtzman’s studio.
64. Daniel Abadie, letter to Holtzman, November 29,1976,92022/089, Centre Pompi­
dou Archive, Paris.
65. Holtzman to Abadie, December 20,1976,92022/089, Centre Pompidou Archive,
Paris.
66. Malitte Matta, “Rapport de mission a San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, i
mai-28 mai 1976,” 92022/079, Centre Pompidou Archive, Paris.
67. Matta to Holtzman, September 13,1976,92022/089 Centre Pompidou Archive,
Paris.
68. Holtzman, letter (draft) to Abadie, December 14,1979, vault 850, box 24, Holtzman
Papers.
69. Ibid. My thanks to Amy Von Lintel for research on Ping Pong.
70. Steeves taught at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, which is “known for its
contemporary focus on the history and tradition of representational art, centered on the
study of nature and the figure” (www.allaboutartschools.com/world/american/connecti-
cut/lyme-cofa/index.htm).
71. See the page inserted into the carbon copy of an undated, typed inventory of
eighty-eight works in the Mondrian Estate. The list includes a concordance between
Holtzman’s numbering system and that of Michel Seuphor’s so-called Classified Catalogue
(Seuphor, Piet Mondrian, 353-95), and it gives the insurance value of each work. Holtzman
noted that New York—New York City “was not included in the inventory, considered of o
value.” vault 856, box 1, Holtzman Papers. The title New York—New York City, assigned in
1977, acknowledged what was then thought to be the work’s bridge position in Mondrian’s
Notes to Pages 96-101
 chronological development between two other paintings, New York (retitled Boogie Woogie
by Mondrian in 1942) and New York City. The current title, New York City 3, corresponds to
the Catalogue Raisonne entry for B303.
72. In preparation for the sale of this painting. Composition with Red, Blue, and Yel­
low (Unfinished), 1940, Holtzman removed a strip of paper tape, so that the painting no
longer conformed to its condition in 1944 as represented by a photograph in Seuphor,
Piet Mondrian, 394, no. 434: “The reproduction in the book,” Holtzman explained, "shows
a strip of paper ‘tape’ over one of the black verticals. As it was placed there by Mondrian
as an expedient toward some further changes, that were of course never realized, its
temporary character interfered with the existing expression (which I discussed with him
at one time). Because it interfered with the structure of the work, I removed it. And thus
it was conveyed to Marlborough-Gerson when I sold it to the gallery in 1963.” Holtzman to
Thomas Gibson (Marlborough Gallery), n.d. H.R. Fischer (also Marlborough Gallery), in a
statement dated December 17,1970, blamed the problem on Seuphor, who, he claimed, had
“used an early photograph of the painting painting.. . . The Seuphor book contains a num­
ber of mistakes, I have discovered on occasion during the past years—this is one of the
more notable ones.” Photocopies of both documents conveyed to me byjoop Joosten, 2007.
73. For more on the infamous treatments involving Old Master paintings, see Meryle
Secrest, “The Disappearing Baby,” chap. 13 of her Duveen: A Life in Art (New York; Alfred A.
Knopf, 2004).
74. C. W. Swaggert (3M Company) to Holtzman, December 1965, vault 850, box 11,
Holtzman Papers.
75. See Martin James, “Piet Mondrian: Art and Theory to 1917,” in Mondrian, Collected
Writings, 11-19, 393- 94 - Although credit is given in this book to both Holtzman and James
for translation of Mondrian’s writings, Holtzman did not read the requisite languages (he
noted in a letter to Mondrian’s brother Carel, January 21,1946 [vault 850, box 24, Holtzman
Papers] that he did not know Dutch and his “French was not very good”) so his role
presumably involved only the refinement of terminology rather than the fundamental
spadework of the translation process. In an interview with Ruth Gurin, January 11,1965,
17, Holtzman recalled of his conversations with Mondrian in Paris ini934-35: “He had
some English and I had some French so we were able to manage.” Transcript conveyed to
me by Holtzman in the 1970s.
