What the Lawyer Learns from Piet Mondrian
 
            Law and art have this in common—both resolve chaos into order.  The most abstract, non-representational work of visual art nonetheless has boundaries—it is framed, and there is a physical denotation of what is “inside” and what is “outside.” Even performance art is framed, if by the limits of stage and time duration.  Plays are divided into acts or scenes; dances into steps.  Music follows its own particular rules and form as well.  Even art that “breaks” the rules nonetheless respects them in the initial instance, if for no other reason that to be able to reject them.  Like legal argument or a statutory framework, the most abstract concepts are reduced, or at least translated, into some type of concrete expressive form.  Within the confines of form, infinitely complex and variable substance exists.  The most rigid sonnet or haiku nevertheless permits the most concomitant flexible content.  Structure may contain ambiguity, but it does not confine it.

            To be sure, law prizes consistency and predictability, and art prizes indefiniteness and uncertainty.  Where law seeks clarity, art favors vagueness.  What law seeks to resolve, art purports to deconstruct and render, ultimately, irresolvable.  The “best” laws, both statutory and judicially crafted, are models of lucidity that foster understandability and immediate comprehension.  The “best” works of art, including those considered “representational” or “documentary,” also are those that allow for repeated viewings and variable, if subtle, interpretation and reinterpretation.  Both strive to isolate their authors from the end product, so that the work of art or law rises or falls on its own merit, regardless of the hand of the crafter. 

            But the apparent difference between law and art is not so different or apparent.  A good law must still be flexible, not rigid, and anticipatory, capable of application to changing circumstances.  Good art must accommodate fresh interpretation and reinterpretation.  The analogy need not be exact; it is a close enough fit.  Both law and art have at their core the need to resonate with the person seeking to interpret them.

            But what of “art for art’s sake?” Most legal professionals would argue against “law for law’s sake;” indeed, law solely for the sake of law is affirmatively disfavored, if for no other reason, than for its redundancy.  But even “art for art’s sake” has a purpose—even if that purpose it to state a “policy”—i.e., the value of art.  It resonates.  And, as a practical matter, some laws do that as well and therefore do serve a purpose.  A legislative resolution recognizing a particular achievement or contribution, or an executive order that is largely symbolic in its expression, such as support for a tent as “the rule of law,” is no less “law for law’s sake” than “art for art’s sake.”

            Law and art are essentially the taking of abstract concepts and reducing them to some visual form—either word or image or performance.  At the end of the day, both ultimately are simply a way of seeing and of expressing a particular vision.  As such, it is appropriate to see what law may learn from art.  Put another way, how does art inform law? To begin a dialog to answer this question, we find that Piet Mondrian, the minimalist painter, has much to offer by way of introduction.
 
            Pieter Cornelis Mondrian (1872-1944), more commonly known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter, mainly famous for his “grid” paintings, rectangles and squares populated with red, yellow and blue colors.  Some are framed as diamonds and others in square or rectangular position; they generally embody asymmetrical black lines with judicially placed squares of primary colors, and the later works are remarkably spare and yet profoundly balanced compositions with more limited use of colored squares.  As with much of law, where deceptively simple and seemingly self-evident ideas often encompass far more profound concepts worth exploring, so does the superficial (and definitely not) simplicity of Mondrian’s work yield deeper insights.  Mondrian’s work and approach have much to teach lawyers.  By drawing connections between his approach and that of legal analysis, the attentive and receptive lawyer may find that new way of seeing.  That hackneyed phrase, “thinking outside the box,” is a cruder, if punning, approach to Mondrian.

            Before proceeding, we of course must accept that the analogy is not perfect, and that some lessons and understandings cannot be taken literally, but rather metaphorically.  We often grasp truths best by indirect means, just as astronomers know that stars can be seen more clearly when viewed viscerally rather than directly by the naked eye.  If a picture saves a thousand words, a good example often renders clear what the most detailed explication leaves murky.

            We begin with form and substance.  A fundamental precept of law is that form will not be exalted over substance.  Form can inform substance, though, and the “body language” of a law or decision—its tone—will have an import on interpretation.  So, too, with art.  Whether the style in which a novel is drafted—the form that affects our interpretation and absorption of the substance, or the brushstrokes and other effect of painterly style that drives the substance of the work, form is separate from, but impacts, substance.  Both are integral.

            Mondrian himself wrote in 1914 in a letter to art historian H.P. Bremmer:

"I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things... I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true."
 
            As part of the De Stijl movement, or more particularly, the “neo-plasticism” of Mondrian, this reduction of perceived reality to simple line and color is consistent with the fundamental precepts of law—simplicity, clarity and built on a foundation of fairness, an expression of policy that has at its root core, if not essential, human values.  Mondrian championed a “non-objective,” or “denaturalized,” painting, with pure abstraction and no representation of actual objects in the real world.  While an oversimplification, one could view positivist legal theory in these terms—an attempt to remove law from moral considerations as such, and root them in principles of legitimacy of the lines and colors themselves, the positing of the law in plain language and adherence thereto.  The black lines and basic colored squares of Mondrian seem to reflect a positivist philosophy.
           
