Yesterday and friend of mine and I visited the grave of Piet Mondrian on Cypress Hills Cemetery (the cemetery is both in Queens and Brooklyn). From the entrance to the grave it was a 20-minute hike.
Mondrian's gravestone is rather discrete, that probably suits him well. In front of it there were some small stones in red, and blue, admirers must have put them there, in an attempt to honor Mondrian.

In 2019 some MOMA curators went to his grave on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. David Kortava in The New Yorker witnessed the visit: ''Christophe Cherix, the museum’s chief curator of drawings and prints, surveyed the surroundings. “Where are we?” he wondered aloud. He had on a charcoal-gray overcoat, a wool scarf tied in a Parisian knot, and a knit cap.

Michelle Kuo, a curator in the department of painting and sculpture, put her hood up and hunched her shoulders. “Did we just stop at a random location?” she asked. “It’s not like Mondrian’s grave is on Google Maps, right?”'

Read the article here.

In the same magazine Peter Schjeldahl reviewed the translation of the Hans Janssen biography:

'Mondrian enjoyed and profited from friendships with women. You might expect a strain of puritanism from an individual who was raised Calvinist in what Janssen terms “perhaps the most traditional communities in one of the least forward-looking of countries.” The effect on the country boy of his move, in 1899, to Amsterdam’s “Quartier Latin,” a district of “bars, nightclubs, cabarets and brothels,” as Janssen tells it, can only be imagined. But, as much or as little as Mondrian plunged into the nocturnal tumult, he kept his art and his life as remote from each other as possible, to the point of destroying most of the letters that he received after reading them. Janssen, for all his sleuthing, finally confesses that Mondrian’s amours remain “more or less a closed book.”'

Read the review here.

The reason for this outing was a project of friend of mine, an artist, who is working on Mondrian and his legacy for a museum in Winterswijk, a small town in the Netherlands not far from the border with Germany, and the place where Mondrian grew up.

It all was utterly pleasant, it helped of course that it was not a wintry day. My friend put some white flowers on the grave, we had spray-painted the steels white, because Mondrian disliked the color green.

Then we walked back.

Tourists who like to see a different part of NYC can take the J train to the cemetery. Or a cab of course. The staff at the front desk of the cemetery is helpful, the cemetery itself a cheer delight, with especially for novelists lots of names to remember.