Dictionary of Literary Influences

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig

to his pro-German sympathies in both world wars, as did his admiration for Friedrich Nietzsche’s brutally competitive philosophy, on which Mencken published a book-length study in 1908. Mencken’s boyhood reading of and admiration for scientific works by Huxley, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, from whom he derived his staunch faith in evolution and also in social and international competition as an engine of progress, probably triggered his lifelong interest in medicine and natural sciences. Writings by William Graham Sumner, Spencer’s leading American admirer, strengthened Mencken’s economic conservatism and commitment to capitalism. His extensive reading also instilled a romantic admiration for an idealized version of eighteenth-century Southern plantation society, which perhaps helped to account for some of his racially controversial statements.

Archives

H.L. Mencken Papers, New York Public Library, New York. A massive collection of Mencken’s literary correspondence and writings.

H.L. Mencken Manuscripts, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland. Extensive biographical and literary materials, including voluminous diaries and autobiographical manuscripts.

Printed Sources

Hobson, Fred. Mencken: A Life (New York: Random House, 1994). The leading biography. Mencken, H. L. The Diary of H. L. Mencken, Charles A. Fecher (ed.), (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1989).

———.Happy Days, 1880–1892 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940).

———.Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943).

———.My Life as Author and Editor, Jonathan Yardley (ed.), (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

———.Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).

Priscilla Roberts

MIES VAN DER ROHE, LUDWIG (1886–1969)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was born in Aachen, Germany, and, with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, would become one of the twentieth century’s most important architects. At age 19, he left Aachen for Berlin, where he would lead a modernist revolt against the imperial and nationalist architecture of Wilhelmine Germany. He served in the army for a short time in 1905 and came of age as an architect between 1906 and 1923, completing his Riehl House (1906) as a real start at designing and completing his plan for the Freidrichstrasse Office Building (1921) as passing German architecture into modernity. During the years in between he developed a nearly adversarial rivalry with Walter Gropius (who opened the Bauhaus in 1919), saw Frank Lloyd Wright’s work for the first time, and worked as a postwar editor for the functionalist journal G. He also tackled the problems of the tall building with his first truly modernist work, the rejected Honeycomb (1921) competition entry for an office building in Berlin. Rohe’s strict modernism would keep him limited to the tall office building and the house of single, open space during the rest of his career. In Rohe’s remaining years in Germany, he completed the Weissenhofsidelung housing colony in 1927 as the representa-

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tion of a real international style, in 1928 presented his masterpiece (the German Pavilion of the Barcelona International Exposition), accepted the directorship of the Bauhaus in 1930 (later closed in 1932 by the Nazis), and joined a group under propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels given the task of designing projects for the 1935 World’s Fair that were never completed. He left Germany in 1938 after accepting a position as head of the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago and after an unexpected visit by Gestapo agents. Rohe’s first design opportunity in America occurred in 1939 with the entire Armour campus, renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) after a merger. His first completed project for the school’s campus was the Minerals and Metals Research Building in 1943. After a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work in 1947, Rohe became the most potent public architect of postwar America, and his office enjoyed over 100 design commissions on three continents. Among his credits are the 860–880 Lake Shore Drive twin apartment buildings (1949–51), the towers of 900 Esplanade and Commonwealth Promenade of Diversey Parkway (1959) in Chicago, and the Seagram Building in New York City (1958), generally considered the most important tall building of the post–World War II period. At 72 years old, Mies formally retired from IIT in 1958. His last major building before his death in 1969 was the Berlin National Gallery (1962–67).

Despite postmodernist attacks against modern architecture as sterile and inhumane, Mies’s position as a pre-eminent architect remains. During his career, Rohe’s influences were largely literary and philosophic, ranging as far as Oswald Spengler, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. Augustine. As early as his days in Aachen, Rohe found a copy of the Die Zukrunft (The Future) journal while cleaning out a desk and credited interest in the journal as a point leading him to thinking about spiritual matters, philosophy, and culture. With his first client, Professor Alois Riehl, Rohe was introduced into philosophy circles, and as his work as a modernist emerged, he moved toward a Spenglerian-Aquinaian argument that there was an overreaching truth that culture depended on and the role of an architect was in recognizing and presenting this truth. While he denied in several interviews that he was influenced by Spengler, he owned both the 1918 and 1922 copies of Decline of the West in his library. Though he abandoned organized religion upon becoming an architect, Rohe admired the philosophies of Aquinas and Augustine, because they echoed his own beliefs that creativity was distillation rather than inspiration, and their arguments that the work of God could be studied and understood through scientific method. His interest in Aquinas and Augustine may have led him in his later years to read the work of major scientists, including Julian Huxley, Arthur Eddington, Sigmund Freud, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger, to help him view science as a rational religion containing a higher unifying system than just theoretical postulates. Rohe also seems to have been influenced by the philosophy of Plato, whom he was reading during work on the Honeycomb design.

