often express the tragic . . . We must free ourselves from our attachment to the external, for only then do we transcend the tragic, and are enabled consciously to contemplate the repose which is within all things.'"Mondrian could find a repose to contemplate in natural things so long as he could see them with their energy held in check, as with the chrysanthemums. The object was tolerated so long as it seemed to contain its energy. Looking at the trees, he recognised the forces flowing out of them - so that the tendency towards the centrifugal first appears among these images - felt the need to release those forces from objects and objectify them in another way. Attachment had to be transferred from natural objects to things not subject to death. To an artificial tulip, which would be everlasting. To lines which were not lines tracing the growth in space of a tree but were lines not matched in nature, lines proper to art, lines echoing the bounding lines of the canvas itself."The lines which had followed the lines of the boughs and branches and twigs of the trees gave way in 1912 to lines derived from the scaffolding in space of Analytical Cubism. Geometric abstraction by and large has its origin in the flat shapes of Synthetic Cubism, a mode completely foreign to Mondrian. One imagines, in the first place, that he must have disapproved of the fact that Picasso and Braque, having evolved with exquisite logic for four years from the Estaque and Horta landscapes to the shattered luminosity of the hermetic period, suddenly took a capricious sideways leap into the arbitrary improvisations of papier coll. It is known that he disapproved of the fact that, having attained a sublime level of abstraction from nature, they used papier coll to let reality - in all its banality and all its subjection to time - in through the back door - a recourse to nostalgia and materialism. It is evident that he could accept no form of assemblage as a solution....
