Art history is among my greatest interests and ever since I began cultivating that interest, the Louvre remained the great art museum I had yet to visit.

Throughout the years, I became increasingly aware of the content of the Louvre’s rich collections until my geographical proximity and stylistic interests made my continuing failure to visit frankly ridiculous.

Now that I have finally made that pilgrimage I must confess that, of all the art gallery experiences I have had to date, this was certainly the least enjoyable.

The Louvre is France’s biggest attraction and counts more visitors per year than any other art museum in the world. This popularity is, I am forced to reflect, precisely the problem.

For when I think of the world’s most visited art museum in the world’s most visited city, the Louvre experience is less an exercise in art appreciation and more a rite of passage. Pilgrimage indeed.

Art should remain for everyone: it is the expression of humanity communicating with itself. Yet I wonder how many of those bored kids and Chinese tour groups are really here to absorb the art, how many of them are actually tuning in.

This is a morning like any other: there’s a big scrum surrounding La Joconde (the famous Mona Lisa). Signage has guided the paying customers here, all the way from the entrance. The flow of traffic suggests that for many of them, the enigmatic smile was their first stop.

And in the jostle of elbows and knees, perhaps less than half are looking at Leonardo’s painting behind its thick protective screen. Many of them are taking photos of it, or more precisely, taking of photos of themselves in front of it.

Posing for the camera, they have turned their backs on the masterpiece.

Manuscript illustrations

The hordes were mercifully less interested in the extraordinary collection of medieval paintings and an agreeably low-lit temporary exhibition of manuscript illustrations featuring works by Jean Fouquet and other masters.

I count myself fortunate to have enjoyed this small but very complete experience and indeed we had planned the timing of our visit to include it.

Recently, I visited Paris. The main reason for this visit was to attend the Mondrian / De Stijl exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This article provides some biographical information and artistic discussion, mainly on Mondrian himself.

Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort near Utrecht and raised in a strict Protestant family. He appears to have led a strongly self-possessed, almost ascetic life, beginning his career as a teacher before devoting himself full-time to painting.

Early years

Mondrian’s early work contains references to various artistic movements of the time, notably impressionism and cubism. Some of his experiments were brief: the brighter, complementary colours associated with fauvism appear in only a few works, whilst a muted palette dominates the later part of his representational period.

Not long after his move to Paris in 1911, Mondrian’s paintings seemed literally to disintegrate. His subtle economy of colour and shade grew narrower and flatter, while his furrowed fields and dense networks of tree branches morphed into grids. Mondrian progressed toward ever more basic, spiritual expressions of balance and harmony.

The theory behind this process of refinement, purification and reliance on instinct came to be known as neoplasticism and Mondrian expounded it through the essays he published in De Stijl, the epoymous journal of a movement of which Mondrian was a founding member.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Unexpected opportunities

During a visit home, the outbreak of war and the neutrality of the Netherlands effectively marooned Mondrian in his native country. Thus seeking an opportunity to maintain the trajectory of his artistic development, Mondrian joined an artists’ colony where he first encountered the painters Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg.

Van der Leck’s current approach, in which he limited his palette to primary colours, was incorporated as yet another step on Mondrian’s path to increased abstraction. Meanwhile van Doesburg, ten years the junior of Mondrian, was an energetic and enthusiastic colleague, the very embodiment of the twice-bright candle.

If Mondrian’s theoretical and philosophical studies formed the basis of De Stijl’s ideological dialogue, much of the movement’s momentum and proliferation came from van Doesburg, who drew in new contributors from the fields of spatial design.

After the war Mondrian returned to Paris, leaving behind his fellow De Stijl members. Van Doesburg did not remain long in the Netherlands, decamping to the Bauhaus at Weimar – where his presence and influence would be considerable – and developing increasingly international connections. De Stijl would later lean further towards the spatial design aspects of van Doesburg’s later contemporaries, in particular through the activities of Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud.

The harmony of the grid

With the key periods of Mondrian’s artistic development having their mise-en-scène in his adopted city, it is perhaps surprising that Paris has never before mounted a proper retrospective on Mondrian’s career.

Nevertheless, it will be remembered that the twentieth century was characterised by mechanisation with internationalisation as its corollary. The New World equalled and then surpassed the economic hegemony of Europe and, reflecting this redistribution of wealth, art collections were scattered across the world. To bring together the oeuvre of Mondrian in Paris, given his status as a prominent artist of that century, is a considerable feat.