Archives

Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: most of his professional files and many personal papers, over 1,000 of his drawings.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.: archival material.

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Printed Sources

Blake, Peter. The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996).

Campbell, Joan. The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

Mies Reconsidered: His Career, Legacy, and Disciple (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1996). Schulze, Franz. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1985).

Christopher C. Strangeman

MILLER, ARTHUR (1915– )

Arthur Miller was born on October 17, 1915, in New York City. His family later moved to Brooklyn. Miller’s mother, Augusta, enrolled him in Abraham Lincoln High School one year before he graduated grade school. As a teenager, he worked at several odd jobs, including carpentry and delivering bakery goods, in order to raise money for college. Miller, who began writing plays at the age of 20, later went to the University of Michigan where in 1938 he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree. While at the university, Miller was first recognized as an up-and-coming author and playwright, winning two awards. In 1939, he wrote The Man Who Had All the Luck. In 1940, he married his first wife, Mary Grace Slattery. They had two children, a son Bob and a daughter Jane. The Man Who Had All the Luck went to Broadway in 1944, but was a failure. Miller still worked at various jobs but continued to write plays as well as scripts for radio. In 1947, he wrote All My Sons, for which he won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Death of a Salesman went on Broadway in 1949, won the Pulitzer Prize, and remains one of Miller’s most popular plays. By 1950, Miller was one of America’s favorite playwrights. In 1951, through mutual friend Elia Kazan, Miller first met Marilyn Monroe. The Crucible, which went on Broadway in 1953 and subsequently won a Tony Award, was another success. In 1955, he wrote A View from the Bridge, which failed. Miller divorced Mary Grace and married Monroe in 1956. While married to Monroe he wrote the screenplay The Misfits, which became a movie in which she starred. In 1961, Monroe and Miller divorced. The marriage to Monroe may have affected some of Miller’s works, including his play After the Fall, seen perhaps not only as a thinly disguised portrait of Monroe’s troubled life, but as representative of human vulnerability and an illustration of private anguish. In 1962, he married photographer Inge Morath with whom he subsequently had a daughter, Rebecca. Later works included Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Creation of the World and Other Business, The American Clock, and Broken Glass. Miller also wrote the script for Playing for Time, a 1980 television film about a women’s orchestra in a Nazi concentration camp, for which he won an Emmy Award. In 1987, Miller published his autobiography

Timebends: A Life, and in the summer of 2001, The Man Who Had All the Luck was staged at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts.

In Timebends Miller cited that two of the most important literary inf luences on him as an author were not writers or even particular titles of books, but his mother Augusta and his aunt Stella (Miller 1987, 36). Miller further cited Russian authors Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as having inf luenced his work; he said both writers were representative of the world’s best authors (Miller 1987, 94). Miller described Marion Starkey’s The Devil in Massachusetts, Charles W. Upham’s Salem

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Witchcraft, and investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s as having all inf luenced The Crucible (Miller 1987, 330). He also named Franz Kaf ka’s The Castle as a definitive work that inf luenced his literary style. Written in a simple yet exploratory style, The Castle continually provided Miller with a frame of reference on how to write. Other major literary inf luences included a book Miller read while in high school, The Brothers Karamazov, which he felt stimulated his love of Russian literature. Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica was another work that Miller described as so inf luential that he never forgot it (Shwartz 1999, 184).

Archives

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at University of Texas at Austin. The Center holds an enormous amount of Miller-related papers, including correspondence, notes, scripts, and sketches.

Special Collections Department, 7th Floor, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich., 48109-1205.

Printed Sources

Bigsby, Christopher W. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987).

Shwartz, Ronald B. For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most

(New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1999).

