The Life of Forms in Art: Modernism, Organism, Vitality 9781501353918, 9781501356018, 9781501353932, 9781501353925

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The Life of Forms in Art

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The Life of Forms in Art modernism, organism, vitality Brandon Taylor

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Brandon Taylor, 2020 Brandon Taylor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes, the Acknowledgements on pp. 241–243 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Maria Rajka Cover image: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Movement of Lines on a Chaotic Ground, 1940, watercolour and coloured crayons on paper, 26.9 × 21.5 cm, Kunstmuseum Bern. Gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach 1970 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-5391-8 PB: 978-1-5013-5601-8 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5393-2 eBook: 978-1-5013-5392-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrationsviii

Prelude: On Life and Form1

Life in the work of art versus technical modernity after the First World War – The embryology of Hans Driesch, the crystallography of Otto Lehmann – The mathematics of life and change – Bergson’s phenomenology of change and duration – The Romantic idea of the work of art as ‘always becoming’ – Organic faktura in the Russian avant-garde – Form and time in the early cinema – Goethe on ‘polarity’ and ‘intensification’ – Instabilities of social life and the search for vital forms in art

1 Organicity27

The work of art as organism in the early European avant-garde – Strzemiński’s critique of Malevich’s Suprematism – His theory of Unism and the struggle against the Productivists – Art and the social metaphor – Kobro’s ‘spatio-temporal units’ in her sculpture of 1928–29 – The project of the International Collection of Modern Art in Łódź – Self-aware pulsations in Strzemiński’s Seascapes of 1933–34 – A biological turn in Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s work and their negative assessment of Surrealism – The eventual curtailment of Unism by war

2 Biomorphism57

Zoological forms in art, and the term ‘biomorphism’ – In Paris, paintings by Miró and Picasso of the mid-1920s – The sharp vitality of French and German art between the wars – Kandinsky’s use of biological imagery after 1934 – In London, the role of the journal Axis – Henry Moore as a carver of ‘slow life’ who ‘bodies out’ flat geometric form – In New York, biomorphism as a triumph of the amoeba over the shape of a square – John Graham’s circle of artists in the later 1930s – Roundness and ‘being’

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Contents

3 Ambiguity91

Natural form in the early work of Hans Arp, and the Dada Cabaret of 1916 – Collages and reliefs that mimic nature but ambiguously – Chance, serenity and evolution somehow combined – ‘Concretion’ sculptures after 1930 and the support of the journal Documents – Oppositions to Gestalt theory – Collaborations with Sophie Taeuber – Arp’s concept of ‘Dada-nature’ that is sense-less but never nonsense – His use of photography to further destabilize his work – The hermeneutic circle that never closes

4 Monstrosity127

Body dysmorphia in Picasso’s art – Elephantine legs and weaponized sexual attributes from the mid-1920s – His Seated Bather as cause célèbre of the monster style – Freudian and Jungian readings – Salvador Dalí’s interest in anamorphosis and the emergence of the ‘critical-paranoiac style’ – His collaboration with Jacques Lacan – The Spectre of Sex Appeal of 1934 – Bataille on nature’s deviations and the bankruptcy of Enlightenment science – Dalí’s emotion versus Picasso’s creatures that are disproportionate, but ‘the same as us’

5 Dialectics165

‘Bringing to form’ as the mission of art – Mondrian and van Doesburg on the basic elements of art – Negation and affirmation in van Doesburg – The Art Concret manifestos of 1930 – Objections from Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein – The tirade against ‘abstract’ art by Kandinsky and others – The emergence of Konkrete Kunst in Switzerland in the late 1930s – Max Bill and the formation Allianz – Richard Lohse on the dialectics of processuality in the completed work – The journal Spirale after 1953

6 Liquefaction197

The fluidity of matter itself – Scribbling, blotting and pouring in French Surrealism before 1939 – Gertrude Stein’s ‘continuous present tense’ – Paper-tearing as fluidity – Arp’s papiers déchirés and papiers

Contents

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froissés in the context of impending war – Degrading or disgusting matter in Sartre and several artists – Liquid methods in New York after 1940 – Motherwell and Jackson Pollock on ‘risk’ as a basis for style – In postwar Paris, Tapié’s advocacy of ‘non-non-form’ – Camille Bryen’s ‘abhumanisme’

Coda235

Signs of a withdrawal of the artist from the work – Rauschenberg in Paris, his quietude and passivity – John Cage’s interests in ‘something’ versus ‘nothing’ – The body as tool in Japanese gutai after 1953 – Allan Kaprow on art’s new openness to ‘old socks and a thousand other things’

Afterword and acknowledgements241 Index 244

List of Illustrations Plates Plate 1a Władysław Strzemiński, Synthetic Composition 1, 1923, oil on canvas, 62 × 52 cm Plate 1b Władysław Strzemiński, Unist Composition No 4, c.1925, oil on canvas, 64 × 64 cm Plate 2a Władysław Strzemiński, Architectonic Composition 5b, 1928, oil on canvas, 96 × 60 cm Plate 2b Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition 3, 1928, painted steel, 40 × 64 × 40 cm Plate 3a Władysław Strzemiński, Unist Composition 13, 1934, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm Plate 3b Władysław Strzemiński, Rainy Seascape of 25 July 1934, 1934, distemper on cardboard, 20 × 25 cm Plate 4a Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar, Juan-les-Pins, 1924, oil with sand on canvas, 140.7 × 200.3 cm Plate 4b Pablo Picasso, Musical Instruments on a Table, 1924, oil on canvas, 162 × 204.5 cm Plate 5a Pablo Picasso, Still-Life, 1925, oil and sand on hardboard, 97.8 × 131.2 cm Plate 5b Wassily Kandinsky, Capricious Forms, July 1937, oil on canvas, 88.9 × 116.3 cm Plate 6a Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934, ironstone, 9.1 cm high Plate 6b Joan Miró, Painting, 1933, oil on canvas mounted on board, 132.0 × 197.2 cm Plate 7a Arshile Gorky, Image in Khorkom, 1936, oil on canvas, 91.44 × 121.92 cm Plate 7b Hans Erni, Bios, 1941, tempera on Pavatex, 120 × 150 cm Plate 8a Hans Arp, Bird Mask, 1918, wood, 19 × 23.5 × 3 cm Plate 8b Hans Arp, Human Concretion, 1934, plaster, 35 × 42 × 34 cm Plate 9a Barbara Hepworth, Three Forms (Carving in Grey Alabaster), 1935, alabaster on marble base, 26.5 × 47.3 × 21.7 cm

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Plate 9b Sophie Taeuber-Arp with Hans Arp, Composition verticalehorizontale, 1916, embroidery, wool, 50 × 38.5 cm Plate 10 Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Lignes géométriques et ondoyantes [Geometric and undulating lines], coloured pencil on paper, 21.2 × 13.3 cm Plate 11 Salvador Dalí, The Rotting Donkey, 1928, oil on wood, 61 × 50 cm Plate 12a Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, 1927–28, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm Plate 12b Pablo Picasso, Bather, 1928, oil on canvas, 24.0 × 35.0 cm Plate 13 Pablo Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930, oil on canvas, 163.2 × 129.5 cm Plate 14a Salvador Dalí, (Bather) Female Nude, 1928, oil and beach sand on panel, 63.5 × 75 cm Plate 14b Salvador Dalí, The Spectre of Sex Appeal, 1934, oil on wood panel, 17.9 × 13.9 cm Plate 15a Theo van Doesburg, Composition VII (The Three Graces), 1917, oil on canvas, 85 × 85 cm Plate 15b Theo van Doesburg, Arithmetic Composition, 1930, oil on canvas, 101 × 101 cm Plate 16a Auguste Herbin, Spirale, 1932, oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm Plate 16b Charles Shaw, Bone Structures, c.1935–36 oil on canvas, 35 × 43.5 in Plate 17 Jean Hélion, Standing Figure, 1935, oil on canvas, 130.2 × 88.9 cm Plate 18a Wassily Kandinsky, Succession, 1935, oil on canvas, 80.96 × 100.01 cm Plate 18b Max Bill, Infinite and Finite, 1947, oil on canvas, 110.0 × 103.0 cm Plate 19a Richard Paul Lohse, Concretion I, 1945–46, oil on Pavatex, 70 × 70 cm Plate 19b Richard Paul Lohse, Two and Two Colour-Groups, 1952/68, oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm Plate 20a Esteban Francés, Barbed Wire, 1937, oil and grattage on canvas, 76.2 × 91.4 cm Plate 20b Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology, 1938, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm Plate 21 Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), It’s All Over, 1946–47, oil on canvas, 81 × 81 cm Plate 22a William Baziotes, The Drugged Baloonist, c.1942–43, collage of printed paper, pen and ink, and graphite, 46.4 × 60.9 cm Plate 22b Robert Motherwell, Joy of Living, 1943, collage of construction paper, mulberry paper, fabric, and printed map with tempera, ink, crayon, oil and graphite, 111.5 × 91.2 cm Plate 23 Robert Motherwell, The Pink Mirror, 1946, oil and pasted papers on paperboard, 99.1 × 74.9 cm

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Plate 24a Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jardin Nocturne, 1947, watercolour and ink on paper, 21.0 × 26.5 cm Plate 24b Camille Bryen, Hépérile No 12, 1951, oil on canvas, 146 × 97 cm

Figures Fig 0.1 Diagram from H. Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, 1908 Fig 0.2 Diagram from E. Haeckel, Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben, 1917 Fig 0.3 Mikhail Matyushin, Running Figure, c.1915–16, tree root, 4.8 × 5.5 × 2.1 cm Fig 0.4 Vladimir Tatlin, wing strut for Letatlin, 1929–32, willow and cork, length 240 cm Fig 0.5 Jean Metzinger, La Goûteuse (The Taster), 1911, oil on cardboard, 75.9 × 70.2 cm Fig 1.1 Katarzyna Kobro, ToS75 – Structure, c.1919, wood, metal, cork, glass (dimensions unknown) Fig 1.2 Kasimir Malevich, The Additional, Formative Element in Cubism, c.1924–27, 55.0 × 78.9 cm Fig 1.3 Drawing from Kasimir Malevich, Suprematism: 34 Drawings, Vitebsk, 1920 Fig 1.4 Diagram from Władisław Strzemiński, ‘B = 2’, Blok, no 8/9, 1924 Fig 1.5 Katarzyna Kobro, ‘The Uniform Rhythm of Calculating Individual Elements of Composition’, 1936 Fig 1.6 Henryk Stażewski, Abstract Composition, c.1936, oil on canvas, 54.5 × 46 cm Fig 1.7 The International Collection of Modern Art, Łódź, installation view showing works by Stażewski, Arp, van Doesburg, Vantongerloo,Léger, Prampolini, Schwitters, Werkman, Baumeister and others, 1932 Fig 1.8 Władysław Strzemiński, Unist Composition 12, 1932, oil on canvas, 50 × 38 cm Fig 1.9 Katarzyna Kobro, Nude, 1933 [lost work], plaster or white cement, dimensions unknown

3 4 11 13 15 28 30 30 35 39 43

43 45 48

List of Illustrations

Fig 1.10 Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition 9, 1933, painted steel, 15.5 × 35 × 19 cm Fig 1.11 Karol Hiller, Heliographic Composition, c.1934, 23.5 × 17.5 cm Fig 1.12 Władysław Strzemiński, Evicted (Deportation series), 1940, pencil, paper, 30 × 38 cm Fig 2.1 Joan Miró, sketchbook double-page showing studies for paintings, c.1925, each page 27.3 × 19.6 cm, pencil and blue ink Fig 2.2 Alberto Giacometti, from ‘Objets Mobiles et Muets [Mobile and Mute Objects]’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, 3, 1931 Fig 2.3 Diagrams of complex surfaces: (a) the zig-zag, (b) the curve, from Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 1926 Fig 2.4 Yves Tanguy, ‘Poids et Couleurs [Weights and Colours]’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, 3, 1931 Fig 2.5 Median section of an amphibian embryo. From Die Kultur der Gegenwart: Zellern und Gewebelehre, Morphologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte, part II, 1913 Fig 2.6 Diagram of Azilian painted pebbles, from M. Burkitt, Our Early Ancestors, 1926 Fig 2.7 Illustration accompanying G. Grigson’s article ‘Comment on England’, Axis, no 1, 1935, p 10, showing Edward Wadsworth, Composition, 1932, and John Piper, Construction, 1934 Fig 2.8 Microphotograph from W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope, 1935 Fig 2.9 Human scapulae with transformational grids (a) Caucasian, (b) Negro, (c) North American Indian from the Kentucky Mountains, from D’Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917 Fig 2.10 Henry Moore, Ideas for Sculpture: Transformation of Bones, 1932, pencil on cream lightweight wove, 17.9 × 11.2 cm Fig 2.11 Naum Gabo, Construction in Space (The Crystal), c.1937, rhodoid, 48.9 × 68.0 × 45.1 cm Fig 2.12 Frontispiece of Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936 (detail) Fig 2.13 Diagram of the amoeba, showing (fi) in the process of engulfing a particle of food, (n) nucleus, (cv) the contractile vacuole, (f) several food particles already engulfed, from

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48 50 55 59

63 64 66

68 71

73 75

75 77 78 81

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List of Illustrations

W.P. Pycraft (ed), The Standard Natural History: From Amoeba to Man, 1931 Fig 2.14 Dorothy Gray, ‘Blustery Weather Lotion’, c.1945 Fig 3.1 Naum Gabo, Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points, 1925, plastic, glass, metal and wood, 67.3 × 55.2 × 101.6 cm Fig 3.2 Hans Arp, Pre-Dada drawing, 1915, ink and pencil on paper, 15.2 × 19 cm Fig 3.3 Hans Arp, Abstract Composition, 1915, collage, 24 × 20 cm Fig 3.4 Hans Arp, Head, 1929, string and paint on canvas Fig 3.5 Hans Arp, Growth, 1938, marble, 80.3 cm high Fig 3.6 Hans Arp, Stone Formed by Human Hand, 1937–38, Jura Kalkstein, 41.5 × 50 × 25 cm Fig 3.7 Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marital Sculpture, 1937, turned and sawn wood, 30.0 × 29.5 × 27.5 cm Fig 3.8 Diagrams by Kurt Koffka and Herta Kopfermann, from Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935 Fig 3.9 Hans Arp, Three Disagreeable Objects on a Face, 1930, plaster, 19 × 37 × 29.5 cm Fig 3.10 Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934, pynkado wood, 27.9 × 54.6 × 30.8 cm Fig 3.11 Alexander Calder, A Universe, 1934, motor-driven mobile: painted iron pipe, wire and wood with string, 102.9 cm high Fig 3.12 Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Duet Drawing, 1939 Fig 3.13 Diagram from Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology, 1947 Fig 3.14 Photo-spread of Hans Arp, Human Concretion, 1936, stone Fig 3.15 Hans Arp, Plant Organism [or Giant Seed], 1936, limestone on a revolving base, 147 cm high Fig 4.1 Pablo Picasso, Studio with Plaster Head, 1925, oil on canvas, 98.1 × 131.1 cm [detail] Fig 4.2 Salvador Dalí, Barcelona Mannequin, 1926, oil on canvas, 198 × 148 cm [detail] Fig 4.3 Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925, oil on canvas, 215.3 × 142.2 cm Fig 4.4 Pablo Picasso, The Painter and His Model, 1927, oil on canvas, 214 × 200 cm

84 85

92 94 94 100 103 104 108 110 111 112 113 118 119 121 123 128 129 130 133

List of Illustrations

Fig 4.5 Pablo Picasso, Bather by a Cabin, 1927, graphite, 30 × 23 cm Fig 4.6 Pablo Picasso, Figure, 1927, grisaille, 133 × 103 cm Fig 4.7 Pablo Picasso, Nude on a White Background, 1927, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm Fig 4.8 Pablo Picasso, Metamorphosis II, 1928, painted plaster, 22.6 × 18 × 11.5 cm Fig 4.9 Picasso exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, 1932 Fig 4.10 Salvador Dalί, The Bather, 1928, oil and collage on panel, 52.1 × 71.8 cm Fig 4.11 Photo-layout in C. Einstein, ‘Saint Antoine de Padoue et l’Enfant Jésus’, Documents, no 4, 1929 Fig 4.12 Salvador Dalí, Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, 1930, oil on canvas, 50.2 × 65.2 cm Fig 4.13 Image from Georges Bataille, ‘Le Cheval Académique’, Documents, no 1, 1929 Fig 4.14 Image from Georges Bataille, ‘Les Écarts de la Nature’, Documents, no 2, 1930 Fig 4.15 Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, Surrealist Figures, 1933, drypoint engraving, 36 × 42.5 cm [detail] Fig 5.1 Piet Mondrian, Composition 10 in Black and White, 1915, oil on canvas, 85 × 105 cm Fig 5.2 Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition VI, 1925, oil on canvas, 50.0 × 50.0 cm Fig 5.3 Hans Erni, Panta Rhei, 1935, oil on canvas, 116 × 80 cm Fig 5.4 Max Bill, Fifteen Variations on a Theme, 1935–38 [one of fifteen colour lithographs], 32.0 × 30.5 cm Fig 5.5 Max Bill, Endless Ribbon (original 1935) 1953, granite, 134.7 (with base) × 111.7 × 116.8 cm Fig 5.6 Richard Paul Lohse, Vogelbild, 1935, oil on wood, 46 × 37.5 cm Fig 5.7 Cover of Spirale, no 1, 1953, woodcut by Dieter Roth, graphics by Marcel Wyss, 50 × 35 cm Fig 6.1 André Masson, Automatic Drawing, c.1925, pen and ink, 30.3 × 24.1 cm Fig 6.2 Marcel Jean, Décalcomanie, c.1935–36 Fig 6.3 Gérard Vulliamy, Fantasmagoria, 1933, oil on canvas, 89.0 × 145.5 cm

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134 135 136 138 142 145 148 150 156 157 162 166 172 181 184 191 192 196 200 201 203

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List of Illustrations

Fig 6.4 Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Movement of Lines on a Chaotic Ground, 1940, watercolour and coloured crayons on paper, 26.9 × 21.5 cm [and on cover] Fig 6.5 Hans Arp, Second papier déchiré, 1932, 28 × 22 cm Fig 6.6 Hans Arp, Drawing on Crumpled Paper, 1942, 64.5 × 49.5 cm Fig 6.7 Jean Fautrier, Hostage no 3, 1945, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 35 × 27 cm Fig 6.8 Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), from Group of Etchings, c.1937–50, etching and drypoint on paper, 12.4 × 9.5 cm Fig 6.9 W. Baziotes, G. Kamrowski, J. Pollock, Collaborative Painting, 1940–41, oil and enamel on canvas, 48.6 × 65.9 cm Fig 6.10 Gordon Onslow Ford, Temptations of a Painter, 1941, oil on canvas, 116.8 × 152.4 cm Fig 6.11 Robert Motherwell, Mexican Sketchbook, 1941, page of 17 July, ink on paper, 22.9 × 29.2 cm Fig 6.12 Knud Merrild, Perpetual Possibility, 1942, enamel on canvas over composition board, 50.8 × 41.1 cm Fig 6.13 Photo of an electric flash, from A. Breton, ‘La beauté sera convulsive’, Minotaure, no 5, 1934 Fig 6.14 Jackson Pollock, Vortex, c.1947, oil and enamel on canvas, 52.3 × 46.3 cm Fig 7.1 Robert Rauschenberg, This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time, c.1948–49, pencil on tracing paper, and fourteen woodcuts on paper, bound with twine and stapled, 30.8 × 22.5 cm Fig 7.2 Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, 1955

207 209 210 212 215 218 219 220 224 226 230

236 240

Prelude: On Life and Form What is form? Or rather: What was form to a generation of European artists coming to activity after the end of the First World War and the onset of the 1920s? How would the artist explore the fashioning of line, mass, volume and scale, now disburdened of the obligation to copy the appearances of natural and physical things? Part of the answer would arise from the very conditions of European life. In war, in industry and in the workplace – mechanization, time-keeping and control. In urban life, increasingly – utility, efficiency and the plan. A technical modernity, in other words, in which all fields of enterprise and inquiry were potentially caught up. Yet it was one in which the technological embrace was not everywhere welcome. Questions were arising – had already arisen – prompted by an impulse to happenstance and experiential flow, to be cognizant of variation and chance, of absurdity and the dream. A certain tension between extremes, therefore: between rational order and the irrational; between measure and motion, data and rhythm; between the what and the how of consumption. By what means could clock-time, chronicity, management – the modernity of quantification – be reconciled with subjective experiences of sensation and cognition? Could the artwork itself come to embody the temporalities of change, transformation and decay? Such questions would crop up repeatedly in the practice of art in the decades between 1920 and 1950. They defined the troubled consciousness of an era, and we have the artworks of the period to demonstrate variously how. My broad proposal – to anticipate a theme that will run through most of what follows – is that such questions proved inseparable from certain apprehensions about the definition of ‘life’ itself. In the studios and in conversation, the languages of artistic practice were changing fast as the First World War came to its grisly end. To mention one significant symptom: for most artists, Cubism was already behind them. A compositional device consisting of taut straight lines that divided planes sharply from each other, or provided facets with edges and direction, or provided offered metaphors for machinery and the efficient use of space: that device was already giving way to the wandering line, to curvature and to organic form, socalled – to a semblance of association with nature, even with the biological. Few could fail to be struck, for instance, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, by the growth of scientific explanation in

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a world once assumed to be organized by the deity. And yet an intractable question was implied thereby. How could the wellsprings of natural, animal and human growth be accounted for in a universe increasingly understandable as mechanism, be it from physics, physics combined with chemistry, or from chemistry alone? The answer provided by Darwin’s The Origin of Species of 1859, that life was perpetuated by nature working blindly – by chance mutation and adaptation – appeared to drain quality itself from the quantitative workings of a vast machine. Even more troubling: if life was not superintended by the deity, and if the arrangement of living things was governed by nothing other than random mutation and selection, then life and non-life might be merely a continuum, with no essential differences between them. An alternative course would be to ask questions about concepts of organization, generation, growth and decay that traditional theology and metaphysics had been unable to answer. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was clear too that observations from the laboratory were inescapably philosophical, hence metaphysical and even ontological; that data from the laboratory would need to support, if not entirely answer, fundamental questions about the differences between living and non-living things, between organic and inorganic substance, and about categories, consciousness, agency, even the experience of time itself. A particular term – ‘vitalism’ – had since Aristotle been used to define the distinction between living and non-living things by reference to a quality called ‘entelechy’, an immaterial power or property that animated any entity that could be regarded as a living ‘whole’. Since the rise of observational science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, vitalism had fallen into disrepute; but in the wake of Darwin some more critical versions had started to take hold. The experiments on the sea-urchin embryo by the German biologist-philosopher Hans Driesch, for example, first published in the 1880s and then presented in his Philosophie des Organischen [Philosophy of the Organic] of 1909, consisted of waiting for the single-cell embryo to divide by itself, then separating the two resulting cells and watching them multiply into four-celled, then eight-celled (etc.) organisms up to a maximum of about 800 cells. To Driesch, the experiment was enough to suggest that life was sui generis, inasmuch as separation of a single cell from the component body prompted ‘organic regulation’; that is, the normal functioning of each separated part as an independent whole. To Driesch, the organism could be described as possessing a novel form of entelechy consisting of ‘equi-potentiality’, which assigns a similar growth potential to each separated

Prelude: On Life and Form

3

embryo cell, and secondly ‘equi-finality’, designating a common growth destination for them all. Here, it appeared, was a non-physical account of the growth and decay of living entities – organisms – that was neither mechanistic nor reducible to mechanism, nor to the versions of late nineteenth-century positivism that gave mechanism its support. On the contrary, growth and vitality seemed non-mechanistic attributes of any organism in its evolving and changing form; in which case ‘organicity’, the quality essential to any organism, might be immanent in the universe. We shall see how, for many artists grappling with the demands of the new century, ‘organicity’ might even function as a model for the work of art. To Driesch’s proposals were soon added other announcements that placed in doubt the distinction between living and inert matter. The physicist and microscopist Otto Lehmann of the University of Karlsruhe observed the internal changes of crystals under conditions of varying temperature

Fig 0.1  Early development of the common sea-urchin, showing (a) two cells, (b) four cells, (c) eight cells, (d) sixteen cells, (e) section of a blastula comprised of about one thousand cells, from H. Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism: The Gifford Lectures, Aberdeen, delivered in 1907, A & C. Black, London, 1908, p 38.

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and pressure, describing them as ‘liquid’ [flüssige] or ‘flowing’ [fliessende] crystals in his books Die Kristallanalyse [The Analysis of Crystals] of 1891 and Flüssige Kristalle [Liquid Crystals], 1904 – or sometimes rheocrystals in acknowledgement of Heraclitus’ maxims on universal flux. The photographs published in Lehmann’s next book Die Neue Welt der flüssigen Kristalle [The New World of Flowing Crystals] of 1911 purported to show animated weblike or mucoid forms, even snake-like filaments, multiplying and branching as if alive. The bio-philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who had taught Driesch at the University of Jena in the 1880s and who in the 1860s had published pictures of tiny living animals known as radiolaria that had seemingly perfect and intricate symmetry, now issued his own account of the living qualities of matter, first in his popular Kunstformen der Natur [Artforms of Nature] of 1904 and then, following Lehmann’s books on crystals, in the philosophically more ambitious Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben [Crystal Souls: Studies in Inorganic Life] of 1917, in which he was prepared to say that evidence from the internal movements of crystals was such as to suggest the presence in them of sensation, feeling, temperament – even ‘real life’ [wirkliche

Fig 0.2  Diagram from E. Haeckel, Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Leipzig, 1917, p 37, illustrating Otto Lehmann’s observations of ‘living’ crystals.

Prelude: On Life and Form

5

Leben].1 To Haeckel, such an outlook was part and parcel of a ‘monism’ that saw no essential physical differences between living and non-living matter, between organic and inorganic form. Haeckel’s writing and ideas were discussed widely. The Monistenbund [Monist League] that he founded with friends and colleagues in Jena in 1906 included the biologists R.H. Francé and Ludwig Plate and the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. Throughout the period leading to the outbreak of the First World War, Haeckel’s Monistenbund functioned as a voice-piece, superficially at least, for a spirit of progress and optimism supported by the findings of science.2 A more sinister version of the Monist point of view was contained in Haeckel’s popular Die Welträtsel [The Riddle of Life] of 1899, which offered a version of social Darwinism that rendered the progress of history and of nations as itself evolutionary, some nations proving better adapted than others to survive. By 1914 Die Welträtsel had been translated into twenty-three languages and was a world best-seller. It is unlikely that any thinker, writer or artist of the period would not have known about it or read it. Evolution, progress, survival (and the struggle for it), the very determinants of the life of forms: such discussions were multifarious and by no means uniform across Europe’s troubled social tableau. Surrounded by anxieties about form on the scientific, popular, social and political levels, the postwar generation of artists was one that needed to ask – and did ask – how those anxieties were to be tested and even resolved in the properties and qualities of the work of art. Could form itself – especially ‘abstract’ form, as it was called by some – be so arranged as to embody the forces that defined life? Could ‘composition’ be another term for ‘organization’ or ‘the organic’? Under what conditions did form fail to live, either through shortcomings in its organization or by lapsing back into mere substance? To the generation of artists that concerns us, the boundary between inert and living matter would become a blurred one by the end of the century’s 1

2

Haeckel’s Die Radiolarien was published in 1862; his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (2 Vols) in 1866. In a summary of Haeckel’s mid-career writings by Spyros Papapetros, ‘Haeckel’s radiolarians and … Lehmann’s liquid crystals were the double proof that the distinction between the organic and inorganic state did not exist. All matter was simple. All substance was one’. See Papapetros, ‘On the Biology of the Inorganic: Crystallography and Discourses of Latent Life in the Art and Architectural Historiography of the Early Twentieth Century’, in O. Botar and I. Wünsche (eds), Biocentrism and Modernism, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, p 87. See D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, Macdonald, London and American Elsevier Inc., New York, 1971, pp 20–2.

