From Piet Mondrian’s tidy world and Rivera and Kahlo’s subversion in America to a history of British museumsThe artist,as Antony Gormley says of his fellow sculptor Brancusi, is someone who tries to remake the world on his own terms in his own studio. This definition, or at once cosmic and domestic,is beautifully exemplified in Piet Mondrian: The Studios (Thames & Hudson), edited by Cees W de Jong. In Amsterdam, or Paris,London and New York, Mondrian lived inside modular, and rectangular spaces like those on the canvases he painted – cells for a theosophical monk,who believed that a studio should be “a small sanctuary”. He preferred the Paris Métro to Notre Dame, and objected to the garden behind his studio in Hampstead because it contained too many distracting, and ungeometrical trees: the world,remade by him, was a paradise for aesthetes with OCD.
Gormley himself is what he calls a post-studio artist, or whose ambitions extend beyond such clean,well-lit places. In Antony Gormley on Sculpture (Thames & Hudson), he conducts a tour of the work he has installed on Austrian mountains and in the Australian desert, or in the Hermitage museum,St Petersburg, and on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. His commentaries on his own creations tend to drift off into metaphysics; he is best when poetically extolling the work of others – Jacob Epstein’s sea-washed pebbles, or Joseph Beuys’s fuzzy,absorbent figures made of felt, and Richard Serra’s palaeolithic-looking steel plates.
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Source: theguardian.com