76. James, statement dated August 29,1979, in Catalogue Raisonne, 2:407.
77. Holtzman, letter (draft) to Welsh, December 14,1979: “Following your kind advice,
to avoid confusion, I chose the statement handwritten, verso the photo, and I destroyed
the other” (vault 850, box 24, Holtzman Papers).
78. Robert Welsh Archive (0632), inv. nr. 98, NIAH. I am grateful to Wietse Coppes for
making this material available.
79.Ibid.
80. Welsh to Holtzman, November 23,1979. vault 850, box 24, Holtzman Papers. A
copy of the same letter is in the Robert Welsh Archive (0632), inv. nr. 98.
81. Holtzman to Welsh, December 14,1979, in the Robert Welsh Archive (0632), inv. nr.
313. This letter is not identical to the draft of the same date, cited above, n. 77.
82. An Italian translation of the essay appeared alongside black-and-white reproduc­
tions of all the Salon de Madame B drawings and a photograph of the 1970 Pace construc­
tion in Germano Celant, Ambiente/Arte: Dal Futurismo alia Body Art (Venice; Edizioni La
Biennale di Venezia, 1977), 40-44.
83. Holtzman was also on friendly terms with Robert L. Herbert, professor of art
history at Yale University, who advised my MA thesis and PhD dissertation, the for­
mer involving 1930s abstract art in New York and the latter devoted to De Stijl. During
252 Notes to Pages 101-105
the 1970s and early 1980s, Herbert was engaged in a publication project devoted to the
Societe Anonyme Collection in the Yale University Art Gallery, which included work by
Holtzman. On December 6,1976, Herbert and I together met with Holtzman to discuss his
own work as an artist and the documentary materials relating to Mondrian that were still
in his collection, many of which were subsequently acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library at Yale.
84. The caption mistakenly referred to “Wall Work #5” rather than "Wall Work #6”;
the west wall that was shown in the photograph was incorrectly identified as well.
85. John R. Lane, “Harry Holtzman,” in Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America,
1927-1944, ed. John R. Lane and Susan C. Larsen (Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie
Institute in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 175-77. The essays I wrote on Diller,
Glarner, and Mondrian were signed by me and included in this publication.
86. Nancy J. Troy, “To Be Continued: A Note on Some Recent Mondrians,” October 2y
(winter 1983): 75-80.
87. Holtzman’s later presentation of the “Wall Works” as a suite of eight individual
objects was in an exhibition at Carpenter Hochman Gallery entitled Piet Mondrian: The
Wall Works, 1943-44 (see fig. 2.15). Originating in New York (October-November 1984), the
show traveled to the gallery’s Dallas venue (December 1984-January 1985).
88. Janis to Holtzman, December 31,1984, vault 850, box 9, Holtzman Papers.
89. Holtzman, letter (draft) to Daniel [Abadie], n.d., vault 859, box 1, Holtzman Papers.
90. Harry Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian: The Man and His Work,” in Mondrian, Collected
Writings, 5. See also, Harry Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian’s Last Work,” Interior Design 55, no. 5
(May 1984): 320-25.
91. R[onny] C[ohen], “Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works,” Art News 84, no. 1 (January
1985): 144.
92. “Introduction,” Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works, 1943-44 (New York: Carpenter +
Hochman Gallery, 1984).
93.Ibid.
94. Holtzman first broached this idea in “L’atelier de New York,” trans. Jeanne
Bouniort, in lAtelier de Mondrian: Recherches et dessins, ed. Yve-Alain Bois (Paris: Macula,
1982), 87-92. He wrote (87): “The walls were arranged with pieces of colored cardboard
in red, yellow, blue or white, affixed by little nails. With the help of Fritz Glarner, I made
a precise tracing of these veritable mural compositions. One can very clearly distinguish
eight individual compositions [unites] that I was recently able to reconstitute, using the
original cardboard pieces, which I fortunately conserved.”
95. The floor plan that appeared in the Carpenter Hochman catalogue is identical
with the one in Mondrian, Collected Writings, opposite 325 (fig. 2.18 in the present book). In
1980, when Holtzman published a floor plan of Mondrian’s New York studio in “L’atelier
de New York” (87), there were no numbers identifying the location of individual wall
compositions. At that point, the “Wall Works” had not yet been created.