Wendy A. Maier

MILOSZ, CZESLAW (1911– )

Milosz Czeslaw is today the best known Polish poet in part owing to his receiving the Nobel Prize. Milosz grew up in a Polonised noble family in Lithuania that was then a part of the Russian Empire. He studied at the University of Vilnius (1930–34) and remains influenced by the city’s cultural and religious diversity of Catholic, Judaic, Orthodox, and Protestant thought. He was also influenced by gnosticism, which is responsible for his rather stark views on nature, and by the pagan elements in Lithuanian folklore. Milosz’s religious ideas at that time were influenced by Marian Zdziechowski, a Christian thinker and professor at the University of Vilnius, in addition to Russian writers including Lev Tolstoy and Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov. The list of Milosz’s intellectual inspirations is vast and includes writers as diverse as Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, and especially his own relative, Oscar Milosz, “a Parisian recluse and a visionary” who interested him in mysticism and metaphysics and who gave him a deeper insight into the religion of the Old and New Testaments. During World War II, Milosz became interested in English and American poetry and began translating various poets who “intellectualize poetry” and influenced his poetic language. Among them are T. S. Eliot, whose use of irony Milosz admired, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Robert Browning.

Milosz’s early poems in Trzy zimy (Three Winters, 1936) present the world through a catastrophic lens and reflect the aura of the deepening prewar crisis in Europe. Milosz’s catastrophist views owed much to Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, the playwright, philosopher, painter, and novelist whose work was the precursor of the theater of the absurd in the early 1920s.

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After the war Milosz worked as a cultural attaché of the People’s Poland, but in 1951 he requested political asylum in Paris. Two years later he published his famous and innovative study about the interdependence between a totalitarian state and the intellectuals who supported it (Zniewolony umysl [The Captive Mind], 1953). As a consequence, his writings were banned in communist Poland for the next 30 years. He published extensively in France and then in the United States (Traktat poetycki [Treatise on Poetry], 1957; Miasto bez imienia [City without Name], 1969; Kroniki [Chronicles], 1987), and in 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. The language of Milosz’s mature poetry is unique but he acknowledges the influence of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s greatest romantic poet. He is also indebted to Stanislaw Brzozowski, a philosopher, critic, and novelist, in particular to his intellectual, nonemotional approach to ethical questions.

At the core of Milosz’s writing is an ethical dilemma for the poet: choosing between detachment from life, which might be morally unacceptable but is necessary for writing, on the one hand, and full participation in life, which precludes writing about it, on the other. His notion of a poet’s “double vision” of seeing life from very close and simultaneously maintaining a distance was influenced by Selma Lagerlöf’s Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a book he read as a boy, and later by works of Simone Weil and her concept of distance as “the soul of beauty.” He credited these writers in his Nobel lecture on December 8, 1980, and acknowledged “the generations who wrote in his native tongue as every poet inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him.” Milosz rejected preoccupation with aestheticism in the name of poetry’s moral obligation (Traktat moralny [Treatise on Morals], 1948) and favored poetry that is understood as “an instrument of intelligence” such as the poetry of W. H. Auden and Karl Shapiro. Milosz’s poetry is emotionally restrained, intellectual yet sensual, metaphorically dense, contemplative, and sometimes prophetic. It is rooted in his native Lithuania yet he felt more privileged than the Western poets for being able to write from the point of view of an outsider speaking with many voices. His extraordinary erudition and familiarity with poetry of Asia, especially the Indian poet Kabir, and with Japanese haiku, demonstrate his openness to diverse influences. His latest poetry has moved toward acceptance of the world as the poetic persona reaches apokatastasis, the state of equilibrium, absent from his earlier poems.

Although primarily a poet, Milosz has written several novels, including some with strong autobiographical elements. The autobiographical novel The Valley of the Issa (Dolina Issy, 1955) presents the world in a Manichean context, while Native Realm (Rodzinna Europa, 1959) is written from the viewpoint of an East European attempting to explain his “otherness” to the Western reader.

Archives

None available.

Printed Sources

Carpenter, Bogdana. “The Gift Returned,” World Literature Today 4, 73 (Autumn 1999), 631–36.

Fiut, Aleksander. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, Theodosia S. Robertson (trans.), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

Haven, Cynthia L. “A Sacred Vision: An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz,” The Georgia Review 57, no. 2 (2003), 303–14.

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Milosz, Czeslaw. Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Moz˙ejko (ed.), (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988).

———. Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut (eds.), Richard Lourie (trans.), (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987).

Nathan, Leonard, and Arthur Quinn. The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

Pinsky, Robert. “Czeslaw Milosz,” Partisan Review 46 (1999), 145–53.