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The Life of Forms in Art

second, catastrophic decade; a nearly irrelevant one by 1930. By 1945 or 1950 the proposition that forms in art could have life was no longer open to dispute. It comes as no surprise, of course, to find that mathematics – systematicity par excellence – made its own claims on natural growth-forms in the period; and of the branches of mathematics, it was geometry that most adventurously encroached on practice in the visual arts. Mathematics had long since claimed to have mastered change, and rates of change; but it was the phenomenon of the logarithmic spiral, above all, with its homology to the celebrated Fibonacci number sequence, that came closest to bringing natural growth-patterns and quantification into alignment; not least since it could be argued that number sequences in their very construction imply the dimensions of both change and time. English-language works such as Theodore Cook’s The Curves of Life of 1914, which uncovered the spiral motion in everything from a flower to a twisting staircase, or D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form of 1917, which proposed quantitative regularities for a range of osteological categories as well as growth-patterns for fish and certain anthropoids – such richly illustrated publications would soon hold out the promise of a convergence between number and every kind and manifestation of natural change. Later in this book it will become clear that non-Euclidean structures, curved space and eventually the mysteries of quantum motion could and did reach some distance into the consciousness of the period artistic mind. But we must not anticipate. Each one of those systematizing branches of inquiry – from Haeckel and Driesch’s biology to the mathematics of shape and change – was by 1920 already under scrutiny from a certain metaphysical philosophy. Before the First World War the French philosopher Henri Bergson had presented challenges to the Western philosophical tradition that sat comfortably alongside any number of revived vitalist or neo-vitalist positions in biology. First in his Matter and Memory of 1896, in the widely read Introduction To Metaphysics of 1903, then in Évolution Créatrice [Creative Evolution] of 1907, he proposed that against a Platonic metaphysics of continuous and stable physical bodies, separated by measurable physical distances and amenable to enumeration by an observer, should be placed a view of reality framed by the familiar experiences of passage and process in relation to which the human subject was not externally located, as in positivist science, but an intrinsic and necessary part. An admirer of Driesch’s experiments, Bergson took pains to characterize a living individual as having the quality of being, as he put it, ‘composed of unlike parts that complete each other’ and were in that sense ‘organized’. ‘Organized being’ had been Darwin’s term for a plant or animal organism – but without

Prelude: On Life and Form

7

a detailed theory about what such ‘organization’ implied.3 The distinction between ‘organized’ and ‘unorganized’ bodies now became central to Bergson’s outlook, but with a difference. Unorganized bodies for him were mere bits of matter, while an organized one could have a function and even be exemplified by a machine – except that these were formed by the addition of part to part and did not, after all, qualify as living things. ‘Organized’ bodies that are vitally organic in Bergson’s sense are formed, or form themselves, by division and continual growth. They are never static, but always developing and unfolding in the indivisible continuum of time. As for geometrical approaches to biology, they could only properly apply to a ‘completed reality’ – whereas ‘vital properties are never entirely realized … they are not so much states as tendencies’.4 Of course, the unfolding processes of living things had been a topic of keen attention for the Romantic poets and scientists fully a century before. Goethe had advised that his readers grasp clearly the distinction between Bildung [process of formation] and Gestalt [static configuration, structure or shape]; he had speculated that naturally organized bodies were defined by their Bildung or self-transformation, not by their properties at a given time. He had often used the image of the Homeric sea-god Proteus to indicate what he called nature’s ‘versatility’, its propensity to perpetual change.5 Bergson, echoing the theme, would say that particular organized bodies – those possessed of organicity – were in a similar sense never complete but ‘always on the way to become so’ [toujours en voie de réalisation]: a formulation that resonated with Friedrich Schlegel’s Athanaeum Fragment 116, penned in the late 1790s and well known to any later philosopher, to the effect that Romantic poetry, in contrast to the kind that is ‘finished and … capable of being fully analysed’, should be ‘still in the state of becoming … that it should forever be becoming and never perfected’.6 Applied 3

4 5

6

H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907) in the authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell, Macmillan and Co. Ltd, London, 1960, p 13; and C. Darwin, Glossary to 6th edition of The Origin of Species (first edition 1859); Random House, New York, 1979. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p 13. ‘Thus in setting forth a morphology we should not speak of Gestalt, or if we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea, the concept, or to an empirical element held fast for a mere moment of time’: J.W. v Goethe, Bildung und Umbildung Organischer Naturen [Formation and Transformation of Organic Nature] (1807), published as an introduction to a reprint of his paper ‘The Metamorphosis of Plants’, in translation in D. Miller (ed and trans), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1995, p 64. For the Proteus image, see ‘Excerpt from “Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy, Commencing with Osteology”’, from On Morphology (1820), in Miller (ed and trans), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, p 121. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p 13; F. Schlegel, Athanaeum fragment 116, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (trans and intr Peter Firchow), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1971, p 175. My emphasis.

8

The Life of Forms in Art

to the visual arts, Bergson’s account of organicity hinted at releasing form from fixed shape, structure or silhouette and resituating it within durée [duration]; that is, within the currency of actual motion and time. ‘Experience confronts us with becoming [devenir]; that is sensible reality [réalité sensible]’, as Bergson says in a summary. His reluctance to think ontologically in terms of complete and finished individuals, of entities that fall into stable categories and never leave them, became a metaphysical outlook that could appeal to an entire generation.7 Not only was it an attitude that marked a rejection of the metaphysics of mechanism that held that life processes were compatible with physico-chemical laws and were explicable by them. It could also be read as a political position that opposed modern warfare, with its use of inhuman machines for military and civilian slaughter.8 Even further, it could give philosophical support to individuals or groups attracted to anarchism. To Bergson, the gulf between the technological project of modernity and lived sense-experience was not merely wide but unbridgeable. ‘All our belief in objects’, he says in an unusual metaphor, ‘all our operations on the systems that science isolates, rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them’, whereas ‘real duration [durée réele] … gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth’.9 If time bites into the form of things, how does it do so? That the registers of time are pervasive in singular works of art should not in itself be a mystery. They take time to make, obviously. Some of them purport to represent momentary or fleeting time. As material things they endure and decay. Yet for the form (or forms) of the individual work we shall need to ask about the material of the work, firstly; about the vitality or otherwise of its organization. We shall need to ask, in different ways according to different artistic biographies, less about measurable shape, volume or relation than about passage and movement; about process, rhythm, even becoming. The latter term especially contains the suggestion of unfolding, bending, cursive time in the region of form itself. It implies that living form always exceeds mere shape; that organic form contains within itself the suggestion that it might change, has already changed, or has the energetic qualities necessary to unfold in a manner implied or already under way. Latency, 7

8 9

H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p 331. My emphases. Bergson’s durée met with the agreement of the mathematical philosopher A.N. Whitehead, whose preferred term was ‘passage’. ‘Passage is a quality not only of nature’, Whitehead wrote, ‘but also of sense-awareness, which is the procedure of knowing’. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1920), Prometheus Books, New York, 2004, p 55. See H. Bergson, ‘Life and Matter at War’, The Hibbert Journal, October 1914–July 1915, pp 465–75. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp 9, 48.

Prelude: On Life and Form

9

we might call it, or more nearly potency; or the blurred but essential intersection of the two. The assumption that an artist of the postwar generation had knowledge, however tacit, of the debates about life-energies and matter just summarized, or understood on some level that a fully contemporary worldview implied a fastdissolving boundary between inert and living stuff, had its reflection in what I shall here call aesthetic monism – it was above all a procedural monism – that mandated that the stuff of representation and the objects represented collapse, in the experience and in the making of the artwork, into one and the same. The so-called ‘two-foldness’ of visual representation that holds that a work of art has a double identity in being both matter and image, matter and sign, despite an influential pedigree in our own time, has little or no presence in the phenomena we are due to explore.10 Some other understanding is needed for the widespread assumption of an élan vital permeating all matter and experience that was intrinsic to so many artistic situations of the day. To put it another way: aesthetic monism in the sense just explicated, though often portrayed (even today) as a slackening of the will to represent in art, as a capitulation to the achievements of photography, or both, in fact corresponds – this is my proposal – to a widely shared conviction among artists of the entre-guerres that the very materials of art, whether paint, plaster, paper, bronze, marble or stone, contain their own generative possibilities and potentialities, their own origins and finalities, their own laws of living and being. This is far from being the cliché it might seem. Picasso’s declaration in 1927, ‘je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ [I do not seek, I find] was both a confession and a way of working, one in which totality – unity, living organicity in the painting or sculpture – was partly a matter of passive receptivity to happenstance and the play of chance (error too) and partly an active collaboration on the artist’s part with the promptings of the medium according to laws that are themselves in a state of constant flux and re-making. The wider conviction that matter behaves 10

For ‘two-foldness’, see R. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987. For the idea of matter as sign in early twentieth century art, see R. Krauss, ‘The Motivation of the Sign’, and Y-A. Bois, ‘The Semiology of Cubism’, both in L. Zelevasky (ed), Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1992. Sign-theory applied to Cubism – for instance – falls directly into the trap prepared for it by both colour and applied matter, such as newspaper fragments, papier collé and so forth; both of which remain immune to the distinction between matter and sign. Two-foldness has virtually no purchase here. It applies convincingly in the theory of the ‘picture-plane’, the invisible membrane that traverses, so it is said, the nearest imagined visual window posited by what the painted scene depicts. For a clear exposition of picture-plane aesthetics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, see C. Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, pp 11–12.

10

The Life of Forms in Art

somehow, the artist functioning as matter’s prosthetic rather than the reverse, was entirely au courant with the period in which this generation worked and lived. Under aesthetic monism, the artist was no longer the master of his or her materials and the tools that go with them, nor wanted to be; rather their compliant servant, albeit one attuned to the materials’ biddings, restrictions and indications. Under the impress of unresolved tensions between mechanism and vitalism, the artist could do worse than to enter into matter as it offered itself to being and to form: not to dominate or instruct matter, but to partner it in its very unfolding, its very becoming. That way, so the fantasy continued, the artwork would come to possess an ‘organic’ quality not in spite of but in virtue of its matter and of its having been made, its possession not just of matter but of organized, which is to say organic, material being. A few examples should suffice. Take the group assembled around the Union of Youth in St Petersburg (Petrograd) from as early as 1910, those such as Pavel Filonov, Mikhail Matyushin and Olga Rozanova, who spurned the old world of what they called ‘pictorial copying’ and replaced it with an attitude to the work of the work of art that can with justification be called processual, in which the artist’s intentionality and the material of the work constitute themselves in mutual and evolving relation. It was typical of the Union of Youth to sharply distinguish such a paradigm from geometrical form – what Filonov called kanon [canon] or the stipulative diagramming of a work according to quantity, proportion and measure. His own paintings exemplify what he took to be the qualities of Russian art generally, namely ‘its specific textural peculiarities: weight, moisture, spontaneous execution, organic aesthetics’. ‘In this situation’, Filonov says, ‘the artist’s spirit dynamically enters the material of the object’ in accordance with zakon [law] while avoiding the rigidities of kanon.11 For him, the art-object changes and grows in an exemplification of every type of sensory awareness that informed it. Matyushin’s method was less painstaking. He ‘made’ sculptures out of portions of tree roots – readymades taken directly from nature – in the conviction that the formal properties found there already exemplified the life-force in a tangible and visible form.12 For Rozanova, the artist ‘passes spontaneously from one creative

11

12

P. Filonov, ‘Deklaratsiya “Mirovogo rastsveta”’ [Declaration of Universal Flowering], 1923, p 14, in N. Misler and J. Bowlt, Pavel Filonov: A Hero and His Fate, Silvergirl, Austin, Texas, 1983, p 169. See E. Kovtun, ‘Matyushin’s Roots’, Devoted to the Russian Avant-Garde, St Palace Editions, St Petersburg, 1998.

Prelude: On Life and Form

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Fig 0.3  Mikhail Matyushin, Running Figure, c.1915–16, tree root, 4.8 × 5.5 × 2.1 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

state to another, and the Principles – the Intuitive, the Individual, the Abstract – are united organically, not mechanically … Each moment of the present is dissimilar to a moment of the past, and moments of the future will contain inexhaustible possibilities and new revelations!’13 The critic Vladimir Markov, close to the Union of Youth, called this radically processual aspect of the artwork its faktura: the specific mixture and interrelation of all the components of the creative process that brought it close to nature’s own principle of ceaselessly unfolding creativity. His description of icons as composed of many materials, ‘with lamps hanging in front of them, with flickering light and covered with soot’, is already suggestive of the experiential density and mobility of faktura in one traditional form.14 For Markov, material was ‘the mother of faktura’; and in an image reminiscent of the sea-urchin embryo reproducing itself he proposed that ‘each newly mobilized material can be used to provide new elements from which to create endless new versions of faktura’.15 For the artist David Burliuk, meanwhile, who had studied in Odessa, Munich and Paris before working in 13

14

15

O. Rozanova, ‘The Bases of the New Creation and the Reasons Why it is Misunderstood’ (Soyuz molodezhi, March 1913), in J. Bowlt (ed and intr), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988, p 103. V. Markov, Prinstsipy tvorchestva v plastichestikh iskusstvakh: Faktura [Creative Principles in the Plastic Arts: Faktura], Petrograd, 1914, p 1; cited in I. Wünsche, ‘Organic Visions and Biological Models in Russian Avant-Garde Art’, in I. Botar and I. Wünsche (eds and intr), Biocentrism and Modernism, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, p 140. V. Markov, Prinstsipy tvorchestva v plastichestikh iskusstvakh: Faktura, Petrograd, 1914, p 2.

12

The Life of Forms in Art

the Russian cities and exhibiting with the Union of Youth, faktura in painting was best conveyed in language laden with references to geological process and hence with the transformations characteristic of geological time. The surfaces of all paintings contained ‘wonderful secret little countries’, he suggested, ‘where mountains, ravines and abysses … are combined’; such surfaces could be ‘hooked’, ‘earthy’, ‘blistered’, ‘granular’, ‘fibrous’ or ‘schistose’, qualities that also played upon the olfactory and haptic senses in evidence of the several processes that had produced them.16 Paintings in their generality were constituted by the forming, setting, hardening and cracking processes resulting from their handling, and presented themselves to the viewer both in their material natures and in their ways of having been made. The same could well apply to Tatlin’s reliefs made of tin, metal, glass, plaster and paint, the earliest of which were probably made in 1915. Eye-witness accounts of Tatlin working, as well as the works themselves, underscore the conviction that, in the assessment of Nikolai Tarabukin in 1916, ‘material gives form [to the artist], not the other way around’, a formula that characterized the entirety of Tatlin’s outlook from then until the end of his career.17 ‘We need to widen the range of our thinking in the area of materials and their interrelationships’, he would say of his Productivist designs of the later 1920s. What Tatlin at that time called ‘the prerequisites of form’ must be located where it can best be found, ‘within the material itself ’. In the words of a self-description: To take advantage of the ‘organic form’ of the material, the artist not only makes technical constructions but ‘we also use as models the phenomenon of living nature’. Or again: in distinction to Western manufacturing methods – this was written in 1930 – ‘I show a great interest in organic form as a point of departure for the creation of the new object … Studying organic form will give the richest material for the creation of a new object.’18 In the cultural milieu of Moscow, meanwhile, the group close to Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova known as the First Working Group of Constructivists, usually assumed to have favoured rational and geometrical approaches to art, in fact followed closely the doctrine of ‘energetics’ of the chemistphilosopher and Monistenbund member Wilhelm Ostwald, as well as the thinking 16

17

18

D. Burliuk, ‘Faktura’, in Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu, Moscow, 1912, p 103; cited by M. Gough, ‘Faktura: The Making of the Russian Avant-Garde’, Res, 36, Autumn 1999, p 37. N. Tarabukin, Le Dernier Tableau (written 1916, published 1923), Editions Champ Libre, Paris, 1972, pp 123–4. V. Tatlin, ‘The Artist as an Organiser of Everyday Life’, Rabis, no 48, 25 November 1929, p 4; in L. Zhadova (ed), Tatlin, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984, pp 266–7; and ‘Let Us Declare War on Chests of Drawers and Sideboards’, Rabis, no 15, 14 April 1930; Zhadova, p 268.

Prelude: On Life and Form

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Fig 0.4  Vladimir Tatlin, wing strut for Letatlin, 1929–32, willow and cork, length 240 cm. Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art – Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

of the polymathic Alexander Bogdanov (also a member of Haeckel’s Monistenbund), the latter of whom proposed the term ‘tektologiya’ to evoke the laws of energy transfer within essentially dynamic systems. No wonder that within the art groups of the pre-Revolution years it became an article of faith that, in Tarabukin’s words once more, ‘the painter must feel the inherent characteristics of each material which of themselves condition the construction of an object [such that] material gives form [to the artist], not the other way around.’19 No doubt Tarabukin’s words are related to that version of Romantic organicism that looked to ‘nature’ as the pre-eminent textbook of form. We read in Schlegel’s contemporary Coleridge, for example, that ‘Form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material … [whereas] organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.’20 Yet if for the European Romantics the material in question was nature herself, for the ideologues of the 1917 Russian Revolution it could also be that of the metropolis, and of modern industry. For the image of self-generation to travel from one century and circumstance to the next, it was only necessary for the biological terminology to widen its scope. Hence for a theoretician like Alexei Gan, close to the First Working Group, a kind of energetics or biophilia proved easily applicable to the use and understanding of factory materials. Gan’s 19

20

C. Douglas, ‘Energetic Abstraction: Ostwald, Bogdanov, and Russian Post-Revolutionary Art’, in B. Clarke and L. Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature, Stanford University Press, California, 2002, pp 76–94; N. Tarabukin, Le Dernier Tableau, pp 123–4. For a fuller account, see my own After Constructivism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2014, pp 1–29. S.T. Coleridge, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Beaumont and Fletcher: Notes and Lectures, new edition, Edward Howell, Liverpool, 1874.

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The Life of Forms in Art

articulation of tektonika, the first of three components of Constructivism and one that echoed Bodganov’s concept of tektologiya, seems to have referred to the planful cooperation of different material technologies. Gan says this: ‘Tektonika or the tectonic style is organically smelted and forged from the qualities of communism itself … and from the purposeful use of industrial material … The word tektonika is taken from geology, where it is used to define the eruptions coming from the earth’s core. Tektonika is a synonym for the organic, for the upsurge from the inner essence.’21 For Gan’s second principle, faktura, he gives the smelting of iron as both a metaphor and an actual case. Cast iron is turned into a fiery liquid mass, then poured into a shaped mould, passes through the hammering section or is simply cut, and then enters the machine shop and the lathes, after which one can say that the cast iron has become an object … More precisely, faktura is the organic state of the processed material or the new condition of its organism.22

Konstruktsiya, thirdly, is not only construction but the process of construction itself on the scale of buildings, cities and communist society. In his appeal to the Party apparatus for support, Gan proposed a Constructivism comprised of all three keywords in a super-principle of organic unfolding transferred from the metaphorics of nature to the needs of the urbanized proletarian class. In the case of Paris Cubism, too, it is impossible to understand the visible energies, potencies and spectral illuminations of a given painting-object without mobilizing – or having others mobilize – some predominantly temporal in contrast to exclusively spatial categories of form. To take a particularly clear example: it has been established beyond serious argument that Bergson’s attractiveness to the so-called Puteaux Cubists can be observed directly in their paintings and writings. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s book Du Cubisme of 1912, whose Russian edition would carry an appreciative ‘Preface’ by Matyushin the following year, is replete with Bergsonian language and ideas.23 There is reference to ‘dynamism of form’ and to the ‘plastic dynamism’ of contemporary art, which must be such that – it is Du Cubisme’s argument against geometry – ‘no two portions of similar extent’ can be visible lest ‘the whole becomes measurable’. For ‘geometry is a science; painting is an art. The geometer measures. The painter paints.’24 And those artists practised what they wrote. In a work like Metzinger’s 1911 painting La Goûteuse (The Taster) to take one 21

22 23 24

Alexei Gan, Konstruktivizm (1923), in the translation by C. Lodder, University of Chicago Press and Editorial Tenov, Barcelona, 2014, p 62. Gan, Konstruktivizm, p 62. I. Matyushin, ‘O knige Metsanghe-Gleze “Du Cubisme”’, Soyuz molodezhi, 3, March 1913, pp 25–34. A. Gleizes and G. Metzinger, Cubism, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1913, pp 31, 55, 41, 46–7.

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instance, we are invited to see a proximate figure slowly raising a spoon to her lips. It is an impression conveyed in something like the following way. While in the individual painted facets we are given elements of the scene realized as discrete arrested moments – the effect of what Bergson describes as the ‘sluggishness’ of perception when not immersed in the full fluency of experiential flow – presented together in the painting they appear not as a succession of events but as an amalgamating whole, as a simultanéité [simultaneity].25 We shall see in due course how potent the idea of

Fig 0.5  Jean Metzinger, La Goûteuse (The Taster), 1911, oil on cardboard, 75.9 × 70.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-124-139. 25

Metzinger’s La Goûteuse would shortly be described by Kasimir Malevich as representing a transitional moment between Cubism and Suprematism, the point, says Malevich, where the object itself ‘begins to dissolve … in the direction of sensation … into a revelation of painterly content’. See Malevich ‘New Art and Imitative Art’, Nova Generatsiya, no 9, 1928; in T. Anderson (ed), Kasimir Malevich: Essays on Art 1915–1933, Vol II, Rapp and Whiting, London, 1969, pp 39, 38.

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The Life of Forms in Art

simultanéité could be. No single term could more effectively evoke what we call a ‘moment’ – no longer an instant – in which a literal present is suffused with a literal past, in which perception’s Bergsonian ‘sluggishness’ is mixed up inexorably with a sense of a shifting and evolving ‘now’. In the so-called ‘Rhythmism’ group assembled around the London journal Rhythm from 1911–13, which included the painters J.D. Ferguson, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Jessica Dismorr, the poet Tristan Derème and the philosopher John Middleton Murry, we see an open enthusiasm for Bergsonian thinking and its direct translation into the language and practices of art.26 In the very different Cubism of the Braque–Picasso friendship pair it was the dynamism of city life that was absorbing; and within the dynamic city, among many other things, the experience of the cinema. That the two of them enjoyed the cinema is not in doubt. That they sat bemused by the novel light-effects and spatialities presented on the screen is the more interesting assumption to explore. Quite frequently we see openly cinematic time-slices in their paintings’ surfaces – especially Braque’s – in the form of such transitions and fractured luminosities as were characteristic of the quasi-reality presented in the screen medium’s early years.27 The young philosopher Georg Lukács described the new cinematic reality as ‘movement in itself, the eternal transience, the never-resting change of things’, indeed contrasted what he called cinema’s ‘tortuously stark “present”’ with the fateful flow of great moments such as can be witnessed on a theatrical stage. That scenes could follow one another in cinema according to nothing more than a law of succession underscored, for him, the cavernous gulf between the kind of fateful human connections conveyed by actors on a stage and a quite different law of connection in the cinema, that of ‘possibility restricted by nothing’. The world of the cinema, in Lukács’ perspective, was one of ‘life without background and perspective, without difference of weights and qualities … without essence and value … [one] of pure superficiality’.28 Cinema, that is to say, was not merely an entertainment medium. By the time of the First World War it had become a deeply philosophical problem too. To Bergson, whatever he may have thought of Cubist painting, the cinema – rather the technology of the cinema – represented the perfect metaphor for that mode of faulty cognition that splits reality into time-slices as a substitute for apprehending 26

27 28

For an analysis, see M. Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993. See B. Rose, Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism, Pace Wildenstein, New York, 2007. G. Lukács, ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema’ (1913), originally published in A. Kaes (ed), KinoDebate. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film, 1909–1929, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, 1978; translated in R.W. McCormick and A. Guenther-Pal (eds), German Essays on Film, Continuum Books, New York and London, 2004, p 13.

Prelude: On Life and Form

17

the fluent experiential continuity of the whole. The reason is plain: The still photograph, in its claim to capture instantaneity, succeeds in capturing nothing more than a single time-slice of what appears in actual experience as a continuum. Even if still photographs shown in quick succession produce a contrivance of movement, the movement is only ‘in the apparatus’, as Bergson puts it – hence the apparatus betrays the fluency of the film-effect by inverting it. The intellect alone, says Bergson, like the senses, ‘is limited to taking, at intervals, views that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming of matter … Thus we pluck out of duration those moments that interest us, and … these alone we retain. And we are right in so doing, while action only is in question.’ Both in the practical frame of mind and in that of science, ‘instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things we place ourselves outside of them in order to recompose their becoming artificially … [hence] the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.’29 Even Muybridge’s successive photos of a galloping horse cannot hope to represent – show – the actuality of movement, so brilliantly given in the pre-cinematic artistry of the Parthenon frieze.30 Therefore if we conduct our speculative – let us add philosophical and aesthetic – activity as we do our practical activity, ‘we become unable to perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming’. We cannot ‘think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile’. ‘Real time’, Bergson insisted, ‘regarded as flux, or the very mobility of being, escapes the hold of scientific knowledge’. ‘Install yourself within change’, he urged his many readers, if you want to resist the reifications of the analytical mind.31 According to a Bergsonian ontology, then, the world is composed of entities that are not thing-like but more akin to events, to passages and phases, to mergings and partings and numerous kinds of division, recombination and coalescence. It was a far cry from the analysis of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in the trenches in 1916–17 and published finally in 1921, to the effect that ‘Objects make up the substance of the world. There must be objects if the world is to have an unalterable form. “Unalterable” [feste], “persistent” [bestehende], and “object” [Gegenstand] are synonymous terms; it is their configuration that is changing and unstable.’ His propositions can be taken in different ways. In one way they amount to a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the idea of change itself – time itself reduced to whatever is left over when the world is conceived of as stable particles in determinate places. What did he then mean by ‘configuration’? His search for propositional ‘truth’ has made the Tractatus 29 30 31

Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp 322, 322–3. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p 351. Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp 288, 355, 324.

