Chapter 23 "The Thief Painted Like Mondrian" - From Monet to Rodenbaud

In ghost stories, or in fairy tales, as long as the tree grows too big and too long, it seems to have a strange magical power, sometimes it is gentle, wise, and full of kindness to help others, like "My Neighbor Totoro" The super big chestnut tree inhabited by chinchillas, or the old willow mother-in-law who plays the wise man in "Pocahontas"; One of them is Tsui Hark's "A Chinese Ghost Story" series of movies, the thousand-year-old tree demon, who wants to find someone to suck blood (using blood and carbon dioxide plus sunlight for photosynthesis, I don't know what kind of tree it is), and exercise by the way Sporting her super big long tongue.

The "good/evil" duality of the tree, of course, does not come from its nature (although many tree species will secrete chemicals to attack other trees in order to gain living space), but the neurotic awe of human beings—— Think about it, the tree is really the strangest life that we can see around us. First of all, we can’t find anyone who can live longer than it, and the long life is nothing, but it is silent and mysterious. Quite, what have you been doing, thinking, and planning for such a long time?Moreover, trees are often very close to people, and even live among them. The enemy is clear and the enemy is dark, so quietly listening to the gossip of the world for hundreds of thousands of years. There should be some conclusions that are very different or even have some kind of historical insight, right?

A pot of turbid wine is happy to meet each other, so many things in ancient and modern times are all laughed and talked about. Therefore, some people who love to dream and think wildly, as well as some neurotic people, will always be at certain special moments, such as when they are tortured by some unrealistic desires such as love, such as a person struck by thunder and lightning. When living alone at night, for example, in the sleep and dreaming that I can't control, I start to expect, doubt, fear, believe and even hallucinate. Trees obviously have strange wisdom and power that we don't know or have.

Of course, it would not be fair to say that the tree itself was not involved at all in such a neural process.After all, trees are just like people. Some are sweet and pleasant, while others are vicious and scary. Coupled with the differences in growth locations, people’s subjective feelings are far different, like a gentle and clean tree by the water. The weeping willows, or the big independent and straight poplar trees in the starry plains, or the old pine trees on the dry rocks and cliffs, or the long-bearded old banyan trees in front of the temple that are used to listening to the evening drums and morning bells and the devout prayers of countless devout men and women, obviously have the same Living in poor mountains and bad waters, such as the Amazon rainforest, the tree that looks like it can eat people is different.

Recently, I heard that Taipei City’s cultural bureau chief, Long Yingtai, wants to legislate to protect trees in Taipei City. It is time to find a good tree, a kind and beautiful tree, to be the spokesperson of her policy. In this way, the first thing I think of is not any real tree, but the one on the canvas. I mean, the tree painted by the Dutch painter Mondrian. Mondrian is a Dutchman, and the trees he described are logically Dutch trees. The special thing about Dutch trees is not the tree species, but the fact that almost all of them grow in low-lying places.The vertical tree, together with the horizontal ground, presents an almost geometric composition, stable, safe, peaceful, and solid. The trees painted by Mondrian give people such a clear mind and a sense of tranquility. .

Everything is balanced, and the streamer is frozen, like a utopia. However, The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian, the painting style is like Mondrian's thief-even if it is just a vertical tree and a horizontal land, how can it be possible that Mr. Bernie Rodenbaud can paint it like it, and it can be painted Really?Yes, that’s right, what Rodenbaud painted was not the pastoral atmosphere of Mondrian, who used Dutch plains, farmhouses, windmills, and especially trees in the early days, but what he called “new art” after 1919. Purely abstract paintings from the period of plasticism.After 1919, not only did there no longer exist any objects we could see on the canvas of Mondrian, in fact, there was not even a single curve. I believe many people have seen and impressed Mondrian at this stage , there are only straight lines and right angles, the colors are almost only three primary colors, and the title of the painting is only abstractly titled "Composition": "White and Black Composition", "Red, Yellow and Blue Composition", "Rhombic Composition" and so on.

This solves a technical problem for our elegant thieves: Yes, Rodenbaud can paint, provided he has a canvas, brushes, a few tubes of paint, and a large ruler.But as soon as one side was suppressed, the other side immediately raised the question: If even Rodenbaud can paint, what is the value of such a painting?Is this worth buying or stealing?Why not draw three or five yourself if you want? yes. In fact, this question is usually asked more bluntly and unreservedly: Can such a painter know how to paint?Meaning, is he bluffing?Is it a liar? If the question is turned into this way, it will be relatively simple, and we can immediately answer loudly: can draw, and really can draw - Mondrian was born in 1872, as for his influence by Picasso and Pollack Cubism The enlightenment and the change of painting style to abstraction came after he participated in the exhibition in Paris, the capital of the painting kingdom in 1912. That is to say, before that, he had worked diligently on canvas and concrete practice. Phase struggled for more than thirty years.Mondrian was known as a genius since he was a child. He obtained the qualification as a primary school painting teacher at the age of seventeen. In his early twenties, he became the most important painter of the new generation in the Netherlands. At the age of 31, he won the Willink van Collen Award of the Artists Association for his work "Still Life".

