The Tree of Life 2 – The Dancing Madonna

— J. Chr. de Vries

Voor Leo S.

‘Chance’ exists, but chance doesn’t exist in a story. Well, at least if stories are by definition fictional, even if they claim to be an account of a real event. If the first sentence of this text is a rule, then what happened to me this week is the exception. When I was enjoying a glass of wine on a terrace in the city centre, I was unexpectedly approached by a man, speaking in English but with a Scandinavian accent. You can tell mainly by the way the ‘s’ is pronounced, with a thin, almost hissing sound. I didn’t initially recognize him; I’m bad at putting faces to names. I need context to identify someone, a place, an item of clothing, or another person associated with them. Besides, I hadn’t seen him in years, but he thankfully saved me from the somewhat embarrassing situation: “Ole Viskrys,” he laughed, “You haven’t forgotten about me, I hope!” — ‘Viskrys’ with those hissing ’s’s.


After we shook hands and Viskrys took a seat at my table with a glass of wine, I inquired about the reason for his visit to The Hague. He explained that he wanted to examine Mondriaan’s early works in person for his research, about which he had written to me a few weeks ago. He had just spent hours exploring the Gemeentemuseum.


“Aha, you are checking out the Tree of Life theory of Losse,” I said.


“I am elaborating on it,” he replied.


He shared that Losse’s theory intrigued him. He was investigating whether the hypothesis was tenable, or at least plausible.


We discussed the randomness of our unexpected encounter for a while. I had just started working on a story about whether Mondriaan’s ‘Tree of Life’ was purely anecdotal or not, inspired by Viskrys’s letter, and suddenly he appeared here. Was that a coincidence? Viskrys believed it was. He had decided to come to The Hague on a whim a few days ago. But, I argued, if I include this in my story, then it’s no longer a coincidence because it becomes part of the construction. He disagreed. Coincidence is a real phenomenon in life, and if it can’t be an element of a story, then life itself can’t be an element of a story. He found that to be an untenable proposition. Stories are a part of life, not the other way around, I retorted.


The discussion shifted to Viskrys’s research, where we delved into Mondriaan’s concepts of ‘representation’ [‘afbeelding’] and ‘re-representation’ [‘weerbeelding’]. His works are not representations of reality but re-representations, in other words, the image of reality is adjusted according to the laws set by the artwork to express that reality more purely. Life also becomes purer within the work. For Viskrys, this was an argument for allowing randomness in the work, and consequently, in a story. Randomness in a story is a re-representation of it. Viskrys became increasingly enthusiastic, completely engrossed in his argument. I somewhat tempered his enthusiasm by suggesting that this only holds true if Mondriaan’s theory is valid.


Suddenly, Viskrys recounted an anecdote. I’m not entirely sure if wine played a role in this, but we were already on our third glass. He spoke of a vision he had experienced a few years ago. He insisted it wasn’t a dream, as he was sitting at his worktable fully awake. He saw a woman, in a flash. She was exceptionally beautiful, turned her head towards him, and gazed intensely at him. It felt as though their souls were deeply connected, even though she made no sign of approach or any such thing; she looked neutral, without a hint of a smile or gesture. All she did was look at him. The vision was brief, perhaps just a few seconds. He was certain he knew her from somewhere, but he couldn’t recall where. He described her face; she had medium-length, jet-black hair, a somewhat tanned complexion, like South European women can have, he suspected, no, he was certain she was French. She had slightly prominent cheekbones, deep-set blue eyes, and beautiful full lips. He was immediately smitten with her. But who was she? Where did he know her from? He was sure he had never met her. I suggested that he had probably seen her in a movie, and the vision was actually a recollection of some scene. Viskrys immediately said he had considered that theory; it seemed the most plausible. But he couldn’t trace the film. I proposed it might be from a TV movie or series. However, he had already investigated that without success.


