モンドリアン展に行った/Went to Mondrian exhibition
TOEFLが近いのに全然英語の勉強をしていないので英語で感想を書く。
Why Modrian?
Recently I've been reading books about the composition and color of modern paintings. It explains how artists struggled to find the best composition and color for the subject like flower, person, landscape and so on. "Broadway Boogie Woogie" by Piet Modrian was also mentioned in the book and it was somewhat different from the others because it is so abstract that it doesn't seem like it has a subject. It is just a pattern of squares. The book mentinoed that this painting is like Jazz. It not only has a systematic rhythm but also some unpredictable blocks, which makes it similar to the improvisation of Jazz. Looking at this picture, I was shocked by how expressive art is and I got curious about how Mondrian came up with this idea, which led me to this museum.
Details of the museum
I got to see three floors of the museum, which each had their own era. The first floor we saw was spotting to the early life of Modrian as an artist which he devoted his time on drawing in many different sytles. He tried realist landscapes, point painting, fauvism and cubism. Next, was the era which he spent his time on creating abstarct painting. During this period, Mondrian founded De Stijl, an art movement to advocate pure abstraction by geometric forms (primarily straight lines, squares and rectangles) and primary colors. One of his famous work, "Composition with red, blue and yellow" was exhibited here. Last, was a room with artworks of Mondrian's late years. Actually there were miscellaneous paintings here which had nothing to do with Mondrian. One of them was the "Sunflowers" by Van Gogh. It is owned by the Sompo Art Museum so I think you can also see it in the permanent exhibition too.
Postcards
I like postcards so everytime when I go to a museum, I buy a few of them in the gift shop. I buy them to cover my walls because that is my favorite method of decoration. Currently all these have accumulated to about 8 so one of my wall is mostly covered by minature paintings. I don't want to cover all of the walls in my room because sometimes I feel like I want to stare at my original white wall. So, I need to start saving buying postcards, at least to like one for each museum.
These are my newest addition to my postcard collection, I bought in the Modrian Museum. I especially like the one on the left. The title is "Composition in Oval with Color Planes". This work was made in 1913, which was a turning point to Modrian in the sense that it was the moment when the cubism of Picasso and Braque influenced him the most. If you look closely, you can see the word KUB on the lower right of the painting, which refers both to advertisement hoardings for the soup brand Kub, and to Kubism, Dutch for Cubism. A soft grey tonality infuses the whole with reminiscence of wintry Paris.
