The image reflects on its own possibility, its own tenuous meaning, in relation to others like it. No wonder I found at last that Mondrian was happily engaged in breaking symmetry. A series permits unending variation. It does not abolish differences. Its formalist drive even highlights them, because subject becomes so bound up in its execution.
Diversity evokes a life in which games take on the psychological weight of work.
Appropriately enough, Mondrian's last studio, reproduced in the museum, stood right around the corner from what is now F. A. O. Schwartz. Little kids in a toy store are not married either. If this art cannot, I am afraid, exactly be sexy, at least it can play fast and loose. The show taught me to see Mondrian as Monet's successor and Kandinsky's contemporary. I think that brilliant insight accounts for the exhibition's few biases as well.