And Mondrian’s reputation was sealed with the advent of the 1920s. Having once more settled in Paris, he now focused intensely on his own work, arriving at the period of his career for which he is best known. The extent of abstraction in his paintings reached its peak between 1921 and about 1927, when he sought out ever more minimalist, instinctive expressions of harmony on canvas. It was in the middle of this same period that Mondrian definitively broke with De Stijl, accelerating the pursuit of his own development.

The fruits of Mondrian’s labours at this time consist of his famous combinations of thick black lines and red, blue, yellow and occasionally black rectangles on a field of white or sometimes bluish grey.

Viewing a Mondrian work from this period can be a profound experience. If we take the elements required to achieve an instinctive visual balance and we pare them down to the absolute minimum required to represent the effect to ourselves, a Mondrian work might be the result. Moreover, given the artist’s ongoing quest for the expression of harmony, the detection of some hint of the Oriental in the work is not unexpected.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lines and the colours are harmonious in terms of both positive and negative space, resonating as mutually exclusive elements yet effectively combined as a whole proposition, when together they achieve a delicate balance.

In this way, Mondrian still engages with the age-old idea concern of artistic composition. What separates him from others is that he has successfully reduced the harmonious composition to its most basic ingredients. It is both an achievement and a preoccupation that artists would continue to develop and investigate throughout the twentieth century.

In a state of constant experimentation, Mondrian now even applied his aesthetic of harmony to his living and working space. Contemporary photographs show the artist’s sparse yet bright decoration, with a selection of works hanging from the walls that chart the progression from his early career right up to his present. Happily, the curators of the Paris exhibition reconstructed the artist’s space within the exhibition space, which gave a clear impression of Mondrian’s environment.

Final departures

The De Stijl movement could no longer survive without the central figure of van Doesburg who died in 1931, though the principles lived on, longest of all in the field of architecture where Oud and Rietveld received important post-war commissions and whose ideas influenced others including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mondrian meanwhile had left Paris by 1938 and after a two-year sojourn in London, he moved to New York where he would live and work until his death. It was in New York that Mondrian’s approach to art appears significantly to have altered, indeed to have loosened up.

I confess that I tend to view this final period of his rather sentimentally. Certainly, anecdotal evidence suggests that Mondrian was much taken with the energy of the great Gotham – doubtless including finding much in common with its grid system – and with jazz records, of which he was a noted admirer and which he liked to play from a gramophone he had installed in his studio.

Now the black lines proliferate, then change colour and are even partly obscured by bits of coloured tape. Just before the end of his life, Mondrian had begun in fact to use the walls of his living space as a kind of experimental canvas.

Lasting influences

The influence of Mondrian and De Stijl has been profound, far outgrowing the period of activity, and notable in cultural expressions including fashion, typography, computer programming and several generations of designers, including myself.

Probably my first encounter with Mondrian and De Stijl came through cycling. There was of course Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire cycling team, but the French cycling equipment company Look had adapted a “De Stijl” treatment of primary colours for its logo and I owned a pair of Look cycling shoes. My favourite cycling team was Panasonic-Sportlife, whose kit used the same colours minus the white background.

Much later, I found a Mondrianesque reductivist approach useful to my work in information design. Alloying Mondrian’s sense of instinctual harmony to a fairly rigorous self-interrogatory process that developed out of my attendance at a usability course in 2005, I learned to develop and test my decisionmaking in visual design and information architecture.

A chill wind blows along the Danube as we cross the Nibelungenbrücke that joins the suburb of Urfahr with the centre of Linz. On the far bank is a boxy glass building that’s home to Ars Electronica.

Even after our visit, we’re not sure what Ars Electronica is actually supposed to be. Museum, exhibition space, annual festival. It’s all three and yet none really defines the experience. Even the common denominator – electronics – is not of itself represented in either taxonomic or historical form. Better then to call it “applied electronics”.

A French television programme I happened to see a few days later during a bit of hotel TV channel flicking mentioned that 9% of 3-4 year olds could tie their shoelaces, whereas 19% of them could operate an iPad.

Covering elements of robotics, data representation and environmental concerns, Ars Electronica seems to be for kids like these, or it will be in a few years’ time when they can actually read. The museum – or whatever it is – seems to be for people without need of a proper context.