18

The Life of Forms in Art

read like an effort to embrace mechanism: ‘Mechanics is an attempt to construct according to a single plan all the true propositions that we need for the description of the world.’32 On the one hand, then, for Bergson, an experienced world of energies, change and duration which is also one of will and agency to which time is internal and constitutive; on the other, a world of impermeable and unchanging entities in quantifiable spatial relation – Wittgenstein’s ‘states of affairs’ – to which time is external and from which the consciousness of an agent is excluded. We have moved unwittingly, it seems, from a report on vitalist biology to some difficult issues in the metaphysics of consciousness, and from there to the attitudes of experimental artists in a period of massive upheaval and change – a period itself of historical fluidity on a crisis scale. We have yet to fully understand how the individual work can register ‘becoming’, how in virtue of its form it could exemplify and embody Schlegel’s ambition for artwork that is ‘forever becoming and never perfected’. The second part of Schlegel’s maxim, ‘never perfected’, transferred from poetry to the visual arts, can only signify the necessary gap between the actual work of art and a completed structural regularity, a completed perfection (implying precision) of geometrical form. As to ‘forever becoming’, a certain dialectical operation now becomes the indispensable key. In the critical viewing of a given artwork it is inescapable that static concepts play one kind of descriptive role, just as they surely do at moments during the composition or manufacture of the work. Yet as to the rhythm of such concepts, their interrelation with one another, their processuality and sequencing in the continuum of time, the operative number has usually been two. Goethe’s term for that rhythm had been Polarität [polarity] and he made it, together with the term Ensteigerung [intensification, ascent], the basis of a Protean change that he insisted permeates all of nature and art. ‘Whatever appears in the world must divide if it is to appear at all,’ he wrote in a short text of 1799. What has been divided seeks itself again, can return to itself and reunite. This happens in a lower sense when it there intermingles with its opposite, combines with it; here the phenomenon is nullified or at least neutralized. However, the union may occur in a higher sense, if what has been divided is first intensified; then in the union of the intensified halves it will produce a third thing, something new, higher, unexpected.33 32

33

L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1961, paragraphs 2.026, 2.027, 6.343. Goethe, ‘Polarität’, from Goethes Werke (ed Erich Trunz), Vol 13: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften (ed Dorothea Kuhn and Rike Wankmüller), Hamburg, 1955; in translation in Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol 12: Scientific Studies (ed and trans D. Miller), Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1988, p 156.

Prelude: On Life and Form

19

In the antinomies of his and Schlegel’s near-contemporary Kant, or in the dance of thesis and antithesis in Schelling; in Hegel’s resolution of the abstract and its negation in the moment of aufheben, or in the scorn heaped upon it by Engels in the Anti-Dühring, or by Marx in Das Kapital, we encounter pairs of terms aligned, as it were, initially in tension, each abutting the other and propelling a resolution in the guise of a further and unfamiliar concept. And much the same rhythm generated by unstable terms in combination is to be found in much of ‘modern’ art. The dialectic in any of its forms, and however much it may sound like a piece of machinery, has the versatility to function like an organism – therefore the proposal that the form of a made object can also be dialectically ‘organic’ is entirely to our purpose here. Frequently we find Bergson himself, notwithstanding his commitment to the fluency of the durée, advocating a dialectic that breaks up consciousness into concepts – ‘puts intuition to the proof ’, as he puts it – but in so doing abandons self-consciousness before finding a need to get in touch with self-consciousness again, thus launching ‘a continual coming and going … between nature and mind’ in a process that has no final term.34 The authors of Du Cubisme exemplified the attitude vividly, and other projects of the period sustained it. In Russia, the slogan that ‘material gives form [to the artist] and not the other way around’ describes one part of a creative situation the other half of which is the consciousness of the artist to whom form is presented or supplied. In the stirrings of the Dada revolt in cities such as Zürich and Berlin, too, we find the art-object’s vitality to be a product of mutually interacting and generative forces – in this case, forces generative of novelty, surprise, even a measure of undecidability. Richard Huelsenbeck, who participated first in Zürich Dada and then in Dada’s very different manifestations in Berlin, Leipzig and Prague, has left us with a fine account of the different components of the case. Three terms of signal importance to Dada, he says, were taken from Italian Futurism – even though most Dadas were ambivalent, at best, towards the publicity-hungry postures of that movement. It is true, of course, that neither Marinetti nor Severini could have agitated or painted as they did without a commitment to the idea of collectively energized experiential time.35 Yet, as Huelsenbeck puts it in language that is Bergsonian to its core, Dada also wanted simultanéité in the sense of ‘a heightened sensitivity to the passage of things in time, turning the sequence a-b-c-d into an a=b=c=d’. The idea of the poème simultané having been attempted 34 35

Bergson, Creative Evolution, pp 251, 252. See Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, pp 160 ff.

20

The Life of Forms in Art

by Derème and Apollinaire in France, in its visual incarnation, Huelsenbeck says, simultanéité ‘transforms the problem of the ear into the problem of the face’. From the everyday events surrounding me (the big city, the Dada circus, crashing, screeching, steam whistles, house fronts, the smell of roast veal) I obtain an impulse which starts me towards direct action … I become directly aware that I am alive. I feel the form-giving force behind the bustling of the clerks in the Dresdner Bank and the simple-minded erectness of the policeman … simultanéité is against what has become, and for what is becoming.

It is, he adds in reference to the version of Dada staged in Berlin, closely bound up with bruitism – noise – which unlike harmony, melody and tonality in music is ‘completely baffling’ to the symbolism and abstractionism of physics, that is, to analysis. Noise must be welcomed. It is the antithesis of number. It is a ‘direct objectivisation of a dark vital force … which defies formulation because it is a direct symbol of action’. It is ‘vomiting, screaming, choking … It is life itself.’36 The third of Huelsenbeck’s concepts is what he calls ‘the new medium’ of Dada, which ‘stands in direct relation to simultanéité and bruitism’. To find its new medium, he says, Dada took an enormous step, from the unattainable reality of the horizon ‘across the foreground’ of experience, to become involved with ‘the absolutely self-evident that is within reach of our hands’, which is to say, ‘with the natural and naïve’, with ‘action’. In a similar fashion, the Dada artwork does not look at life from a distance; it ‘participates in life itself ’.37 At the same time, and importantly, Dada’s ‘new medium’ was a refusal of abstraction in art. As Huelsenbeck saw it, the association of Dada with abstraction, such as was supported by his rival Tristan Tzara, represents a total failure to understand things both near and far … [it] fails to see the possibilities of the birth, life and death of an idea [that of simultanéité] or to understand the significance that an ens spirituale [spiritual mode of being], a fluidum [fluid] … can assume for a little circle of art-jobbers and a startled continent looking up from its work.38

Huelsenbeck’s statements serve to evoke a much wider refusal of the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ as they occurred in the literature and practices of modern art. The currency of the terms nowadays is apt to dangerously mislead. 36

37 38

R. Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada: The History of Dadaism (1920), in R. Motherwell (ed and intr), The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1988, pp 35, 36, 35, 36, 26, 37, 36–7, 37. Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, pp 37, 36–7, 37. Huelsenbeck, En Avant Dada, p 31.

Prelude: On Life and Form

21

We are sometimes urged to see virtually all of modern art as either an ‘abstracted’ relation to nature or as a total withdrawal from the world of appearances into a higher and ideated realm. Yet the majority of artists routinely accused of ‘abstraction’ in the early decades of the twentieth century seldom used the term, were suspicious of it or preferred to avoid it altogether. In the aftermath of the Symbolist movement in the later nineteenth century, an artist taking advantage of a certain looseness in the rendering of detail would describe that element of his or her work, or have it described by others, with the greatest possible care. ‘People have often criticized you for this sketchiness, my dear Matisse’ – so wrote Apollinaire in a piece in La Phalange in late 1907 – ‘without stopping to think that you have thereby accomplished one of the most difficult of tasks: you have endowed your paintings with a plastic [plastique] existence without having recourse to objects except to stimulate sensations.’ Apollinaire’s word plastique is being used here to indicate, not ‘abstraction’ but a form-quality suggestive of fluidity, organization, even life; a certain rhythm or energy in the organization of material whose action was never complete ‘but always on the way to become so’.39 Kandinsky in the early part of his career preferred to speak of ‘veiling’ his references rather than ‘abstracting’ from them; and he struggled with the latter concept throughout the rest of his career. Terms such as ‘pure painting’, ‘inner necessity’, the soul’s ‘vibrating’, not to mention analogies with music, with theatre and with dance, were among his preferred ways of explaining how the new art could exist as a material thing having a vitality all its own. Terms such as the Russian bezpredmetnyi or the German gegenstandlos – ‘without objects’ and ‘objectless’ respectively – could sound overly negative, unless qualified heavily, to function as descriptors of the new art. A synthesis with music, theatre and dance, an animation of all the senses in a dynamic and fluid totality, was far closer to Kandinsky’s goal in that phase, just as the forces and energies of nature already governed the interests of his colleagues Franz Marc and August Macke in Munich, a city that enjoyed close relations with Russia at the time. And recall that both he and they had at their ready disposal the distinction recently published by Wilhelm Worringer, for whom, while Einfühlung [empathy] stands as the name for a volition ‘towards the truths of organic life’, Abstraktion [abstraction] represented a kind of refuge from ‘the obscurity and entanglement of phenomena’, whose first and immediate 39

Apollinaire, La Phalange, December 1907, in Le Roy C. Breunig (ed), Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, Viking Press, New York, 1972, p 38. My emphasis.

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The Life of Forms in Art

symptom is ‘the simple line and its development in purely geometrical regularity’. ‘Here’, according to Worringer, ‘the last trace of connection with and dependence on life has been effaced, here … the purest abstraction has been achieved … while everywhere else the caprice of the organic prevails.’40 Admittedly, we find Kandinsky in Der Blaue Reiter Almanac of 1912 explaining to his readers that a decrease in ‘the objective element’ meant an increase in the ‘internal effect’, which increase was greatest in the case of ‘abstraction’; but in no sense did he want ‘abstraction’ to become a goal in its own right, and he would later renounce the term completely.41 To the cosmopolitan Cubists, wedded to the city’s sensations, including sensations emanating from slowmoving or seemingly stable objects placed near to hand – within reach, on a nearby table, in a room – ‘abstraction’ in Worringer’s sense was likewise an irrelevance. Dadas and Surrealists made jokes about it. In common with many periods in art, the decades to be examined here have become littered with confusing and wrong-headed terminology. In its lived actuality, the artistic quest of the interwar period was principally existential, seldom one of monolithic categories alone. ‘Abstraction’ as a term of style or manner does not appear once in Gan’s book on Constructivist faktura. It will be used with extreme circumspection in this one. Already by the start of the 1930s, I am saying, ascriptions of ‘abstraction’ to art had long since fallen into crisis. For several of the leading figures at that time, Theo van Doesburg and Kandinsky among them, the real ambitions of ‘abstraction’ could only be salvaged by a rhetoric of ‘concretion’ in the sense, not of materially impenetrable and unchanging singular things, but of things already having a riven or dialectical character, things whose unity would always, and at the least, presuppose a viewing situation whose very medium was experiential time. ‘Concretion’ meant nothing if not actuality, immediacy, the experience of potential or actual change. With the benefit of hindsight, it was an outlook with similarities to a second challenge to ‘abstraction’ in which, around 1929 or 1930, a kind of negative vitalism came powerfully and disruptively to the fore: not one of generation, growth and self-organization but instead one of ruination through smearing, tearing and decay. For reasons not yet sufficiently charted, it became relevant at a 40

41

W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1906), trans M. Bullock, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1953, pp 14, 20. W. Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’ (1912), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds and intr), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 1, Faber and Faber, London, 1982, p 244.

Prelude: On Life and Form

23

certain historical moment for artists and philosophers to engage with collapsing rather than burgeoning form, with descending rather than ascending matter, with form in the guise of its absence or lack – of Romantic ‘incompletion’ transposed into an altogether new key. To be specific: from the early 1930s, an increasing number of artists began to invert the customary order of material by shifting their attention from solids to liquids, from the impermeable to the viscous or viscid condition; and we shall discover in later chapters how fluidity itself – a propensity of submission or resignation to the forces of the physical world – came to embody the opposite pole to any number of reified or deterministic conditions. We shall discover how mess, indecent superfluity, nausea and waste entered the field of aesthetic sensation in a riot of insurgency against the all-too static condition of matter, not least its codification within the language of an ideal geometry. Meanwhile, in a paradoxical double-manoeuvre, it was just such an appreciation of repulsiveness and of repulsion that gave rise to a heightened interest in the temporality of consciousness, expressed in the recognition of the en-soi of time itself, its continuous presentness – whether in the immediacy of unfolding sensation or configured as what a later writer would call ‘the still soft, long larval “now”’.42 In practice, of course, the motions of history do not arrange themselves simply. None of my cautions over the use of the term ‘abstraction’ can alter the fact that a well-populated group calling itself Abstraction-Création, active in France between 1932 and 1936, made a muted plea for ‘abstract’ art as an antidote somehow to the tide of political and artistic oppression then rising in Germany, Italy and the USSR. In the first of its five annual Cahiers, Abstraction-Création proposed the term ‘non-figuration’ to encompass both ‘the progressive abstraction of forms from nature’ as well as non-figuration ‘achieved purely via geometry, or by the exclusive use of elements commonly called abstract such as circles, planes, bars, lines, etc’.43 The trouble was that the term ‘abstraction of forms from nature’ concealed – and in so doing obscured – a vast range of processes going from simplification, schematization, abbreviation, selection, suggestion, typification and reduction on the one hand, to more complex qualities including distortion, allusion, projection, allegorization and ambiguation on the other. Furthermore, AbstractionCréation must have misheard – or ignored – the warnings of Huelsenbeck or any number of vitalists from Aristotle to Schlegel, or of neo-vitalists such 42 43

The phrase is from V. Nabokov, Ada or Ardor (1969), Penguin, London edition, 2000, p 422. Abstraction-Création, No 1, Paris, Spring 1932.

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The Life of Forms in Art

as Bergson and William James, to the effect that there exists a difference of kind, not of degree, between a self-consciousness of process or ‘becoming’ and the abstract truths of mathematics, the latter of which can never represent the qualities of living form, must always run counter to them and in certain respects even contradict them.44 Heedless of such reservations, AbstractionCréation in its second Cahier of 1933 affirmed that ‘when free thought is being fiercely contested, in so many ways and on all levels … everywhere’, it stood ready to represent ‘independent artists who … respond to the cultural demands of the era’ by standing ‘in total opposition to all oppression of whatever kind’.45 But represent how? In part, these statements were a reaction to the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, passed in April 1932, that mandated a refusal of ‘individualism’ and ‘abstract formalism’ in that country as well as an enforced abandonment of any artistic technique involving plasticité, simultanéité – as well as ‘energetics’, dynamism, tectonics, smelting and so forth.46 In the country of tektonika, faktura and konstruktsiya, art was now being tasked with providing a picture of life ‘in its revolutionary development’ in line with a class-conscious historical determinism (itself related to a biological paradigm) uncovered and promulgated by Marx.47 In a period characterized by a heightening of public rhetoric on both sides it seemed inherently unlikely, then, that defending ‘abstraction’ as non-figuration would be nearly enough. On the contrary, ideological rivalry combined with economic crisis was pressing the industrialized (and industrializing) countries towards another war. Notwithstanding the demise of Abstraction-Création in 1936, two opposed versions of something that could be called ‘dialectic’ were by now in play: the Soviet version that saw the function of art as raising the self-image of 44

45 46

47

As James puts it in an emphatic declaration relevant to our topic: ‘Novelty … doesn’t arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents are always interfused, the smallest datum being both a coming and a going … The intervals [between discrete individuals] also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every individual rut.’ The same attitude is a philosophical objection to the mathematization of movement – or changing curvatures – by Newton and Leibniz. In curves ‘the same direction is never followed’, James says, while the method of fluxions by which a curve is minutely divided contains ‘the whole paradox of the same and yet the nascent other, of an identity that won’t keep except so far as it keeps failing’: W. James, The Pluralistic Universe: The Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, Longmans, Green and Co., London, 1909, p 399. Abstraction-Création, Paris, no 2, Spring 1933. For an account of the Decision ‘On the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organisations’, see my Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks, Vol 2: Authority and Revolution 1924–1932, Pluto Press, London, 1992. See further my ‘Socialist Realism: “To depict reality in its revolutionary development”’, in M. Beaumont (ed), Adventures in Realism, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2009, pp 142–57.

Prelude: On Life and Form

25

the working class through images of industrialization, and the West European version that required some appropriately complex ways of understanding invented form, whether nature derived on the one hand or apparently geometric on the other. The period saw the onset of an aesthetic as well as political standoff between Western Europe and the USSR in which there would be no outright winner. For twenty years at least, two aesthetic cultures proceeded in lock-step in a contest in which neither could be said to prevail. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This book is not a straightforward defence of vitalism in art, whatever that would portend for the making or understanding of the individual work. For one thing, theoretical biologists themselves were losing faith in the vitalist idea progressively from the later 1920s on. The more resonant phenomenon for theorists, in Germany especially, was that of ‘holism’ – sometimes ‘Gestalt’ – whose cardinal property was the mutual dependence and interaction of the whole and its identifiable parts.48 Therein lies a far longer tale – in which metaphors of functional wholeness and totality seeped from biology and psychology into social ideology and the very definition of the nation state. In the culture of art, so my argument goes, it is not vitalism per se but more flexible ideas of vitality that gained a remarkable and tenacious hold: ideas that emerged from strategies by which energy and matter – matter in its temporality – were in that generation so daringly and so vividly brought to form. ‘Vitality’ in this usage stands less for Aristotelian entelechy than as a signpost to the many conundrums wrapped up in ideas of organicity and fluidity of form – in effect the categories of biology as they appeared, changed but still recognizable, in the mid-century of modern Western art. The original seepage of biologism from biology itself into metaphysics, then from metaphysics into social life and eventually the culture of Western art – whether in pursuit of living form or in the attempt to achieve its modification or eradication – can be exemplified in one final citation. The context remains that of the aftermath of the First World War, and the place, once again, is Berlin. ‘Modern individualism’, suggested the elderly sociologist Georg Simmel in a famous commentary on the cult of originality among the generation of his day, is a direct reflection of a broader commitment to ‘life’, a commitment that is also 48

See, for instance, L. van Bertalanffy, Kritische Theorie der Formbildung, 1928, slightly expanded for the English edition, Modern Theories of Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1933, and the discussion of ‘third-way’ biology in England in the circle of J.H. Woodger, Joseph Needham, C.H. Waddington and others, recently presented in E.L. Peterson, The Life Organic: The Theoretical Biology Club and the Roots of Epigenetics, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, USA, 2016.

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The Life of Forms in Art

a refusal to accept, acknowledge, give credence to, any fixed or objective form.49 Simmel had long maintained that a dualism of fixity and its contrast, flexibility, pervades all forms of sociation, from business and marriage contracts to the self-presentations of the subjective life. In the articulation of his theories he had always found it necessary to deploy metaphors of displacement and flux, pressure and agitation, generation and plasticity, streams, fluctuations, fluidity and flow. Simmel was a dialectician of consciousness too, and held that experience is both bounded and unbounded, known but also known as limited, determinate as well as diverse. An interplay between the fluidity of forms and their limits, he came to believe, even gave the character of our self-transcendence.50 Now, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and in the middle of the Dada revolt, he insinuates the same of the wider social field. ‘Originality reassures us that life is pure’, he says in the well-known essay of 1918, ‘that it has not diluted itself by absorbing extrinsic objectified, rigid forms into its flow’, therefore that such an attitude, the quest for originality, ‘goes far beyond the transformation of the problem of knowledge. Now, every object becomes a pulse-beat of absolute life, or one manner of its presentation, or a developmental stage.’ It was a statement that could apply to a generation’s self-presentation through fashion, through political commitment – or through the destructions and reconstructions of art. ‘At present we are experiencing … a struggle of life against form as such’, Simmel wrote; ‘against the principle of form’. What the development of a multifaceted Lebensphilosophie [life-philosophy] among the young generation of his day was doing for the self-conscious subject, he concluded, ‘it would do for the object as well’.51

49

50

51

G. Simmel, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’ (1918), originally published as Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur, Duncker and Humblot, 1918; in the translation of K. Peter Etzkorn, Teachers College Press, 1968 in D.N. Levine (ed and intr), Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1971. G. Simmel, ‘Social Forms and Inner Needs’ (1908), Soziologie, Duncker and Humblot, Munich and Leipzig 1908; Levine (ed and intr), pp 351–2; and ‘The Transcendent Character of Life’ (1918), from Lebensanschauung: Vier Metaphysische Kapitel, Munich, Duncker and Humblot; Levine (ed and intr), pp 353–74. Simmel, ‘The Conflict in Modern Culture’, pp 385, 387.

1

Organicity

Of all the projects in the modernist corpus that tried to define what it meant for a work of art to be ‘organic’, to have ‘organicity’, those of the sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and the painter Władisław Strzemiński are of special importance. The terminology sounds as if it came from biology or physiology, and in one sense it did. Yet both artists meant it to evoke the very experience of the work of art in the sight and mind of a viewer. It was as if wholeness and a mutual interdependence of parts could be embodied in a modern work of art – could be what a modern work of art really was. Nothing illusionistic, therefore; no picture-making or figural building. The achievement of ‘organicity’ was for both of them to be a fifteen-year project through a maze of precedents and obstacles, images, words and things. The modern work of art was to be a model of how life – both individual and social – could be given form. Too little is known about Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s early training for us to be entirely certain of their intellectual and artistic beginnings. Born in Moscow and Minsk respectively, both of them received artistic training in Moscow in the years 1917–19. In 1917 Kobro entered the School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (soon to become the Second State Free Art Studios or SVOMAS), where both Kasimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin were teaching, and her earliest known sculpture, an upright assembly of assorted machine parts, reflects Tatlin’s ‘culture of materials’ principles that mandated materiality – tension, density, weight and flexibility – as the proper starting-point of any contemporary construction. Strzemiński, having suffered injury, amputation and the virtual loss of one eye while serving on the Eastern Front in Byelorussia in 1916, entered the First State Free Art Studios in 1917 and also became exposed to Tatlin’s ideas. By 1920 both Kobro and Strzemiński were working as artists in the city of Smolensk in Western Russia, increasingly under the sway of Malevich’s UNOVIS (that is,

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The Life of Forms in Art

Suprematist) academy in nearby Vitebsk, just across the border in Ukraine. By the end of 1921 or the beginning of 1922, the artists, now married, had crossed into newly independent Poland and had begun to establish contacts with groups in Vilnius, Cracow and eventually Warsaw. They had already begun to reflect intensively on the methods of their teachers and how to move beyond them towards a democratic modern art as well as a demonstrably ‘organic’ one. 1 The term first enters their vocabulary in 1922. In his ‘Notes on Russian Art’, published in the journal Zwrotnica [Switch] during that year, Strzemiński’s criticisms of Malevich’s system were forthright. As he saw it, Malevich had

Fig 1.1  Katarzyna Kobro, ToS75 – Structure, wood, metal, cork, glass, c.1919, dimensions unknown, from Kompozycja przestrzeni. Obliczenia rytmu czasoprzestrzennogo [Composition of Space. Calculations of Space-Time Rhythm], Bibliokeka Grupy ‘a.r.’, Vol 2, Łódź, 1932. 1

The pattern of Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s travels in and beyond Russia in the period is well covered in J. Milner, ‘Władisław Strzemiński: Questions of Identity and Location’, in P. Polit and J. Suchan (eds), Władisław Strzemiński: Readability of Images, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2015, pp 17–32.

Organicity

29

been searching for what Strzemiński described as ‘a determinate system’, the ‘inescapable conditions from which the organicity of the work of art would follow’.  He understood well that his ‘determinate system’ was in effect an evolutionary hypothesis that was embodied in a book he wrote in the early 1920s and that was being taught – there can be little doubt – to the UNOVIS students in both Smolensk and Vitebsk at that time. Its arguments echoed the theory of adaptation in Darwin’s The Origin of Species. First, says Malevich, we must read the art of painting as like a body, subject to adaptation when exposed to new conditions, but otherwise quiescent. At any given time, its norms ‘continue to exist until an additional element arises out of the various phenomena of the changing environment and causes the old norm to evolve’. Cubism’s ‘additional element’ in relation to Cézanne, Malevich says, was the ‘sickle-shape’ of straight line attached to a curve: it corresponded to the world of cranes, locomotives, iron girders and the culture of the motor car. According to Malevich, an additional element gets its strength ‘by disturbing the previous norm – if necessary by deformation – and reconstructing it’. Suprematism’s environment was flight above the earth and the view of the earth from space. Its additional element was the pictorial plane untethered from its ground. Suprematism claimed to transcend Cubism by introducing geometric planes and launching them into space. Transposed into a medical metaphor, the change to a new system is like the effect of bacteria on the human organism, such that ‘through the action of the additional element old conceptions of the conscious mind are destroyed (displaced, that is, by new conceptions)’. In this sense each norm is dynamic, and under the pressure of circumstances ‘embarks on its way to becoming a new norm, a new system’. As he further explains, ‘the Suprematist square and the forms proceeding out of it can be likened to the primitive marks of aboriginal man which represented, in their combinations, not ornament but a feeling of rhythm’.2 Yet Strzemiński quickly spotted that by Malevich’s logic Suprematism must anticipate the conditions of its own redundancy, its own supercession by a dynamic new norm. Suprematism was in any case a historically transitional form endorsed by the Bolsheviks as a way of defeating classicism and nature-painting. More importantly still, in Suprematism ‘the distance between one form [in the picture] and another is a function of the force of attraction between these forms, and not a valid linear measurement relating to the whole picture’. What then was the 2

The text was not published until its appearance as Die Gegenstandlose Welt, Munich, 1927; in translation as The Non-Objective World, Paul Theobald and Co., Chicago, 1957, here pp 14, 14, 26, 14, 76.

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The Life of Forms in Art

Fig 1.2  Kasimir Malevich, The Additional, Formative Element in Cubism, c.1924–27, 55.0 × 78.9 cm.

Fig 1.3  Drawing from Kasimir Malevich, Suprematism: 34 Drawings, Vitebsk, 1920.

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‘additional element’ likely to be capable of supplanting it? Strzemiński, in his ‘Notes on Russian Art’, claimed that the redundancy of Suprematism was more likely to be a subtraction than an addition, namely of anything obstructing or obscuring the operation of laws that were – as he now asserted – peculiar to painting itself. The opportunity to expand on those ‘laws’ came the following year, 1923, at the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius, which showed work by Strzemiński together with Henryk Stażewski, Mieczysław Szczuka, Teresa Żarnower and Vytautas Kairiūkštis – all figures of importance for the direction that Strzemiński’s own work would now follow. Strzemiński’s ‘laws’ would be those of flatness (the condition of the stretched canvas); geometry (consonance between interior forms and the shape of the painting); localization of painterly action (absence of reference to events beyond the painting); economy (simultaneity of all visual devices); and a fifth feature that invokes the idea of ‘organicity’ in the painting by means of selfgenerative multiplication of basic elements to a notionally endless degree, namely, what he called ‘an exponential growth of forms by a juxtaposition of discrepancies’.3 Naturally, they were laws best seen in his own paintings. A work of 1923 named Synthetic Composition 1 shows painted forms within a pictorial ground, as carefully positioned in relation to the painting’s edges as to each other (Plate 1a). Those several forms, delimited with meandering as well as straight borders, all sit within a discernible relation to each other or to the framing edge such as to affirm, through difference and emphasis, that the physical limits of the painting are really there. It is as if Strzemiński wanted his new painting to figure a reconciliation between the forms and the field constituted by the plane of the painting itself. ‘I define art as the creation of the unity of organic form’, he says, ‘through an organicity parallel with that of nature, not identical to it.’ ‘Each entity attains its organicity according to a law proper to itself.’ And then, importantly: the laws of organicity for painting ‘cannot be derived from the structure of any other thing’.4 But what of Productivism, Constructivism’s more practical partner in the early days of Soviet power? This, too, was proving to be a major obstacle in the way of Strzemiński’s ‘organicist’ idea. ‘The baleful influence of Productivism’, he had said in his notes on the Russians, ‘has diverted artists from finding solutions to the problems of organic unity; more especially the reconciliation of pictorial form, not 3

4

Strzemiński’s preface to the Exhibition of New Art, Vilnius, 1923 was published as ‘I Define Art’, 1923; in R. Stanislawski and others (eds), Constructivism in Poland 1923–1936: BLOK, Praesens, a.r., Museum Folkwang Essen and Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller Otterlo, 1973, p 68; hereafter Constructivism in Poland. W. Strzemiński, ‘Catalogue of the New Art Exhibition’, Vilnius, May 1923; Constructivism in Poland, p 68.

