The Gap between the Subject and the World: Twisted Trees

In the second Scene Mondrian’s text provides an opposite experience. The harmony and tranquillity in the vision is gone. After the calmness and repose of the landscape in the first Scene, the strollers now look at a restless view of the “scattered clusters of trees silhouetted against the bright moonlit sky”.440 _{The text realizes its message}

437 Mondrian’s adaptation of Schoenmaekers’s Hegelian concepts was not as linear as it might seem. First of all Mondrian’s correspondence shows that he was critical. See Mondrian’s undated letter to van Doesburg in April 1918. The Archive of Theo and Nelly van Doesburg. (0408) RKD. Moreover, Bois reminds us that Mondrian digested Hegel by occasionally misinterpreting him, sometimes even ignoring him, sometimes by creating a conceptual hybrid of his own. See Bois 1994, 338. See also the note 97, p.369.

438 Tarasti 2000, 7.

439 Tarasti 2000, 18. In Tarasti’s model, meaning emerges via a temporal process in the subject. 440 Mondrian 1986 (1919–1920), 87.

especially by contrasting the second Scene to the first Scene. This description serves as a way of leading the reader to the further meaning of the text, to acknowledge that there is a gap in the interplay between the observing subject and the natural environment ‘out there’. Twisted branches form not one image of repose but many images, which call forth pre-established mental images, and Y sees “all kinds of heads and figures in them”.441 _{Thus, Y’s thinking mind comes between the perceiver}

and what is perceived and prevents the immediate experience. The tree is in this way broken into many details, plus a form of perception that needs to be kept under control, as X reminds the other two participants.

The meaning of the capricious branches brings to mind Rudolf Steiner’s philosophical writings about perception. Beside ideas about art, Steiner also published writings about perception and consciousness and the subject-object relationship, and thus participated in contemporary discussions about philosophical dualism and monism.442 _{Steiner’s example of observing the branches of a tree is}

surprisingly close to Mondrian’s text. “We look twice at the tree,” writes Steiner. “The first time we see its branches at rest, the second time in motion. We are not satisfied with this observation. Why, we ask, does the tree appear to us now at rest, now in motion? […] The something more which we seek in things, over and above what is immediately given to us in them, splits our whole being into two parts.”443 _{Therefore, what Steiner acknowledges is the universal philosophical}

insight which acknowledges the gap between our human consciousness and the world ‘out there’. However, the feeling of belonging to the world is something that we cannot deny.444 _{The twisted and clustered branches, which do not support a}

harmonious feeling about being connected to the world, but which rather break this idea, is the corresponding expression about this relationship in Mondrian’s text. This insight recognizes the disharmony, the gap, between the thinking subject and the sensuous perception of the world. Historically, it has received different solutions depending on whether the interpreter is a monist or a dualist, as Steiner reminds us: “Man is aware of himself as ‘I’, he cannot but think of this I as being on the side of the spirit; and in contrasting this I with the world, he is bound to

441 Ibid.

442 Steiner’s studies of Goethe, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and Kant extended over many years and served to clarify his own concepts. He also sought dialogue with contemporary thinkers. The question of the foundations of what can be termed ‘reality’ was repatedly of central importance. What is interesting, considering Mondrian, is that Steiner came to comprehend reality as no longer ‘real’ but as something that has been ‘aesthetically constituted’. Steiner expressed doubts towards ‘transcendental realism’ and recognized the impossibility of acknowledging its validity. See Kugler 2011, 29–30.

443 Steiner 2011 (1894), 21–22. 444 Steiner 2011 (1894), 22.

put on the world’s side the realm of percepts given to the senses, that is, the world of matter.”445

The second Scene recognizes this problem. X and Z realize that there ought to be a bridge between subject and object, or spirit and matter, but that they are unable to create it, even though X tries to keep the details in the landscape under control: “X: […] The great difficulty in painting is precisely to keep the details subordinate to the whole […].”446 _{The second Scene reflects the interplay between}

the subject and nature as object. It focalizes the readers’ imaginative vision so that a coherent single image seems to escape. It describes the moment when the subject begins to grasp itself as distinct from the object so that it would be able to manipulate it for some purpose. This is precisely what Y does when the shape of branches starts to resemble all kinds of other figures for him and his thinking mind begins to interfere with the immediate experience of the image.

To solve this problem, the memory aspect becomes important. As Mondrian’s text presents in its first Scene, Z, the painter of abstract art, assumes some sort of pre-established harmony between subject and object by making an arbitrary hypothesis about horizontal and vertical features. In the second Scene, Y, the layman, recalls this image:

When I compare this landscape with the previous one, where these scattered clusters of trees were not to be seen, I feel that the capricious natural form cannot produce in us the profound repose to which we inwardly aspire.

Z: True. In these trees you can clearly see that the tensing of contour and the reduction to the plane did not bring the profound repose you spoke about to direct plastic expression. You were right in seeing it as far more plastically apparent in the earlier treeless landscape.447

That Mondrian’s text overall is speaking of images when dealing with the issue of perception, is in itself a very philosophical approach from Mondrian’s part. This setting arouses a philosophical attitude in the reader. As the contemporary philosopher, Henri Bergson, puts it: “we can only grasp things in the form of images, we must state the problem in terms of images, and of images alone”,448

and significantly De Stijl had in its list of recommended books Bergson’s Matière et

445 Steiner 2011 (1894), 22–23. Italics original. 446 Mondrian 1986 (1919–1920), 87.

447 Mondrian 1986 (1919–1920), 88. Italics original. 448 Bergson 2007, (1896), 13.

mémoire (1896).449 _{It was Theo van Doesburg under the name of I.K. Bonset who}

openly referred to Bergson’s philosophy,450 _{whereas in Mondrian’s texts references}

to such philosophers are usually scanty. The Scene of twisted trees suggests the need to keep one steady and enduring image in mind and to let nothing disturb it, so that the emotion of harmony would be possible at all. According to Henri Bergson, some kind of a pre-establishing of harmony, a common ground, is necessary to settle the mind-matter problem.451

Ultimately, the second Scene probes the artist-subject’s relation to nature. Mondrian’s text here reflects an insight that was not at all new and was in fact ‘pre-modern’. This Scene recognizes the need for resolving the mind-matter or the subject-object gap and offers a solution. As such, it is the empathetic impulse in man’s psychological attempt to bridge the essential ‘otherness’ of nature. These kinds of aspirations already existed in the pre-formalistic ideas of the 19th _century.452