Exhibit Review
From van Gogh to Mondrian, powerful lessons on display at SAM show

By Sheila Farr
Seattle Times art critic

KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM In "Composition in Color B," 1917, Piet Mondrian strove for balance and harmony.

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Yes, we have van Goghs in town. That fact alone will get people flocking to Seattle Art Museum beginning tomorrow for "Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kröller-Müller Museum."

The popular appeal of the show probably lies in a handful of famous paintings, but for anyone interested in looking deeper, "Van Gogh to Mondrian" holds some powerful lessons for artists, viewers and patrons.

The exhibition is drawn from a private collection assembled during art history's most radical decades at the beginning of the 20th century, when Modernism was developing at breakneck speed. The work, collected by Helene Kröller-Müller, the wealthy wife of a Dutch industrialist, represents some of the breakthroughs as they happened, from Cubism to the birth of pure abstraction. Some of the more innovative artists progressed from wanting to change the face of art to wanting to change the world.

Kröller-Müller also collected established earlier artists and was particularly attracted to the emotional force of van Gogh, who died in 1890. Yet her strong biases (often based on the advice of her arts mentor H.P. Bremmer) sometimes led Kröller-Müller astray. She ignored completely the artists of her native Germany, bypassing such greats as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (a Russian living in Berlin), Franz Marc, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner — the whole passionate development of German expressionism and abstraction.

In the end, Kröller-Müller not only collected art, she cultivated artists and, as this show demonstrates, influenced the course of their careers.

	KRÖLLER-MÜLLER Vincent van Gogh's oil painting "La Berceuse," 1889, is one of several portraits van Gogh made of his friend Joseph Roulin's wife.

The floor plan of "Van Gogh to Mondrian" puts the van Goghs at the heart of the exhibition, which isn't the most logical place for them in context. The show starts in the late 19th century with Post-Impressionist paintings by a number of artists and a little prelude to Surrealism from Odilon Redon. From there, it moves into early 20th century Cubism, then back to the 19th century for the van Goghs — a group of 10 drawings and a dozen paintings. The van Goghs are followed by some furniture and architectural drawings and finally a selection of Mondrian paintings spanning an important six-year period (1913-19). Alongside is a more comprehensive group of works by Bart van der Leck, who was influenced by Mondrian, and may have been Kröller-Müller's grandest folly.

One of the biggest disappointments of the show is viewing the paintings — particularly the voluptuous surface of the van Goghs — through glass. Piet de Jonge, curator of collections at the Kröller-Müller Museum, said the glass is the clearest, highest quality material available. Still, it sanitizes and flattens the experience of the painting. "I hate it, but I have to defend it," de Jonge said, stressing the need to protect such valuable works. From the museum's point of view, it's understandable. From a viewer's, it's a crime.

Tickets and hours "Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kröller-Müller Museum," Tomorrow through Sept. 12. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays-Sundays. Open Memorial Day 10 a.m.-5 p.m.. Members and their guests only 2 p.m.-9 p.m. Mondays, beginning June 7. Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St., Seattle (206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org). $15 for adults, $12 for students, seniors and children ages 7-17. Free to SAM members and children under 6. Advance tickets through Ticketmaster, (206- 292-ARTS or www.ticketmaster.com) Opening party tomorrow: SAM is putting on an opening-day party 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. tomorrow, featuring clog dancers, roaming artists and entertainers and live musical performances: Le Rouge at 3 p.m. and The Dead Science at 7 p.m.

The exhibit begins with pointillism — the practice of making images out of thousands of dots of color. It was an intriguing concept that never really took off at the time. The idea, developed by Georges Seurat, a Post-Impressionist, was that the different hues would meld together in the eye rather than on the artist's palette to create a livelier effect. For the most part, the paintings in this show don't make a case for the experiment. Works like Seurat's "Sunday at Port-en-Bessin" (1888) and Paul Signac's "View of Collioure" (1887) come across as pallid and static, almost paint-by-numbers flat. The most vivid painting of the group, Signac's "Breakfast" brings motion, depth of field and a strong play of light and shadow to a tightly composed scene. The teeming surface generates energy, a kind of vibrato, which animates the image.

Interestingly, it took another hundred years and the innovations of contemporary artist Chuck Close to really push the color theory behind pointillism into exciting new terrain.

	KRÖLLER-MÜLLER MUSEUM Using a pointillist technique, Paul Signac completed "Breakfast" in 1887.

If the van Gogh paintings had been installed alongside the sedate Post-Impressionist paintings, which date from the same years, it would have helped 21st century viewers understand why van Gogh was considered so shocking at the time — and also why we love him so much now. His work comes across as real, vital, intense, brimming with desperate urgency. He didn't paint according to someone's theories, but with an emotional fervor that left many of his fellow artists in the dust.

One thing to keep in mind when viewing this selection of van Gogh's work is that he painted certain images, such as his famous sunflowers, repeatedly. In this show, the familiar portraits of van Gogh's friend and postman, Joseph Roulin and "La Berceuse" (Roulin's wife), are not unique. Van Gogh painted three versions of the Roulin portrait and several of "La Berceuse" as well.

The Mondrian part of "Van Gogh to Mondrian" is where Mrs. Kröller-Müller's zealous approach to collecting went awry. Over the years, with her aesthetic adviser Bremmer, Kröller-Müller began taking a more active roll in her patronage, supporting certain favored artists in return for paintings. Such was the case with van der Leck, an artist who also designed stained glass windows and posters for the Kröller-Müller firm, and Piet Mondrian, an impoverished Dutch artist stranded in Holland during World War I.

Mondrian had worked in Paris long enough to get familiar with Cubism but developed a philosophy that moved him beyond the innovations of Picasso and Braque. Several key paintings in the Kröller-Müller collection show Mondrian's move from a Cubist-inspired, condensed representation of forms to a deeply meaningful pure abstraction meant to act on the psyche the same way music does. He wanted to express peace, balance and spirituality in his paintings, "the idea of ascent, of greatness."

But Mrs. Kröller-Müller preferred work that kept a little more to the beaten path. She stopped her patronage of Mondrian in favor of van der Leck, who was more malleable to the taste of his patron. Van der Leck maintained a comfortable lifestyle on the payroll of the Kröller-Müllers, who eventually collected more than 400 of his paintings.

Mondrian stuck to his convictions and went on to become one of the major artists of the 20th century. Sadly, the Kröller-Müller collection provides only a limited window into his accomplishments.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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