            But without resorting too much to involved discussions of legal philosophy, to a large extent we may also find resonance of these principles in rules of statutory and contractual construction—while the lawyer aims for specificity, the language should be clear (as Mondrian’s primary colors and lines) but also abstract enough to accommodate the principles behind the statute or contract.  Mondrian also noted that “[t]he emotion of beauty if always obscured by the appearance of the object.  Therefore the object must be eliminated from the picture.” The use of the straight lines and judicially placed color is consistent with his other comment that “[e]verything is expressed through relationships.” These concepts will be familiar to the lawyer, as litigator, judge or draftsperson, who must interpret abstract language to the particular facts and circumstances.   In a common law system there is a favoring of minimalism, of setting forth the broad lines and primary colors, to distance from the “appearance of the object,” and leave the empty boxes to be filled in dependent upon the particular facts.  And even in civil law systems, where perhaps more emphasis is placed on the black letter law as stated in statutes and regulations, we can similarly see the “gridwork” of Mondrian.

            But the lessons are not that basic; we are less concerned with finding patterns than distilling broader lessons.  Those lessons relate to proportionality.  The De Stijl philosophical framework uses the balance between spiritual harmony and order; as Mondrian noted, “[t]o approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.”   The most complex legal issues are built upon the most basic of legal concepts, and consistently have at their root fairness and balance: a need to do the greatest good for the greatest number while still protecting the minority.  The most complex relationships in Mondrian’s grid works are expressed in straight lines, occasionally of variable width, and primary colors.  Emotion is eliminated, or more accurately, transcended.  The concrete—i.e., the reality—is reduced to a visual and comprehensible pattern that is reflective of deeper purposes.

            In his book titled Principles of Composition in Photography, the renowned photographer Andreas Feininger urged photographers to study Mondrian’s works, among selected others, since they teach balance and harmony.  They do this through “dynamic balance,” which, compositionally, entails static elements (parts of the picture appear at rest while other, “dynamic” elements reflect asymmetry.  Good legal writing and argument—whether in statute, opinion, contract, or brief—must ultimately be the legal equivalent of “aesthetically pleasing.” In other words, they must resonate and be comprehensible, and must take the disparate and asymmetrical elements of the case or situation, and resolve them with the static elements, into a coherent result.  Just as Feininger was not suggesting that one could make a photograph of a Mondrian abstraction but rather, could adapt the principles of composition and balance into understanding photography, so may the lawyer seek to apply these foundational elements of Mondrian’s work to the application of legal advocacy, adjudication and drafting.

            Law is balance or, as Aristotle wrote in Politics, “[l]aw is order, and good law is good order.” Law takes abstract policy and in its preferred state, expresses that policy through artificial (in the sense of man-made) or, to borrow from Mondrian, plastic terminology and standards.  No statute, contract or judicial opinion, regardless of how carefully and conventionally drafted, can accommodate all exigencies.  At best, each piece of legal writing provides a harness or framework.  Each reduces the abstraction to an impersonal expression.  While rooted in reality, the legal expression cannot be so concretely expressed—it must use words, just as Mondrian uses lines and color.  It is one step removed, as it must be.  In Mondrian’s works, a few colored boxes are spread out among many white spaces.  Even in as detailed a later work such ass Broadway Boogie Woogie, with its complex blue and red squares breaking up the yellow line, there remains significant white space.  Law cannot predict with absolute certainty; it, too, must have the empty square, the white space.

            Mondrian’s lines and colors is work about connection and relationship, balance and harmony, resolution of tension and conflict through the most straightforward means possible.  It is non-objective in the sense it does not seek to represent the object, but it is a kind of ultra-objectivity in its transcendence to expression in purely abstract form.  Law is objective in this same latter sense: it is meant to be impartial and transcend particular feeling or emotion, and offer resolution based on a balance of underlying principles, expressed in the most comprehensible way and yet still providing flexibility.  While law may have its spiritual basis, it nonetheless must be expressed simply.

            Compositionally, a work of art must be pleasing and in balance, yet cause the eye to move about.  The whole must be greater than the sum of the parts.  Straight lines and primary colors provide clarity but at the same time, form does not override substance.  Both are integral.  In this regard, Mondrian also teaches efficiency of communication, and the need to reduce complex ideas (the substance) to linear form and primary colors.  Of course, a statute or brief or opinion or contract will have more detail, and the analogy is not meant to be exact, but the clarity of presentation of detail—as handled in the example given of Broadway Boogie Woogie—bears out the point and tracks the Mondrian paradigm.  Linear, logical form is used to set forth the substance of a distilled reality.

            Paradoxically, we conclude with another statement from Mondrian: “In art the search for a content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual.” Emphasizing his lessons of comprehensibility and simplicity that one can draw from the minimalism of Mondrian’s work, it is important to consider Mondrian’s comment in the context of the need for justice in each individual case in law.  So, we may say, there is no paradox.  Simplicity of form, if not content, is nonetheless capable of great flexibility and accommodation; interpretation, while straightforward, is not rigid.  Balance accommodates individual justice.

            One sometimes hears the asides in a museum, in viewing works that are deceptively simple, the comments expressing the mistaken belief that “anyone” could do it.  Anyone, perhaps, now, and after the fact, possibly could imitate Mondrian, but Piet Mondrian was the first or at least most successful, to implement a vision with a clear philosophy behind it.  And that provides the most fundamental lesson for the lawyer—the ability not merely to “think outside the box,” but to visualize the appropriate form that gives full resonance to the substance that is to be communicated.

 

August 2009

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