Peek at Piet

PITTSBURGH — Modern art would be nothing without Piet Mondrian.

And Piet Mondrian would be nothing without windmills and landscapes.

OK, so art geeks don’t think “windmill” when they think “Mondrian.”

They think Neo-Plasticism.

They think rigid, mathematical grids made up of white, blue, red, yellow and black rectangles framed by thick black lines.

They think harmony and balance.

But windmills and landscapes are where Mondrian started. Rectangles are where he eventually ended up.

Take a walk through the Andy Warhol Museum’s new Mondrian exhibit, and you’ll only see three examples of the grid paintings.

Three. That’s it.

But don’t let that stop you, because you’ll see 21 other examples of where Mondrian came from, some of them never before viewed in the United States.

You’ll see the artist’s progression from windmills (he was Dutch, after all) to impressionistic landscapes to shapes for the sake of shapes.

Just don’t make the error a visitor made during last Saturday’s party that opened the exhibit. He explained earnestly to his art-illiterate companions that only these three paintings were really Mondrian. The rest, well …

(Apparently, packed exhibit openings with two cash bars in the lobby and a swingy jazz band tuning up next door can bring out the pompousness in a guy. They also bring out young women in hooker dresses, snobbish society matrons, Goth/artsy types in torn jeans and couples gussied up for the prom. But I digress.)

Make no mistake: All of the paintings in the Warhol’s new exhibit are worth seeing. They’re all fascinating.

And they’re all Mondrian.

ALSO AT ANDY’S When you’re done ruminating over the marvels of Mondrian, slide down the hall to check out Transformer, an exhibit by Los Angeles artist Glenn Kaino.

Though much of Transformer is on the seventh floor, Kaino has works scattered throughout the building, from the spinning chair in the lobby (it randomly goes from a slow circle to a dizzying 200 revolutions per minute) right up to the giant stuffed ostrich made of snakeskin on the top floor.

One display that’ll grab your attention is “Simple System For Dimensional Transformation, 2003,” which starts out with a tiny origami crane in front of a photo of the artist’s L.A. studio. A small string pulls the crane’s tail, causing its wings to flap.

Follow that string around the corner and you’ll encounter a large machine powered by a shower that turns a watermill of giant plastic teeth. The watermill powers a revolving jackalope on a tuft of synthetic grass, and the jackalope’s platform is connected to a mechanism that pulls the string that flaps the crane’s wings.

Other Kaino works include a chess set made of cast bronze hands (the lighter-colored pieces are making peaceful gestures; the darker ones are much ruder); a pirate ship with enough planks for every pirate; a 14-foot Zen garden sandcastle that references Oz’s Emerald City; and a wall of 20 synchronized blue wave machines.

Kaino’s works are definitely not Mondrian.

But they are really cool.