Mondrian's "transdance": Transposition of music and dance movements into painting

Abstract

The syntagm, Mondrian's "transdance" is a term with which the author wanted to symbolically indicate the main research interest presented in this paper, that is, the examination of how the basic stance, steps and movements in the Foxtrot and, implicitly, the main elements of jazz, i.e. melody, rhythm, harmony, are transposed into the particular visual compositions - Fox Trot A (1930) and Fox Trot B (1929). All of these particular art forms (dance, painting, and music), though very different in the aesthetical and poetical respect, are nevertheless connected with one essential element - movement, as a measure of both time and space. In this consideration of painting as a temporal, and not only a spatial object, the visual art discourse is influenced by the vocabulary of the art of music and of dance. Thus, this paper should be understood as the author's intimate observation of time-space transpositions (at the wider level), as well as the author's discussion about the latent (interdisciplinary) 'dialogue' which the painter, Piet Mondrian, aka "The Dancing Madonna", conducted with dance and music (in the strictest sense). This premise is explored from several aspects, but none of them deviates from the main methodological course, determined by the "interdisciplinary model of musicological competence" (Veselinović-Hofman).