The Catalogue Raisonne Part 2
Posted by: Craig Bunch
Having learned from two of my librarian friends that they had read (unprompted by me) and approved of my July 19, 2009, Points of Reference post “The Catalogue Raisonné,” I have been inspired to continue the theme.
I announced my plan at the end of that post to return to the Houston Public Library’s central branch and examine Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné for the express purpose of seeing whether ”The Dilemma of Piet Mondrian,” a painting by Mr. Otis (pseudonym and painterly alter ego of the late journalist and popular historian Stewart Holbrook) was based on one of Mondrian’s actual paintings. “The Dilemma of Piet Mondrian” shows a very stylized Mondrian, complete with beret, scaling the grids of a Mondrian-like canvas composed of quadrilaterals of primary colors adjacent to black grids over a white background. I knew in my heart that the stylized Mr. Mondrian was “pure Mr. Otis,” but I wanted to know about the background. A bit disappointingly, but rather definitively, I determined that the Mondrian-like background was pure Mr. Otis as well. “Rather definitively”? As I suggested in the July 19 post, a good catalogue raisonné is the best hope we have of determining which are the genuine, known works of a particular artist. But new information inevitably comes to light.
In the hour or so it took to flip through virtually every page, I was blown away by the technical ability and tremendous range of an artist I had known previously only for what what seemed to be variations on his “signature” style. But in addition Mondrian painted accomplished still lives, landscapes, portraits, and studies of single flowers. The first volume of Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné in fact covers only the naturalistic works until early 1911. Mondrian (1872-1944) was born in The Netherlands and lived most of his life there and in Paris, and from 1938 in London or New York. He was buried in Brooklyn. (Thanks to Wikipedia for information in the last two sentences. I notice that the Mondrian entry was last updated 2 days ago.) An 1891 painting of a dead hare shows him to be (at least in small reproduction) very much the heir of the 17th century Dutch masters. The second volume of the boxed set includes the works from 1911 to 1944, both purely naturalistic and purely abstract, as well as transitional styles including cubism.
Thanks to Robert P. Welsh, Joop J. Joosten, and Henk Scheepmaker for introducing me in these volumes to many sides of an artist I thought I knew better than I did. Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné was translated into English by Jacques Bosser and published by Harry N. Abrams in 1998. I intend to spend many more hours studying it. And I will end with a plea, seconded by my librarian friend in Dallas, to keep those catalogues raisonné coming, both into print and into libraries.
