Despite their titles — and despite enduring misconceptions about Piet Mondrian — these two shows at Harvard are not about theoretical systems or mathematical models. Rather, they expose the heart and passion behind the geometry, giving formal abstraction a human face and, in the case of “The Transatlantic Paintings,” offering a hands-on, open-ended detective story that lures you into a web of conjecture, puzzlement, and state-of-the-art technology.

Everyone knows what Mondrian’s signature work looks like — the assertive black vertical and horizontal stripes set against stark white backgrounds, with little blocks of primary colors as punctuation. In reproduction, the works appear pristine, cool, and supremely rational. Mondrian, who was born in the Netherlands in 1872, pioneered a style known as “neoplasticism” based on an absolute harmony of straight lines and pure colors underlying the visible world, and his influence on the development of modern painting has been enormous.

In “person,” however, this assembly of 11 of the artist’s so-called Transatlantic Paintings at the Busch-Reisinger Museum aren’t aloof or cold in the least — Mondrian is clearly as involved in the physical pleasure of painting as he is in the rigors of theoretical constructs and composition. You can see the brush strokes in his application of paint to the white squares and rectangles, which are in no way “blank” or “empty” but rather are carefully brushed up to the edges of the black lines, often with a thickness that implies two solid volumes set next to each other, like bricks or blocks. And you can see the great variation in the whites: some warm, some cool.

That’s when the questions start forming. Did Mondrian choose these different whites according to the weight and balance of his compositions? Do they look different only because of the way the paintings have aged or been conserved? Or did he simply switch whites as he moved from country to country, or as technology made new materials available? If you’re in the gallery on a crowded Sunday, you’ll be struck by the tastefully toned “ding dong” of the alarm system as it goes off whenever curious viewers draw too close to these works while trying to glean their secrets.

The complete Transatlantic Paintings comprise 17 canvases that were started (and in many cases, considered “finished” and even exhibited) between 1935 and 1940, while Mondrian was living in Europe, and then were heavily reworked after 1940, when the artist moved to New York to escape World War II. Mondrian added lines and blocks of color in order to complicate and enliven his compositions — to give them more “boogie-woogie,” as he put it. You can easily spot these areas: they are the only places where color is set directly next to white, unmediated by a black line. The two dates with which each painting is inscribed (in careful red paint on the black bars) emphasize the importance of the revisions in Mondrian’s mind.

The schizoid genesis of the Transatlantic Paintings is part of what inspired this collaboration between the Fogg’s Harry Cooper, associate curator of modern art and a specialist in Mondrian, and Ron Spronk, associate curator for research at the Straus Center for Conservation and a specialist in early Netherlandish paintings and their technical examination. Cooper and Spronk have set up an extensive corollary exhibition in the gallery across the hall, where an unfinished Mondrian work gives you a taste of the artist’s working process. Blow-ups of X-rays, infrared photographs, and user-friendly computers show how conservators and art historians have used these paintings to sort out what Mondrian changed, when, and why. Informed by the technical analyses, you will want to run back into the main gallery and peer through the layers of these deceptively simple paintings.

IN THE 1930s, the ideas being pioneered by Mondrian and his European contemporaries made their own transcontinental journey to Latin America, influencing artists and precipitating a radical break with the region’s rich figurative tradition. With a wealth of works by artists working primarily in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela between 1934 and 1988, “Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection” helps fill in the large blanks in our knowledge of this art. Ranging from methodical to whimsical, it forms a universe that at times runs spookily parallel to developments in Western art, including minimalism, post-minimalism, and body art. Artists from Ellsworth Kelly to Sheila Pepe find kindred spirits in this work, which developed at a great distance but with shared roots.

Latin American art prior to 1930 was oriented toward traditional Western European art; the artists trained at national academies steeped in movements like Impressionism and Cubism, often decades after these had become passé, and traveled to Europe to study Western culture. One of the first to attempt to break the cycle of subordination to Western art was Joaquín Torres-García, who was born in Uruguay in 1874 but was raised in Spain, where he worked as an assistant to Antonio Gaudí in Barcelona and in Palma de Mallorca in the early 1900s. Torres-García later moved to Paris, where in 1930 he helped found the “Circle and Square” constructivist group. In 1934 he returned to Uruguay, where he worked to connect modernism with the pre-Columbian art of his homeland, incorporating the symbolic imagery and nonobjective language of Latin American indigenous cultures into his work. Two of Torres-García’s works here, Locomotive with Constructive House (1934) and Construction in Black and White (1938), show architectural-looking grids with elements of primary color or idiosyncratic color placement animating the formal structures.

Such works spawned a multitude of movements. Some extended this rationalist, theoretically based direction; others sought to create a more humanistic, expressive abstraction. Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica utilized both concepts. His bright orange Spatial Relief (1959) brings the actions of folding and overlap to geometric construction. His warmly toned Archeologic (1964-’65) uses color and texture to transform the simple volumes of a rectangular cube into an extended essay on the nature of interior and exterior.

This is a large show, occupying three galleries and spilling out into several hallways. Playing with the space around them, the wall reliefs call out to be handled (but do heed the “Don’t Touch” signs). For me, though, it’s the women who make the strongest statements, in many cases by taking the theoretical language of geometric abstraction to a distinctly nonlinear place. Gego was born Gertrude Goldschmidt in Hamburg in 1912, but she emigrated to Venezuela in 1939. Her sculptures explore architectural space using humble materials that look like coathangers and wire connectors from bed frames, and they hang from the ceiling like the spirits of broken umbrellas or wasp’s nests. Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (who worked in artist Fernand Léger’s Paris studio in 1950) created articulated metal sculptures called Os bichos (“The Animals”) that change as you play with their “spinal” hinges. A video that accompanies the exhibition shows her working with a group of French students weaving and then climbing into a sort of cocoon made of rubber bands — looking totally Fluxus and highly international.

The work in this exhibition finds an apt home at the Fogg, since the nearby Busch-Reisinger houses abstract works by artists who influenced geometric abstraction in Latin America, including the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, the Russian El Lissitzky, the Swiss Max Bill, and of course Piet Mondrian. The fortunate juxtaposition of “Geometric Abstraction” with “The Transatlantic Paintings” allows us to examine a jumping-off point for the Latin American work, and to marvel at the imagination and diversity that resulted from that jump.

Issue Date: June 14-21, 2001