Show as slideshow

Ars Electronica

Slightly bewildering technology exhibition in the Austrian city of Linz.

Dürer’s Young Hare (1502)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Albertina consists of a modern reception space, behind which the visitor finds a succession of fondant-fancy chambers complete with plush furniture and stove heaters à l’époque.

Today the corridors are traipsed by a paying public and the rugs are getting rather dirty.

Some of the gilded old ladies look like they might be here to reconnect with something familiar. For J and I, it’s rather the collection of drawings and temporary exhibitions of Roy Lichtenstein and the Blaue Reiter movement, whose number contained Kandinsky, Macke and Klee.

The drawings collection features several renowned artists. During our visit, J pointed out to me that drawings are a sort of artistic leveller. Though we are perhaps most familiar with paintings produced according to the particularities of the artists and their times, their drawing output often gives us a more intimate sense of their individual skill.

I have always found myself unable, for example, to find much sympathy with Rubens’ work, though his reputation speaks for itself. However one of his drawings on display at the Albertina I found completely arresting, free as it was of all the heavy-brushed hubris I see in his oil paintings.

Albrecht Dürer’s works from nature – particularly his Young Hare and the incredible Piece of Turf – must surely rank among the greatest examples of fine draftsmanship known today.

From the Blaue Reiter exhibit, the standout for us was the mysterious Alfred Kubin, whose post-apocalyptic, expressionistic work stood out from the bright swash of his contemporaries.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Having visited Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds in Brussels back in October 2008, we decided to check out his latest touring exhibition of plastinated animals at the Naturhistorisches Museum.

Many of the display techniques were already familiar to us from the human exhibits we’d seen on that previous occasion. Their delicate application this time to fish, reptiles and animals was fascinating.

As usual though, von Hagens’ sense of theatre meant that the biggest impressions were saved until last, when we could only imagine how he and his team had managed to produce two enormous displays from the bodies of a whale and an elephant.

Outside of the rooms occupied by von Hagens’ works, the Naturhistorisches Museum is the sort of place one could never visit in a single day. Rather like the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, it’s full of glass cabinets and drawers. The crystal and mineral collection alone is quite extraordinary.

Bruegel’s The Peasant Wedding (1567)

One half of Emperor Franz-Joseph’s huge museum complex on the Maria-Theresienplatz in Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is one of the world’s most important art collections.

In addition to the artworks, the museum also features artifacts from several global civilisations. Our visit concentrated on the main palace since our time was limited.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum houses the world’s largest collection of paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and this was one of the attractions for us. Dürer and Rembrandt are also particularly well represented here. Sadly though, Arcimboldo’s bizarre fruit-and-veg composite portraits appear to have been on loan elsewhere.

Show as slideshow

Kunsthistorisches Museum

Vienna's foremost art and archaeological collection and one of the world's finest.

Virgin of the Dry Tree – Petrus Christus / © Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

There’s something different and rather appealing about this art museum.

I ask myself: is it because the Thyssen-Bornemisza family has made its large private collection accessible to the public? Or could it be the unusually broad range of works on view?

These are both important facts, but in reality what I like best is the colour of the walls: a warm, sympathetic tone somewhere between pink gypsum and smoked salmon, and it shows off the paintings beautifully.

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is one of Madrid’s three great art musea, along with the Prado and the Reina Sofia. Rather than being reflective of the tastes of the Spanish royal family or dedicated to more modern trends, this collection spans every great period of picture art from byzantine-influenced, pre-Renaissance Italian works right up to hyperrealism and pop.

Having visited not a few great European galleries in the last decade, some of the artists represented here seem almost like old acquaintances: Uccello, Petrus Christus, Baldung Grien, Jan van Eyck, the Bellini brothers, Mondrian, Bonnard and Hopper to name but a very few.

Outer doors of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Prado is one of the world’s great art musea, with almost 8,000 paintings barely 10% of which are exhibited publicly within its impressive buildings.

Much of the collection originates from the Spanish royal family, whose acquisitions throughout the centuries reflect the formidable influence and particular tastes of the monarchs.

The presence of El Greco, Rubens, Velasquez and Goya dominates the halls here, with their large format works occupying considerable wall space.

The austere king Felipe II (1527-1598), who presided over the highpoint of Spanish empire, was a voracious collector of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and today the Prado has the largest Bosch collection in the world, including the painter’s best known work The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-4).

