He becomes
an incredibly accomplished
ballroom dancer
starting in Paris
in the twenties
That reputation continues
into New York
where he is in Harlem
as frequently
as he can possibly be,
dancing with whoever
can keep up with him
I think for Mondrian,
his paintings danced
a good deal more
than we tend to see them
We tend to read
Mondrian as
being rather architectural,
more involved in
stable design
or something like that
Which is not necessarily
the way he read his paintings
or thought about them being
He saw them as being
much more dynamic,
as involving
the resolution of oppositions
but only tentatively
So that, in that sense,
they are not unlike
the diagrams
of a dance step
So I think the
the symbiotic relationship
between the taste
for painting that his
paintings represent
and the kind of dance
that he danced
and the music that he likes
are not all that difficult
to understand
