Mondrian's Search for Geometric Purity: Creativity and Fixation

God geometrizes.

—attributed to Plato

Introduction

This essay derives from my larger interest in "Geometry and the Mind." That interest has arisen from a confluence between my clinical work as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist and my longstanding extra-clinical interests in literature and the arts. I begin the essay by tracing the course of my curiosity and by outlining a working hypothesis about geometry and the mind, emphasizing both conflictual and adaptive aspects of that relationship—geometry as a defense against disorder and geometry as an act of creation. The essay then moves to a detailed examination of the life and work of Piet Mondrian. I discuss elements of his cultural, artistic, and political milieu that help locate him among his artistic contemporaries—abstract geometric artists—but also help demarcate his distinctive personal and artistic characteristics in comparison with those contemporaries.¹ Part of that discussion involves an excursus on Platonic and Neo-Platonic influences in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century abstract art, including Mondrian's relation to these Platonic traditions. I argue that with this background before us, it is possible to discern more readily which elements of his life and work reflect the idiosyncratic conflictual areas that might have contributed, paradoxically, both to his creativity and to a constriction in his work. Mondrian's search for some transcendent, artistic, abstract purity involved a theory of male and female principles in art, with the female as the inferior and the main obstacle to attaining that transcendental purity.

Before concluding the essay, I discuss the limitations of what one can say psychoanalytically about the person Mondrian, and present reasons for these limitations. A reflection on the wide critical disparities in judgment of his work, both by art critics and by the general public, leads to the question: How do we define his fixed creative vision and the fixation in his work? I conclude with a resumé of what has been energizing and enlarging and what has been disappointing for me in the course of constructing this essay.

From Chaos To Geometry: Dreams of Measurement and Order

The following vignettes are representative of clinical encounters that have piqued my curiosity about the psychological meanings and uses of geometry.² I cite these to help frame the notion of geometry, mathematics, and measurement as potentially defensive, adaptive, and creative:

1. 1. A thirty-year-old man would rarely dream, and rarely let out any negative affects, especially anger. Whenever he did dream, the dream contained an element of expansion without limit, or some kind of threatened or actual explosion. The dream would also typically have an element of precise configuration, measurement or calculation. In a dream of the plot to assassinate Hitler, he saw a basement bunker with a square concrete table, with the bomb underneath, about to go off, but the table almost filled the room, leaving "exactly six inches between the walls and the edges of the table." A dream during the second trimester of his wife's (unexpected) pregnancy involved several measured spaces, e.g., a room in a restaurant, suddenly opening up to a huge unbounded space, losing its boundaries and becoming a vast (and scary) space. He then adds, "A field, you know, the length between the goalposts in football," immediately reestablishing boundary and measurement.

2. 2. A twenty-five year old economics graduate student with severe sexual anxieties early in treatment reports a dream: "I am in a movie theater, and the screen is a 'split screen'—on the left side is a mathematical formula, 'the equation of regression.' On the right is a pornographic movie. I don't know which one I am supposed to be watching."

3. 3. An obsessive male physician is beginning to experience unaccustomed perturbation in his inner life. He reports a dream that is "very different from my regular dreams." It turns out that this dream is very different in respect to the pictorial structure and frame of his dreams. His dreams are typically geometric and bounded, "like when you see a building partially demolished, and you see the outline of the rooms of...