However, such a powerful painter, why is he willing to give up his painstakingly refined skills, give up the most powerful weapon he possesses, and come down to the world where we normal people can do it?Let us try to answer this with a more familiar and exaggerated example than Mondrian. This is Picasso, a great wizard who is better at painting than Mondrian, but also more varied. , the ever-changing King Kong in the history of human painting. If you have not been able to visit the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, ​​Spain, like me, I hope that you have at least seen Picasso's "childhood" paintings in the album, such as "Self-portrait with Fluffy Frontal Hair" at the age of fifteen or at the age of sixteen. "Science and Charity", then you will definitely have the same terrible feeling of being struck by lightning as I personally felt when I saw these paintings for the first time-thus, you will also believe that the following is absolutely true : It is said that Picasso, as an adult, once visited a certain children’s painting exhibition and said that he would never be able to draw such innocent and childish works in his life to participate in this kind of painting exhibition. It is already as good as Raphael's painting."

His poor father, who was also a painter, art school drawing teacher, and museum curator, reacted not far from ours.When Picasso was less than thirteen years old, he gave all the paintbrushes and utensils sent by his life career to this terrible son. Since then, he has stopped painting all his life, and Cui Hao wrote poems on it. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of others, if a person possesses a full set of the ultimate classical painting skills like Raphael at the age of nine, but luckily makes him live to be more than eighty years old, what can you hope for him in this life?Repeatedly and tediously copying the paintings like a white mouse treading a wheel for more than seventy years?Or must he restlessly think of doing something special, such as twisting and stretching lines, unstacking reality, changing colors or something?

I think that such voluntary repetition can happen only when a painter’s identity is self-conscious as a craftsman, just like the professional identity of our office workers, repeating the same tedious work for decades from nine to five every day until they get A sum of pension for retirement, or until the unworthy children and grandchildren are stuck in the stock market and housing market until they lose all their money.Raphael was a great painter in the Renaissance era. At that time, their identity subjects were obviously craftsmen, and they depended on the church, kings, nobles, or emerging powerful merchant families. If the boss wants you to paint portraits of your ancestors, you can do portraits. If you want you to paint biblical characters, you can do it. Character, think about it, the living room of the boss’s house lacks a sofa and requires you to knock it out. Can you bother to make a high-powered microscope and let their family sit on it and drink tea and chat?