96. “In Paris in the early 1920s he began the practice of creating ‘wall works’ using
colored rectangles, linking paintings, furnishings, and environment into a continuous
totality.” “Carpenter +Hochman Gallery Opens with Mondrian Exhibition,” press release,
September 18,1984. vault 850, box 4, Holtzman Papers.
97. Holtzman, “Piet Mondrian: The Man and His Work,” 5.
98. See Matthias Fliigge, Robert Kudielka, and Angela Lammert, eds., Raum, Orte der
Kunst. (Berlin: Akademie der Kilnste; Nuremberg: Verlag fur moderne Kunst, 2007).
99. As early as 1991, the Gemeentemuseum was approached on behalf of the Holtzman
heirs by a German art gallery offering "Piet Mondrian: The Wall Works, 1943-1944,”
described as “a very extraordinary project.” Brigitte Remmen (Galerie Linssen, Cologne)
Notes to Pages 108-120 253
 to Rudi Fuchs (Gemeentemuseum director), December 4,1991, BNR 515, inv. nr. 665, Haags
Gemeentearchief, DSK/Haags Gemeentemuseum.
too. Jason Holtzman et al. v. Christie's, Inc., Supreme Court of the State of New
York, County of New York, filed February 26, 2010. iapps.courts.state.ny.us/iscroll/C_
PDF?CatID=569668&CID=6oo500-20io&FName=o. “Conversion” is a legal term for the
action of wrongfully dealing with goods in a manner inconsistent with the owner’s rights.
101. Hilary Richardson, e-mail to Michele Ciaccio, February 8, 2006. In another e-mail
message to Ciaccio (February 3,2006), Richardson stated, “All of the studio wall designs
Mondrian made with cardboard squares are Wallworks, a descriptive name given after
his death to the designs on his walls. They are Wallworks when on the wall and when re­
moved for preservation. They don’t take on a new life when placed on a panel (just a more
portable life).” My thanks to those at the Getty Research Institute who shared relevant
correspondence with Hilary Richardson, occasioned by the publication of my essay, “Piet
Mondrian’s Last Thoughts,” in Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work,
ed. Karen Painter and Thomas Crow (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 15-35.
102. Hilary Richardson, e-mail to Michelle Bonnice (Getty editor), February 13,2006.
103. Bonnice, e-mail to Nancy Troy and Julia Bloomfield (head of publications, Getty
Research Institute), February 23, 2006.
104. See Susan M. Bielstein, Permissions, a Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intel­
lectual Property (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
105. Jason Holtzman, e-mail to Nancy Troy, June 21,2007.
106. Nancy J. Troy, “The Significance of Piet Mondrian’s New York Studio and Its
Furnishings,” October 30,2007, unpublished statement provided to the Mondrian Trust/
Holtzman Estate, November 2007.
CHAPTER 3
1. Michael Auping, “Fields, Planes, Systems: Geometric Abstract Painting in America
since 1945,” in Abstraction-Geometry-Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting inAmerica
since 1945 (Buffalo: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1989), 16.
2. Ibid., 35.
3. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism
(New York: Praeger, 1970), 19.
4. Sidney Tillim, “What Happened to Geometry?” Arts 30, no. 9 (June 1959): 38-44. See
also Thomas B. Hess, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase. N.Y.: Viking, 1951,
107: “The American myth of sacrosanct originality (probably initiated by patent lawyers,
but today perpetuated by all retailers, especially art dealers) has made the possibility of
derivation more unmentionable than that of venereal disease.”
5. Virginia Pitts Rembert, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting” (PhD diss.,
Columbia University, 1970). See also Rembert’s book, Piet Mondrian in the USA: The Artist’s
Life and Work (n.p.: Parkstone Press, 2002).
6. Susan C. Larsen, “The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation
of Its Impact on American Art” (PhD diss.. Northwestern University, 1975).