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with practical utility, rather with the need for “dynamism” among the painting’s various competing parts.’5 His answer to what he termed the ‘auto-hypnosis’ of Productivism had been forthright and severe. The efficient structures of the OBMOKhU Constructivists (the Stenberg brothers, Rodchenko and Medunetsky) had impressed him as ‘truly new art’, and the work of the young Katarzyna Kobro had been ‘a veritable forward step’ in that context, ‘achieving values that were never attained before’. The OBMOKhU had been exceptional; and their experiments had pre-dated the more recent fetish for ‘production’. Tatlin’s celebrated constructed reliefs, for their part, had done little more than present a machinist image of the modern city ‘such as a rustic from the countryside might have entertained in pre-war days’. In Strzemiński’s view, Tatlin’s favoured materials of iron, glass, concrete, zinc and other metals – the stuff of the American skyscraper, according to Strzemiński – were in reality only decorative, and his Monument to the III International was ‘a formal ruin, a disorganised heap having neither plan nor system, a confused confrontation between a spiral and an oblique’.6 The trouble was that the journal Zwrotnica in which Strzemiński’s writings appeared was itself heavily Productivist, and held out for the closest possible reflection of the new society in the contemporary work of art. The signs were immediately present that Strzemiński would face a theoretical battle over the balance between the social and the organicist functions of art. Zwrotnica was edited by his friend Tadeusz Peiper – someone who had attended Henri Bergson’s lectures in Paris before returning to Poland in 1921, then publishing his own manifesto in the issue of Zwrotnica immediately prior to that in which Strzemiński’s article on the Russians appeared. The position Peiper adopted in his manifesto, entitled ‘Modern City. Mass. Machine’, is itself of some importance. Launched in 1922, it was explicit that in a modern society the working mass was the very condition on which the individual is dependent and through which he or she can lay claim to a public life. ‘The mass as society and the mass as a crowd exerts its ever-stronger influence on the human mind’, said Peiper, ‘and sooner or later will exert its influence on art.’ The history of composition in art had thus far been ‘a kind of tennis-game between rigour and informality’, and Peiper supported organicity as the principle of construction for the work of art only on the condition that ‘the several parts of a work be related to each other 5

6

W. Strzemiński, ‘Notes on Russian Art’, Zwrotnica, no 3, 1922, pp 79–82; published as ‘Notes sur l’Art Russe’, in A. Baudin and P-M. Jedryka (eds and intr), L’Espace Uniste: Écrits du Constructivisme Polonais, Paris, 1976, from which the translation is made, here pp 42, 44. W. Strzemiński, ‘Notes on Russian Art’, Zwrotnica, no 3, 1922, L’Espace Uniste, pp 43–44, 50.

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by a strict functional dependency, the only possible source of unity in the work … the result of the irrevocable, organic arrangement of its parts’. Mechanist and organicist metaphors had to be closely combined. ‘Society itself is an organism’, Peiper wrote uncompromisingly, ‘productive of the most sophisticated order that can be imagined.’ It is ‘more beautiful than anything that nature has created’ but also ‘as complex and functionally precise as a machine’. Further, mass-society ‘will impose its own construction on art … Society will be a work of art.’7 But it was the overuse of such functionalist imagery that Strzemiński was determined to avoid. And it would not prove easy. He already faced opposition from the artist Teresa Żarnower, a Productivist according to whom the work of art must be strictly utilitarian. ‘Sensations of technology have replaced those of nature’, she said on the occasion of the Vilnius exhibition; ‘it is in machines alone that we can enjoy simplicity and logical construction, qualities that must find their counterpart in the work of art.’8 The challenge was further compounded by the launch in Warsaw of another magazine, Blok, in March 1924, under the editorship of Żarnower, Szczuka and Stażewski, occasionally aided by the artistdesigner Henryk Berlewi and by Strzemiński himself. Blok was ConstructivistProductivist in its orientation, and by no means unanimous as to the relation between art and functional utility. Blok faced both east and west. Żarnower, Szczuka and Berlewi knew about the situation in Berlin. Berlewi was the author of the manifesto Mechano-Faktura that advocated a ‘disciplined system’, powered by technology, for the manufacture of textures and surfaces beyond the customary ones of paint, wood, tin and so forth; a system suitable, so he claimed, for the eradication of ‘the moods and whims’ of subjectivist art.9 Szczuka, for his part, had already declared in Zwrotnica for February 1923, ‘IN FUTURE WHEN THE NIGHTMARE OF EXPLOITATION HAS ENDED … THE FORMS OF ART TOO WILL CHANGE IN WAYS THAT CANNOT BE PREDICTED’.10 Now, he and Żarnower were ready to take Blok’s Productivist ideals into typography and photomontage. For them, the elements of construction were firstly materials and their qualities – the ductility of steel, the rawness or polish of wood, the incandescence of electric light – but no less T. Peiper, ‘Modern City. Mass. Machine’, Zwrotnica, no 2, July 1922; Constructivism in Poland, pp 60, 61.  8 T. Żarnower, ‘Statement’ in the Catalogue of the Exhibition of New Art, Vilnius, May 1923; Constructivism in Poland, p 70.  9 H. Berlewi, Mechano-Faktura, Warsaw 1924; here in Constructivism in Poland, p 74. 10 M. Szczuka, ‘Reaction to the Environment’, Zwrotnica, no 4, February 1923; Constructivism in Poland, p 67.  7

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importantly the processes by which they were assembled, the ‘systems’ that lead to social utility, the model for which was not the free creative individual but the worker in industry. They admitted grudgingly that a commitment to collectivism and utility ‘does not mean the elimination of disinterested creative activity from art’; yet Blok’s more general position was that ‘SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND THE PROBLEMS OF ART ARE INDIVISIBLE’. As they emphasized repeatedly, ‘Constructivism is a search for PRACTICAL applications of the creative drive … [and] should aim first and foremost at the practical efficacy of the thing’ by means of its ‘economy’, ‘efficiency’ and so forth.11 To Strzemiński and Kobro, this was not what ‘organicity’ in the work of art should mean. Their experience had been in Russia, and they knew the extent to which the slippage of Constructivism towards ‘production’ could expose it to tremendous and perhaps inevitable strain. Strzemiński’s instincts as an artist were for natural rather than mechanical organicism. A work of art ‘can have no model’, he now insisted, ‘neither in the exactitude of photography, nor in industrial products, nor in any other thing … nor is it a blueprint or a narrative about another content, experienced elsewhere and then finding its vestige and imitation in the work of art’. It must pursue ‘perfection of plastic form’, the very opposite of that ‘dynamism of spatio-temporal action’ on which Cubism, Futurism and Suprematism were all based. On the contrary, ‘A work of art is the organicity of a spatial phenomenon.’12 * The phrase serves well to make intelligible a major series of Strzemiński’s paintings known as Unist Compositions. Running from 1923/24 to 1934, they comprise a major contribution to the theory and practice of organic visual form. To grasp their visual and conceptual claims – subtle as they are – the Unist Compositions are best viewed alongside Strzemiński’s long and typographically adventurous essay ‘B = 2’, published in Blok in late 1924, together with the more 11

12

M. Szczuka and T. Żarnower, ‘What Constructivism Is’, Blok, Warsaw, no 6–7, 1924; from the translation in Bann (ed), The Tradition of Constructivism, pp 103–4. Notwithstanding, Nowa Kultura, the unofficial intellectual organ of the Communist Party of Poland, commented disapprovingly, ‘we do not hear [from Blok] a single reference to the working class, or to social issues. Without knowing the social views of the editors of Blok, we dare to affirm that only one social class can bring about a living art – the victorious proletariat.’ Nowa Kultura, no 2, 1924; see A. Baudin, ‘Avant-Garde Constructivisme Polonaise Entre les Deux Guerres: Quelques Points d’Histoire’, L’Espace Uniste, p 17 and note 30, p 33. W. Strzemiński, ‘What is Legitimately called New Art’, Blok, no 2, April 1924, Constructivism in Poland, p 75. My emphasis.

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exhaustive statement set out in an article ‘Dualism and Unism’, published in another journal, Dźwignia [Lever], in 1927, then republished as a booklet titled Unizm w Malarstwie [Unism in Painting] in 1928 (Plate 1b). In these important writings, he would attempt to address the problem of time. Strzemiński says in ‘B = 2’ that ‘Cubism and Suprematism allowed a dynamic tendency to develop, and forms began to glide on the canvas’, adding that ‘the law of plastic organicity requires the greatest possible union of forms with the plane of the picture’. Hence the earliest Unist Compositions comprise blurred, close-toned forms that maintain an explicit accommodation to the edges and the dimensions of the canvas – as if to eradicate any visual impression of figure–ground priority or a linear separation between the forms themselves. For ‘how strange and discordant an impression is made by a non-simple form next to the edge of a straight-lined picture, or a straight-lined form next to the edge of a round picture. A certain straightness of forms must be the result of the straightness of the limits of the stretcher. The picture must agree with its limits.’ Or again, ‘Every aspect of plastic action must be contained within the given work of art.’ And concerning time: ‘Time is a non-plastic element’, Strzemiński insists, ‘characteristic of literature and music’, and therefore to deploy the means proper to painting ‘implies the elimination of time.’ What is required is ‘not the action of one form towards another, but COMPLETE SIMULTANEITY of the phenomenon’.13 Evidence of a ‘Unist’ practice in painting as early as 1923 or 1924 was important enough. Yet something called ‘plasticity’ mattered too – that is, the organization of form and matter in three-dimensional space, as in sculpture or architecture. It is probably the main reason why a sub-series of paintings known as Architectonic Compositions, made between 1926 and 1930, is often held up as

Fig 1.4  Diagram from Władisław Strzemiński, ‘B = 2’, Blok, no 8/9, 1924. 13

W. Strzemiński, ‘B = 2’, Blok, no 8–9, November–December 1924; in Constructivism in Poland, pp 82, 83.

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Unism’s major achievement – though they actually represent a diversion from Unism’s most significant idea. They must be mentioned nevertheless. The series coincides with the period of Strzemiński’s and Kobro’s association with an architects’ group that included Bohdan Lachert, Józef Malinowski, Szymon and Helena Syrkus, and Józef Szanajca around another journal, Praesens [Present], committed to a union of art and architecture both as metaphor and as organizing agent for the social. In Szymon Syrkus’ words: ‘Architectonisation provides new opportunities, not only plastic as it might seem, but also social – for architecture changes the social pattern, just as the social pattern changes architecture.’14 The salient characteristic of Strzemiński’s Architectonic Compositions, then, is of a rectangular canvas occupied by two forms mutually abutting, one tonally darker than the other, with the paint applied flat and with the forms designed such that neither reads as figure or as ground (Plate 2a). Equally clearly, some forms read as stone ledges or classical corbels, even though others are architecturally unspecific. Straight edges are always parallel to the picture edge, while connecting curves usually have an approximately elliptical profile, somewhat as if a quarter-circle has been stretched lengthways in conformity to the canvas proportion most regularly used, namely 8:5. The repeated use of that proportion itself gives us a clue to the ‘organicity’ Strzemiński thought the paintings could present, for it is a Fibonacci ratio that others had discovered in the genesis and growth of plants.15 This indeed entered the rhetoric of the booklet Unism in Painting, published with the Praesens Library in Warsaw in 1928. There, Strzemiński maintains explicitly that ‘in the construction of a picture we should take its actual height and width as the starting point while the height and width as well as the place of each other shape should be dependent on them. In this way the dimensions of a picture … become something basic and determining of the painting’s character and construction.’16 Unism in Painting made other recommendations too. Following the plea for ‘simultaneity of the phenomenon’ in ‘B = 2’, the booklet now makes it explicit that ‘organicity’ in painting means the absence of ‘dynamism’ in the sense of durational or dramatic time. The target of this emphasis was of course the Baroque, where according to Strzemiński the accreditation of all contrasts of 14 15

16

Cited by A. Turowski, ‘Praesens (1926–1939)’, in Constructivism in Poland, p 39. The majority of Architectonic Compositions measure 96 × 60 cm, or 8:5. The paintings were labelled by the artist on the back as either ‘Kompoz.architekt’ or ‘Komp.architekt’. Given that the Polish ‘architektoniczny’ does not distinguish between ‘architectonic’ and ‘architectural’, I adopt the former as corresponding to Strzemiński’s meaning most closely. W. Strzemiński, Unizm w Malarstwie/Unism in Painting (1928), English translation by Wanda Kemp-Welch, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 1994; here p 14, translation slightly modified.

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colour, line, shape, texture or compositional incident had historically begun. All contrasts or dualities in the Baroque, Strzemiński states, imply ‘dramatic tensions, the painting of forces’ implying a theatrical mode of apprehension, whereas a Unist picture should be ‘an object destined only to be looked at. It must not be a dramatic play of struggling forces, but a purely visual phenomenon.’ In sum, ‘dualist conceptions should be replaced by a Unist conception: not the pathos of dramatic explosions and great forces but the picture as organic as nature itself ’. Yet that organicism must be outside time and duration: ‘Our aim is an extra-temporal picture, operating only within the notion of space.’ And lastly, lest anyone should think that geometrical construction alone guarantees spatiality devoid of time, and although geometry offers ostensibly clear and precise elements, nonetheless ‘it cannot assign them their exact place in the picture and always forces the painter back onto the threadbare resources of intuition … therefore in reality geometric construction alone is as random and subjective as any other construction’. The message of Unism in Painting is that, transcending Baroque drama on the one side and geometry alone on the other, the artist must accept ‘a mystical conception of the picture as a painterly organism, a painting whose parts are unanimous’.17 It can be said that Strzemiński’s theory of Unism appeared early in the historical scheme, inasmuch as it made a demand that the ‘modern’ work of art create for itself a domain in which it was (or could become) selfdefining.18 Equally, it appeared at a time of mounting crisis for Poland as a young republic, when international stability was once more very fragile too. Industrial production remained low, and the pressure upon Strzemiński to align his work with Productivism remained intense. Szczuka, for instance, drew repeated attention to the crisis of Western capitalism, a crisis with which contemporary artists were not in his estimation keeping pace. ‘The houses of the rich’, he wrote, were ‘decked out in columns and cornices, while the rooms of servants and workers, in the basements and garrets, are simply terrible. Artists are failing to adjust to the new demands.’ The rising class ‘needs art not in the form of stucco gimcracks for Sunday evenings, but art for the days of the week’. Paintings and sculptures, in his view, had become ‘an expensive commodity, an impure foam on the flood-tide of the proletariat’. The modern 17 18

W. Strzemiński, Unizm w Malarstwie/Unism in Painting, pp 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 16. Emphasis added. Recent accounts of Unism have been excited by what looks like a correspondence to later Minimalist painting, for example Frank Stella’s black paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s. See for example Y-A. Bois, ‘Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation’, in Painting as Model, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 123–55, and its treatment of what Bois calls ‘mourning of the loss of modernism’ (p 125).

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artist, he insisted, working on his own initiative, has been too slow to keep up. The proletariat ‘demands useful things’.19 * Whether pressure from Productivism – for utility – was a significant factor behind the architectonic turn in Strzemiński’s work is difficult to tell. At any rate, the Architectonic Compositions came to an abrupt halt in 1930, to be replaced by an altogether different attitude to organic form. It seems that a combination of factors played their part. We need to recognize that Katarzyna Kobro was herself adopting an architectonic manner in her work, while remaining aware that temporality for a sculptor was not the same as for a painter, given that physical dimensions must be measured in three dimensions rather than in two. Many of her sculptures of the mid-1920s are lost – but we know that by 1928 she had developed a sculptural idiom in which the made object would avoid a solid core or any reference to the human body. ‘The solid is a lie to the essence of sculpture’, she wrote in that year; ‘It closes up the sculpture and separates it from space.’ Sculpture should be ‘the shaping of form in space’. That is, ‘sculpture enters space and space enters sculpture … Mutual interdependence of shapes creates a rhythm of dimension and division’ (Plate 2b). Kobro’s language is prescient. She grasped that in an important sense sculpture was inevitably temporal. She understood too the relevance of the viewer’s awareness of any dimension of the work in relation to the others; one part or shape in relation to others; the different relationships that are observed when photographs are taken of a work from different positions relative to the viewer and to the sculpture’s placement. Her solution to that tension between form’s temporal unfolding and a sculpture’s unity as a thing lay in an appeal to the numerical relations involved. As she put it, ‘the unity of rhythm is

19

M. Szczuka, ‘Art and Reality’, Dzwignia, no 4, July 1927, Constructivism in Painting, p 102. An occasion for further critique was Malevich’s cramped retrospective exhibition mounted by the Polish Art Club in one room of the Hotel Polonia in Warsaw in March–April 1927. Distinguishing between ‘East European Suprematism’ (Malevich and his school) and ‘Western Suprematism’ (Mondrian and his followers), Szczuka states frankly that ‘Malevich is unable to compose his pictures’ since the background plane ‘extends beyond the frame’. He works from a basis of ‘literary sensation and muddled metaphysics, and has an abhorrence of the word “construction” … it is how they [Suprematists] justify their passivity and laziness for social commitment’; M. Szczuka, ‘The Funeral of Suprematism’, Dzwignia, no 2–3, 1927; Between Two Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes 1910–1930, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Compare the emollient text by T. Peiper ‘Malevich in Poland’, Zwrotnica, no 11, 1927; also Between Two Worlds.

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achieved by means of the unity of its calculations’.20 Then, in a much longer text entitled Composition of Space: Calculation of Space-Time Rhythm, written with Strzemiński in 1929, the two artists elaborate on how to extend the reach of Unist theory from painting to the practice of three-dimensional art. They concede that sculpture’s temporal rhythm originates in a single rectangular frame, the frame of sight: ‘The whole of what we perceive’ on such a plane, they say, ‘is indeed a purely spatial phenomenon, a plastic one, and time is not directly given in it.’ But they add that ‘the character of the spatio-temporality of a single plane can be said to be potential, as a rhythm having the element of time latent in it’. ‘Time is potentially inherent within a single plane’, they now say, whereas in the experience of a three-dimensional work ‘it appears openly, as the result of the beholding motion [of the observer] around the work of art.’ And that beholding motion in turn implied a detailed analysis, shape by shape, ratio by ratio, of how

Fig 1.5  Katarzyna Kobro, ‘The Uniform Rhythm of Calculating Individual Elements of Composition’, from ‘Funkcjonalizm’ [Functionalism], Forma, no 4, 1936, p 12. 20

K. Kobro, ‘Sculpture and Solid’, Europa, no 2, 1929, from translations given in Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1851, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1999, p 149, as well as in Tre Pionérer for Polsk AvantGarde, Fyns Kunstmuseum, 1985, p 58. My emphasis. Photos of her sculptures’ variations were published both in Praesens and in the original published version of Composition of Space: Calculation of Space-Time Rhythm, Volume 2 of the a.r. library, Łódź, 1931.

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the potential rhythm of a planar view then initiated a dynamic series of views once the viewer was in motion around the work – above it, through it, beyond it. The decision to paint her sculptures of the period plane by plane, in mostly saturated colours (black, yellow, red, blue, white), would come a short time later. In Unism, the task of sculpture was ‘to build a transition from individual shapes that are purely spatial and non-temporal … up to the rhythm of the whole work of art or to the overt rhythm that unites the work into a single spatio-temporal unity’.21 And there was a second important idea. For Strzemiński and Kobro now make the claim that to be truly Unistic – to possess ‘organic unity’ – a work of visual art must be at one with the inalienable condition of its situation ‘naturally’; that is, in advance of the work’s actually being made. They understood with some clarity the need (if it could be achieved) for a joining together of Unism in painting and Unism in sculpture despite the differences in their fundamental materials and relationships to space. And the key term in that unification would be that of place. As they put it in a signal remark, ‘the unity of a work of art for painting and sculpture alike must be the place in which it arises … the natural conditions that already existed before the work of art was made’.22 It was as if Unism’s ‘organicity’ must lie in an accommodation of the newly arisen work to the material conditions, the topography, of its prior ground. The stretched unpainted canvas as a place, then, and the spatial situatedness of the sculpture likewise. A concern for the ontology of the work of art had been implicit earlier, but had now come suddenly to the fore. We should note – it is an interesting conjuncture – that Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] of 1927 was meanwhile insisting on recognition of the ontogical priority of ‘Being’ (with capitalized B), claiming it to be more fundamental than that which individual branches of knowledge could offer. In biology itself, Heidegger notes in relation to the question of the organic, ‘there is an awakening tendency to inquire beyond the definitions which mechanism and vitalism have each given for “life” and “organism”’ and to define ‘the kind of Being which belongs to the living as such’.23 It is as if Heidegger’s metaphors of ‘groundedness’ and ‘clearing’, together constitutive of alētheia (unconcealment) and hence of Dasein or ‘there-being’, 21

22 23

K. Kobro and W. Strzemiński, Composition of Space: Calculations of Space-Time Rhythm; in Constructivism in Poland, pp 107, 108. My emphases. Kobro and Strzemiński, Composition of Space, p 107. My emphases. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1973, at H. 10, p 30.

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were exerting an appeal. The suggestion is not that Strzemiński and Kobro were consulting the latest German phenomenology, but that ‘organicity’ was a question of metaphysical as well as practical concern. Organicity was a matter of material finding its experiential adequation to some more basic ground. The implication is that in Unism, the achievement and revelation of temporal ‘Being’ – it can be called ‘becoming’ – was now a prime purpose of the organic work of art. * Unity of what has arisen with what had been prior to the work of art: such a formula, adopted sometime between late 1928 and early 1930, nevertheless represents only a stage in Unism’s longer and unfolding story. Further changes were afoot, and the speculation must be that events beyond the studio played a major and determining part. The international context now loomed large for both Strzemiński and Kobro, and in several senses. By 1928 the relative prosperity of the Polish Republic was beginning to dim, followed by the international market crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression. By 1932 the productivity of Polish industry would fall to 54 per cent of its 1929 level; and by 1933 one-third of the Polish workforce would be unemployed.24 Perhaps ‘organicity’, for some, would evoke a much older idea of ‘organic work’ [praca organiczna], one that had been championed by progressive thinkers following the defeat of the people’s insurrection of 1863 – a programme of economic and cultural reconstruction designed to prepare Poland for true national consciousness at a time of disunity and invasion by neighbouring powers.25 Yet the message of collectivism in the USSR was that radical proletarianization was scarcely a model to follow. Modern art everywhere was under attack. Strzemiński and Kobro would learn in the summer of 1930 that Malevich had been arrested and interrogated under the charge of ‘formalism’ by the Soviet secret police. Neither of them would wish to shore up Unism’s metaphors with the slogans of the First Five-Year Plan. The other international context for Unism lay in Europe to the west and south. It seems that the writing of Composition of Space in the middle part of 24

25

See J. Ludowski and H. Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp 242–4. ‘Organic work’ would permit Polish nationals to ‘extend work and learning in society … and allow us to concern ourselves with our own problems, rather than those of others’, in the works of A. Swigtochowski, ‘My I Wy’ [We and You], Przeglad Tygodniowy [The Weekly Review], 1871, no 44. See S.A. Blejwas, ‘The Origins and Practice of “Organic Work” in Poland: 1777–1865’, The Polish Review, vol 15, no 4, Autumn 1970, pp 23–54; here p 23.

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1929 had prompted both artists to re-evaluate their sympathy for the architects of Praesens. Splitting from that group in June 1929, a new and different one named ‘a.r.’ was formed (artyści rewolucyjni [revolutionary artists] to Julian Przyboś but awangarda rzeczywista [real avant-garde] to Strzemiński). Centred in the city of Łódź, ‘a.r.’ comprised Strzemiński, Kobro and Henryk Stażewski together with the poets Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski, its stated aim being to promote international links and relations in which the Polish group could play a significant part. At least as early as 1926, Strzemiński had toyed with the idea of establishing a museum of modern art in Poland, one that would look to sources of modernism in Western Europe and thus turn away from the arguments about art that were so divisive in Russia. Stażewski was in Paris, a member of both Cercle et Carré and what would become Abstraction-Création, and was already a loyal proponent of something close to the Unist idea. Brzękowski was in Paris too; and Strzemiński with the support of his close friend Karol Hiller in Łódź now set about obtaining works from German, French and Dutch artists, either by gift or exchange.26 Thanks largely to Brzękowski, who was publishing a bilingual art and poetry magazine L’Art Contemporain – Sztuka Współczesna in the French capital, contributions were quickly forthcoming from artists as notable and ambitious as Léger, Arp, Ernst, Taeuber-Arp, Schwitters, Gleizes, Herbin, van Doesburg, Marcoussis, Picasso and Vantongerloo (several others too). As Strzemiński wrote to Przyboś in August 1930, ‘Stażewski was here a few days ago … We’ve already got 17  paintings, with 8 foreign (Arp, one relief, extremely good); TorresGarcίa, one painting, good; Prampolini, one painting, Futurist; Charchoune, four paintings … Modern Polish painting is not bad and it can keep up with the West.’27 The result of this enterprise was that the earliest European public museum of modern art, known as the International Collection of Modern Art, was opened with the support of the city authorities in the Bartoszewicz Museum of History and Art in Łódź on 15 February 1931. Other contributions followed.28 Łódź was suddenly a centre of attention for Western modernists. At the same time, Strzemiński’s own work as an artist underwent an irreversible 26

27 28

Strzemiński wrote to Przyboś in December 1929: ‘I believe that … only a unified front of poetry and the plastic arts, each an accompaniment to the other, can present a strong movement, and that we can smuggle art to poetry lovers and poetry to the lovers of art’ (letter of 1 December 1929), cited in Anna Labecka, ‘The “a.r.” Group, 1929–1936’, in Contructivism in Poland, p 42. W. Strzemiński, letter to Przyboś, 31 August 1930; Constructivism in Poland, p 114. For further detail and some analysis, see M. Rogucka, The Museum Sztuki in Łódź: Deconstructing Władysław Strzemiński’s Unist Vision, MA dissertation, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2014.

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Fig 1.6  Henryk Stażewski, Abstract Composition, c.1936, oil on canvas, 54.5 × 46 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łodź, Marek Stażewski and Marcin Stażewski.

Fig 1.7  The International Collection of Modern Art, Łódź, installation view showing works by Stażewski, Arp, van Doesburg, Vantongerloo, Léger, Prampolini, Schwitters, Werkman, Baumeister and others, 1932.