The trouble is that history goes all the way to Picasso and Mondrian at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the continuous development of Western European society endowed these painters with an unprecedented identity of independent creators and artists: painters.In this way, the attempt to change seems inevitable, no matter whether the change to the unknown world is good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable, promotion or sinking, it must be changed. In Vonnegut's "Blue Beard" novel, there are a few lines of wicked dialogue: "I want a painting with trees in it." "Oh, green and brown." "There's still a sky." "blue." The swaying trees and the ever-changing sky are simply represented as large flat patches of green, brown and blue. Is this a return to the essence of clever insight, or is it an unbearable and crude reduction? However, here we have to say that no matter how we decide to look at Mondrian's transformation, we must admit it as a major premise: he is definitely a serious, sincere, and extremely upright person, and he is a person who can be lonely for a long time and will not. Those who want to please the public may be a bit more stubborn, but they are definitely not the kind of showman salesman that we think of as contemporary painters who are talkative, good at managing and showing themselves, weak in self-regulation, and deliberately indulgent as a selling point for their talents.Mondrian walked into a highly simplified weird world. In fact, there were far more boos than applause, but he completely obeyed his own cognition and never returned. There were processes, steps, clear changes, and even a painting A painting leaves almost every stage of change that can no longer be complete. He is definitely not the kind of person who wipes saliva on his fingers, checks the wind direction from time to time to decide where to go, and changes beliefs faster and more conveniently than changing clothes. man of. We can clearly see this trajectory from the evolution of his series of paintings on the theme of "Church", "Dune", "Windmill" and "Tide and Breakwater". "The change of shape is the most thorough——Mondrian first let the color peel off and wither, presenting a simple monochromatic shade; then he boldly cut down the overgrown branches, becoming a regular geometric rough embryo; and then the curve was gradually straightened into a Diagonal lines, oblique lines further evolved into horizontal and vertical lines, and just like that, Monet became Rodenbaud without looking back. For such a turn, the honest Mondrian certainly has a whole set of corresponding theories, but having a theory does not guarantee that it is reasonable or good, especially for creators who face the unknown and delicate world, some of them are too formed and too tenacious. Theoretical guidance is often quite dangerous. Among the many creative fields of human beings, it is strange that painters seem to be the kind of people who love to publish theories and explain the meaning of their works and creations—compared with the novels that use the most and most proficient words and have the longest thinking endurance For example, Tolstoy, who is most keen on reasoning in novels, once answered a noblewoman's question about meaning, and said euphemistically that answering this question would require the same whole novel. Milan Kundera, who also has a strong argumentative strength and a vertical historical perspective, directly said that it is difficult for a novelist to explain his own work, because "the work is usually a little smarter than its creator. , if a novelist is smarter than his work, he'd better consider changing careers." This is a very beautiful statement, thought-provoking. My personal experience is roughly like this: theory, which can generally be regarded as the ordering of human thinking, basically works on a certain clear and universal level of thinking. However, in the face of unknown, uncertain, seemingly The creative world shrouded in mist is a kind of primordial chaotic state. At this stage, the thinking "temporarily" feels that it is empty and has nothing, and tries to create in a variety of reasonable, unreasonable, impossible, and shapeless ways. All possible diffusions burst out, including insight, perception, intuition, and even a little bit of vague and erratic light. These future (or next stage) theories are not easy to accommodate in the process of ordering. The way of thinking and path that is easy to admit and may have to be given up is the irreplaceable or even the only weapon for the creator and the creative stage, which may discover and catch some people's clever and unexpected prey—I think , the work is a little bit more and smarter than the original author, which may be derived from this, and it is mastered in a subtle way that is difficult to use regular language. If we can use some kind of adventure journey through mountains and rivers as a metaphor for the creative world facing the unknown world, then we should see the primitive and sinister scene described in Li Bai's "The Road to Shu" without any existing roads, or just One or two people walked the path that was re-occupied by overgrown vines. The ground destroyed the landslide and the strong man died, and then the ladders and stone stacks were connected. It was the yellow crane that could not fly. Hu Weilaizai, such a path usually only accommodates one person, not enough to spin a horse, let alone a theoretical system of heavy equipment.When the creation obeys the theory, it is no longer brisk, so the plank road trails that are as dangerous as this can only be scratched from its map, and marked with the stamp of "this road is not accessible". Therefore, the better way to achieve breakthroughs and innovations in the creative world is always to arrive first in an aesthetic form, rather than in a prudent and comprehensive theoretical form. This is the trouble with Mondrian, and many more theoretical painters and others, who, unfortunately, were usually poor theorists. We should humbly say that we are certainly no match for Mondrian as far as painting is concerned, but when he abandons his most powerful weapon and turns to a theory he is not familiar with, then we are Don't be afraid of him anymore, it's the same as Jordan, the basketball god after three consecutive victories, decided to switch to baseball, so those major league pitchers who are not qualified to lift his shoes on the basketball court, although they still respect him, find him I want to shake hands with him for an autograph when I have the opportunity, but usually it only takes three or four balls to strike out this god of another field. Mondrian's theory of "subtraction", which cuts off the chaotic details of phenomena, and simply finds the geometric "true essence of things", honestly, it is more than two thousand years behind human theoretical cognition. What is this? ?This is Parmenides and Plato in the philosophical thinking of the two schools of "doing more" and "doing one" in ancient Greece. Even, it should be fair to say that Plato, who looked down on the phenomenal world and believed that the real world is just a rough copy of the pure and perfect ideal world, is far more complicated than Mondrian. In fact, we can see It turns out that Plato did not find the prototype of his idea in the "Nirvana" style and just stop there. On the contrary, Plato still returned to the details of reality again, tirelessly trying to construct his impossible reality in the real world bit by bit. In the Kingdom of Perfect Philosophers, he even told the important story of "cave theory" to express his ambition, asking those philosophers who broke through the chains and ascended to the world of clear ideas to descend to the degenerate world, thinking that this is the mission of philosophers and responsibility. Details still need to be paid attention to and meaningful. It is not just the inevitable mistakes, corruption and unnecessary deformation when the "true essence of things" is embodied. On the contrary, it is the main form of human language, and it is also the aesthetics. The most subjective form of language, it makes up for the discontinuity and inevitable omission of the theoretical framework, and also makes the perception of beauty perceptible, not just knowable, it makes literature, painting and even all creations not subject to theory, and they face it independently , explore, and answer more questions that theories cannot handle and put aside (such as beauty, belief, value, religion, and even the question of human existence as Kundera said)—it makes those who seek order miserable , but it gives us a kaleidoscopic image of a complex world that is always changing and surprising. Looking at the geometric abstract paintings of Mondrian's neoplastic period, I always wonder, what novelist has done the same thing?Has any novelist "discovered" that all human thinking and phenomena are miraculously expressed by combinations of twenty-six English letters, so he only wrote these twenty-six single letters repeatedly, thinking that this Is it the most extreme and purest form of expression in the novel? ——I think the closest one is Wang Wenxing in our country, and his weird "The Man Behind the Sea". Isn't this another way of "Brave New World" coming? What about Brother Rodenbauder who painted Mondrian? I think that human beings will never give up the pursuit of the ultimate, simple, and pure nature of things that exist like gods, which is also good, but this also brings out a crisis of "arrogance" (no matter what How humble the pursuer himself is, such as Mondrian, such as Spinoza), so I will copy here two speeches of Levi Strauss on the art of painting as a conclusion: I have a special liking for artistic skills. This is one of the greatest irreplaceable achievements created by human beings in thousands of years. It is formed based on a recognition of one's own position in the universe.The questions that art raises, like other questions, are definitely not one-dimensional. Man must convince himself that his place in the universe is very small, that all is permeated by its richness and variety; that man's total aesthetic creative powers can never be as great as that given to him by a rock, an insect, or a flower—and Our eyes lose their ability to discern, we no longer know how to see things.