‘Cracking the Mondrian Code’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
When it comes to my own poetry, I am both inspired and haunted by the unfinished. Rarely does a poem ever feel inalienably complete. I don’t mean I can always fiddle with a line break—I mean, whenever I finish a poem, there’s always something lingering at the edges of the stanzas. I often cram drafts together, remix chapbook manuscripts, and rework poems after publication because that makes sense to me, that’s what it is to bring a poem into the world.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Anne Carson said , I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on page and the reader […] has to enter into that action.
To me, the end of the poem is rarely the end of the action. Rather, it sets something in motion that doesn’t stop.
This is less about a romantic notion of the fragment, the purposefully incomplete, but it’s not entirely unrelated. But this particular depth of perception, when it comes to unfinished work, is increased tenfold when we’re looking at a late artist’s last work.
In a wonderfully in-depth essay at The Believer, Nina Siegal goes long on Piet Mondrian’s ‘Victory Boogie Woogie,’ his unfinished masterpiece, and the subsequent efforts to divine its completed form.
Such works, suddenly abandoned by their creators, are the cherished orphans of our cultural heritage. Once their maker has departed, they remain in aesthetic purgatory, on some undetermined spot in the infinite line between conception and achievement. They enchant us, at least in part, because around them we can still smell the lingering sulfuric burnt-match scent of creative sparks.
“The last works of artists and their unfinished pictures,” wrote the Roman author and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, “are more admired than those which they finished, because in them are seen the preliminary drawings left visible and the artists’ actual thoughts, and in the midst of approval’s beguilement we feel regret that the artist’s hand while engaged in the work was removed by death.”
The question of Mondrian’s unfinishedness lingers. How close was he to completion? Did he intend to wrap it all up neatly before he died, or was the unfinishedness intentional? How unfinished was Mondrian’s “Victory Boogie Woogie”?
It’s fascinating to learn that artists have tried to figure out the painting’s final composition through math and philosophy. And of course, we’ll never know it—and therein lies the heat.