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shift of emphasis in which the concept of ‘organicity’ began a new career – and in some unexpected ways. By the time of the opening of the Łódź International Collection, Strzemiński’s Architectonic Compositions series had come to an abrupt end. It seems he had decided that the Compositions’ claims to ‘organicity’ could not finally be reconciled with the sharp differentiation of the picture plane into distinct visual parts.29 The solution was to reinterpret Unism’s formal prohibitions – against Baroque drama, principally – by crafting surfaces containing much softer textual effects obtained by arranging micro-forms that colonize the picture’s rectangle as a whole, without emphasizing one element or part against the claims of another. Described formally and without metaphor, Unist Compositions 8, 9, 10 and 11 of 1931–32, together with an unnumbered Unist Composition of 1932, generate a field effect of small flecks or incidences of paint.30 Uniform without being mechanical, these effects can be likened to natural growths such as tree bark or fish scales, or patterns of wavelets such as are produced on a puddle by a sudden gust of wind. Unist Composition 12, also of 1932, introduces wave-like curves that meander, start and stop, in places defining a blob or a module, elsewhere engulfing them like the edges that separate soap and water. In the language of rhythm, one can describe Unist Composition 12 as marked by an irregular beat, of the kind to be found in eddies, weather-patterns or the marks left in sand by the action of the sea. Unist Compositions 13 and 14 of 1934, on the other hand, are different. Square rather than upright paintings, their undulations establish a centralized pulse within the painting, an energetic centre that comes close – but not too close – to unflattening the whole (Plate 3a). What do these rhythms and turbulences mean? We know from Strzemiński’s correspondence with Przyboś that the question of society, the analogical reach of Unist practice and theory, could not be entirely forgotten. ‘New form results from a change of building material’, Strzemiński had remarked in a letter to him dated June 1930; ‘new building material yields a new building construction, and new construction makes a new form possible.’31 The comment was meant to apply to designed objects or to architecture, but implicitly it applied to painting as well. It might even be said that Strzemiński’s new paintings wore their social 29

30

31

Strzemiński declared as much in ‘Dramatyzm I architektonizm’ [Dramatism and Architectonism], L’Art Contemporain – Sztuka Współczesna, 3, 1930, p 93. The unnumbered Unist Composition of 1932 was originally given as a gift to Hans Arp, and is now in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. W. Strzemiński, letter to Przyboś, 24 June 1930, Constructivism in Poland, pp 113–14.

Organicity

Fig 1.8  Władisław Strzemiński, Unist Composition 12, 1932, oil on canvas, 50 × 38 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak.

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The Life of Forms in Art

metaphors on their sleeves. Unist Compositions 8 to 11 and the unnumbered one of 1932 present equivalent quantities of energy and colour calibrated without hierarchies or dominance-relations within a total pictorial field. So described, each might be viewed as a living democratic organism – even ‘organized’ in the Darwinian sense, an articulation of elements that are quietly cooperative and dynamic. Unist Composition 12, by contrast, read socially, presents its energylines as nodes of intensity constituting a more active field across a wider whole, centres of energy emerging and communicating, then dying away. Numbers 13 and 14, the square ones and the last in the series, show a phenomenon only dimly articulated politically at the time. We see a swelling of scale and emphasis at the centre, as if caused by energy passing from one unit to its neighbours and from those to their neighbours across a wider pictorial – for which read social – field. Multiplicative effects generate large movements of form out of those that are initially small. Read this way, the centres of the paintings become allegorized moments of uprising within a larger social body, images of an organized mass in the moment of its historical unfolding, its becoming. Metaphorically, it is the mode of social activism of the collective.32 Of course, we cannot be entirely confident that such readings can be sustained. Strzemiński’s turn to fluid and mobile shapes may have been inspired by Hans Arp, a set of whose drawings had recently been obtained for the Łódź Collection and whose interests in organicity, though quite different, the Polish artists were coming to know. The ‘a.r.’ group was active in arranging an exhibition in Warsaw in which members of the L’Art Contemporain group in Paris including Léger, Arp, Ernst and others would all participate. It opened in July 1933. Or was it the example of Katarzyna Kobro that prompted him to review his methods and his practice? The fact that Strzemiński did no Unist Compositions at all in 1933 is suggestive. He had tried again to pacify the Productivists by saying that ‘in spite of our apparent break with utilitarianism and our appearing to operate with pure form … our art is still matter-of-fact and utilitarian’ – while also insisting on his entitlement to continually modify and change. ‘Modern art’, he had said, ‘like any living art … is in advance of its time and untiring in its experiments … We must go forward, try again and again, start again from the beginning … life never comes to a halt, not even for a moment.’33 At the same 32

33

I discussed Unist Composition 12 in ‘Strzemiński’s “Biological” Line’, in P. Polit and J. Suchan (eds), Władysław Strzemiński: Readability of Images, 2015, pp 203–17. ‘W. Strzemiński laureat nagrody malarskiej miasta Łodźi wyjaśnia swoje credo artystyczne’, Illustrowana Republika, no 147, 1932, p 7. Constructivism in Poland, p 33 and n. 13, p 35.

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time Kobro, who had turned away at least once from her Spatial Compositions to produce quasi-figurative plaster carvings of the seated or crouching nude – her Nude series of 1925–27 – now made a very different Nude (lost, but dated 1933) showing fluid concave undulations directly evocative of Arp’s Concretions of about the same time. She also made a thoroughly Arpian sculpture, known to the record as Spatial Composition 9 and also dated 1933, that appears to reformulate – by radically streamlining – everything in her thinking on spacetime rhythm hitherto. Made from a single sheet of steel, folded to create a threedimensional organic form, this extraordinary work announces a relaxation of the drive to model a utopian social architecture and marks her discovery of a new language of non-geometrical – that is, openly biological – form.34 It is a change reflected in her response to some questions circulated by the journal Abstraction-Création and published in its cahier for 1933. In answer to a question about the role played in an artist’s work by the shape of a tree, Kobro replied that the quality of a work of art depends neither on resemblance to a machine nor on mimicry of ‘nature’ exemplified in the form of a tree; rather, she wanted her goal to be ‘a purely plastic and abstract shape’. ‘I am tending towards concrete things’, she wrote, ‘[and therefore] trees have no influence on my work.’ ‘All devices reach their goal through movement, which cuts through space.’35 * A biological turn – if such it be – appears widespread at the start of the 1930s, yet has attracted little attention in the literature of art so far. Nevertheless – and for reasons soon to be examined – its theoretical determinations were neither uniform nor straightforward. Kobro and Strzemiński’s close friend Karol Hiller himself published a statement in Forma (the official organ of the Łódź Trade Union of Plastic Arts and effectively the voice-piece of the ‘a.r.’ group) early in 1934 urging the mobilization of ‘flexible and fluent forms’. Rhetorically at any rate, his target was class society: ‘Emphasising the fluidity of all things cannot become popular in the eyes of capitalism since the outlook on life of the well-to-do classes has produced virtues which by their nature are constant and static, so consequently their outlook 34

35

The speculation that the work was intended as a gift to Hans Arp remains unverified. Kobro gave the work to her friend Lucyna Wegner for delivery, but for reasons unknown it never arrived. Despite evidence of cordial relations between Strzemiński and Kobro and Arp and Taeuber, no correspondence between them has yet come to light. See Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951, Leeds, p 127. Kobro, ‘Reply to a Questionnaire’, Abstraction-Création, no 2, 1933, in Katarzyna Kobro 1898–1951, pp 150–1.

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Fig 1.9  Katarzyna Kobro, Nude, 1933 [lost work], plaster or white cement, dimensions unknown, as published in Abstraction-Création, no 5, 1936, p 15.

Fig 1.10  Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition 9, 1933, painted steel, 15.5 × 35 × 19 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak.

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follows suit.’ What is needed, Hiller said, is ‘a dialectics [which is also] a method of analysing phenomena in their fluid state [so as to achieve] an enrichment of abstract ideas by incorporating the inexhaustible riches of nature’ – including what he calls ‘the spectator’s visual perception’. We see Hiller stepping away from a mechanist social vision. We need ‘the application of dialectics in all domains of contemporary life’, he proposes, ‘a complete revision of concepts of time and space as presented by science and technology, both of which have played a powerful part in what now concerns us – the forms of visual understanding in a post-war society’.36 To Hiller, the challenge (one also addressed by Moholy-Nagy) was to exploit the action of light and energy on the processes of changing form. In his art, the medium for this dialectic would be the heliograph, a transparent plate etched by chemical action, scratched, stained or rubbed, then applied to a photo-sensitive paper before being solarized, giving rise to a field of microbial or cosmic forms, merging, overlapping, staining, fusing and dividing. Such forms had not appeared in modern art before. Strzemiński’s own change of manner, more or less coincident with Unist Compositions 13 and 14, was no less far-reaching. It was a move away from oil painting  altogether, in favour of tempera paintings on cardboard at a muchreduced size and scale, consistent with being handled in the open air. The idiom of the Seascapes – as the new paintings would be known – is no less important than their scale. The majority were done while on family holidays at Chalupy on the Hel Peninsula in 1933 and 1934. It was a significant location because of the presence on both sides of the peninsula of the sea; yet the term ‘seascape’ is misleading, for just as the Unist Compositions are not really compositions, so the Seascapes are not seascapes, except in the sense of recasting the idea of seascape into a new and original form. The paintings are not of a seascape, place or scene. They do not show topographical features or tell us much about the weather or the atmosphere of the place. At the same time, the series returns the viewer to an experience of tangible relations with a visible and therefore visual world. The artist has sat in or near the water’s edge and has set out to trace what the mind sees inside vision as much as what is merely visible optically – an inside that includes the shifting rhythms of attention attendant upon the opening and closing of his one good eye (Plate 3b). Here as elsewhere, Strzemiński’s organization of the picture surface is to some degree a result of near-monocularity (one eye 36

K. Hiller, ‘The New Vision’ Forma, no 2, Łódź, 1934, in Hiller-Heliographs, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, 1982, pp 95, 96, 99 and ‘Heliography as a New Kind of Graphic Technique’, pp 101–2 (my emphasis); also A. Nakov, ‘From Photomontage to Abstract: Light Painting Instead of Production’, pp 74–92.

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The Life of Forms in Art

Fig 1.11  Karol Hiller, Heliographic Composition, c.1934, 23.5 × 17.5 cm. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź.

could pick up only light) and the restricted depth-perception that his condition implied. In a fragment entitled ‘Modern Art in Poland’, written and published in 1934, he refers to the need for art to serve ‘the formal organisation of everyday events’ and to do so through its relatedness to ‘the scientific organisation of work and leisure and its grounding in modern technology’ – so far it is the Productivist formula – but he adds ‘in psycho-physiology and bio-mechanics’.37 37

W. Strzemiński, ‘Modern Art in Poland’, from J. Brzękowski, L. Chwistek, P. Smolik, W. Strzemiński, O sztuce nowoczesnej [On New Art], Łódź, 1934; in Constructivism in Poland, p 121.

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‘Bio-mechanics’ here refers to Meyerhold’s method for theatrical training, the essence of which was awareness of the body in its situatedness, its training of ‘the body that thinks’.38 For Strzemiński in his new manner, bio-mechanics linked with psycho-physiology pointed to the rhythms and relationships set in motion by the mutual dependency of eye, head and body in self-conscious apprehension of a scene across a given interval in time. As Andrzej Turowski has argued, the visual pulse of the Seascapes ‘is what [for Strzemiński] finally connected cognition of the world and the physiology of the human observer within it’.39 * In one sense the Seascapes mark a turn away from the theory of Unism; yet in another they seem a refinement, even a deepening, of it. Strzemiński would not himself reflect on the question until his late book Theory of Vision, published in 1958, in which he admits, ‘I could not place [the Seascapes] accurately in the line of development of art’, but adds that ‘it was only a verification of their visual base and an analysis of the components of their visual consciousness that allowed me to place them precisely.’ The paintings ‘are works based on the application of empirical method and the incorporation of the effect of physiological rhythms upon visual consciousness’.40 From the start he had been interested in a phenomenological account of sight, but now he was searching for an awareness that was also dynamic, cumulative and self-critical. Of course, such an ambition had a long and important pedigree to support it. In common with painters before him, Strzemiński’s experience of clouds and sea was foundational to an apprehension of the relation between visual experience and passing time. Clouds had functioned for Alexander Cozens and John Constable a century or more earlier as an index, not of formlessness but of apprehended change, for which older philosophies of perspectivalism were proving hopelessly inadequate.41 Mondrian’s 38

39

40

41

For Meyerhold’s statements on this theme, see E. Braun (ed and trans), Meyerhold on Theatre, Methuen, London, 1969. A. Turowski, ‘The Physiology of the Eye’, in Władysław Strzemiński 1993–1952, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 1994, p 38 and passim. ‘It is impressionism but distinct from historical Impressionism’, Strzemiński says in Theory of Vision, ‘in the sense that a new ingredient, namely physiological rhythm, has been put into the equation. Historical Impressionism was concerned with the content of directed gazes; whereas the impact of these gazes, the manner in which our organism reacts and is affected by them … is one of the components of the physiological process of seeing.’ W. Strzemiński, Theory of Vision, cited by L. Kiepuszewski, ‘Image Drift’, in P. Polit and J. Suchan (eds), Readability of Images, Proceedings etc., Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2015, pp 177, 166–7. On this topic, see H. Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, Stanford University Press, California, 2002.

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Pier and Ocean paintings after 1913 had figured the sea as an exemplification of the a-social, but also as a visual continuum whose mobile organic forms resolved under analysis into orthogonally placed linear units making up a rhythmic ovoid field, a stable ‘disequilibrium’ (to use Mondrian’s term) reconciling the evershifting and contradictory forces of the life-world. For Strzemiński too, the sea in its motility was assuming real importance – not merely as metaphor but as embodied exemplification. As he wrote to Przyboś in 1932, ‘nature is no longer an accidental feature such as a tree or a hillock, but elemental things like light, heat, water and sand … everything is purer and more essential’.42 But can we specify what the Seascape paintings show? On the occasion of his exhibition at the Institute for the Propagation of Art (IPS) in Warsaw in March 1934, Strzemiński wrote apropos the Seascapes that ‘the real content of a work of art lies not in its story or object, but in its methods of shaping form, in its predilection for certain formal elements and in the way they are combined’.43 The Seascapes offered what he called ‘a painterly equivalent of nature’, but in a special sense. ‘By disrupting an object into the line and the blot I was aiming at irregularly symmetrical rhythms.’ Recall that Unist Compositions 13 and 14 were also painted in 1934, marking at best a limit – even an adieu – to the social metaphor at the same time as the Seascapes were being born. ‘In the face of nature one is experimenting’, Strzemiński now says; ‘its contingency determines the contingency of the picture.’44 Meanwhile, in a statement in a contemporary issue of Forma, ‘A rhythm arising from the interaction of all the components of a landscape is brought about by releasing the interdependences and the reciprocal effects of each element of nature, the rhythm of the whole conceived as a fluid asymmetric continuity.’45 Perhaps ‘irregular symmetry’ and ‘fluid asymmetry’ amount to the same. At any rate, the preoccupations of the act of painting and the act of seeing are being held together at this moment, in a manner we shall find characteristic of the interwar modernist avant-garde. For sure, the temporality of the Seascapes is not easy to describe. To ask whether a particular one can be said to capture a ‘moment’ of the scene is to raise the question how brief, extended, atypical, singular (etc.) is the moment concerned? What does the term ‘moment’ really mean? The paintings seem to show broad volumes of sky, water and sand, in ‘blotted’ shapes that are 42 43

44 45

W. Strzemiński, letter to Przyboś, July 1932, Listy, p 266; Kiepuszewski, p 169. W. Strzemiński, ‘An Account of the Exhibition at IPS’, Glos Plastykow, vol 3, no 9–10, 1934, p 136; in Tre Pionérer For Polsk Avant-Garde, Fyns Kunstmuseum, Odense, 1985, p 41. The IPS show was shared with Henryk Stażewski. W. Strzemiński, ‘An Account of the Exhibition at IPS’, 1934, Tre Pionérer For Polsk Avant-Garde, p 43. W. Strzemiński, ‘Our Visual Potential’, Forma, no 3, 1934, cited by Baudin, ‘Avant-Garde et Constructivisme Polonais entre les Deux Guerres’, L’Espace Uniste, p 35, n 61.

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themselves deforming and re-shaping as we look, while they in turn are traversed by continuous white lines that evoke the shapes of clouds that double as scanning motions of the eye as they traverse the integral scene. However described, they embody an internal pictorial simultaneity of line and blot working together – the moving and the static combined. To take a particular example: the Seascape of 25 July 1934 was painted in the rain, that vertical continuum that flattens as well as rhymes the sensory whole, inside which, as the critic Łukasz Kiepuszewski observes, ‘we are dealing with a weave of gazes and an unfolding of the micromovements of the eye’. Interestingly, Kiepuszewski refers us to the passage in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? which posits a concept of entre-temps – ‘meanwhiles’ or ‘between-times’ that are not themselves part of measurable time but rather ‘belong to becoming’.46 It is true that Deleuze himself insisted on the entre-temps as a central concept in his project to understand events in distinction to things – ‘being in the middle’, as he put it, ‘a matter of metamorphosis rather than metaphor’.47 In What Is Philosophy? he and Guattari suggest that ‘meanwhiles’ belong with Bergson’s concept of the qualitatively multiple durée, in which ‘the virtual’ (unrealized) passes into ‘the actual’ (realized) and does so seamlessly. As if to evoke the action of a Strzemiński Seascape, they propose: Each component of the event is actualized … in an instant, and the event in the time that passes between these instants; but nothing happens within the virtuality that has only entre-temps as components and an event as a composite becoming. Nothing happens there, but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past.48

To describe the Seascapes this way is to describe them phenomenologically. ‘I painted them for diversion because such work is less demanding’ – Strzemiński is here defending them against the critique of the mathematician, philosopher and artist Leon Chwistek, who wanted art that was truer to life, closer to its static character.49 The Seascapes were diversionary, it is true. But Strzemiński returns the question: ‘What is truer to life? Relatedness to actual events, or the discovery of laws 46

47

48

49

Ł. Kiepuszewski, ‘Image Drift’, in P. Polit and J. Suchan (eds), Władisław Strzemiński: Readability of Images, p 181; to which I am indebted here. G. Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995; also Bergsonism, 1966. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, Verso, London, 1994, p 158 (my emphasis) that itself (p 229, n 17) refers the reader to the ‘very intense article’ of B. Groethuysen, ‘De quelques aspects du temps’, Recherches Philosophiques, 5, 1935–36. Chwistek belonged to a group known as Formists and developed a theory of ‘plural realities’ known as Strefizm [Zonism] in the practice of which the painting is divided into disjoint parts. See K.  Chrobak (ed and intr), Leon Chwistek: The Plurality of Realities: Collected Essays, Jagiellonian University Press, Kraków, Poland, 2018.

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and rules according to which events take place? What we need nowadays is not an unimaginative obedience to reality, but the will to transform it.’ The conversation took place in December 1934, and Strzemiński was adamant that Unism had always required a time-element, that of the eye passing to and fro between one part of the painting and the next – passing narratively, let us say, constituting it as art in the continuum of time and space together. He had posited back in 1923 that the organicity of art must be ‘an organicity parallel to that of nature, not identical to it’.50 * Even so, it was a position that needed maintaining in the face of a new phenomenon – what appeared to him as a certain ‘biologism, irrationalism and primitivism’ that Surrealists elsewhere were now pursuing for all it was worth. As he put it to Chwistek: ‘What kind of reality is reflected in a picture broken up into unrelated fragments of biological vitality?’51 The question pointed exactly to Strzemiński and Kobro’s shared predicament in that year of 1934. Biologism and irrationalism seemed to them dangerous, and they reacted strongly against it. They disapproved deeply of the use Picasso had made of the meandering closed line in his curvilinear grisaille paintings of 1925 and 1926 (albeit Picasso was half-hearted about Surrealism). It was a step too far, they were convinced, if he was treating curvature as if it were a shorthand for ‘expression’ or ‘the instincts’. Strzemiński would complain in an issue of the journal Forma for 1936 that Surrealism had reduced man’s reality to ‘the pulsing of his blood and the spontaneous movement of his psycho-physiological images’. His words had the character of a warning. ‘The form most dearly loved of the Surrealists is the biological line’, he complains, ‘one that delineates a formless mass, an amoeba thrown up by the sea, a palpitating Galatea in the sun of a deserted shore … The rapport between Surrealism and reality is incomprehensible … a crisis of forces that rise up and collapse inert, the uncontrolled and irrational movement of thoughts, the pulse and voice of the blood.’ He mocks the Surrealists further by citing the passage in Mein Kampf in which Hitler had claimed that ‘wisdom is the enemy of action, [that] it is instinct and will that we must have’.52 Kobro’s own  anti-Surrealism was equally forthright. In her essay ‘Functionalism’, published in Forma in the same year, she offered a brilliant late endorsement 50

51

52

See Strzemiński, ‘Catalogue of the New Art Exhibition’, Vilnius, May 1923; Constructivism in Poland, p 68. My emphasis. The dialogue took place in December 1934 and was published as ‘A Dialogue between Chwistek and Strzemiński’, Forma, no 3, 1935; in Tre Pionerer, pp 50, 54. W. Strzemiński, ‘Aspects of Reality’, Forma, no 5, 1936; L’Espace Uniste, pp 176–7, 179, footnote p 180.

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of the principles of utility and efficiency in art, but on the principle that ‘every plastic form become at the same time a blueprint for the organization of the human psyche and its activities’. Without such a principle art would descend to being ‘a narcotic against life’s imperfections, a mere ornamentation that underlies the flowering of the biological line in Surrealism, with its emotivedreamlike experience supressing the constructive-planning approach’. As she had always been, Kobro remained adamant in her resistance to a fully subjective posture in art. ‘The entangled, freakish line in Surrealist art reflects only the vibrations of so-called “inspiration”’, she says mockingly; it finds its justification ‘only in the artist’s biology and physiology.’53

Fig 1.12  Władysław Strzemiński, Evicted (Deportation series), 1940, pencil, paper, 30 × 38 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak.

53

Kobro, ‘Functionalism’, Forma, no 4, January 1936, in Tre Pionerer For Polsk Avant-Garde, p 61. She includes in her critique the ‘floating apparitions and colour-filled mists’ of the Kapists (a PostImpressionist group including such artists as Józef Pankiewicz, Jan Cybis and Józef Czapski).

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This then was Unism’s vantage-point at a time of rising fascism in Western Europe combined with a complete territorialization of art in the country in which Strzemiński and Kobro both trained. Surrealism was the psychic condition of the individual at a time of economic and social decomposition, ‘a mirror in which contemporary man sees himself and his time in all its collapse and disintegration’ – so wrote Strzemiński.54 Biology without organicity, organicity without vegetable, animal or human nature: Surrealism for Kobro was degenerate, whereas true organicity ‘would defy all sorts of cynical disillusion, laissez-faire attitudes to life, vitalism, and so forth … all of which systematically discredit the progress of the human mind’.55 Events would prove too much for Unism. Poland was invaded in September 1939, and with devastating force. Kobro’s artistic career was curtailed by the need to care for their two children, born in the late 1930s, before wartime circumstances forced her to all but abandon her work. For his part, Strzemiński continued to use a fluid closed line in drawings of the later 1930s and the war period.56 In them, he tried to express a world disintegrating into shadows and ruins, peopled by hapless victims of a new and virulent war, displaced by the very instinctual forces that he and Kobro had so recently opposed. Amid the destruction of another war, it was suddenly unclear what – if any – version of ‘organicity’ in art could be sustained. It would be a question for other artists in the years and decades to come.

54 55 56

Strzemiński, ‘Aspects of Reality’, p 178. Kobro, ‘Functionalism’, p 61. See J. Kadnowska, ‘Drawings of Władisław Strzemiński – The Realism of Physiological Rhythm’, Polish Art Studies, no 12, 1991, pp 75–82.

2

Biomorphism

The appearance in modern art of the wandering line, of looping, irregular curvatures and undulating morphologies is a phenomenon of a particular kind. By the mid-1930s those tendencies were most definitely widespread, and it has never been clear how we should describe them. Katarzyna Kobro’s reaction to the ‘entangled, freakish line in Surrealist art’, or Władisław Strzemiński’s revulsion at the ‘formless masses’ in so much contemporary art, was on one level an expression of their preference for what Kobro herself referred to as the ‘constructive-planning’ approach to a modelling of the human psyche.1 Yet their willingness to call that morphology ‘biological’ in 1936 is symptomatic of something deeper. Recently, ‘biomorphism’ has been claimed to signify not an expression of the instincts but a kind of ‘middle way’ between geometric abstraction and Surrealism in a period in which strident differences were being contested between alternative philosophies of art. Biomorphism was ‘a hinge between abstraction and the organic’, says Guitemie Maldonado in a recent book, an ‘entre-deux’ whose place in art history comes from its being an oscillation between poles, from ‘allowing one to think … in terms of a tension between different principles in search of equilibrium’.2 The question raised, of course, is whether this is principally a claim about the management of art or whether it reflects how particular artists thought and worked. The language of biological form occurs only intermittently in artists’ statements of the time. How are we to handle this tension, between the self-consciousness

1

2

See K. Kobro, ‘Functionalism’, Forma, no 4, January 1936, and W. Strzemiński, ‘Aspects of Reality’, Forma, no 5, 1936; see footnote 52 to Chapter 1, above. G. Maldonado, Le cercle et l’amibe: Le biomorphisme dans l’art des années 1930, CTHS/INHA, Paris, 2006, pp 140, 151.

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of the artist with his or her own proclivities in the studio and the curatorial wish to generalize across the whole? What can confidently be said is that roundness, rotundity, first appeared in modern art without benefit of an ideology or a name. Perhaps we owe the new enthusiasm for casual, melting forms to two Spanish artists, Miró and Picasso, in their work of the early to mid-1920s. The Catalan painter Joan Miró found the ‘biomorphic’ impulses for which he later became celebrated as early as 1924 and 1925, during a time when he was shuttling to-and-fro between Montroig, near Barcelona, and his Paris studio in the rue Blomet, Montparnasse. Talk of ‘automatic writing’ was in the air, and many of Miró’s new friends were from André Breton’s circle, in which conversation centred around how form could emerge differently when conscious controls were put aside. Three months before the publication of the First Manifesto of Surrealism in November 1924, Miró wrote to Michel Leiris, a writer friendly with André Masson, whose studio was in the same building, referring to the method of evolving a painting that seemed to follow where the idea of automatic writing led. ‘You told me how you started with a word and watched to see where it would take you’, Miró says to Leiris; whereas ‘I start from some form in a piece of wood’ and develop a line or shape from there, ‘parallel to what writers can obtain by starting with an arbitrary sound, for instance the “rrr” from the song of a cricket.’ Miró is excited by what his version of automatism is now suggesting. ‘I have noticed the extremely disturbing quality of the dissociated drawings I sometimes do  – meant for canvases I am preparing and on which I jot down a number of remarks: names of colours or simply the monosyllable yes when I feel that an idea should be carried out.’ In other drawings, ‘of objects that fly around on a flat surface, I write isolated letters’.3 He is explaining to Leiris that the marks and wavy lines that populate his notebooks of the period belong to the surface they are found in, but also to the moment in which they were made. His notebook pages were already pictorial, he seemed to say, and the words that were cropping up in them were becoming pictorial too. They do indeed contain curvatures looking both open and closed. Some wander like the path of an insect. Others evoke the doublecurves of a woman’s body. Others are inchoate, or lack any scale at all. We know that Miró then translated many of them meticulously into larger paintings, taking care to universalize the letter-forms so as not to let them seem specifically 3

J. Miró, Letter to Michel Leiris, 10 August 1924; in M. Rowell (ed), Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, DaCapo Press, New York, 1992, p 86.

