Luftwaffe - After Mondrian 1976

Curator: Looking at Ian Hamilton Finlay's "Luftwaffe - After Mondrian" is always such a disquieting experience. It feels both familiar and deeply unsettling. Editor: It's a sketch, almost airy, but the sheer number of crosses… they swarm the page like a bad dream. Are they supposed to be Iron Crosses, as in, from Nazi Germany? Curator: Finlay appropriates Mondrian's geometric abstraction, but replaces the rectangles with the Iron Cross, the symbol of the German Luftwaffe. The title makes the connection explicit. It's a loaded juxtaposition. Editor: Right, playing with the cold, ordered beauty of abstraction to hint at something terrible. So much conceptual art hides behind cleverness, but this really resonates. Curator: Finlay was always interested in the darker aspects of classical ideals, the way beauty can be twisted, and the horrors inflicted in the name of order. It makes you wonder about the hidden potential for violence within seemingly rational systems. Editor: It's a stark reminder that even the most pure-seeming forms can be co-opted and corrupted. I'll never look at a Mondrian in quite the same way again. Curator: Well, there’s always a shadow side, isn’t there? Finlay just makes it visible.