Cardplayers with Mondrian Watching

#92016     50″ X 66″      ac

• Rouault: “The Old King” (1937)
• Picasso: “Ambroise Vollard” (1910)
• Michelangelo: “The Prophet Jeremie”
• Window a la Mondrian

At the first glance, two people are playing cards, then we add an old man in the middle. T. F. Chen supposed there is a person watching the game. Who is he or she and where?

Mondrian stands there on the upper right corner, represented by a window in his style, a very distinguished style of him in horizontal and vertical black lines containing prime colors and the white.

Actually Chen employed the Mondrian elements for the consideration of the whole composition of the painting. These colors and lines not only enrich and brighten the picture but also bring to it an obvious sense of modernity. Even though Picasso’s Cubistic “Vollard” and Rouault’s Fauvistic “Old King” are revolutionary images in art history challenging the classic like Michelangelo’s “Jeremie” on the Sistine Chapel, they look traditional comparing to the Mondrian design which envigorizes the whole painting while modernizing the work.

Here we see four persons in four different esthetic styles coexist and enpower each other in a manifestation of post-modernism using cardplaying as a pretext.

– T. F. Chen