DreamingofFrance

drawings, watercolors and oil sketches. But it is important to note that it consisted of works by artists later considered “modern”, and on the rise at the beginning of the 20 th century. The drawing was then purchased around 1946 by Mondrian’s patron and friend the collector Sal Slijper. For years, Slijper would help support Mondrian by buying works, offering him commissions, organizing exhibitions, and helping place his paintings in museum collections. By 1956 the drawing was in the collection of Charmion von Wiegand, an American journalist and former Moscow correspondent for the Hearst newspaper chain, as well as a tough-minded art critic. Mondrian had come to New York in 1940 at the age of 68 to flee the war, and he loved the city. The pace and novelty and the sense of American optimism provided a perfect manifestation of the “New Life,” as he called modernity. Wiegand was introduced to Mondrian by the painter Carl Holty. She interviewed him in 1941 and was enormously impacted, becoming an abstract painter herself

after the master’s death. A book about their relationship titled A Sameness Between Us: The Friendship of Charmion Von Wiegand and Piet Mondrian in Letters and Memoirs, illustrates our work front and back (p. 196 , illustrated). The catalogue raisonné records fewer than 20 landscape drawings from this early period and ours is the most complete and fully developed.

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