Victor Mindeleff’s Paintings 
the period of their full fruition. t hey 
appeal to him as living things, as well as 
from their decorative motives, and it is 
the essence of their spirit that he tran¬ 
scribes with his brush. Not their evanes¬ 
cence but their enduring significance; their 
structure and purpose rather than their 
fleeting charm. Curiously, perhaps, he 
rarely presents them in their natural envi¬ 
ronment—seldom painting them as though 
out-of-doors—but shows them by prefer¬ 
ence in juxtaposition with still-life objects 
which are complementary in color and in 
line. They are purposeful arrangements, 
not accidental compositions. Thus the 
straight lines of a low-toned kakemono 
serve to accentuate the graceful turning of 
a bright flower’s branch, while the circular 
outline of a red lacquered placque is made 
to suggest the irregularity in the seemingly 
rotund form of the swamp magnolias, 
which its color throws into high relief. 
These objects, while subordinated to the 
flowers, hold a prominent place in the com¬ 
positions and are always rendered with 
extraordinary care and accuracy. They 
are, as a rule, Japanesque in character and 
elaborate in device. Commonly, they 
have a prototype in an existing object, but 
not infrequently they are in detail evolved 
from inner consciousness. The composi¬ 
tions once conceived in color—the flowers 
once presented in fact, the rest works itself 
out, as it were, without voluntary effort. 
One part suggests another, and each in 
turn is called into existence by the neces¬ 
sity of its being. 
Because Mr. MindelefF is an architect it 
may be that apportionment of space re¬ 
ceives at his hands primary consideration. 
Certainly his compositions find develop¬ 
ment in accordance with the theory of 
axis, and while broadly distributed and 
not overbalanced, there is little or no di¬ 
vision between subject and background, for 
the two, complementing each other, are 
invariably joined in a unified whole. 
Every factor is made an integral part of 
the sum. 
In order to heighten the decorative ef¬ 
fect, and also further mark the type, small 
subsidiary panels of purely conventional 
design are often added by Mr. MindelefF 
as auxiliaries to his pictorial compositions. In 
these the flower, in most instances, finds repetition 
with its leaf in geometric forms which by contrast 
recall attention to the graceful irregularity of the 
principal. Sometimes there is more than one 
FLEUR-DE-I.IS 
panel, and when this is the case the conventional¬ 
ization is reduced to its lowest terms and the plant 
made to repeat itself in varying degrees of formal¬ 
ity. These reductions are usually of vital inter¬ 
est and import and in themselves worthy of minute 
II 