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his, at the same time deleting from the painted ground any sense of the where, the when, or the by-whom of the resulting picture-scheme. ‘I combined reality and mystery in a space that had been set free’, he said in a later interview with Denys Chevalier; ‘I escaped into the absolute of nature … the magnetic appeal of the void … I became interested in the void, in perfect emptiness … my linear gestures on top were signs of my dream progression.’4 At the same time, the viewer must accept that Miró’s paintings of those years contain no ornithology or entomology, no human or marine biology. The flat intertwining cursive forms that shortly followed, in his work of the later 1920s and the 1930s, seem to exist in a region beyond obvious categories, which the mind can barely recognize and language never adequately describe. In retrospect it seems no accident that Miró’s years in the rue Blomet, before he moved to a rue Tourlaque studio in Montmartre and got to know Hans Arp, Max

Fig 2.1  Joan Miró, sketchbook double-page showing studies for paintings, each page 27.3 × 19.6 cm, pencil and blue ink respectively, c. 1925, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, nos 698 and 699. The paintings in question are (left) Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse, c.1927, oil and feathers on canvas, 83.5 × 102 cm, private collection; (right) Oh! Un de ces messieurs qui fait tout ça, c.1925, oil on canvas, 129.8 × 94.9 cm. Galerie Maeght, Paris. 4

D. Chevalier, ‘Miró’, Aujourd’hui: Art et Architecture, November 1962; Rowell, Joan Miró: Selected Writings and Interviews, p 264.

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Ernst, René Magritte and the dealer Camille Goemans, are those in which he was closest in morphological invention to Picasso. In 1924 and 1925 his compatriot was looking for a way out of Cubism, and in that enterprise lie some of the greatest works of a curvilinear manner at least a decade before the popularity of the genre. Those works of Picasso are – roughly – still-life paintings. The German critic Carl Einstein referred to a group of later paintings by the artist as situated in an ‘audelà’ of form – in a formal ‘beyond’ that we cannot and should not try to name.5 The sense of a slow-moving yet fertile life inside them is certainly unmistakeable, and their morphological ambiguity would take Picasso far. In the Guggenheim Museum’s Mandolin and Guitar of 1924, for instance, one cannot – as the Picasso scholar Elizabeth Cowling explains – escape the impression of a melting, humanoid morphology capable of sustaining many different projections, though perhaps not all of them simultaneously (Plate 4a). She lists no less than six readings of variously reclining, plasmoid volumes, sexual revealings, proximities and co-minglings that can be seen in the painting’s crowded scene; made more startling still if imaged on a theatre stage, beneath a proscenium arch or against a backcloth of faux-daylight. Buttocks, breasts, upright penises, testicles, hair – and in reading seven a massive grimacing face – all suggest themselves to the astonished and largely wordless gaze.6 Or we can step beyond those erotic projections and notice some larger, unspecific forms that surround and encompass the more suggestive ones: a cursive parsing between, across and among the rounded forms of the painting taken as a compositional whole. It is here above all that the painting’s morphological invention lies: the dollop of chocolate brown and near-black that may be the guitar; the flat red volume surmounting the mandolin, or the table-cloth sags and folds that animate and embellish the whole. In the darker Musical Instruments on a Table, now in the Reina Sofίa, Madrid and also of 1924, a whole taxonomy of spoon/egg forms appear, somehow substantial despite their radical and lively indefinition. And this painting contains the ghostly presence of a female luxuria figure, materializing as the faint outline of a head and upper torso that then completes itself with legs coinciding with the table’s own. It seems to tell us that musical instruments are really decoys for bodyparts; while a table is a bed (Plate 4b). In this and other performances, such as in the Metropolitan Museum’s Mandolin, Compotier and Cake, one finds a body-anvil, as I shall call it, a double exuberance of 5 6

C. Einstein, ‘Pablo Picasso: A Few Paintings from 1928’, Documents, 1, no 1, 1929. E. Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning, Phaidon, London, 2002, pp 460–2.

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breasts-and-thigh shapes to which the table-top compotier roughly corresponds – it contains fruit, after all, as the painting’s provocative but polite disguise.7 We can notice too how Musical Instruments on a Table gives new deployment to the very phenomenon of line: not the carefully measured line, but the line incised or scratched into the surface with the wrong end of the brush, defining forms and volumes that were not there when the painted areas were being laid, but now seem inseparable from the whole. Were they in Picasso’s mind when those areas were being painted in? ‘I do not seek’, the artist famously said, ‘I find.’ Like the diverse object and body-shapes they support, those incised lines are nothing if not energy-vectors, done with a one-shot finality, a performance of graphic spontaneity that unquestionably enlivens the whole. It is in another of this group of Picasso’s still-lifes that such a description begins to falter and degrade. The Pompidou Centre’s 1925 Still-Life is both literally and semantically dark (Plate 5a). The picture’s once familiar room-space is now deserted and dark. Moonlight is coming in through a window and creating puddles of off-white illumination in the cold interior. The usual accoutrements of compotier, table top, vase and dish seem to be decaying as we look at them. Their forms are melting into each other, swelling a little, competing for space in an obscure struggle for lebensraum in some dark and forbidding place. Are we sure it is a kitchen at night? The fruit and drink have been put away, and something nightmarish seems to have begun. At any rate, the painting has found a morphology in which none of the terms of ordinary domesticity apply. * Those paintings have little overtly to do with biology. Yet the temptation to apply biological categories, whether from entomology or the invertebrate lifesciences, has often seemed irresistible. We know the 1920s to have been a time of intense discussion among theoretical biologists as to the distinctions between ‘life’ as a mechanism, ‘life’ as an organism, ‘life’ as an epiphenomenon of complex structure, ‘life’ as heritability, and so on. The popular illustrated magazines of the day increasingly carried microscope photographs showing life in its most basic constituency. Necessarily, we do not always know how much of this rubbed off on the actual practice of art.8 We know that Picasso was fascinated by 7 8

The same construction appears in Still Life with a Cake, 1924, Gellman Collection, Mexico City. For a recent selection of case-studies, see O. Botar and I. Wünsche (eds), Biocentrism and Modernism, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011; and for sculpture in Britain alone, E. Juler, Grown but Not Made: British Modernist Sculpture and the New Biology, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2015.

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cephalopods; while Miró’s imaginative world seems to have been one of bare lifeforms apprehended in the medium of the dream. More generally, we can say that continental artists affiliated with Surrealism after 1924 showed a pronounced affinity for water, both shallow and deep, and because of water, fish – or more properly, aquatic life. Here was a realm of constant fascination for Surrealists in their exploration of repellent – at any rate unfamiliar – living form: from the deep-water fantasies summoned up by Yves Tanguy to Alberto Giacometti’s fluid creatural forms of 1928–32 to the speculations on basic biological nature in virtually all of Kandinsky’s newest work. These artists exemplify especially a preference – at times resembling a fashion – for natural morphologies seemingly at odds with the rational dimensions of city existence. Giacometti had joined the Surrealist circle with a group of sculptures incorporating insectoid, crawling forms that belonged precisely to a mysterious deep-water world. ‘Mobile and mute’ were the terms that governed this unfriendly environment, in which creatures come and go, transmute, rise, fascinate, squirm and disappear.9 Kandinsky’s paintings of the 1930s would respond equally to a version of the biological theme. His travel in this territory was complicated – as was Paul Klee’s – by his attempts during his Bauhaus days to adhere to a basically Romantic view of nature but do so scientifically, as if in pursuit of nature’s inherent morphological systems and laws. ‘The science of art is in the ascendant’, we hear Kandinsky saying – slightly absurdly – in an article of 1926 on the wild dance-postures of Gret Palucca. ‘We are born under its sign.’10 To make his point he had produced line-diagrams reducing photographs of Palucca’s exuberant movements to a series of circular arcs and straight lines, in defiance of the titles she herself gave to her dance-pieces, such as ‘Sudden Outbreak’, ‘Broadly Swinging’ and ‘Dying Away’. When in the same year Kandinsky published his long treatise Point and Line to Plane in the series of Bauhausbücher edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, we find him positing a taxonomy of linear bends, ascents, descents, pressures and speeds marked diagrammatically and systematized according to his understanding of the energies and tensions visible within them.11 In practice, it seems that few artists made much use of Kandinsky’s ‘science of art’, either then or later. The  9 10

11

A. Giacometti, ‘Objets Mobiles et Muets’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, 3, 1931, pp 18–19. The words and photos are in W. Kandinsky, ‘Dance Curves: The Dances of Palucca’, Das Kunstblatt, 1926; in translation in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 2, Faber and Faber, London, 1982, pp 520–3. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (1926), in K. Lindsay and P. Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, pp 527–699.

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Fig 2.2  Alberto Giacometti, from ‘Objets Mobiles et Muets [Mobile and Mute Objects]’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, 3, 1931, p 18. ‘All things … near, far away, those that are past and others, near to, that move, and my female friends - they change (I pass close to, they are far away), others approach, come up, go down, some ducks on the water, here and there, in space, rising, falling I am sleeping here, the flowers on the wall-paper, water in the dripping tap, patterns on the curtain, my trousers on a chair, someone speaking in a room further away ...’

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Fig 2.3  Diagrams of complex surfaces: (a) the zig-zag, (b) the curve, from Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, 1926.

world had to await his virtuosic turn to irregular rounded form in the paintings he achieved in Paris after his arrival there in early 1934. The circumstances were exceptional. With the closure of the Berlin Bauhaus in April 1933 and the Faculty dissolved, the Nazis in Germany were rampaging. Hitler was Chancellor. Jews were being persecuted. As Russians in Berlin, Kandinsky and his much younger wife Nina were already displaced, and moving to Paris at the end of that year displaced them once more. Nina recalls in her memoirs that they considered Switzerland, Italy and the USA before deciding to move to Paris for ‘only a year, to begin with, and then return to Germany’, despite the obvious signs of reaction in that country.12 In Paris, Kandinsky was already a grand peintre d’aujourd’hui – as Will Grohmann’s monograph of 1931 had called him – and his exhibitions there in 1929 and 1930 had been wellenough received.13 By the same token he was no longer an enfant terrible, and the prices being fetched for his work were somewhat depressed. The more remarkable, then, that his painting should now enter a new and highly fertile stage, suddenly energized by a renunciation of straight-edged forms and a turn towards a broadly ‘biological’ lexicon, taken both from the

12

13

As late as 1935 Kandinsky was still urging his nephew Alexandre Kojève to plead his and Nina’s case with the German authorities. See C. Derouet, ‘Kandinsky in Paris: 1934–1944’, in Kandinsky in Paris: 1934–1944, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1985, p 20 and n 30. For Nina Kandinsky’s testimony, see her Kandinsky et Moi, Flammarion, Paris, 1976, p 174. W. Grohmann, Kandinsky, in the series Les Grands Peintres d’Aujourd’hui, Editions Cahiers d’Art, 1931. The exhibitions were Wassily Kandinsky, Galerie Zak, January 1929, and Kandinsky, Galerie de France, March 1930. Kandinsky also exhibited with the Cercle et Carré group show, Galerie 23, spring 1930.

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work of other artists and from scientific books and magazines containing images of embryological and protoplasmic morphologies. Already in his last years at the Bauhaus he had been keeping an eye on Salvador Dalí’s new paintings of collapsing, organic forms, for instance his Bather paintings of 1928 that were published in magazines such as Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution and Documents. Now in Paris, Kandinsky was quick to visit the studio of Hans Arp, whom he had known from his days in Munich in 1912 and who no doubt showed him his new Concretions sculptures, one of which had just been published by Zervos in Cahiers d’Art.14 Dalí’s new work, and Arp’s, presented soft, invertebrate volumes seemingly in defiance of structural logic, yet defined by clear dermic outlines and a crisp, even if unfamiliar identity of their own. And Yves Tanguy had recently joined the fun. His Poids et Couleurs [Weights and Colours] drawings, published in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution in late 1931 above narrative captions, played a game with the very idea of standing or resting zoological forms imagined explicitly as works of sculptural art. Kandinsky himself now turned to the encyclopaedia Die Kultur der Gegenwart [The Culture of Today], especially its ‘Morphologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte’ [Morphology and Evolution] section on zoology and biology that contained diagrams of embryos, fungi, larvae, hydra, echinoderms and so forth. He looked again at Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, and took notice of the magazine Die Koralle with its microscopy photographs of plankton and other deep-sea forms. The question of course is why. To say that his new paintings from 1934 are full of zoological elements is to see the individual forms as nematodes, starfish and medusoids literally, as if the viewer is in the deep sea or outer space, or in a region where the miniscule and the massive mingle and meet. In fact, the best of Kandinsky’s new paintings exploit this new repertoire in their own way. Often, they capture uncertainty and change by positioning unpredictable and unpredicted incidents in relation to an almost-stable grid. In them, fish or fishlike forms appear as extra-terrestrial life of unknown and unknowable identity, as harbingers of movement and change. Significantly, his new paintings begin from very precise compositional sketches done in ink or pencil on modest-sized pieces of paper before being squared up for enlargement – a technique that ensured that a sense of totality predominated over individual squirming forms. In Chacun Pour Soi of March 1934, published almost as soon as it was painted (in the London journal Axis for 1935) we see nine different amniotic sacs fructifying individually 14

In J. Brzękowski, ‘Exposition en Galerie des Cahiers d’Art’, Cahiers d’Art, nos 5–8, 1934.

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Fig 2.4  (See facing page.) Yves Tanguy, ‘Poids et Couleurs [Weights and Colours]’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, no 3, 1931, p 27. ‘The object above, the size of a hand and appearing as if it had been moulded by one, is in pink plush. The five terminations underneath, which withdraw into the object, are in transparent celluloid and made of pearl. The four holes in the object’s body allow the four fingers of the hand to pass through. In the ensemble above, the object at left is made of plaster, painted zinzolin, with the nail rose-coloured. It is weighted at the base by a ball of lead which permits oscillations and always returns the object to the same position. The very small object in the middle, full of mercury, is covered with bright red plaited straw so as to appear extremely light. The large object at right is in cotton, moulded in pale green, the nails in celluloid pink. The last object on the right is in plaster covered with black ink, with a rose nail. The object at left is in soft-wax imitation flesh. The appendage on top is loose-fitting and in a browner colour. The three rounded central forms are in hard material, in matte white. The object at right is in sky-blue chalk. On the top, some hairs. This object can be used to write on a blackboard. It will be worn down at the base so that it runs out, leaving only the tuft of hair on top.’

yet uniformly in a totalizing fluid field. It was accompanied by a short article titled ‘Line and Fish’, in which the artist explained that, to him, lines and fish are both ‘living beings with latent forces peculiar to themselves’. Each has a ‘look’, he says, whose latency springs to life, becomes dynamic, in the right compositional environment (the line) or in water (the fish). Arrangements of lines and fishy things both made for composition, and composition – here he resorts to a basic formula of organicism  – is ‘the organised sum of the interior functions (expressions) of every part of the work’.15 Division-Unity of October 1934 presents myriad creaturelike forms, most of them aquatic or embryological, taking on movement and personality within a vibrating yet loosely structured whole. In Capricious Forms of July 1937 we see a nearly exact translation of the diagrams of Die Kultur der Gegenwart into the atmospherics of the new art (Plate 5b). The Parisian paintings remain magnificent examples of what the American artist Frank Stella later called ‘the catching of everyday associations’ not in but as ‘fluid structure’ in a manner that was securely non-illusionistic. The new paintings ‘leave behind the “outer skin” of nature’, as Kandinsky himself put it in an interview at the time – ‘but not its laws’.16 15 16

W. Kandinsky, ‘Line and Fish’, Axis, no 2, April 1935, p 6. F. Stella, Working Space, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986, p 98; and ‘Complexité simple; Ambiguïté’, in Kandinsky: Album de l’Exposition, Paris, 1984; Kandinsky, Interview with the collector and art dealer Karl Nierendorf, 1937, published eventually in Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 2, p 807.

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By this date, a sense of wide interest in biology could be also spotted in the Dimensionisme Manifesto that Kandinsky signed alongside Enrico Prampolini, Marcel Duchamp, Camille Bryen and Hans Arp – among others – under the guidance of the document’s impresario, the Hungarian poet Charles Sirató in 1936. The Dimensionisme Manifesto abounded in statements favouring process and perpetual change, and promoted ‘the absolute need for evolution [that] compels the avant-garde to walk towards the unknown, leaving dead shapes and expired essences as the prey of dilletantes’. The young artist Camille Bryen, it states, wishes to invent a poem like ‘a living animal from an unknown kingdom’. Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs underscore the theme of unending mobility. Sirató and Bryen together concluded: ‘Dimensionisme’s deep meaning is Biological Revolution.’17

Fig 2.5  Median section of an amphibian embryo. From Die Kultur der Gegenwart: Zellern und Gewebelehre, Morphologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte, part II: Zoologische Teil, 1913, p 355.

*

17

C. Sirató, Dimensionisme Manifesto, in the version printed in Katarzyrna Kobro 1898–1951, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 1999, pp 166–7. Other signatories were Picabia, Kotchar, Kann, Nissim, Fernandez, Albert-Biro, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Nicholson, Calder, Huidobro, Kakabadze, Kobro, Miró, Moholy-Nagy, Pedro, Domela, Negri, Prinner, Rathsman and Taeuber-Arp. For a recent analysis, see V.V. Maloy (ed), Dimensionism: Modern Art in the Age of Einstein, MIT Press in association with the Mead Art Museum, Amhurst College, 2018.

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Paris in the mid-1930s was not the only centre in which an urge to find biological analogues for the visual arts was in play. It seems the English critic Geoffrey Grigson was the first to use the term ‘biomorphism’ in print, in January 1935, in the first issue of the London journal Axis. Grigson’s deployment was carefully presented as a compromise. What he called ‘biomorphic abstractions’ are ‘the beginning’, he suggested, ‘of the next central phase in the progress of art’. Recent work by Picasso, Brancusi, Klee, Miró, Jean Hélion, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore and certain others in England at the time are situated, ‘between Mondrian and Dalí, between idea and emotion, between matter and mind, matter and life’. A further and different motivation was to draw a decisive contrast with ‘geometric abstraction’, a quality that was leading, in Grigson’s words, ‘to the inevitable death’ of art.18 To be sure, London in the late 1920s and early 1930s was a predominantly literary culture, in which ‘modern’ art was permitted only a grudging and minor place. Terms such as Cubism, abstraction and Surrealism were still unfamiliar there, and it took a younger critic to find points of connection between Britain and a modern visual culture still largely identified with Paris. Grigson, born and raised in Cornwall and fascinated from an early age by nature and naturalism, heard Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein lecture while a student at Oxford in the late 1920s (‘they were impressive … though more for their persons and their presences’) and in the wake of a growing admiration for writers such as Louis MacNeice and W.H. Auden came to know the work of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and John Piper.19 When the journal Axis was launched in 1935 as a discussion forum for ‘abstract’ art, Grigson was quick to contribute, though it was the writings of Herbert Read, the most powerful critical voice in England at the time, that helped set the tone of his reviews. Both critics understood that ‘abstract’ art was still unpalatable to the general viewer in England. Read, in his widely read Art Now of 1933, reverts to a passage in Plato’s Philebus where Socrates, in conversation with Protarchus, says: By beauty of shapes I do not … mean what most people would expect, such as that of living creatures or pictures, but … straight lines and curves and the surfaces or solid forms produced out of these by lathes and rulers and squares … For these things are not beautiful relatively, like other things, but naturally and absolutely; and arouse their proper pleasures, in no way depending on the itch of desire.20 18

19 20

G. Grigson, ‘Comment on England’, Axis, no 1, January 1935, p 8. Emphases added. For some remoter uses of the term in the life-sciences, see J. Mundy, ‘The Naming of Biomorphism’, in O. Botar and I. Wünsche (eds), Biocentrism and Modernism, pp 61–75. G. Grigson, The Crest on the Silver: An Autobiography, The Cresset Press, London, 1950, p 113. H. Read, Art Now, Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1933, pp 101–2; from Plato, Philebus, paragraph 51 B in the version given in E.R. Carritt, Philosophies of Beauty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1931, slightly adapted here, pp 29–30.

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At the other pole to ‘abstraction’, says Read, lies ‘symbolic’ art, by which he means Surrealism. Since the distance between the two poles can seem unsettling, what must be hoped for is that the artist must find access ‘to that delicate balance which man, if he is to remain vital, must always maintain between intellect and intuition, between knowledge and faith, between individuality and discipline’.21 Intellect tempered by intuition, individuality by discipline: it is a supremely Anglo-Saxon scheme, and Grigson in his early writings followed much of what Read had already said. He is coruscating, for instance, about what he called ‘purified’ abstraction, of which the main culprit was inevitably Mondrian. Mondrian was ‘a severe and tedious moralist’, says Grigson, ‘a Cubist shaved thin’, a ‘puritan’ who has ‘rolled pictures up like Holland and cut them up with insubstantial canals’. The abstract art of Mondrian, Neo-Plasticism, Purism and De Stijl ‘replaces life with mechanism’; it amounts to ‘only ideal flat and patterned surfaces’; it is ‘art of a distracted world … art of an ideal death’. Even worse, Mondrian is ‘a social product’ – along with Theo van Doesburg, Georges Vantongerloo and César Domela – whose shared puritanism stands at the opposite pole to Surrealism’s ‘impure’ disposition. What must come, says Grigson in an appeal that still echoes Read, ‘is a new synthesis of the two ways, the idealist way and the way of Surrealism, a resynthesizing of intellect with emotion, of form with matter, of geometric with organic’. In a more reflective statement he says that ‘the organisation of forms which thoroughly moves us, moves us first through an affective centre of rhythm and symmetry, not by an appeal to reason but by a correction of our internal disharmony’. And he offers a new description. The great artists of our day ‘have bodied out’ – it is a term we shall remember – ‘the spiritual and affective centre in a visual language which they know will be understood’.22 This ‘bodying out’ of form is an ancient impulse, Grigson thinks; it is the technique of contemporary artists who recapitulate the terms of Mesolithic cultures in which a compromise is reached between abstract markings without functions, at the one extreme, and openly figural depictions at the other, creating ‘degraded’ or ‘half-abstract’ forms in neither category and in both. Grigson had recently gleaned from the drawings in a 1926 book by the anthropologist Miles Burkitt how certain Azilian river pebbles, from the recently excavated Grotte d’Azil, south of Toulouse, carry markings that seem to ‘body out’ some more formal design. He also seems to have known Hugo Obermaier’s Fossil Man in Spain of 1924, in 21 22

Read, Art Now, p 118. G. Grigson, ‘Painting and Sculpture Today’, in Grigson (ed), The Arts Today, John Lane the Bodley Head, London, 1935, pp 84, 76, 79, 79. Emphases added.

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which one group of Mesolithic pebbles is described as marked ‘with symbolic, biomorphic signs; that is to say, with totem pictures’.23 The Azilian pebbles too, Grigson says in reference to Burkitt’s book, ‘are “biomorphic”, which is no bad term for the paintings of Miró, Hélion, Erni and others to distinguish them from the modern geometric abstractions and from rigid Surrealism’. Miró’s recent visual language also well exemplifies the nascent organicism of the ancient wall paintings of northern Spain and Pyrenean France. In all such ancient productions, Grigson concludes in a comment that still has no obvious relation to modern biology, ‘an organic-geometric tension is very well obtained’. The young contemporaries ‘seem to be going back to figured forms through a new semi-abstraction’.24 We see here Grigson attempting to find the mots justes for the modern English artists (it is always English rather than British) that came within his view. The achievement of this ‘bodying out’ was not given to many, he believed. Yet we may say that his assessment of the ‘hesitancy [and] error’ widespread among English modernists is without equal in the rhetoric of his day. Edward Wadsworth is ‘neither biomorphic nor geometric’, he says in his first article in Axis, ‘[only]

Fig 2.6  Diagram of Azilian painted pebbles, from M. Burkitt, Our Early Ancestors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1926, np. 23

24

M. Burkitt, Our Early Ancestors: An Introductory Study of Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Europe and Adjacent Regions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1926; and H. Obermaier, Fossil Man in Spain, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1924, p 331. Grigson, ‘Painting and Sculpture Today’, pp 81, 81, 80.

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a respectable simplifying and concentrating of a cold curtailed fancy’. John Piper’s reliefs make an attempt at biomorphic abstraction but are ‘irresolute here and there in form’. Ben Nicholson’s new reliefs are ‘floating and disinfected’. By contrast, Henry Moore is ‘the one English sculptor of large, imaginative power, a power of which he is almost master’. He is ‘the biomorphist producing viable work’, says Grigson, ‘with all the technique he requires’ – in works such as the Sculpture of 1934 (now known as Two Forms), carved from ironstone, the smaller Two Forms in pynkado wood, also of 1934, and probably some of the early Reclining Figure sculptures that Grigson had read about or seen (Plate 6a).25 Yet the note of hesitancy in Grigson’s voice should not be missed. For though ‘viable’ is always for him a term of commendation, he has noticed other characteristics of Moore’s work that were seldom mentioned at the time and have been missing from the more anodyne readings of Moore ever since. In comparison with the poet W.H. Auden, whose skill is that of mastering his own fantasies ‘without repressing them’, Moore’s control of his fantasies is far less thorough. ‘Moore does not know himself so well and is not separate from himself enough … to make jokes in wood as Auden does, when he wants to, in words.’ Further, ‘Moore gives up the fullness and strength and solid grace of ordered stone which make his megalithic humans or semi-abstracted humans (the two figures in ironstone), for a big squareness … or broadness or brutality, positive and complete … like an all-in wrestler.’ Too many of Moore’s shapes of life, ‘much more than can be liked, are vegetative and static, or at least slow-moving rather than energetic images of human life or energetic images of all life in common’.26 ‘Big squareness’, ‘all-in wrestler’, ‘broadness or brutality’ – the phrases come up repeatedly in Grigson’s other commentaries on Moore. ‘Stone-life’ is the term he uses in the Arts Today anthology for the energy that he sees emerging in Moore’s ‘slow and solid block’. It is a qualified endorsement, at best. We find him bemoaning Moore’s attraction to ‘pin-headed giantesses’ – it is the phrase that Wyndham Lewis had used for certain of Picasso’s figures – as well as finding in Moore the same ‘vegetative imbecility’ that Lewis claimed to find in Picasso’s recent bathers and reclining nudes.27 Those features ‘belittle the human’, ‘puff out 25 26 27

Grigson, ‘Comment on England’, Axis, no 1, January 1935, p 10. Grigson, ‘Henry Moore and Ourselves’, Axis, no 3, July 1935, p 10. Grigson, ‘Painting and Sculpture Today’, pp 101, 102, 102. The phrases of Lewis contra Picasso are from Men Without Art, 1934, p 289. It should be recorded that Grigson held Lewis in high regard, and despite the latter’s book on Hitler of 1931. Grigson’s adulation allows him to say that Lewis ‘was not deceived by fascism’ (p 98); and to reflect later that ‘this formidable man was pure stimulus to anyone in his twenties meeting him and getting to know him … Here in a London of selling I knew a man not for sale, combative, fearless and intelligent, but combative in the support of a consistent notion of life and art’; Grigson, The Crest on the Silver: An Autobiography, The Cresset Press, London, 1950, p 165.

