The Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose modern school of painting, known as "De Stijl" would certainly subscribe to the modernists assertion of the separation of of society and nature, quite the opposite is true.
While Mondrian painted in a very geometric abstract style, using primary colors on a white ground, he is a prime example of Latour's hybrid theory.
Piet Mondrian, "Broadway Boogie Woogie", Oil on Canvas, 1942-1943. 50"x50" Donated Anonymously to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Latour, in a broad sense, lends his assertions on art and other objects thusly,
Social scientists have for long allowed themselves to denounce the belief system of ordinary people. They call this belief system ‘naturalization’. Ordinary people imagine that the power of gods, the objectivity of money, the attraction of fashion, the beauty of art, come from some objective properties intrinsic to the nature of things. Fortunately, social scientists know better and they show that the arrow goes in fact in the other direction, from society to objects. Gods, money, fashion and art offer only a surface for the projection of our social needs and interests. (51 – 52)
While there is some credibility in this statement, art history tells us differently when it comes to Mondrian.
First, we must understand what abstraction is in regards to art. While the layperson will assume it is just a bunch of lines, colors, "my kid can do that", that is simply not the case. If we define abstraction, we discover that it is:
an abstract or general idea or term.
the act of considering something as a general quality orcharacteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, oractual instances.
an impractical idea; something visionary and unrealistic.
the act of taking away or separating; withdrawal.
While this definition seems to support Latour, with considering something as apart, Mondrian contradicts this assumption. Mondrian, who was a staunch advocate of nature, sought nature as his primary forms for abstraction. A detailed look into his body of work shows abstracted landscapes dominating his early paintings.
Piet Mondrian’s Farmhouse in Meadow Landscape near Duivendrecht. c. 1905
This love of nature, particularly it's formal qualities, led to such paintings as "Broadway Boogie Woogie". Mondrian's distillation of nature into it's purest forms, for him being primary colors, and a strict adherence to vertical and horizontal lines, was the basis for his later work. He said of it in the "New Plastic in Painting":
I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things… I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true
This seemingly "pure" style did not exist in a vacuum, but rather by intense study of the natural world. Without the hybrid process of the societal (Mondrian) and the nature from which his body of work was derived, there would be no real intellectual pursuit contained within the artwork. Could the painting exist without such an integration of society and nature? Possibly, however, there would be no substance to the painting. The canvas, which was woven from cotton, the pigments in the paint, which are derived from natural sources, as well as the binding agent (in most high quality oil paints, it is derived from rabbits) usurp the modernist notion that society and nature exist independently.
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