Art

The story begins in 1945, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art organized a memorial exhibition of the Dutch painter’s work. The appropriation of fine art as a foil for the presentation of fashion was a familiar feature of women’s magazines, but it is surprising to find the juxtaposition of fashion with Piet Mondrian’s rigorously abstract, neoplastic style in the pages of the respected journal Art News. Mondrian’s rigor, purity, and distance from any association with naturalism, decoration, or forms of bodily expression would seem to place him and his art beyond the reach of fashion. Far from denigrating fashion as a means of interrogating fine art, the case of Mondrian demonstrates that fashion prods historians of modernist painting to think differently, and perhaps more imaginatively, about how to approach their objects of study.