REMEMBER that Partridge Family bus? Totally Piet Mondrian. If you asked the sitcom creators why they did that, you wouldn’t get a clear answer. Cool and psychedelic, they figured at the time. Psychedelic? Yeah right. America has actually been Mondrianized for a long time. This is partly because Piet eventually came to live in New York. He deleted an A from his name, back when he was still in Paris, and Mondrian is easy to pronounce for Americans.
Mondrians are popular paintings in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they also sell Mondrian pens. There are Mondrian Hotels in Miami and West Hollywood. Some rooms have an entire Delft blue wall. In Chicago there’s a fashion store with a Mondrian exterior, Dallas has a Mondrian high-rise apartment building, and Nike sells Mondrian tennis shoes. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show features a Mondrian studio decor.
UNFORTUNATELY, he lived only briefly in the States to where he fled, on the run from World War II. He had been here for barely three years, with the war still raging overseas, when pneumonia killed Piet. But it was long enough for him to capture people’s tastes by storm – they wanted something new and different already, something that was not Depression and war. Bright red-white-blue-yellow art, what with those tight rectangles, squares, and straight black lines. Gruff and gray be gone, away with poverty. Unusual art, now hugely appreciated all over America. The longer you look at it, the happier it makes you feel.
Born in Amersfoort, buried in New Amersfoort. That’s what that part of Brooklyn used to be called, memories of which you can still see: there’s an Amersfort Place and Amersfort Park, both nearby, and an Amersfort elementary school. Cypress Hills Cemetery is a bit of a tragic place, because his grave is essentially a small stone in an unkempt row of stones, disorderly, discolored. Not remotely resembling Piet’s tight schemes, but since at the end of the day we will all be dust to dust, Piet probably doesn’t care. Besides, Mae West rests close by, which makes up for it a good bit.
IT IS now called Flatlands there, the name that has replaced New Amersfoort, founded and built up by the Dutch, with the solid Dutch names of those days: Van Couwenhoven, Hudde, Stoothoff, Wyckhoff, Van Nuys. The men were told from Manhattan to help build a decent church there on Long Island, and they did. Together they paid the minister’s wage, and sure enough, there’s still a Dutch Reformed church there today. Moreover, truth be told, this is a part of Brooklyn that stands out by its network of almost ramrod straight streets and roads, all at tight angles or parallels, as far as the eye sees. Call in a painter and tell them to color it in, lots of red, white, blue and yellow, and you have your own Pietwijk.
He might have actually liked that.