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Fig 2.7  Illustration accompanying G. Grigson’s article ‘Comment on England’, Axis, no 1, 1935, p 10, showing Edward Wadsworth, Composition, 1932 and John Piper, Construction, 1934.

the stone’, ‘encourage the organic to become almost the tumescent’. Grigson has spotted that ‘life’, in Moore’s inventions of the period, come in the form of animal bones, prehistory, stone itself, and with women recumbent or reclining – those odd phrases – as if too heavy or exhausted to rise. Later, Grigson tried again to specify the sense in which some of Moore’s carvings have vitality even if they could not be said to be very much alive. His carvings ‘by no means always reach the grandeur of life’. Moore humanizes ‘rock or wood or bone or geological shape’ if only to ensure that the life he carves ‘has only the virtue sometimes of not being dead’. It is as if the price to be paid for real sculptural vitality is that life is taken back to its most elemental beginnings – to ‘bare life’, to use Giorgio Agamben’s

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term – a risky compromise, says Grigson finally, that ‘produces some of the most monumental, but also at times some of the least moving of Moore’s work’.28 A second reason for concern about the closeness of Moore’s forms to those that are already dead lies in their relation – or lack of it – to lived or living experience. As Grigson clearly saw, the boundary between the ‘rock or wood or bone’ of Moore’s work and his sculpture’s capacity to redeem itself somehow in the dimension of bare life was by no means a simple one. He lamented later that ‘when I look at [Moore’s] carvings I sometimes have to reflect that so much of our visual experience of the anatomical details and microscopical forms of life comes to us, not direct, but through the biologist’, in contrast to the primitive carvers whose ‘intensely vital’ work comes from a direct knowledge of animals  – ‘alert, walking, leaping and at rest’.29 Grigson may have had in mind images of the kind published in W. Watson-Baker’s World Beneath the Microscope of 1935, in which magnified images of sponge spicules and other organisms were directly associated with the inventions of so-called abstract art.30 He must have been aware too of the proliferation of morphological studies in circulation in the period of Moore’s new work. We have it on good authority that a book of 1917 by the biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, ‘passed rapidly from hand to hand in the Hampstead, London studios of the day’ and was looked at – if not read – for its richly illustrated chapters on spicules, radiolaria and the like, as well as on relations of transformation among related natural forms, principally osteological and skeletal structures as well as certain fish.31 Thompson was an empiricist and a mechanist, in the sense of insisting that Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry together provided the necessary conditions – ‘conditions sine qua non’, as he put it – of both form and material change. ‘And it is not only shape, but the whole living body’, says Thompson at one point, ‘one integral and indivisible whole …

28

29

30

31

G. Grigson, Henry Moore, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1944, pp 7–8, 10, 11, 10, 11. For Agamben, see footnote 56 below. Grigson, Henry Moore, 1944, p 7. He would soon be a journalist on the London desk of Yorkshire Post, followed by a spell with the right-wing populist paper Morning Post. ‘I was a socialist shifting from Toryism to dogmatic Toryism’, he said of himself during those years. He recounts a conversation with the bluff Yorkshireman J.B. Priestley on the subject of ‘modern’ art. ‘Henry Moore? He’s lumpy’, Priestley said. ‘I don’t know why all this modern stuff needs to be lumpy. What’s there so attractive about eggy things? The egg isn’t such an attractive shape. As for Herbert Read – I hope he isn’t a friend of yours – he is a nitwit. You could always take him in. He hasn’t what we call gumption in Yorkshire’; Grigson, The Crest on the Silver, p 164. See the introduction by W. Gaunt to W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope, The Studio, London and New York, 1935, pp 7–9. C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work, Theory, Impact, Royal Academy of Art, London, 2008, pp 4–7.

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Fig 2.8  Microphotograph from W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope, The Studio Ltd, London, 1935, np.

Fig 2.9  Human scapulae with transformational grids (a) Caucasian, (b) Negro, (c) North American Indian from the Kentucky Mountains, D’Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917), revised edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1942, p 318; based on Y. Dwight, ‘The Significance of Bone Architecture’, Memoranda of the Boston Society for Natural History, 4, 1886, p 1.

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the integral solidarity of the organism’, that such geometrical transformations can describe, for the time being in two dimensions but eventually (he adds ambitiously) in three.32 It is not that Thompson’s book was accepted by the biological fraternity. It was not. Julian Huxley admired it for its work on multiplicative growth in horns and shells and the functioning of the logarithmic spiral, but described Thompson’s typical transformation diagram as ‘of little use for detailed analysis, on the grounds that it neglects the fundamental attribute of differential growth, namely changes in relative proportion, part against part, in relation to absolute size’. Thompson’s method is ‘static instead of dynamic’, Huxley complained, ‘and substitutes the short-cut of a geometrical solution for the more complex realties underlying biological transformations’.33 As for the artistic community, the suggestion that something of the book’s spirit rubbed off on Piper, Arthur Jackson, Margaret Holding, Wadsworth, Barbara Hepworth and Moore – notably in his Transformation Drawings after 1932 – is probably overstated. Moore’s first concern in those drawings was to get holes into sculpture – to sculpt the empty space first and let the form come out as it may. Others of his drawings address the look of a bone when its disposition changes relative to the sculptor’s angle of sight, is shifted on the table in front of him, is tilted, or has the angle of lighting changed. The word ‘transformation’ that appears in the titles of some drawings refers to visual correspondences, holes included, between bone, much magnified, and the human form.34 On the other hand the study of natural morphology, conducted not in a Romantic spirit but from within an analytical frame, appealed to Naum Gabo, himself a visitor to London in those years after some unproductive years in Berlin. Gabo’s relationship to On Growth and Form can be detected straightforwardly in works like Construction in Space: Crystal of 1936–37, with its curvatures directly mimicking those of mathematically ideal growth – achieved in three dimensions thanks to the newly discovered flexible plastic (Perspex) from which its shapes are cut and then mutually combined. Gabo also paid close attention to Theodore Cook’s The Curves of Life, a compendium of 1914 that purported to show how plants, shells, horns, bones, anatomical structures 32

33 34

D’A.W. Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917, in the abridged edition (ed. J.T. Bonner), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1961, 2014, p 323. J. Huxley, Problems of Relative Growth, The Dial Press, New York, 1932, p 106. I have written of Thompson’s unwitting appeal to the Surrealist imagination in ‘D’Arcy Thompson’s Surrealism’, in E. Levey and C. Terranova (eds), D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Generative Influences in Art, Design and Architecture: From Forces to Forms, Bloomsbury, [forthcoming].

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Fig 2.10  Henry Moore, Ideas for Sculpture: Transformation of Bones, 1932, pencil on cream lightweight wove, 17.9 × 11.2 cm. AG32.68r/HMF 957. Reproduced by kind permission of the Henry Moore Foundation. Photo: Sarah Mercer.

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Fig 2.11  Naum Gabo, Construction in Space (The Crystal), c.1937, rhodoid, 48.9 × 68.0 × 45.1 cm. Gift of Mrs Murray S. Danworth. Courtesy of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI.

and eventually spiral staircases – anything that twists or coils – approximate in one way or another to the Fibonacci numbers and hence to the ‘organic’ logarithmic spiral with its celebrated ratio φ, or ½ (√5-1).35 This is not the digression it might seem. For one thing, morphology based simply on the logarithmic spiral is concerned with largely completed shapes, largely static ones, simplified and then rendered diagrammatically in two dimensions; less frequently with stages of growth and change. Thompson’s laboratory subjects had also been non-living entities such as shells, horns, tusks and teeth, together with skulls or other bones such as the pelvis, the shoulder-girdle and the femur, harvested from animals that were no longer alive. He had measured crustacea only on condition that they were no longer 35

T. Cook, The Curves of Life: An Account of Spiral Formations and their Applications to Growth in Nature, Science and to Art, H. Holt, New York and Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1914. Meanwhile, the Canadian Jay Hambidge’s The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, published in 1919, found ‘dynamic’ quantitative ratios in the measurements of shells, plants and the dimensions of the human body that challenged the static symmetries of the kind found, for instance, in pre-classical Greek art: these dynamic ratios too were said to derive from the Fibonacci numbers translated into so-called root rectangles, or ‘whirling rectangles’ as Hambidge elsewhere calls them, that were themselves ‘suggestive of life and movement’ (pp 5, xv, xvi). The spread of ideas about mathematical patterning based on the Fibonacci series is discussed further in my After Constructivism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2014, pp 63–93.

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inhabited; birds when they were no longer flying; fish when they were no longer in water but lifeless on a laboratory table. His animals are mostly in skeleton form alone, and his diagrams lent themselves well to that quality in British modernist sculpture that showed minimal interest in living and moving beings while they are actually living and moving. The contrast between Moore’s heaviness and the seemingly changing and fructifying forms in work by artists such as Arp, Miró, Masson or Klee in the interwar decades is striking: a kind of near-necrophilia in the one case, a sharp experimental vitality on the other. The Inuit, the Bushmen and the Altamira cave-painters had been able to render humans and animals ‘of a tense vitality’ – Grigson again – amid a physical life constituting ‘a total, a final, an embracing fact, a paramount good’. Not even the exceptionally talented Moore seemed able to match that quality, Grigson says finally, that of the life of thought and the life of nature in a kind of unity. Our period is one ‘of confused and hasty distraction, of possibilities of construction and power for excellence, but of still more enormous likelihood of destruction’. His verdict is that Moore’s ‘biomorphism’ in such a world was one of mechanical stillness – nearly that of Mondrian – but also one of vegetable stillness in which he exhibits what Grigson calls his D.H. Lawrence side, that of ‘the life stream in slow motion’.36 * Two European cities, then, in which something called ‘biomorphism’ could be said to have flourished after the 1920s, under different formulations and supported by different cultural and metaphysical principles. But we notice a further version of biomorphism that appeared, largely shorn of its geological and anthropological colouring, in a third city, New York, in the spring of 1936. Alfred H. Barr’s ambitious exhibition and book project Cubism and Abstract Art was launched at the Museum of Modern Art in March of that year. The American curator had been in Hanover, Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Munich in 1935 on the second of two European research visits, and he had seen the persecution of modern art as well as the obstruction and threatened destruction of modern artists’ work. Returning to New York, Barr resolved to fashion a descriptive classification of styles and movements that would convey to a new 36

Grigson, ‘Henry Moore and Ourselves’, Axis, no 3, July 1935, p 10. In another formulation, Moore synthesizes the elements of his vision ‘by enlivening and promoting the form of flints and bones and shells’ but ‘will never allow objects to impose on him their own deadness’; Grigson, The Arts Today, 1935, p 102. Henry Moore, 1944, p 102.

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and interested American public the main lines of European modern art – a public largely ignorant of sensibilities abroad and for the moment preoccupied with the consequences of the Great Crash.37 The scheme that he devised for his exhibition is now famous, even notorious, for its evolutionary structure and for its implication of art as a hermetic and self-determining system.38 The diagram that represents it is hermetic too. Its directional arrows, some straight, some curved, its lines of genetic connection, its typographical emphases, the selection and position of its major stylistic categories: all these invite questions and legitimate doubt. In four of the six preliminary sketches for it we find ‘Biomorphic Abstract Art’ positioned at a confluence of two sub-groups: Duchamp, Picabia, Arp, Ernst, Man Ray and Schwitters, who constitute ‘Abstract Dadaism’, and Picasso, Ernst, Miró, Arp, Masson and May Ray who constitute ‘Abstract Surrealism’.39 In the diagram as published, the term ‘Abstract Surrealism’ has been replaced by ‘Non-Geometrical Abstract Art’, which itself stands in contrast to ‘Geometrical Abstract Art’. Meanwhile Barr speaks of ‘biomorphic abstraction’ freely in his explanatory text in expounding the work of Hélion, Domela, Arp, Picasso, Masson, Klee, Miró and Moore. What was the latter term supposed to mean? Within the designated group, Masson’s and Miró’s new paintings tended to be ‘flat, two dimensional and linear’, Barr explains, while Miró’s ‘have the convincing gusto of primitive cave paintings or children’s watercolours’ (Plate 6b). A large new pastel by Masson has ‘extreme calligraphic freedom’; his line has ‘spontaneity … impetuosity and fury’. Arp on the other hand is a puritan among Surrealists, the author of the recent Human Concretion, itself ‘a kind of sculptural protoplasm, half organic, half water-worn white stone … a biomorphic form’. Among the Surrealists ‘only Tanguy is consistently abstract’, says Barr. He ‘took the flat, organic, biomorphic shapes of Arp and Miró, and, about 1927, painted or drew them in the round’ before placing them in his lunar and submarine scenes. On the other side, Mondrian is ‘ascetic’ (compare Grigson’s ‘puritan’), while Nicholson is ‘chaste’, 37

38

39

Furthermore, the New York exhibition would present a way of getting some important works by Malevich, Schlemmer and others to safety in the USA. See L. Dickerman, ‘Abstraction in 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art’, in Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925: How A Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013, pp 364 ff. See the riposte of M. Schapiro, ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’, Marxist Quarterly, January–March 1937, and more recently G. Pollock, ‘Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde’, New Literary History, vol 41, no 4, Autumn 2010. In the fifth sketch, Tanguy and Giacometti are added to that group. The six pencil sketches for the published scheme (that mentioned here is number four) are discussed in G. Lowry, ‘Abstraction in 1936: Barr’s Diagrams’, in Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925 , pp 358–63.

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Fig 2.12  Frontispiece of Alfred H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York (detail).

whereas Henry Moore by comparison is always at the ‘organic’ pole of the abstract movement.40 The essential distinction, then, is between Geometrical Abstract Art and Non-Geometrical Abstract Art, the former of which Barr describes as a ‘pure’ abstraction of geometrical shapes while the second or ‘biomorphic’ type is ‘impure’ abstraction (also referred to as ‘quasi-’, ‘pseudo-’ or ‘near-abstraction’) in which the defining gesture is the artist’s transformation of natural forms ‘into abstract or nearly abstract’ ones. ‘Impure’ abstraction, according to this account, is exemplified by Picasso’s Cubism, which retains vestiges of still-life, portraiture and very occasionally landscape, also by Arp’s reliefs of the mid-1920s and by Miró’s latest painting, whose forms – this is how Barr puts it – ‘are so far removed from nature that it is often difficult to tell whether a given object represents a head or a cloud’, notwithstanding that, in both cases, ‘the cords which tie these works to nature are tenuous, but unbroken’. Such impure abstraction or ‘biomorphism’, Barr claims, ‘approaches an abstract goal but does not quite reach it’.41 40

41

A.H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, pp 80, 182, 186, 186, 192, 182, 218. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, pp 11, 12–13, 13. My emphases.

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Such metaphors of purity and impurity are worth exploring further. To describe ‘biomorphism’ as ‘impure’ is to imply its exemplifications are defective or spoiled, the result perhaps of corruption, debasement or decay; as a descent from ideality to less satisfactory realities beneath. Or perhaps Barr’s phrase ‘approaches an abstract goal’ suggests mathematical convergence, achievable only at infinity. The predicament of ‘impure abstraction’ is made out to be in this sense a difficult one. Like Herbert Read before him, Barr quotes the passage from the Philebus in which Socrates is speaking of the beauty of shapes, in which straight lines and regular curves ‘are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are … but are always by their nature beautiful, and give pleasure of their own, quite free from the itch of desire’; that is, outside of earthly consciousness and beyond the experience of temporal flow.42 ‘Pure’ abstraction in the Western tradition, says Barr a little later, ‘is intellectual, structural, architectonic, geometrical, rectilinear and classical in its austerity and dependence upon logic and calculation.’ The impure kind is ‘intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual; organic or biomorphic rather than geometrical in its forms; curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural, and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational’. The Western tradition can be summarized, he says, as Apollo, Pythagoras and Descartes versus Dionysus, Plotinus and Rousseau. Now it is Malevich versus Kandinsky, Pevsner versus Miró and Arp. It is the chaste reliefs of Nicholson in competition with Henry Moore’s feeling for organic forms, texture and colour. Barr then gives a final image of pure geometry versus the impurity of the biomorphic. ‘The shape of the square’, he says, ‘confronts the silhouette of the amoeba’.43 The image is a startling one, and we do not immediately know how to take it. Was Barr becoming nervous of the qualities implied in the ‘pure’ – its uncompromising tone, perhaps, its severity as a type? How much did his ‘pure’ versus ‘impure’ duplicate a wider tension in 1930s USA, between regulative order and conformity and a contrary demand for everyday freedoms to speak and act? Or perhaps the relative seniority of Mondrian, and of Malevich, whose death in 1935 had been recently announced, confirmed in Barr a sense that Cubism was at the end of something, that its heyday was over and was already 42

43

Plato, Philebus, 51B (in a different translation from the one used by Read), in Cubism and Abstract Art, p 14. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, p 19. In another summary, he describes ‘the Arp shape’ as a ‘soft, irregular, curving silhouette half-way between a circle and the object presented, [one that] appears again the work of Miró, Tanguy, Calder, Moore and many lesser men’ (p 180).

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in the process of being replaced. Mondrian, he says, the steadfast champion of the rectangle, ‘has been deserted by his brilliant pupils Hélion and Domela, who have introduced in their recent work various impurities such as varied textures, irregularly curved lines and graded tones’. The battle for geometric purity represented by Nicholson’s chaste reliefs was over, and art’s morphologies were changing quickly too. ‘It seems fairly clear’, he concludes, ‘that the geometric tradition in abstract art … is in decline [and that] the non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miró and Moore are definitely in the ascendant’.44 * We should look more closely at the amoeba, the most frequently used cipher for ‘biomorphism’, and explore some of its other valuations. Strzemiński had regarded the shapeless organism as part of Surrealism’s obsession with biology, as well as, more generally, the point of origin of all the accidents of animal and human life.45 Biologically minded philosophers such as Henri Bergson recognized the amoeba as the basic protoplasmic mass, but also saw that it was constructed for ‘full freedom for change of shape and movement’ – haphazard though that involuntary movement was – at the lowest level of organicity in nature.46 Even in Bergson’s day it was understood that the creature is in fact so small (no more than a few millimetres across) as to make it more or less invisible to the naked eye; an image therefore available exclusively through the microscope rather than by direct observation. The amoeba’s reputation indeed lay principally in its capacity for more or less random movement. Popular schoolbooks of the 1930s explain that the Greek word αμοίβη or amoibè itself means change; that the common variety known as amoeba proteus is named after the mythical seagod Proteus who embodies that quality. Students of any age could learn from W.P. Pycraft’s Standard Natural History, published in New York and London in 1931, that shape-shifting movement is amoeba proteus’s determining trait – well captured in this description of how it self-propels in search of food: At first it is almost spherical, but, in a short while, blunt, finger-like processes, known as pseudopodia or ‘false feet’, begin to appear on its margin. These slowly elongate, and, as they expand farther and farther, the rest of the body shrinks in proportion. The forward movement, initiated by the pseudopodia, is communicated 44 45 46

Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, p 200. W. Strzemiński, ‘Aspects of Reality’, p 177. Bergson, Evolution Créatrice (1911), in the Random House translation as Creative Evolution, 1944, pp 120, 133.

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Fig 2.13  Diagram of the amoeba, showing (fi) in the process of engulfing a particle of food, (n) nucleus, (cv) the contractile vacuole, (f) several food particles already engulfed, from W.P. Pycraft (ed), The Standard Natural History: From Amoeba to Man, F. Warne and Co. Ltd, New York, 1931, p 6. to the rest of the body, with the result that the whole moves forward to the point reached by the pseudopodia. The amoeba has now reached its more-or-less rounded condition. Fresh pseudopodia are again thrown out and the process is repeated.47

More advanced students of biology would know that amoeba proteus had in fact never had a stable taxonomic identity; that the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had dubbed it volvex chaos in his system, before reclassifying the creature a few years later as chaos chaos – a morsel of scientific history that any Dada artist would surely have enjoyed.48 On the other hand the amoeba in Barr’s system is a motionless shape, a static silhouette. Socrates himself seems to have conflated ‘shape’ with ‘form’, if the translations of Philebus into modern English represent him fairly. We notice too that Barr’s ‘curvilinear’, ‘decorative’ and ‘romantic’ are likewise shape-words – whereas the ‘biomorphism’ of Moore, Arp, Kandinsky and Miró in fact demand recognition as a quality of form. Shape differs from form in some important ways. Linguistic intuition tells us that geometrical configurations have shape, whereas liquids, landscapes and solar systems have form; that artefacts generally have shape, while mountains, plants and animals have form. Shape 47

48

W.P. Pycraft, The Standard Natural History: From Amoeba to Man, Frederick Warne and Co. Ltd, New York and London, 1931, pp 5–6. A return to the Linnaean taxonomy Chaos chaos was advocated by the American biologist Asa Schaeffer as late as 1926, in his ‘The Taxonomy of the Amoebas, with a description of thirty-nine new marine and freshwater species’, Papers of the Carnegie Institute, Washington, no 24, pp 1–116. I doubt whether even the most well-informed Dada would have known this.

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Fig 2.14  Dorothy Gray, ‘Blustery Weather Lotion’ advertisement, c.1945.

is in the plane, that is to say, while form governs the volumetric. For Barr, a typical Arp shape is ‘a soft, irregular, curving silhouette half-way between a circle and the object represented’ – a flat shape inhabiting the plane.49 The reveal came in 1978, on the occasion of Barr’s retirement from the Museum of Modern Art, when a folder in his desk labelled ‘Arp shapes’ was found to contain a pile of commercial magazine pages in which a designer had used an irregularly rounded shape for graphic effect, to frame an image or enclose some advertising copy on a page.50 In art, it might be said, the amoeba needed to function as protean and never still, as the very embodiment of living form. 49 50

Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, p 186. I am indebted here to Cara Manes, ‘One Man Laboratory: Hans Arp and the Museum of Modern Art’, in M. Steinkamp and L. Würtenberger (eds), Hans Arp and the United States, Stiftung Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, e.V., Berlin, 2016, pp 65–6. Other ‘Arp shapes’ in Barr’s folder included curve-edged platforms for shop display, together with a note referring to ‘organic drawings by Saarinen and Eames’. The undated note probably arose in the context of Museum of Modern Art’s Organic Design in Home Furnishings exhibition of September–November 1941, curated by Eliot Noyes. The show included, inter alia, moulded plywood chairs designed by the Saarinen

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If the European artists suffered under the reductive categories of Barr’s show, younger artists in the USA were not subject to the same fate – given that Barr had excluded them from the selection (the one exception was Alexander Calder). During the planning of Cubism and Abstract Art, representations had been made to him on behalf of younger Americans for whom ‘abstraction’ of various kinds was becoming a motivation – but to no avail. Yet the USA at this moment was not without relevant projects of its own. We can mention the artists in the circle of the enigmatic John Graham (born Ivan Dombrowski, in Ukraine). Graham was aware of Picasso’s extraordinary talent and in his own work was engaging in a sort of dialectical mixing of Picasso’s ‘crystal’ Cubism with a quite opposite indulgence in rotundity, in various of his still-lifes of the 1930s. Graham’s own influence, conveyed partly through a theoretical book of 1937, System and Dialectics of Art, extended to Arshile Gorky (born in Armenia) and to David Smith (later to become a sculptor), both of whom – thanks also to illustrations available in Cahiers d’Art – developed painting practices after about 1936 heavily committed to a similar kind of melding of styles (Plate 7a). Members of Graham’s circle could also visit the Albert E. Gallatin Collection of modern European art at New York University, in Union Square. Gallatin preferred to call it ‘The Museum of Living Art’ to emphasize its vitality as well as its contemporaneity, while Gallatin himself, a wealthy European emigré, together with the no less patrician G.L.K. Morris, his wife Suzie Frelinghuysen, and Charles Shaw – known collectively as the Park Avenue Cubists – in other circumstances would have been strong candidates for inclusion in Barr’s show.51 Likewise the young Willem de Kooning, also a European, took from Graham a curious egg motif and used it as a pictorial fulcrum in which carved pictorial cuts and scooped intersecting forms presaged the emergence of his original and highly energized style. Ironically, the exclusion of Americans from Barr’s adventures with ‘abstraction’ may even have encouraged the fortunes of a distinctively American modern art.52

51

52

and Eames partnership, and by Alvar Aalto, the typical drawings for which showed curved and rounded shapes within the plane. But not all. Aalto would refer to ‘the biological properties of wood in the sense of its affinity with man and living nature, its pleasing tactility and the many different surface treatments available’. See Aalto, ‘Wood as a building material’, Arkkitehti, nos 6–7, 1956, in G. Schmidt (ed), Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, Rizzoli International Publishers Inc., New York, 1997, p 101; and Aalto, ‘Architettura et arte concreta’, Domus, 1947, in Schmidt (ed), Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, pp 108–9. See D.B. Balken and R.S. Lubar, The Park Avenue Cubists: Gallatin, Morris, Frelinghuysen and Shaw, Routledge, London, 2002. The founding of American Abstract Artists (AAA) in New York in 1936 is part of that discussion. The AAA’s forty founding members included Burgoyne Diller, Balcomb Greene, Carl Holty, Ibram

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* What then are we to make of ‘biomorphism’ – not as a managerial category but as an impulse within the individual work? What could not be denied is that by the end of 1936 the international situation was changing fast – and who could say how artists would respond? Russia had long since abandoned modern art in favour of statecontrolled production. Germany was turning sharply towards fascism. In the period between Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in November 1935, Hitler’s sequestration of the Rhineland in March 1936, the generals’ attack on Spanish democracy in July 1936 and the bombing of Guernica in April 1937, international turmoil prevailed. Picasso’s great painting would be that turmoil’s grand indictment. Meanwhile ‘abstraction’ as a category, heavily proscribed in the totalitarian states, was again under review in the democracies. Kandinsky, Arp and others were disclaiming it. In England, Axis was clear that finding a kind of balance between abstraction and Surrealism – let alone making a choice between them – was no longer the point. As the journal’s editor Myfanwy Evans wrote in the summer of 1936, ‘we are lost amongst individuals whose works protest at classification’. However useful the many ‘-isms’ of twentieth-century art, the price to be paid is ‘that the living picture comes to have no meaning at all within its class’. Classification alone ‘can never be a substitute for a gradual comprehension, the personal shifting of understanding and emphasis until things fall into some kind of order  … one of real vitality’. Picasso, Arp, Giacometti, Hartung and Holding – among others – ‘reserve the right to alter [their style] according to their inclination and nature, and not according to a group programme’.53 A piece Grigson wrote with John Piper for what would be the journal’s last-but-one issue, published in the autumn of 1936, bore the title ‘England’s Climate’ and called for a review of the principles that they had earlier endorsed. Now, they turned back to the values and experiences of English villages and farmsteads, country lanes, field stones, forgotten architecture and the national past.54 ‘The next central phase in the progress of art’, Grigson had said eighteen months earlier, would comprise work that was ‘bodied out’ in the manner of the Bakairi of Brazil, whose simple geometrical designs on wood,

53

54

Lassaw, G.L.K. Morris and Charles Shaw, and held its first exhibition at the Squib Gallery, New York in April 1937. See S.K. Larsen, ‘The American Abstract Artists: A Documentary History, 1936– 41’, Archives of American Art Journal, vol 14, no 1, 1974, and S. Kraskin, Pioneers of Abstract Art: American Abstract Artists 1936–1986, Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, 1996. The much-vaunted contest between Surrealism and Abstraction ‘is a silly battle’. See M. Evans, ‘Order! Order!’, Axis, no 6, Summer 1936, pp 5, 8. G. Grigson and J. Piper, ‘England’s Climate’, Axis, no 7, Autumn 1936.

