Mondrian & Metzarim

Photo: Nico Perez.

Once in an art history class, we were learning about the influential 20th-century Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. A founder of the De Stijl movement, Mondrian is best known for his ubiquitous paintings in which black lines cut across white stretches of canvas at right angles. These grid-like creations often encase bold rectangular accents in red, yellow, and blue.

I can appreciate the timeless style of these artworks. Mondrian’s paintings have influenced everything from fashion to architecture and glassware.

I wouldn’t say, however, that I have always understood Mondrian. During the class, I made the mistake of voicing my confusion to the graduate teaching assistant.

“I don’t get Mondrian,” I told her.

“Well, I do,” she replied.

Then there was a silence. As with other ludicrous moments during my stint in art history, and there were many, I wondered if I was being secretly filmed. Wasn’t it, like, her job to help me?

Modern art often evokes intense curiosity, yet the culture surrounding it tends to subtly discourage questioning. If you have to ask, then you must not belong. The people who feel excluded tend to then loudly denigrate this type of artwork writ large, and they tell others to do the same. There is a communication breakdown.

Recently I encountered Piet Mondrian again, thanks in part to the exhibition “Ever Further,” about Mondrian’s work and philosophy, now on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Mondrian has kept me wondering, and I decided to explore his work again, although sadly without my beloved teaching assistant.

Scholars and art-history enthusiasts are still trying to get their arms around Mondrian’s ideas. The best help I found came from British abstract painter Bridget Riley, who has engaged extensively with Mondrian’s work.

Mondrian’s De Stijl movement embraced something called “neoplasticism.” Like so many jargon-y art history terms (my personal favorite is definitely “picture plane”), the word somehow makes me roll my eyes and feel inadequate, all at the same time. Bridget Riley understands that. Noting that “Plastic is a word which causes great confusion,” she explains that when Mondrian uses it, “He refers to a form of making which lays a strong emphasis on construction; to put something with and against something.”

With Mondrian, we are talking about the pressures of creating art. It’s sort of like architecture, she explains. While a finished building has made the details of its construction invisible, Mondrian’s contribution is that, done right, “Painting could not only reveal how it was built—how it, too, dealt with tensions, pressures and weights—but also that these ‘plastic’ relationships could become expressive in themselves.” In painting, “There are weights, pressures, tensions, all kinds of conflicting forces, and it is Mondrian’s great achievement that he tackled these head on.” Now we are finally getting somewhere.

Life often seems to follow a pattern: construction, destruction, new construction, and so forth. We live inside various constraints and structures until we outgrow them and begin straining against them. We then break through those old constraints. For a while afterwards, we are in a wilderness of sorts as we encounter a new and more expansive reality. It’s only a matter of time, however, until we begin building structures that respond to our new situation.

With Passover approaching, I am thinking about this model quite a bit. The Jewish people escaped from their old constraints of slavery in Egypt, then they wandered in the wilderness, and during that time they received the Torah, a new and novel structure for living.

What is less commonly known is the role of coercion in this story. The Jewish people were meant to be slaves for a much longer period until God cut short their “sentence” early. Their departure from Egypt had to happen quickly—markers of the holiday commemorate the hurried nature of their flight. Finally, it is said that the Jews were actually coerced by God into receiving the Torah.

We often have to be forced out of old structures and into new ones before we feel ready—otherwise we’d never do it. When it’s time, it’s time.

In Hebrew, Egypt—the land of oppression—is called “Mitzrayim.” “Mitzrayim” is a play on “metzarim,” a word that means “narrow places” or “oppression.” When I look at Mondrian’s paintings, I see metzarim. I see narrow places and constraints. Bright, bold primary colors are being boxed in by the metzarim, if you will, of thick black lines.

On Passover it is customary to consider how we’d like to be more free in the coming year. What is currently oppressing us? How can we achieve freedom? We are meant to experience every Passover as if we have been personally saved from the constraints of Mitzrayim.

I’m not trying to sound provocative. Yet with Mondrian in the picture—sorry, picture plane—this year I am more curious about the narrow places, the metzarim. I wonder if it might be useful to ask what the narrow places in our lives have done for us during the times when we have been constrained by them. If metzarim can create art like Mondrian’s, then maybe they sometimes have a positive purpose in our lives.

As someone pointed out to me, the Jewish people’s time in Egypt was deeply foundational to our collective identity as a group. Think of the times when you’ve been in a really hard situation. You probably formed close, lasting bonds with certain individuals who shared that experience with you. Even if the experience was terribly difficult, it probably also served as a crucible.

Sometimes people cannot escape the comfortable and familiar pain of their metzarim. I was reminded recently that it is believed that only one-fifth of the Jewish people actually left Egypt. The rest stayed behind. Even for those who left, nostalgia for Egypt crept up while they were faced with the uncertainty of the wilderness.

It takes a tremendous amount of courage to break out of old constraints—whatever they may be—and decide to live our lives in new ways. That process often involves the “small-t trauma” of rocky, challenging transition periods. You experience the wild sensations of freedom in unchartered waters, and then you must start mapping out what your next chapter will look like.

It can take extraordinary forces and events to push you out of your comfort zone. I notice that people often advise others: “Jump before you’re ready.” You’ll figure out the new scaffolding, the new supporting structures and details, later. Taking that first leap is the hardest and most necessary thing.

