Mondrian and Nicholson: an artistic journey along parallel lines

Where were the paparazzi in September 1938? They should have been thick on the ground outside 60 Parkhill Road in Hampstead, for that month one of the 20th century's most audacious painters, Piet Mondrian, moved in. His arrival in England followed that of other leading avant garde artists, designers and architects, many of them having fled fascist or Soviet autocracies. For a brief period in the second half of the 1930s, London, or more accurately Hampstead and Belsize Park, became the focus for international modernism. Mondrian's presence in London, with hindsight, crowned this development. But, at the time, this 66-year-old man, though at a peak of his creativity, was neglected by collectors and very impoverished. Hampstead, too, was quieter, less wealthy and not yet at the mercy of property developers. 60 Parkhill Road was then a boarding house with a communal bathroom on the first floor. Ben Nicholson, the artist who arranged for Mondrian to take a room on the ground floor, had been guided by the need to obtain a cheap rent.

It was a dreary room, by all accounts. The sole redeeming feature was a three-pane, double-height sash window. It overlooked a garden which might also be thought advantageous. Mondrian grumbled: "Too many trees." Self-parody, perhaps, because of his renowned hatred of the colour green. For many years he had banned it from his palette and deliberately limited himself to white, grey and black and the three primary colours, in keeping with the laws of neoplasticism that he and Theo van Doesburg had first explored in the Netherlands.

Mondrian had taken these ideas further in Paris, during the interwar years, while occupying two studios, one after another. These he had decorated with pieces of board and plain furniture, all painted with the colours of his restricted palette, so that the room and his pictures formed a unity. Everything was carefully positioned; Nelly van Doesburg recollected of the first studio that you could not move an ashtray without destroying the room's harmony. Placed on a table in the hallway was a vase containing a single plastic tulip, its leaves and stem painted white. After seeing this, friends knew never to bring Mondrian flowers.

White was his colour. Ben Nicholson claimed: "No one could make white more white than Mondrian." Very quickly, with the help of white paint, his room in Hampstead began to resemble his studios in Paris. Miriam Gabo, the wife of the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo whom Mondrian had known in Paris, helped him to shop in Camden Town for cheap kitchen furniture, which he made pristine with several layers of white paint. Orange boxes, similarly treated, also helped to furnish this room. Soon it was transformed into a sanctuary for work. As before, everything visible would have upheld his aesthetic, while anything personal would have been hidden or destroyed. This erasure of individuality links Mondrian with the bare, anonymous surfaces of architecture's international style and Le Corbusier's promotion of an impersonal "machine" aesthetic. But it also connects with his ambition to arrive through his art at a universal language and what he called "pure reality".

Nicholson never entirely shared Mondrian's utopian vision, not even during the Dutchman's two years in England, when Nicholson was his closest ally. Yet, even before their first meeting in 1934, Nicholson had been travelling in a similar direction to Mondrian, clarifying and purifying his abstract language through a series of white reliefs, today regarded as the high point of modernism in this country. The association between these two artists lasted seven years. It is the subject of a small, intense, beautifully curated exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, which acts as a reminder that abstract art, at its best, can be powerfully visceral. Witness the dynamic tension in Mondrian's Composition B (No II), with Red, between the explosion of red in the top left rectangle and the black horizontals and verticals holding it in position. Nicholson's paintings and reliefs also have depth and authority, as, for example, when he balances the lift of a circle against the weight of a nearby hanging square or rectangle. Both artists achieved in their art a serene equilibrium. But in Mondrian's case there is a fierce rigour and refusal to opt for tastefulness that Nicholson never matched. Thus while exploring the dialogue between these two artists, the exhibition brings out what Nicholson himself observed – the astonishing differences in their developments, despite shared ambitions and concerns.

They were 22 years apart in age. Nicholson was 40 in the year they first met. His interest in Mondrian appears to have begun the year before, and Christopher Green, co-curator of this exhibition with Barnaby Wright, believes that the greater discipline suddenly visible in Nicholson's handling of materials, lines and forms around 1933-34 may be a response to Mondrian's example. But it was not until after Nicholson visited the artist's Paris studio on 5 April 1934 that he began to regard Mondrian as a mentor.

Many people visited this studio at 26 rue du Départ, which acted as a Mecca for modernists. Situated in a nondescript street near the Gare Montparnasse, it was reached via an entrance beside a printer's shop that led into a courtyard. On the left through a doorway was a dank communal staircase, up which the visitor climbed three storeys. Once through the front door of the apartment, he passed through a dark corridor and vestibule, probably unaware that this was where the artist slept, and then reached another door that opened on to the all-white studio decorated with coloured rectangles and squares. For Michel Seuphor, this transition caused the onset of "an incredible feeling of beauty, of peace, of quiet and harmony". Another of Mondrian's friends compared it to the entrance to paradise.

Nicholson, too, was taken aback; he later claimed that he did not, on his first visit to the studio, understand Mondrian's art, but he was profoundly affected by the feeling that the room generated. He took away "an astonishing feeling of quiet and repose", which stayed with him, even while he sat at a cafe table on the edge of the pavement almost touching the traffic going in and out of the Gare Montparnasse. The studio seemed to him like a hermit's cave, "where lions used to go to have thorns taken out of their paws".

He was at this time inseparable from the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and their constant interchange of ideas was another influence on his art. He also made several visits to Paris in the mid-1930s because his estranged wife Winifred Nicholson and their three children were living there. The Courtauld exhibition would certainly have been less neat and less focused if the curators had opened up the conversation to include Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson, the latter seeing Mondrian frequently during his last two years in Paris. But their absence is in some ways regrettable. It's boys'-club art-history again, aside from the catalogue essay by Nicholson's granddaughter, Sophie Bowness, who reminds us that Mondrian valued Winifred's opinion on his work and writings, and noted the way she saw "into the essence of things and beauty at its purest".

In London, Mondrian referred to Nicholson and Hepworth as his "best friends". For a man who did not make close friends, this still meant a lot. The fact that they lived nearby, in the Mall Studios, and Mondrian could see Nicholson's studio from his window made communication easy. Mondrian even took tea on occasion with Nicholson and Hepworth's four-year-old triplets. Although the infants behaved beautifully, Mondrian afterward proffered Nicholson the opinion that all children are barbarians.

"It's good to work with you," Mondrian wrote to Nicholson. "You are so precise (I find that precision is one of the most important things for anybody)." The two men regularly exchanged photographs of their work, and Mondrian took a sincere interest not only in Nicholson's work but also Hepworth's. It was therefore a blow to him when, for the safety of their children at the onset of war, Nicholson and Hepworth moved to St Ives at the invitation of Adrian Stokes. They begged him to go with them, but he declined. He had found London conducive to work and liberating, though he had remained an outsider. Yet, even before leaving France, he had resolved that America would be his final destination. It was not the war that decided him on this next move, but the fall of France. He stopped painting and once again felt an inner pressure to leave. The main reason was the need to protect his paintings. Come to Cumberland, Winifred Nicholson wrote, offering him the safety of her home, Banks Head. In her recollections, he replied: "It is too green." She had not forgotten the 1938 journey they made together, from Paris to London. The train sped through the Somme landscape amid early evening sunlight, past lush grass and green and soft poplars. Mondrian had not been anywhere outside Paris for almost 20 years. "Isn't it wonderful," he murmured. At first startled by his pleasure in the scene, Winifred quickly realised that the cause of his exhilaration was the beat of the telegraph poles, their repeated verticals offset by the flat horizon.