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John Beattie has devoted his observe to replicas of Piet Mondrian’s 26 rue du Départ studio. The Dutch painter left the atelier when he fled Europe in 1938, and it was later destroyed to make means for the growth of the Gare Montparnasse practice station. Beattie’s Reconstructing Mondrian, 2013–22, approaches the lacking web site as a synecdoche for the artist. The sixty-minute moving-image work facilities on a full-scale mannequin of the studio produced by Dutch architect Frans Postma, who drew on black-and-white images taken by Paul Delbo in 1926. However what’s the worth of reconstituting the Parisian harbor from which Mondrian launched his fleets of Neoplastic canvases?
At a movie studio in Amsterdam, Beattie captures Postma’s crew unloading preassembled architectural parts from a truck. Every of those jigsawlike fragments, shrouded in pink, Velcro-clasped fabric, is dealt with like a piece in its personal proper. The group slots collectively the partitions, home windows, and flooring, following the annotated tape marks on the ground—outlines whose brash yellow shade can’t assist however remind one in all Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43. Via its a number of ranges of mediation, Reconstructing Mondrian reveals how every mobilization of the duplicate pays homage to Mondrian, reshaping his legacy in numerous institutional contexts.
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