Molecular Techniques and the True Content of Reality

" E verything was spotless white, like a laboratory. In a light smock, with his clean-shaven face, taciturn, wearing heavy glasses, Mondrian seemed more a scientist or priest than an artist. The only relief to all the white were large matboards, rectangles in yellow, red and blue, hung in asymmetric arrangements on all the walls " (1). This description of Piet Mondrian's New York studio sheds light on the man who went beyond all efforts of his generation to achieve abstraction in search of absolute reality. Mondrian's incongruous appearance and even his name (changed from Mondriaan) reflected his transformation during an artistic career that spanned two world wars. Over the 20 years during which he studied abstraction, he steadily moved toward simplicity and purity. He abandoned all that was representational, turning himself from a painter of landscapes and flowers to one that tolerated only horizontal and vertical lines, flat surfaces, and primary colors. Forging a style that was in its essence mathematical, he selected single motifs and worked on them until they were completely stripped of form and reduced to lines or grids: " I saw the ocean as a series of pluses and minuses " (2). Mondrian was born into a family of artists in Amersfoort, Holland, and was brought up a Calvinist. His early work, mostly landscapes of the Dutch countryside, bespoke the realism featured in his academic training and a sense of order and surface geometry reminiscent of Jan Steen. Influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh and an interest in theosophy, his paintings became increasingly abstract (3). Theosophy, a philosophic movement of the late 19th century that focused on the spiritual structure of the universe , also influenced the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimer Malevich, and other contemporaries (4). Mondrian traveled to Paris, where he met Georges Braque and other leading artists and was exposed to the abstracting qualities of cubism and the primary colors of fauvism. His work in Paris culminated in a new art movement known as De Stijl or neoplasticism. The term neoplasticism was coined by Mondrian's friend the Dutch mathematician and theosophist M.J.H. Schoenmaekers. " Plastic " referred to a formal structure underlying everything in nature. In abstract art, distracting elements around this fundamental structure were removed, leaving fragments of objects or, in Mondrian's work, black bands and color rectangles. The challenge was to find, out of infinite possibilities, the right …