I remarked that I found it to be an intriguing anecdote but that I didn’t see its relevance to our topic of ‘coincidence.’ Viskrys responded as follows:


“Maybe not clearly with the English word ‘coincidence’, but it does with the Swedish word ’tillfällighet,’ which, like the German word ‘Zufall’, means something like ‘which falls to us’. Yet the English word, when we take it back to the original Latin word ‘coincidere’, means literally ‘which falls together’, so it’s close to the Swedish and German words. Surely in Dutch, it’s similar.”


“Yes, ‘toeval’ is literally the same as the Swedish and German term in Dutch,” I replied.


He continued, “The anecdote is also something that ‘falls to us’. Suddenly, it’s there, out of nowhere. An encounter or confrontation with another reality. This also ties into my research on Mondriaan and theosophy, how art relates to what we typically consider as ‘reality’. Mondriaan’s perspective is clearly of a Platonic nature; there are distinct realities, the profane and the ideal. Through the ideal reality, art should illuminate or elucidate the profane.”


“The anecdote is very interesting, I mean, the anecdote in general, because I’m writing a story on Mondriaan, questioning if his relation with theosophy is purely anecdotal or if it’s actually fundamental to his work. For this, I am making a distinction between ‘anecdotal’ and ‘mythical’, where the first is only of interest to a specific individual, and the latter has a public interest. The two kinds of meaning are interchangeable, so a work can be anecdotal at one point and become mythical.”


He replied that he found this to be an intriguing distinction as it touched upon his own findings regarding the borderland between the profane and the ideal reality. When the ideal reality of an artwork influences or even changes the profane, the work transcends the anecdotal. The ‘representation’ is anecdotal, the ‘re-representation’ is mythical. The trees that Mondriaan painted in his early work already contained a mythical element, but the anecdotal predominated. There is a gradual process in which the branches of the trees become increasingly abstract, until only the vertical and horizontal lines remain. This is what Losse referred to as the ‘Tree of Life of Mondriaan’. The colors also become more abstract until only the primary colors of yellow, blue, and red remain, alongside the essential white and black, which are both not colors but, on one hand, the sum of all colors and, on the other hand, the total absence of them.


I attempted to steer the conversation back to our original topic of chance and remarked that in a painting, there can be no element of chance. After all, it is an object, unchanging, with no unexpected events occurring within it.


Not only does the object change over time, the paint, the canvas, the frame — as he explained — ultimately, it’s about the perception of the object, and within that ‘subjectwise’ perception, all sorts of things can happen, including unexpected elements such as associations and memories.


“And how about your mysterious, beautiful Française? Does she fit into your theory somewhere?” I asked.


“I have no idea; she’s a riddle. I can’t see how her anecdote can become mythical, to use your words. Who knows, someday I’ll meet her.”

The following day, I decided to visit the Gemeentemuseum to view all the available Mondriaans. There was a substantial amount of his early work on display, as well as one of his last, the unfinished ‘Victory Boogie Woogie’. I found myself in agreement with Viskrys’s Tree of Life theory. As I walked through the paintings in chronological order, I witnessed the abstraction process unfolding before my eyes.


I lingered for a while at the ‘Victory Boogie Woogie’, surprised by the bits of plaster that were still on the work, presumably used to protect colors from mixing during the painting process. I also noticed the frayed lines. From a distance, it all looks impeccably sharp, but the opposite was true when you stood close. I thought a house painter could have done this better, but perfection doesn’t sit well with beauty. Perfection is toxic. Never drink ‘pure water’, my father used to say; you can die from it. The proposition 1 + 1 = 2 is not perfection; it is a constructed truth. Art, insofar as it is pure, is not about perfection but about ‘excellence’. Pure art is excellent, but not perfect.


In the evening, I received a call from Viskrys, his voice filled with excitement: “I found her!” He had finally found his Frenchwoman in a semi-fictional documentary about Mondriaan. The image in the film matched exactly with the one in his vision: the same head movement, the same unchanging gaze. She revealed that she had danced with Mondriaan, who was fond of dancing and was jokingly referred to as the ‘dancing madonna’. When I congratulated him, the tone of his voice changed: “This film was made two years after my vision!”

— J. Chr. de Vries, Den Haag, January 18, 2023