Devotees of geometric abstraction this season would be hard put to find a
gallery exhibition more impressive than “Mondrian
and Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity”[1]
at PaceWildenstein.
Borrowing
important works from museum and private collections, the gallery
offered a tête-à-tête between the seminal modernist and a painter
known for his forbiddingly austere canvases. PaceWildenstein has
garnered a reputation for mounting museum-caliber shows matching
artists whose connection is, at times, tenuous. That commercial
considerations play a part in such pairings is understood. Hitching
Reinhardt, whose estate the gallery represents, to Mondrian is a
gambit designed to enhance the former’s stature. Still, perhaps a
specialized exhibition such as this one—which required an eye
sympathetic to an often difficult brand of abstraction—could only
be attempted by a gallery. If “Influence and Affinity” was not as
provocative as the recent coupling of Bonnard and Rothko, it was
first-rate nonetheless.

The question that arises is, What artist who has pursued
geometric abstraction doesn’t share an affinity with Piet Mondrian
(1872–1944)?
The genre itself all but stems from Mondrian, not to mention the fact
that he is arguably the greatest abstract painter,
geometric or otherwise, of
this century. The uncompromising nature of Mondrian’s vision has
inspired even those artists whose work diverges stylistically from
that of the Dutch master. (William Baziotes, that painter of cryptic
biomorphs, considered him a hero.) Yet the school of Mondrian was
never as influential as Cubism. Mondrian’s Spartan
aesthetic—with its dramatic reduction of pictorial elements—had a
finality to it