a color plate which showed a geometrical abstract painting. Vertical and horizontal black bands divided an off-white canvas into squares and rectangles, several of which were painted in primary colors.
“The absolute beauty of pure geometry,” she said. “Or perhaps I mean the pure beauty of absolute geometry. Right angles and primary colors.”
“Mondrian, isn’t it?”
“Piet Mondrian. Do you know much about the man and his work, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”
“I know he was Dutch.”
“Indeed he was. Born in 1872 in Amersfoort. He began, you may recall, as a painter of naturalistic landscapes. As he found his own style, as he grew artistically, his work became increasingly abstract. By 1917 he had joined with Theo van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck and others to found a movement called De Stijl. It was an article of faith for Mondrian that the right angle was everything, that vertical and horizontal lines intersected space in such a way as to make an important philosophical statement.”
There was more. She gave me the four-dollar lecture, declaiming it as fervently as she’d read about poor Smith a couple of days earlier. “Piet Mondrian held his first exhibition in America in 1926,” she told me. “Fourteen years later he moved here. He’d gone to Britain in 1939 to get away from the war. Then, when the Luftwaffe started bombing London, he came here. New York fascinated him, you know. The grid pattern of the streets, the right angles. That was the beginning of his boogie-woogie period. You look confused.”
“I didn’t know he was a musician.”
“He wasn’t. His painting style changed, you see. He was inspired by the traffic in the streets, the elevated railways, the yellow cabs, the red lights, the jazzy pulsebeat of Manhattan. You’re probably familiar with Broadway Boogie Woogie—that’s one of his most famous canvases. It’s in the Museum of Modern Art. There’s also Victory Boogie Woogie and, oh, several others.”
In several other museums, I thought, where they were welcome to remain.
“I see,” I said, which is something I very often say when I don’t.
“He died on February 1, 1944, just six weeks before his seventy-second birthday. I believe he died of pneumonia.”
“You certainly know a great deal about him.”
Her hands moved to adjust her hat, which didn’t really need adjusting. Her eyes aimed themselves at a spot just above and to the left of my shoulder. “When I was a little girl,” she said evenly, “we went to my grandmother’s and grandfather’s every Sunday for dinner. I lived with my parents in a house in White Plains, and we came into the city where my grandparents had a huge apartment on Riverside Drive, with enormous windows overlooking the Hudson. Piet Mondrian had stayed at that apartment upon arriving in New York in 1940. A painting of his, a gift to my grandparents, hung over the sideboard in the dining room.”
“I see.”
“We always had the same seating arrangement,” she said, and closed her big eyes. “I can picture that dinner table now. My grandfather at one end, my grandmother at the other near the door to the kitchen. My uncle and aunt and my younger cousin on one side of the table, and my mother and father and me on the other. All I had to do was gaze above my cousin’s head and I could look at the Mondrian. I had it to stare at almost every Sunday night for all of my childhood.”
“I see.”
“You’d think I’d have tuned it out as children so often do. After all, I’d never met the artist. He died before I was born. Nor was I generally responsive to art as a child. But that painting, it evidently spoke to me in a particular way.” She smiled at a memory. “When I was in art class, I always tried to produce geometrical abstracts. While the other children were drawing horses and trees, I was making black-and-white grids with squares of red and blue and yellow. My teachers didn’t know what to make of it, but I was trying to be another Mondrian.”
“Actually,” I said tentatively, “his paintings don’t look all that hard to do.”
“He thought of them first, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
“Well, there’s that, of course, but—”
“And his simplicity is deceptive. His proportions are quite perfect, you see.”
“I see.”
“I myself had no artistic talent. I wasn’t even a fair copyist. Nor did I have any true artistic ambitions.” She cocked her head again, probed my eyes with hers. “The painting was to be mine, Mr. Rhodenbarr.”
“Oh?”
“My grandfather promised it to me. He