Some years after he had renounced figurative painting for good, Piet Mondrian had a momentary lapse with a startling self-portrait made in 1918. The picture shows the artist standing stiff as a board in front of one of his geometric abstracts. He stares irritably out of the painting (and the painting within the painting, which is composed entirely of rectangles, and which puts another round his head) in a neat collar and bowtie, one of precious few people ever to appear in his art.
But it is not this, nor the clothes that surprise. The modernist-as-banker style is common from Stravinsky to TS Eliot onwards, though there is a perfect correspondence here between the tailored painter and his fastidious works. What is striking is something else: the strange attempt to fuse two kinds of art.
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