7. See, for example, Post-MondrianAbstraction inAmerica (Chicago: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1973); John R. Lane and Susan C. Larsen, eds.. Abstract Painting and
Sculpture inAmerica, 1927-1944 (Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute; New York:
in association with Abrams Publishers, 1983); Progressive Geometric Abstraction inAmerica,
1934-1955: Selections from the Peter B. Fischer Collection (Clinton, NY: The Gallery, 1987);
Robert Knott, American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s: TheJ. Donald Nichols Collection
(Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
254 Notes to Pages 121-129
8. Nancy J. Troy, Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism inAmerica (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer­
sity Art Gallery, 1979).
9. Harry Cooper, “To Organize Painting,” in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, ed. Michael
R. Taylor (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 57-73.
10. Quoted from the second page of an undated addendum to a curriculum vitae of ca.
1965, vault 850, box 1, Holtzman Papers. At the end of another undated curriculum vitae
(ca. 1969), Holtzman noted, “For the most part, I have refused to exhibit during the last
twenty-five years, for complex personal philosophical reasons; sometimes works were
shown in various exhibitions taken from collections without consultation,” p. 5, vault 850,
box 8, Holtzman Papers.
11. The divorce from Muriel Eileen Holtzman was finalized on January 2 ,1945. See
Journal Entry, District Court of Montgomery County, Independence, Kansas. Copy, vault
856, box 1, Holtzman Papers.
12. McCormick’s firm had also handled Mondrian’s immigration, according to Rem­
bert, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting,” 94. Mondrian’s will was probated in
Surrogate Court, County of New York, March 31,1944, Copy, vault 856, box 1, Holtzman
Papers.
13. Rembert, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting,” iiiniii.
14. Jack Burnham, “Mondrian’s American Circle,”Arts Magazine, 48, no. 1 (September
1973): 36. Burnham continued, “If he has been overprotective with his legacy of Mondrian’s
writings and art work, he has nevertheless sought to place these in the best possible light.”
15. Rembert, Piet Mondrian in the USA, xxii.
16. My thanks to Richard Meyer for this insight.
17. Rembert, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting,” 96.
18. Robert Motherwell to Ive-Alain [sic] Bois, October 13,1980, in The Collected Writings
of Robert Motherwell, ed. Stephanie Terenzio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 239.
19. The earlier writings include Holtzman’s introduction to Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art
and Pure Plastic Art 1937 and Other Essays, 1941-1943, Documents of Modern Art, 2 (New
York: Wittenborn Schulz, 1945)>8, and “Piet Mondrian,” League Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1947):
4-8. Subsequent works include his introduction to Piet Mondrian, February 5-March 17,
1951 (New York: Sidney Janis Gallery, 1951); “Mondrian Problem,” review of Piet Mon­
drian, Life and Work, by Michel Seuphor, Art News 55, no. 2 (April 1957): 34-35,52, 54; Piet
Mondrian. A Portfolio of 10 Paintings, intro. Harry Holtzman (New Haven, CT: Ives-Sillman,
1967); preface to Two Mondrian Sketchbooks, 1912-1914, ed. Robert P. Welsh and J. M. Joosten
(Amsterdam: Meulenhoff International, 1969), 5.
20. Holtzman, interview with Ruth Gurin, January 11,1965, transcript (conveyed to me
by Holtzman in the 1970s), 22.
21. See Rembert, “Mondrian, America, and American Painting,” 50-51: “In 1936,
Holtzman had married the student friend who sent him a regular check while he was in
France [where he had gone to meet Mondrian in 1934]. She had some property and soon
inherited more, which he managed and turned into a sizable estate for the time. When
he was thrust from about $1,300 per year (standard pay on the Federal Art Project) to an
income of over $10,000, Holtzman said that the first thing he did was to write Mondrian.
He had decided that the best way to help the artist would be to pretend to buy his works,
sending a check every month until there was enough for a painting. Mondrian would pick
out a painting and send a photograph, but Holtzman would offer an excuse for not taking
it.” Elsewhere Holtzman recalled that after returning from Paris in 1935, followed by sev­
eral years of involvement in the WPA, “early in 1938, 1 left the project, having an opportu­
nity to make money through a family connection. I then began to send Piet a check every
month” (unpaginated spiral notebook, vault 850, box 24, Holzman Papers).
Notes to Pages 131-135