Katarzyna Zechenter

MIRO, JOAN (1893–1983)

Fundacio Joan Miro was born in Barcelona, Spain, and from an early age attended informal drawing lessons at La Llotja School of Fine Art. Despite pursuing further artistic studies at the Academia Gali, Miro worked for a number of years as a bookkeeping clerk in a specialty imports firm. Suffering from the effects of typhoid fever as well as a nervous breakdown, Miro resigned from his previous employment, endeavoring to use art as a means of rehabilitation. Possessing a lifelong resistance to depicting the human form, Miro fused the styles of the fauvists, cubists, and impressionists into his own nonfigural, colorful biomorphic abstractions. After his first one-man exhibition in 1918, Miro moved to France to produce such masterpieces as The Farm (1922) and Harlequin’s Carnival (1925). His atmospheric oneiric and Dutch interior paintings of 1925–28 were followed by two years of collage experimentation, after which Miro’s work began to reflect the serious atmosphere surrounding the Second World War. In 1942 Miro returned to Barcelona, where he embarked on his self-proclaimed “assassination of painting,” using a wide range of innovative materials and techniques that would influence American abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Miro won the Grand Prize for engraving at the 1955 Venice Biennale and in 1959 completed two large ceramic murals for the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1966 he was honored with a retrospective at the Tokyo and Kyoto Museums of Modern Art in Japan, but he continued to pioneer new artistic avenues well into the 1970s.

Joan Miro’s art was truly a product of the literature of his era. In the Barcelona of his youth, Miro was exposed to two opposing literary movements. Noucentism was essentially new Mediterranean classicism based on Catalonian culture and best typified by the writings of Eugenio d’Ors, whose novels, including La ben plantada, Miro read as a youth. In opposition to this movement were the modernistes, authors whose external influences such as the symbolism of Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck led them down more expressionist and fantastical paths. The young Miro incorporated both the established and the creatively progressive in his work, an act that was reinforced and paralleled by his reliance on both traditional poetry and the work of his Paris contemporaries in later life. After 1920, Miro became acquainted with the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Pierre Reverdy, as well as the surrealist proponents Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Phillipe Soupault. Although he failed to attend surrealist meetings, Miro incorporated the surrealists’ sense of experimentation and innovation into his artistic productions and often formulated the subject matter of his pieces from unconscious impulses and dream experiences. Moreover, Miro would occasionally include the titles and contents of contemporary French poetry in his paintings, etchings, and sculptures. Coupled with this interest in the literature of his day was Miro’s fascina-

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tion with traditional spiritual authors. Miro was an avid reader of the Christian author St. Francis of Assisi, whose Canticle of the Sun he often referenced while completing his detaillist paintings of 1918–20. The work of early Eastern authors such as Lao-Tsu and the Tibetan ascetics influenced Miro as well. From these sources, Miro learned to keep his visual compositions uncluttered and simplistic and to concentrate through acts of meditation while awaiting inspiration for his work.

Archives

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA86-A995.

Printed Sources

Dupin, Jacques. Miro (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993).

Erben, Walter. Joan Miro: The Man and His Work (New York: Taschen, 1998).

Lassaigne, Jacques. Miro: Biographical and Critical Study (Geneva: Skira Publishers, 1963).

Gregory L. Schnurr

MISES, LUDWIG VON (1881–1973)

Ludwig von Mises was born at Lemberg (today’s Lviv, Ukraine), then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After attending the prestigious Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna (1892–1900), he studied law at the University of Vienna (1900–1906). In 1906 Mises received his doctoral degree in both Canon and Roman Laws and from 1906 until 1912 he held a teaching position at the Wiener Handelsakademie für Mädchen (Viennese Commercial Academy for Girls). Mises was also employed as an economist by the Vienna Chamber of Commerce (1909–34) and after World War I he became the main economic advisor to the Austrian government. He was attending Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s economics seminar at the University of Vienna (1904–14) when he published his first important theoretical book, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel. Mises began lecturing at the University of Vienna in 1913 but was called up soon after the outbreak of World War I to serve as a captain of the cavalry mainly on the eastern front. After the war, Mises took up lecturing at the University of Vienna (1918–34) but was unable to secure a tenure-track position. Between 1920 and 1934, he conducted a private seminar in his office for post-doctoral students and other invited guests and founded the Österreichische Institut für Konjunkturforschung (Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research) in 1927. After Adolf Hitler had gained control in Germany, Mises accepted a professorship of International Economic Relations at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1934 before he emigrated to the United States in 1940. At New York University he was offered a visiting professorship from 1945 until 1969.