Not being generally interested in 17th and 18th century art – a period of which the Prado collection has many works – I didn’t enjoy this visit quite so much as the Thyssen-Bornemisza. However, the highlights did Romanesque chapel frescoes, an impressive Flemish turnout and a room almost completely full of Bosch paintings.

The Reina Sofia is not immediately obvious to those who approach it from the Atocha metro station at Plaza Carlos V. The complex is set back slightly from the boulevard and observant visitors will note how at distance it seems to peek out from beyond the façade of older buildings, playing a sort of edificial hide-and-seek.

With its hiding place is finally found out, the complex turns out to be both modern and enormous, with a monumental entrance court containing a tall Lichtenstein sculpture.

From this aspect, the museum’s latest development makes even the permanent exhibits feel temporary. The whitewashed displays that enfold visitors tend to suggest that a shopfitting is happening behind, with the actual works of art an advertisement for greater things to come, opening soon.

The Reina Sofia is most famous for a brave and fairly recent effort to acknowledge Spain’s difficult history, now firmly contained behind the fence of last century.

Films are shown of young men joining up for the Republican cause, wiry, smiling bashful and uncertain of how to handle their ageing Lee Enfield rifles. Then the bombings and the barricades. Then the infantry fighting across dry plains, all about which we already know from a single Robert Capa photograph.

The chief witness of this painful testimony is Picasso’s Guernica, surrounded by tourists who form a wide semicircle more or less consciously around the massive work. The jumble of curves and straight lines represents chaos, suffering, agony and anguish.

I have always found it hard to connect with Picasso’s ideas. Here, I’m unable to think myself into the horror, so I try to summon instead my memories of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a prose of disappointment stung by the sudden loss of fragile ideals.

Eventually I realise that my lack of empathy has less to do with Guernica than the setting in which it hangs: a tall, bright and hopeful space full of people, each of whom can expect some share of the future.

Byzantine decline and Ottoman rule spread a cloak over the landscape of old Greece, silencing it while the world continued to revolve busily elsewhere. Living memory has nothing much to say about the stones, white spots all over the sage green hillsides.

Certainly, they were hewn from some other sage green hillside and carved with the figures and symbols of some other culture. A centuries-long, slow motion explosion scattered them all over, until they became a grand puzzle that patiently awaits rediscovery and ultimately, a solution.

In the nineteenth century some adventurous Germans, rambling far off the usual beaten Classical trails, set about that grand puzzle. They cobbled together a collection of trial-and-error tools and techniques and in so doing they invented modern archaeology.

The Great Altar of Pergamon

The puzzle has been pieced together in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. A colossal feat worthy of the Gods, the Great Altar of Pergamon needs to be rearranged a little on occasion. Perfection is a German imperative, of course.

Pergamon was famed far and wide for its singular collection of texts. Plutarch reports that around 200,000 volumes were collected there, destined for Alexandria as a wedding present from Marcus Antonius to his bride Cleopatra.

The Egyptian queen’s gain was posterity’s loss, however, since the library of Alexandia famously burned down some time later.

The Altar, which appears to have been intended as a place for burnt sacrifices, depicts the Battle of the Gods, featuring all the main players.

Museums within a museum

In addition to impressive collections of Greek artifacts, the building also houses two enormous gates, that of the market in ancient Miletus and the other of Ishtar, from ancient Babylon, whose walls collectively constitute one of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

In the floor above the Ishtar Gate can be found an impressive collection of Islamic art and the famous Mshatta Façade, part of an Ummayad building complex. This façade dates from the eighth century, around the same time that the first Caliphs of Córdoba ruled the region of Al-Andalus.

Ancient remains to go

A visit to the Pergamonmuseum raises in my mind the issue of what has been called Elginism, namely the illegal removal of historical artefacts from their original location, or ‘cultural vandalism’ for short.

Of course, there are important differences between the Pergamon exhibits – the Great Altar, Ishtar’s Gate, the Market Gate of Miletus and the Mshatta Façade – and the Elgin Marbles, from which the term above derives. For each of the examples in the Pergamonmuseum, permission was sought and granted.

And without the painstaking work of historians and archaeologists, the Pergamon exhibits might never have been restored and would surely have deteriorated further outdoors.

That said, we will likely never see again the Pergamon exhibits in their original surroundings, nor will those whose cultural heritage has now been lost to a foreign museum. They can stand on their sage green hillsides today, but there’s nothing left to see.