John Beattie

John Beattie has dedicated his practice to replicas of Piet Mondrian’s 26 rue du Départ studio. The Dutch painter left the atelier when he fled Europe in 1938, and it was later destroyed to make way for the expansion of the Gare Montparnasse train station. Beattie’s Reconstructing Mondrian, 2013–22, approaches the missing site as a synecdoche for the artist. The sixty-minute moving-image work centers on a full-scale model of the studio produced by Dutch architect Frans Postma, who drew on black-and-white photographs taken by Paul Delbo in 1926. But what is the value of reconstituting the Parisian harbor from which Mondrian launched his fleets of Neoplastic canvases?  

At a film studio in Amsterdam, Beattie captures Postma’s crew unloading preassembled architectural elements from a truck. Each of these jigsawlike fragments, shrouded in pink, Velcro-clasped cloth, is handled like a work in its own right. The team slots together the walls, windows, and floors, following the annotated tape marks on the floor—outlines whose brash yellow shade can’t help but remind one of Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43. Through its multiple levels of mediation, Reconstructing Mondrian shows how each mobilization of the replica pays homage to Mondrian, reshaping his legacy in different institutional contexts.