As a student of the Akademisches Gymnasium, Mises was especially interested in economic issues, but he was disappointed with the predominant German historical school. His main advisor at the university, Carl Grünberg, was influenced mainly by the German economic historian Georg Friedrich Knapp, one of the leading thinkers of the younger German historical school. Mises, however, found that the Grünberg-Knapp methodology did not provide scientific explanations of economic

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history. In his posthumously published autobiographical sketches, Notes and Recollections (1978), Mises claimed that his reading of Carl Menger’s work Principles of Economics (German edition 1871) in December 1903 had the profoundest influence on his thinking about economics. As a result, he turned away from a left-liberal and interventionist position and embraced Menger’s free-market liberalism. Mise’s breakthrough as an economist was his Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (The Theory of Money and Credit), which was published in 1912. The book questioned the Anglo-American quantity theory and Irving Fisher’s “equation of exchange.” Moreover, it proved the British Currency School and David Ricardo right. Drawing on Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, Mises predicted in his second major work,

Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (German edition 1922), the downfall of socialism because, as he said, socialism was unable to undertake “economic calculation.” Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s influence on Mises cannot be overestimated as Böhm-Bawerk clearly criticized Karl Marx and his followers. The so-called “Austrian School of Economics,” which was founded by Carl Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser, was revived by Mises’s radical laissez-faire doctrine.

Archives

Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn, Ala.: All of Mises’s manuscripts and correspondence.

Printed Sources

Hazlitt, Henry. “Understanding ‘Austrian’ Economics,” The Freeman (February 1981), 67–78.

Kirzner, Israel M. Ludwig von Mises: The Man and His Economics (ISI: Wilmington, 2001). Mises, Ludwig von. Notes and Recollections (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1978).

———.On the Manipulation of Money and Credit (Dobbs Ferry: Free Market Books, 1978).

———.Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981).

———.The Theory of Money and Credit (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1980).

Rothbard, Murray N. “Ludwig von Mises.” In Holcombe, Randall G. (ed.), 15 Great Austrian Economists (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999).

Gregor Thuswaldner

MITTERAND, FRANÇOIS (1916–1996)

Born in Jarnac, a small village of west central France, François Mitterand studied law at the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques in 1934. He worked with a Vichy government agency but quickly broke his association with the Vichy regime in 1943 on account of its anti-Semitic actions. He joined the Resistance, but did not get along with de Gaulle. During the Fourth Republic, Mitterand served eleven governments with different ministerial titles. He joined the UDSR party (Union Démocratique des Socialistes de la Résistance). His constant opposition to de Gaulle propelled him to the political forefront. He received the control of the socialist party in 1971 and was elected president in 1981. His first seven-year term started with socialist ministers and ended with a period of coalition (1986–88). Reelected in 1988, he first appointed socialist ministers. But in 1993 a new coalition government occurred and lasted until 1995.

Mitterand was inf luenced by the socialist doctrine. He quickly showed a great talent for analyzing and synthesizing some French socialist movements such as Saint-Simon (1760–1825) in Le catéchisme des industriels (1823–24), Jean-Joseph

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Proudhon in La philosophie de la misère (1848), and Louis Blanqui and Flora Tristan when they attacked the notion of propriety, underlined the power of democratic election, and requested the right of peaceable assembly. Following in the footsteps of Jules Ferry, who aimed to achieve free education, free press, and development of unions, he was also inspired by Jean Jaures, founder of L’Humanité and writer of Histoire socialiste, when he wanted to apply to France a more socioeconomic and dynamic power while encouraging the separation of church and state and a strong educational system. Mitterand’s vision of nationalization of resources, social security, and added paid vacation was also inspired by Leon Blum, who governed France during Le Front populaire in 1936. Mendès France’s articles about his decision to finish the Indochina war and his objections to CED (Communauté Européenne de Défense) would affect his decisions when president. But Mitterand developed his own political style in a mixture of complex and ideological dogma.