In my own life, I have recently begun doing more writing in my own name. I have also started my own business assisting clients with their own writing and other creative pursuits.

This era has gifted me with an unprecedented sense of creative freedom. Paradoxically, however, this freedom has come with a tremendous number of new and important constraints, new metzarim. As anyone starting a venture knows, you must take on many temporary restrictions in the name of long-term freedom.

I was once told that in the Torah, one of the letters marks a spot where Pharaoh, chasing the Jews into the Red Sea, was up to his neck in water, so much so that he was gurgling instead of speaking. Not to compare myself with Pharaoh, but starting a new venture has given me that same drowning feeling.

A client in STEM recently taught me the term “forcing function.” In science or engineering, a forcing function is a mechanism that steers you into a certain way of doing things in order to improve your product. A forcing function can also steer you away from something, similarly for your own good. I have encountered many forcing functions in my career. At the time they felt like unfair constraints. Looking back, I think they were helping me. Forcing functions, like the black lines of Mondrian’s paintings, maneuver us out of situations that could otherwise swallow us.

For the last several years, work has taken up most of my life. That isn’t to say I haven’t had fun, or I haven’t had new experiences. I have, however, spent most of my time and energy building and constructing new versions of my career. The changes have been fast, at times faster than I felt I could handle. The alacrity of these transformations has been good for me, though—I don’t have time to overthink them.

It’s not accurate to say that I am suffering or in pain right now. What I actually feel is pressure. There is a force of thrumming, continuous pressure moving through me, all of the time. I am the facilitator of the changes—I can monitor and guide them somewhat—but these changes feel as if they are happening mostly on their own and at their own pace. So I let them. When that boulder moves, I think you owe it to yourself to get out of your own way and let that process happen, even if it scares you.

We can only really define the chapters of our lives after they end. It’s a lot easier to say “Yes, that belonged to X era of my life,” after that chapter has concluded. I do sense that this period is finally slowing down now, though. Most of this new structure—for both my writing and my business—feels intact now. The federal filing deadline for U.S. taxes actually falls during Passover this year. Geulah, baby.

Metzarim force you forward in certain areas, while deftly guiding you completely clear of others. Mondrian’s paintings are noted for their seeming imbalances: Some color blocks are very large, while others are very small. Their placement sometimes seems confusing.

I feel that forceful sense of imbalance myself. My career “box” is a lot bigger than any other area of my life right now. While metzarim have forced me into a constant confrontation with my career, I haven’t always had the energy to build or maintain other structures.

Certain people in New York City who didn’t know me before this chapter seem to see that same lopsided canvas when they look at me. Part of me is amused and even flattered to be so mis-cast.

When you are bounded on all sides by metzarim, you are in a penalty box of sorts. The penalty box is not going to hurt you, but it does give you some needed separation from areas of your life where you used to enjoy more freedom. You start to recall moments when you could have used that freedom in more responsible ways. While sitting on the sidelines, you are forced to watch bold, colorful action take place elsewhere, in other people’s lives. You promise yourself that you’ll play the game a little bit better next time, if they ever let you back on the ice.

Walking on the streets of New York City, I recently ran into a character from what is now a long-distant chapter of my life. You could call it a Jackson Pollock era. I realized in a flash how much I had changed since that time. Sometimes metzarim save you from yourself.

In a video for Sotheby’s, Bridget Riley emphasizes the intense discipline of Mondrian the artist. Metzarim seem to go away when discipline is no longer needed, when you have fully integrated your new systems and constraints. It’s a time of spiritual refinement.

Whether you “get” Mondrian or not, these paintings have style. They represent a moment in time—an iconic and ubiquitous moment, but a moment nonetheless, and one that eventually passed. Mondrian permanently influenced the art world with these paintings. These works were disruptors—they changed the way we all see and conceive of art forever. Sometimes we need these short, meaningful shots of extreme disturbance to alter the way we see and do things going forward. It doesn’t mean that all moments have to be this charged, this energetically laden. Nobody wants to exclusively experience Mondrian-style art. Mondrian’s paintings, it could be said, were forcing functions.

The Exodus was a huge, dramatic, complex event with many stages. Spiritually, I believe that events like these can and do—and did—happen. At other times in life, however, metzarim don’t always have to let us out so dramatically. Sometimes they release us as smoothly and quietly as paint bleeding off the edge of a picture. Shoot, I meant picture plane. In those moments, it is a wonderful feeling when metzarim finally release you from their grip.

Mondrian was very interested in spirituality. I was disappointed that the wall text of the Guggenheim exhibition seemingly suggested that viewers find a way to appreciate the art without accessing those concepts in real detail.

Then again, here’s what real detail sounds like, from scholar Charmion von Wiegand: “Faced with the visible results of a more abstract conception of reality, Mondrian came to terms with it. The new elements become suddenly coordinated into a severe unit of organization that assumes the precision of exact mathematical formulae. The static balance is forsaken for an equilibrium of unequal but equivalent oppositions of line.” I will pay you $20 if you can tell me what that means.

I am not a rabbi or an art historian. I do, however, want to leave you with a thought. I believe that sometimes metzarim—the narrow places of our lives—really do serve a purpose. They force us forward. Happy Passover.

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