Mondrian: Flowers is an album of some fifty-odd images of flowers—single stems mostly, plus a few bouquets—that the inven tor of Neoplastic painting executed both before and for a while after he began his more than twenty years of total abstraction. It marks the first gathering of these flower images, which Mondrian never showed in public and which, indeed, were done, as he said, to earn the money that his abstract paintings could not. Into the essay which ac companies the pictures, the poet David Shapiro, who conceived the collection, ad mits this paraphrase of a Mondrian letter of 1921: “Mondrian tells a friend that he has rendered commissions for flowers ‘(natural istic)’ for 100 francs, and that if this kind of success continues he will stop painting!” This would suggest that Mondrian dismissed these works. Shapiro’s essay, however, is an attempt to give a special, even a primary place to these flowers in Mondrian’s oeuvre. They are the linchpin of Shapiro’s argument for Mondrian the “libidinous poet.”
The virtues and faults of this elegantly turned essay lie closely entwined. Shapiro has the artist’s curiosity about the great artist, all of him; his desire to see Mondrian whole is sympathetic. Even if you don’t accept Shapiro’s premise that “no one who knows [the flowers] is not entranced by them” (and I don’t: I think they are, for the most part, pretty bad painting), you might be able to ac cept his interest in them as an interest in