He was also influenced by important literary figures such as the romantic figures of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1866) and Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins (1847) in their fight to obtain democratic election and redistribution of wealth. Albert Camus’s point of view in La Peste (1947) on the absurdity of the human condition following the Second World War played a strong role in Mitterand’s pursuit of peace and freedom for the world. A special mention is deserved for Charles Peguy with Les cahiers de la quinzaine (1900–1914) and Émile Zola with Les RougonMacquart, histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second empire (1871–93): their socialist ideas in newspaper articles and their strong commitment for justice found echo in Mitterand. Strongly affected by the war, his constant quest for freedom and social change was in total conflict with General Charles de Gaulle’s Mémoires de guerre (1954–59). The stylistic approach of Marguerite Yourcenar in Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27), stressing the delicate intricacy of past and present, the concept of death and literature, influenced both his books Le grain et la paille (1975) and L’abeille et l’architecte (1978). His friends who were journalists ( Jean Daniel, Le Nouvel Observateur), writers (Marguerite Duras, L’amour, 1971), poets (Louis Aragon, Le crève-coeur, 1941) and architects (Louis Pei, cour Napoléon, 1986–88) brought him new perspectives on the value of man, beauty, and politics and were expressed in interviews and political speeches.

His principal changes following the presidential election reflected some ideals of the 1968 “May revolution,” as well as socialist concepts, philosophy expressed in Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1758) in their pursuit of equality and justice for all. Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (1966), in his criticism of human sciences and fragmentation of history, and Gilles Deleuze’s Qu’estce que la philosophie (1986), in which he stressed the notion of “difference,” were reflected in Mitterand’s speeches.

Mitterand’s complex international, artistic, and theoretical formation led him to mix genres in politics. But his words were not always followed by corresponding actions, and it is true that his frequently changing course disappointed many of those who had carried him to power in 1981.

Archives

Archives Nationales de Paris; Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; Socialist Party Headquarters, Paris.

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Printed Sources

Bell, D. S., and Byron Criddle. The French Socialist Party. The Emergence of a Party of Government (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Cole, Alistair. François Mitterand. A Study in Political Leadership (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).

Duhamel, Alain. Une Ambition Française (Paris: Plon, 1999).

Dupin, Eric. L’Après Mitterand. Le parti Socialiste à la dériv (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991). Mamère, Noel. Ma République (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

Mitterand, François. L’abeille et l’architecte (Paris: Seuil, 1978).

———. Le grain et la paille (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

Price, R. A Concise History of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Martine Sauret

MONDRIAN, PIETER CORNELIS (1872–1944)

Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Upon completion of elementary studies he pursued a teaching diploma and taught for a brief time at a school that his father administered. In 1892 Mondrian moved to Amsterdam and studied fine art at the Rijksacademie, copying paintings from the Rijksmuseum and receiving additional private lessons from instructors. His early works exhibited a calm semi-naturalism that was quickly abandoned upon his introduction to cubism in 1911. Mondrian exhibited at the Salon des Independants in Paris before moving to Holland for four years during the First World War. In 1917 Mondrian founded De Stijl, an avant-garde style of art based on his concept of neoplasticism. Through his productions such as the nonrepresentational Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue (1937), Mondrian strove to express underlying universal absolutes through the use of flat primary colors, planar elements, and straight lines. Unable to sell his abstract work, Mondrian was forced to paint canvasses of flowers throughout the 1920s to earn enough to survive. He moved to New York in 1940 and two years later held his first one-man exhibition, showcasing work such as Broadway BoogieWoogie (1942) that demonstrated his use of chain-link patterns of color. Mondrian died of pneumonia in the Murray Hill Hospital in New York City on February 1, 1944.

Mondrian’s substitution of symbolic color for natural color and of nonrepresentational signs for perceived reality was directly linked to the literature of his era, especially that of the theosophist writers Henry Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky. Theosophy synthesized oriental religions, Western magic, Asian scripture, and Rosicrucian mythology into a type of organized occultism that espoused that knowledge of the laws of the universe could be obtained by discarding the immediate and the tangible. Mondrian, who was a member of the Theosophical Society, believed that by banishing nature from art one could also expel the irrational and emotional to expose universal truths. This nineteenth-century idea was closely linked to that of ancient philosophers such as Plato, who espoused that universal order and higher consciousness could be demonstrated through the use of perfect solids. Artists contemporary to Mondrian, such as Constantin Brancusi, also believed that the essence of things was not expressed in their external form and that it was impossible for artists to express anything essentially by imitating the exterior. It was this belief that art could provide a transition to regions of deeper, spiritual reality that led Mondrian to champion the use of the nonrepresentational

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