The Classic Mondrian in Neo-Calvinist View: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2017

A fresh look at Mondrian by a renowned art historian. In this study, Joseph Masheck discards what has often been taken as a spiritualistic, if not occult, view of Mondrian's art, proposing instead a parallel between the equilibrium found in his paintings and contemporary Dutch theology of “justification.” The artist's Calvinist Christianity is considered in respect to the balanced asymmetry of his “classic” phase of the 1920s and 1930s by adducing telling resemblances to the writings of a neglected but important Dutch theologian of the Neo-Calvinist movement. Finally, the author follows Mondrian's classic phase into the 1930s and beyond, in this extraordinary and inspiring reassessment. This lecture came to inspire the broader survey of Faith in Art: Religion, Aesthetics, and Early Abstraction (2023).

Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland and the University of Edinburgh, 2018

ISBN: 978 1 911054 28 3