Smelling Oldness… and Antisemitism
Piet Mondrian, a painter who loved every primary
color,
said he could smell in any room the smell that’s made
by any person who is old.
I don’t think that old people are than younger people
duller,
when catastrophically confined in the category old in which they have
been forcibly enrolled.
As an old man I do not compete with members of the
youth;
their most typical aroma seems to me to be
derived from boldness,
inspired by their alleged discovery of
the truth,
although I doubt this diagnosis, smelling skeptically,
due to oldness.
Smelling oldness is like smelling Jews, who
troubled
Piet Mondrian as much as the portrayal in his
painting of real life,
two problems of this painter that may prejudicially have
doubled
his distance from reality undoubled in it
by a wife.
In “Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man,” NYT, 11/24/24, Dwight Garner writes, reviewing Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute by Nicholas Fox Weber:
Mondrian lived like an ambassador from the kingdom of ridiculous notions.
He went in for spiritualism and phrenology and unusual diets. He had no sense of humor and rarely smiled. His peculiar style of dance made others snicker behind his back. “He moved only his feet and held the rest of his body rigid, with his head tilted upward,” the author writes.
Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as “You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.” Taking him into certain social situations was like throwing a cat into a swimming pool. He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, “It smells old in here.”
More unhappily, Nicholas Fox Weber reveals Mondrian as an antisemite. It is difficult to calibrate interwar antisemitism against a background of general prevalence, but the artist does seem to have been more than usually bigoted – against the Parisian dealers, Léonce and Paul Rosenberg (“Those Rosenberchs [sic] are Jews”, against dancing partners – “I got to know two Russian Jewish girls … Jews always have something off-putting”).