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affective through symmetry and rhythm, their makers could treat ‘through imaginative association [as] the memory images of objects’ such as snakes, swarms of bees and women’s aprons. It had been what the ethnographer Wilhelm Wundt had called ‘the beginning of formative art [bildende Kunst]’. Only by being ‘penetrated and possessed … by a more varied affective and intellective content’, Grigson had written, could a modern art ‘answer to the ideological and emotional complexity of the needs of human beings with their enlarged knowledge of the widened country of self ’. Now, newly committed to the English sentimental past, Grigson’s position was that Anglo-Saxon sensibilities had always been to the fore. His defence of some form of ‘middle’ ground he now expressed in national rather than international terms. Neither geometric abstraction nor the ‘pure subjectivity’ of Surrealism was or could ever be an English cast of mind.55 Meanwhile, Kandinsky remained and worked in Paris until his death in 1944, apparently unmoved by the bombs dropping near his and Nina’s flat in Neuilly-sur-Seine. With his German passport now exchanged for a French one and seemingly aloof from the proximity of German bombing in the war – and despite having had five of his paintings pilloried in Hitler’s Entartete Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition in Munich in 1937 – he continued to be absorbed in aquatic and quasi-biological imagery, never weighed down by earth-bound habits of observation and verification applied to vegetative or nearly lifeless things. In Switzerland, artists invested in the dynamics of ‘becoming’, such as Hans Erni, developed a language of more figural biological beings in which life is re-imagined as damaged but still surviving form. Erni’s middle-sized tempera painting Bios of 1941 seems situated near to the concept of ‘bare life’ or zoë deployed by Giorgio Agamben, as well as to the more positive ‘manner of life’ or bios, the term used by R.H. Francé to title his book Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt of 1926, in effect a treatise on the biotechnics of natural structures. In the words of a fine account by the critic Konrad Farner, ‘in the midst of waste lies the animal killed and dissected by man, but the inward details revealed by skilled hands show clearly that the threads and bundles of sinews and muscles represent the original constructive stresses employed in the technics of the human body’.56

55

56

G. Grigson, ‘Comment on England’, Axis, no 1, January 1935, pp 8, 9; citing W. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie (1912) in the translation of E.L. Shaub as Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind, G. Allen and Unwin Ltd, London, and The Macmillan Company, New York, 1916. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, California, 1995; R.H. Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt, Leipzig, 1926; and K. Farner, Hans Erni: Weg und Zielsetzung des Künstlers: Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1931 bis 1942, p 96.

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Erni’s painting can be read as a meditation on the fight for life itself in a world ravaged by another war (Plate 7b). The very otherness of rounded form, then, its resistance to categories and its flight from schemes that try to explain it, may be the real area of competence to which the term ‘biomorphism’ in art must ultimately apply. That morphological otherness had been recognized once or twice, gropingly but impressively – by Carl Einstein’s ‘au-delà’ of form from his 1929 article on Picasso, by Grigson in his first musings on the Mesolithic, and by Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, Marcel Griaule and others in terms that we shall examine shortly. By the later 1930s other speculations were already enlarging upon its implications. Within a few years of the appearance of his The New Scientific Spirit of 1934, the young Gaston Bachelard abandoned his studies in the philosophy of mathematics to pay ever closer attention to the predicates that attach to organic as well as inorganic physical things – predicates characterizing not their shapes or their measurements, but a viewer’s experience of their form. Bachelard first offered the term ‘sur-rationalisme’ for that posture in a short article in the Paris journal Institutions in 1936, proposing a viewpoint that ‘takes over all the objective formulas [for objects], well cleansed and economically ordered by the logicians, and recharges them psychologically, puts them back into motion and into life’.57 Soon, Bachelard would examine the phenomenological observations wrapped up in the use of ordinary adjectives such as ‘large’, ‘small’, ‘wet’, ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘dry’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ – and begin to grasp the truth of the ordinary homilies in which we encase the significant everyday things that surround us, living or not living as the case may be. We must de-philosophise ourselves, Bachelard would say; de-psychoanalyse ourselves too; take things quickly and in their comic immediacy, in their ordinary solitude and profundity. ‘Being is itself round’, Karl Jaspers once seemed to observe – as if roundness belongs first and foremost to nature. Perhaps Jaspers’ actual words ‘Jedes Dasein scheint in sich rund’ [Every Being seems in itself round] was an ontological claim, a claim that ‘Being’ arises where we experience a complete and equilibriated whole, a kind of vital unity.58 The suggestion contained in that statement is that of Gestalt, as the psychologists of the day would have it. And yet Gestalt is not 57

58

G. Bachelard, ‘Surrationalisme’, Institutions, no 1, June 1936, Editions Sociales Internationales, Paris, in the translation of J. Levy in Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion 4, 1989, p 113. This is the observation of Bachelard, Poetics of Space (1958), Maria Jolas translation, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, p 232, in reference to K. Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, Munich, R. Piper and Co Verlag, 1947, p 50.

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the kind of rotundity that artists were trying to catch in art. Our conclusion is that Miró, Picasso, Arp, Giacometti, Tanguy and others – even Moore – were in pursuit of another nature, strange and incomplete, one belonging to a pre-scientific past as well as to a future remote from the one promised by the situation of the entreguerres. As the artist and writer Georges Hugnet said of Tanguy, Arp and Duchamp in the context of Barr’s second 1936 show, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, the purpose their work was to give back to everyday things their power of expression. ‘A new and increasingly complex mythology of desire comes into existence’, Hugnet suggested; and of the forms of life conjured by these artists, ‘none had any intended connection with art.’ ‘They are only an attempt to establish super-reality.’ In the end, what Hugnet suggested for these versions of Surrealism may be the best we can do for ‘biomorphism’. The claim of those strange presences was to get to the bottom of things, he said; ‘to take man out of himself … to draw out of man the necessary light for his total emancipation … [to] restore to art its true meaning’.59

59

G. Hugnet, ‘In the light of Surrealism’, in A.H. Barr (ed), Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, pp 50, 52.

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Ambiguity

We shall consider here some works by Hans Arp and certain collaborative projects by him and his partner (then wife) Sophie Taeuber. The consensus has been that ‘Arp is concerned with organic forms’, in the words of the critic Herbert Read, in contrast to the Constructivist Naum Gabo, whose first concern ‘is with the structural elements of reality’. In 1924 Gabo was making sketches for a work titled Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points, whose hallmark was the equilibrium obtained by suspending a cube in the centre of an implied sphere – Gabo is said to have considered it one of his favourite works.1 Arp by contrast, according to Read, ‘had no interest in learning or technical knowledge. He begins with the “natural form” (hand or shell) and arrives at a distillation of essence of life within a natural form.’2 In a variation on that theme, Rosalind Krauss has read Arp’s motivations in the light of his remarks that ‘art is a fruit that grows in man, like fruit on a plant’, that he wanted his work ‘to find its humble, anonymous place in the woods, in the mountains, in nature’. She concludes that Arp viewed the art object as a species of natural object, what she calls ‘a unique addition to the inventory of natural forms’. In a typical work of the later 1920s and 1930s, she adds, the articulation of forms and volumes ‘suggests a kind of unfolding through time which we associate with the phenomenon of growth – like a plant progressing through the morphological stages of its life cycle, changing its shape from seed, to sprout, and to bud, holding within itself the essential unity of its own organic life’.3 1

2 3

Though planned while Gabo was in Berlin, the work was executed in 1930. See M. Hammer and C. Lodder, Constructing Modernity, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2000, pp 121–2, 129–30. H. Read, Arp, Thames and Hudson, London, 1968, pp 132. R. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1977, 1981, pp 138, 140. Arp’s two comments here are from ‘L’art est un fruit’ (in the Mannheim translation), 1948, in M. Jean (ed), Arp: Collected French Writings: Poems, Essays, Memories, Calder and Boyars, London, 1974, p 241, and ‘Looking’, in J.T. Soby (intr), Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p 15.

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Fig 3.1  Naum Gabo, Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points, 1925, plastic, glass, metal and wood, 67.3 × 55.2 × 101.6 cm, Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of H. Wade White, B.A., 1933, in memory of Joseph M. Hirshman.

Both critics knew that to an artist of Arp’s generation and background (he was born in 1886 in Strasbourg) phrases like ‘essence of life’, ‘growth’ and ‘unity’ were the cultural legacy of the German Romantics as well as background terminology for much of modern theoretical biology. Arp himself knew well the centrality of plant growth in Johann Gottfried von Herder’s celebrated essay ‘On the Knowing and Feeling of the Human Soul’ of 1778 – perhaps the beginning of organicist aesthetics in Germany – in which the growing plant was both the model for poetic inspiration as well as the proper antidote to mechanist theories of nature. The question of oblivious nature versus the machine had been a powerful theme in Kant – and as Tristan Tzara observed, Arp ‘loved Kant’s writings’. A machine, Kant wrote in The Critique of Judgement, has ‘solely motive power’, whereas nature is composed of self-preserving, self-repairing organisms possessing ‘inherent formative power … in which every part is reciprocally both end and means’.4 To some, the idea that the work of art forms itself as nature 4

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, Part II: Critique of Teleological Judgement (1790), trans J. C. Meredith, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, para 65, p 202.

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does was irresistible. As Goethe put it in his turn, ‘[a] work of art must be treated like a work of nature, a work of nature like a work of art, and the value of each must be developed out of itself and regarded for itself ’.5 Yet the question is not straightforward. Arp was also absorbed by ‘life’ and ‘nature’ as presented in pre-Socratic philosophy, in Heraclitus especially, and in the writings of the medieval mystics Johannes Tauler, Nicolas of Cusa and Jakob Boehme. Arp was an avid reader of them, and seems to have responded to the principle, common to them all, of a coniunctio oppositorum or an equivalence and difference of opposites.6 We shall find that he manipulated that principle in a startling and original way. The art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker, who first got to know Arp in 1924 and wrote about him well, commented that his artistic language not only ‘appears to express the principles of growth and continuous transformation that one finds in nature’ but that, to judge by a pattern of disjunctions established very early in his career, it alternated ‘between mocking fantasy and classical serenity’, often in the same work. His frequent combination of organic and geometric shapes ‘produce an ambiguous effect’, she wrote, ‘which enhanced the remarkable double-level of his art at that time’.7 She is talking about the years after 1909 when he was working from his family’s home in Weggis, in the Lucerne canton of Switzerland, then from 1915 in Ascona on Lake Maggiore, the cultish centre of the Lebensreform movement where he met the artist and designer Sophie Taeuber and which functioned as a training ground for the uproarious displays and performances of the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich’s celebrated Dada cavern. Arp tells us that it was in Ascona that the principles of his future manner were first explored. ‘I found decisive forms’, he wrote later; ‘I did India ink drawings of broken branches, roots, grass, and stones thrown up on the shore; I then simplified these forms and united their essences in fluid ovals [bewegte Ovale], symbols of the metamorphosis and development of bodies.’8

5

6

7

8

J.W. von Goethe, Kampagne in Frankreich, 1792; Sämtliche Werke, XXVIII, p 122; my guide is M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1953, chapter eight. The likely importance to Arp of Johannes Tauler’s fourteenth-century sermon Der innere Weg [The Inner Way] is explored in E. Robertson, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2006, pp 32–3. For Arp and Jakob Boehme, see H. Watts, ‘Periods and Commas: Hans Arp’s Seminal Punctuation’, in S. Foster (ed), Dada/Dimensions, UMI Research Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1985, pp 86–109. C. Giedion-Welcker, ‘Arp: An Appreciation’, in Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, here p 24. My emphases. Her comments reflect her training as an art historian in Munich with Heinrich Wöllflin, whose oppositions between ‘linear’ and ‘painterly’ style finds its reflection here. Arp, Jalons [Signposts], June 1950; in M. Jean (ed), Arp: Collected French Writings: Poems, Essays, Memories, Calder and Boyars, London, 1974, p 271.

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Fig 3.2  Hans Arp, Pre-Dada drawing, 1915, 15.2 × 19 cm, ink and pencil on paper. Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Berlin. © DACS 2019.

Fig 3.3  Hans Arp, Abstract Composition, collage, 1915, 24 × 20 cm. Kunstmuseum Basel. Gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, 1968. © DACS 2019.

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By ‘fluid ovals’ he meant, not regular ellipses but irregular shapes and curvatures done in ink on paper, many of which appear to contain homunculi or small organic filaments floating or squirming inside. At the same time, he was making simple collages out of very ordinary remaindered paper fragments, both straight- and curve-edged, of the kind taken from the kitchen waste-bin and having no value of their own, glued into overlaps and conjunctions of apparent compositional randomness, even a kind of carelessness. They were very unlike Cubist paper collages that played elaborate games with materials and printed signs. In Zürich, we are told, this time by his friend Richard Huelsenbeck, Arp stood outside the main Dada group – Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tzara and Huelsenbeck himself – committed as they were to becoming noisy outsiders to the bourgeois norm. ‘Arp did not seem to be very interested in all this’, recounts Huelsenbeck. ‘He lived apart, and seldom appeared at the Cabaret.’ He recalls being invited by Arp to his studio. ‘We entered the small apartment, and I was amazed at all the objects standing around and stacked up against the walls. There were dozens of canvases, cardboards, and unfinished works of sculpture.’ Spending time in his studio and actually making things, Huelsenbeck wrote, ‘Arp was able, with all his friends around, to bring into pictorial and sculptural reality what he had been thinking for a long time.’9 Arp’s contribution to Dada was undoubtedly unique. We have a near-autobiographical statement from an article by a certain ‘Alexander Partens’ (actually Arp himself, in a trio with Tristan Tzara and Walter Serner, therefore written in the third person): He wanted a direct form of production, one that conformed precisely to the way a stone breaks off a mountain, a flower blossoms, or an animal reproduces itself … a type of animal formation with all its wild intensity and diversity – the creation of a new body of work outside of us that lives as we do: perches on the corners of tables, lives in the garden, looks down from walls.10

It is all process and becoming. What Arp himself called ‘the metamorphosis and development of bodies’ belonged in one sense with the Naturphilosophie

 9

10

‘He [Arp] said he wanted to produce something entirely new, a form of abstraction expressing our time and our feelings about it. This “time”, the impact of which we saw and felt daily in the war headlines of the newspapers, asked for … a complete revision of all our notions about colours and forms’; Huelsenbeck, ‘Arp and the Dada Movement’, in Soby (ed), Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, pp 17, 18. Alexander Partens [sic], ‘Dada Art’, in R. Huelsenbeck (ed), The Dada Almanac, Erich Reiss Verlag, Berlin, 1920 (in the English edition presented by the M. Green, Atlas Press, London, 1992, p 93).

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that he and other Dadas knew from Herder and Goethe; but now the Romantic authors were being put to new ends. We find evidence of the new outlook in the Dada magazine Merz, whose issue No. 6 for October 1923, prepared by Arp and Tzara, carried six wood reliefs by Arp that underscored a commitment to ‘nature’ as one of Dada’s truly productive terms. Yet the relationship was not a simple one. On the one hand, ‘nature’ could be understood as the opposite of ‘culture’, but was performing in the modern century as the inverse of ‘reason’, ‘mechanism’ and ‘technology’. Merz carried another idea too. Issue No. 8/9 for July 1924, edited by Kurt Schwitters and El Lissitzky, bore the title Nasci, the Latin term for ‘nature’, and on its cover a citation from a child’s encyclopaedia. Printed in capital letters in German and with a French translation added, in English it reads ‘Nature, from the Latin NASCI, signifies becoming, originating, which is to say everything that by its own force develops, forms, dies away.’ ‘All the trouble that we expend and will expend on defining the beauty of nature’, Nasci further states, ‘comes and will come to nothing, for being ourselves nature we struggle to change the face of the world. Nature herself is oblivious to eternal beauty, and by continually changing its forms she gives birth incessantly to new creation – the modern world is the other half of nature, that which comes from man.’ And of artistic production at that time Nasci pronounced: ‘Enough of the machine/Nothing but the machine’; as well as: ‘The machine having alienated us from nature, it has enabled us to discover a new nature, one quite unknown … whose results have been arrived at by intuition, which is the method of art.’11 Two illustrations were prominent: Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, and Arp’s own According to the Laws of Chance of 1916, a collage of rectangular papers arranged to appear like two architectural towers wobbling towards each other uncontrollably – whether by attraction or error we cannot easily tell. It is a composition in which rational units are given the semblance of an organic life of their own. In fact, the years between 1916 and 1924 in Arp’s output had seen the arrival of a third métier, one that used the fluid ink shapes and material collages already mentioned to form wood reliefs in which vegetable-cumanimal forms, cut out of wooden planks with a zig-saw, are screwed together, most often painted, and hung in a frontal pictorial position on a wall. Fantastic and serene, several of these also exemplify Giedion-Welcker’s ‘combinations of organic and geometric shapes’ that seemed to her to lie at the centre of Arp’s already provocative career (Plate 8a). 11

Unattributed, in: Merz, 8/9, July 1924, np.

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Not all of Dada’s admirers understood Nasci’s implications very well. The writer and artist Georges Hugnet in his essay ‘The Dada Spirit in Painting’, published in Cahiers d’Art in 1932 and 1934, claimed the Nasci issue to have shown how Dada went astray, how Merz was ‘only remotely a Dada review, other interests having opposed Dada and usurped its place’. Hugnet might have been describing Arp’s own work in observing (albeit in irritation) that ‘Nasci came out for a new order, abstract in tendency, i.e. the discovery of form’. On the other hand, Hugnet had not fully grasped the significance of Nasci as its editors had meant it.12 They had announced in full capitals, in words that point towards the kind of ambiguity we are exploring, ‘EACH FORM IS A CONCRETISED MOMENT OF AN EVOLUTION. THE WORK IS NOT A FIXED END, BUT A MOMENTARY POINT OF DEVELOPMENT.’13 Merz 8/9 makes for one way of understanding Giedion-Welcker’s ‘ambiguous effect’ or ‘double level’ in Arp’s work at this time. It is an understanding that straddles the idea of ‘concretizing’ a given moment while still expressing its fluid and evolutionary path. It is a doubling of some kind; even a Bergsonian acknowledgement of perpetual instability and change. But no less certainly, Merz was absorbed by the dance of sense and loss of sense in Arp’s recent work. By their titles alone, his works from the Zürich and post-Zürich period, including Bird Mask (1918), Plant Hammer (1917), Moustache Watch (1923), followed by Lips and Hand Mirror (1927) and Bottle Cravat (1929), suggest the rhyming as well as the opposing of the natural with the non-natural (sometimes the mechanical), in addition to the humorous possibilities of conjoining two disconnected areas of sense. For obviously the conjoining would be a disjoining too, one that delved deeply and mysteriously into the unclear territory between form and language, between the art-object as a physical thing and the incantatory power of the word. It should be remembered too that 1924 was the year of the First Manifesto of Surrealism and, by his own admission, for a while Arp was wedded to Surrealism. By the end of the decade he had got to know Max Ernst and Johannes Baargeld in Cologne, as well as Man Ray, André Masson, Miró and Picasso in Paris, where he eventually obtained French citizenship as well as access to a poly-lingual, pan-European community in which the idea of impermanence and ambiguity was all. Arp exhibited in the first Surrealist group show in 1925 at

12

13

Georges Hugnet, ‘The Dada Spirit in Painting’, in Robert Motherwell (ed), The Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951, pp 123–96, here p 164. My emphasis. Unattributed, in: Merz 8/9, July 1924, np.

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the Galerie Pierre and, as he puts it, ‘was encouraged [by the Surrealists] to ferret out the dream, the idea behind my plastic work, and to give it a name’. But then, taking up more permanent residence in Meudon in the Paris suburbs in 1927, the circle of his regular acquaintances changed, and there began a new period in an already remarkable career. * The possibility is that Arp was encouraged in what was to come by the critics and philosophers around Georges Bataille’s journal Documents during 1929–30, devoted as those writers were to ethnographic and anthropological speculation and above all to reconstructing the concept of form as always heterodox, always beyond categories, always exceptionalist, evoked best by analogy with the fantastic, the monstrous or the illicit. Nasci had also declared: ‘All that passes incessantly – all that oscillates between the sense-full and the sense-less – that will be called NASCI’; and it is in something like that spirit that Michel Leiris’ review of Arp’s small show at the Galerie Goemans in November 1929 lists a mix-up of predicates that do not describe precisely, rather they hover ambiguously in the neighbourhood of the work. It is as though Leiris wanted to remove Arp’s work from sense and sense-making altogether. His wood reliefs and string collages are equally ‘raw material and personhood’, Leiris says, independent of the four realms yet equally linked to all: neither pebble nor stream, neither shadow nor metal, neither idea nor framework, neither gas nor solid; half-fig, half-grape, neither flesh nor fish, everything destined to be forever caught between bark and tree, un-licked bear-cubs, caterpillars trying to change into butterflies, anthropoid monkeys, sphinxes … the astounding phenomenon of osmosis through semi-permeable walls, mineral salts in a state of cooling, amalgams of snow and mud with which Eskimos coat the runners of their sledges.

Leiris’ voice becomes more active when he says that Arp ‘takes the universe and transforms it into corrugated iron’. He is one who knows well the contents of the hardware store and everything that can be done with material. He makes forms buckle; he makes everything resemble everything else, systematically upsets the illusory categories and orderings of created things. He amuses himself with the world like a sprite escaping from a forest, and conducts himself in the magnificent manner of a dog in a game of skittles.

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His language takes its semantically dislocated cue from the very works he is describing. Arp’s stringed paintings and wood reliefs, says Leiris, could be those of some extravagant banquet, a theophagic or anthropophagic ritual during which a family of giants scarcely different from the mountainous masses that engendered them eat a charming umbilical cord which some aphids have befriended, drinking to the full what others call divine and cutting natura naturans [nature naturing] and natura naturata [nature natured] into gaily bleeding pieces, seasoned with a parsley capable of immediately freeing both earth and heaven from all the dodderers and destitute old parrots of eternity.14

The interest taken in Arp’s work by the German critic Carl Einstein, also of the Documents group, can be directly compared. In 1930, and coinciding with the sole Paris exhibition of the Cercle et Carré group to which Arp at that time belonged, Einstein published a coruscating assault on ‘the pedants of the circle and the square’ who elevate mathematical form to a dogma and so ‘limit all invention’. Arp is wise enough to concentrate on simple forms, Einstein says, such as the bow-tie, the egg, the leaf, then ‘to isolate them in order to over-determine them  … each theme precipitating its contrary while sliding imperceptibly towards it’ in the manner of a childhood game in which magic, even cannibalism, are practised in games of sadistic make-believe. All his forms are ambiguous, Einstein says approvingly, ‘the occasion of wide-ranging humour’. In contrast to the cowardice and inoffensiveness of Paul Klee, Arp gives us ‘intense shocks, those of birth, the explosion of the mother’s egg, and a congested communicant strangled by his own tie as in the forgotten rituals of a prehistoric infancy [une enfance préhistorique]’.15 By the time Einstein’s article appeared in print – perhaps even in consequence of it – Arp had accepted that Surrealism was behind him. Now married to the artist Sophie Taeuber, he realized that they had to give up attending endless meetings of rival Surrealist groups in Paris cafés ‘where eighteenth-century Satanism was still a favourite dish’. ‘In 1930’, he reminisced later, ‘I went back to the activity which the Germans so eloquently call Hauerei [hewing]. I engaged in sculpture and modelled in plaster.’ Starting with two Torsos, he now embarked on an important series to be named Concretions, sometimes Human 14 15

M. Leiris, ‘Exposition Hans Arp (Galerie Goemans)’, Documents, no 6, 1929, pp 340, 342. C. Einstein, ‘L’Enfance Néolithique’, Documents, no 8, 1930, pp 482, 479, 483.

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Fig 3.4  Hans Arp, Head, string and paint on canvas, 1929 as shown in Documents, no 6, 1929, p 341.

Concretions. They were three-dimensional objects carved in plaster or marble or stone possessing undulating irregular surface curves that defied almost every convention associated with sculpture up until that time, including those of shape, balance, organization, even that of a stable physical and visual orientation to the ground (Plate 8b). ‘Concretion’ – sometimes ‘concretization’ – had been a favourite term of Schwitters, who had used it to emphasize the actuality, the quotidian nature, of his soiled, sometimes torn or scissored fragments, whether of paper, cardboard, wire, cloth or wood. ‘Concrete’ had also been a term of recent dialogue between Arp and his friend Theo van Doesburg, whose manifesto Art Concret, published in Paris in April 1930, advocated exactitude, precision, clarity, and with some

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vehemence insisted that it was essential that the work of art ‘should contain no natural form’.16 Arp would use ‘concretion’ differently – as a verbal noun significant of genesis, changefulness and becoming, close to the geological term for encrustation around a given nodule or core, or the aggregation or congelation of liquid matter over time. ‘Concretion’ for Arp signified ‘the natural process of condensing, hardening, coagulating, thickening, growing together … the curdling of the earth and the heavenly bodies. Concretion’, he explained, ‘designates … the solidifying of stone, plant, animal and man’ – the emphasis being on process rather than destination, on natura naturans rather than natura naturata, in the language of Spinoza’s categories that Leiris had earlier invoked in his review.17 Yet he switches back to natura naturata when he implies that a certain condensing and hardening in the art object has already taken place. ‘Concretion’, Arp says in another statement, ‘is something that has grown.’18 And to say that the sculpture has grown is to affirm once more that, for him, the work’s coming-into-being is neither constructive, measured or deduced. Nor is it planned in advance. The sculpture ‘has grown’ in the sense that the artist has nurtured it. The Concretions and Human Concretions are among the best known of Arp’s works, yet their twisting, unpredictable profiles and the fluid volumes that seem to lie within them look discrepant if the categories applied are those of known species or genera. They, the sculptures, can look as if something has gone wrong with organic form. They seem to fascinate on account of their closeness to the unseen, the unusual, even the monstrous. In a rare piece of reflection on his nurturing process, Arp put it this way: ‘A small fragment of one of my plastic works presenting a curve or a contrast that moves me is often the germ of a new work. I intensify the curve or the contrast, and this determines new forms. Among the new forms two grow with special intensity. I let these two continue to grow until the original forms have become secondary and almost expressionless. Finally, I suppress one of the secondary, expressionless forms so that the others become more apparent.’ Sounding like the ‘forcing’ process used in horticulture, 16

17

18

T. van Doesburg, Art Concret, April 1930, in J. Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, Studio Vista, London, 1974, p 180. See Chapter 5 below. The Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77) distinguished between nature as a set of ‘modes’ or ‘modifications’ of substance which we could call potentialities, processes and changes in the relations between things (natura naturans), and a single ‘substance’ of nature conceived as a universal morphological scheme capable of being apprehended by investigation and classification (natura naturata). In Spinoza’s monistic system God/nature, mind/matter, were one and the same – it was up to humans to achieve an adequately complete knowledge of what both philosophy and science could uncover. See Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, in the translation by E. Curley, Penguin, London, 1996; Part I, Prop 29. H. Arp, ‘Looking’, in J.T. Soby (ed), Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, pp 14–15.

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it is as if only the strongest growths are allowed to flourish and survive. Yet Dada nurturing was quite unlike actual horticulture. Marble or limestone, plaster or granite – the inertness of material seems not to have mattered. Arp merely reports: ‘I work until enough of my life has flowed into its body.’19 Dada horticulture then is something different. The marble sculpture Growth of 1938, to take an example, though not named as a ‘concretion’, may look to most observers as if it thematizes natural growth, yet the manner in which its volumes burst out of one another from the base up, its higher volumes oddly larger than its lower ones like gloops of viscous matter in liquid motion: this appearance demands a more complex description. The horticultural method has required coordination of eye-and-hand, yet the inert material has not been treated as mere passive stuff. On the contrary, each modification of its size, shape, contour, mass and balance has changed the terms on which eye-and-hand has responded to it; as if the sculptor gave permission to the material, and the material made suggestions in return. ‘The artist must let his work create itself directly’, Arp wrote in a short statement for a later publication. ‘Today [he is writing in the 1940s] we are no longer concerned with subtleties. My reliefs and sculptures fit naturally into nature.’ He then quickly reverts to a sense of human control: ‘On closer inspection … they reveal that they were formed by human hand, and so I have named certain of them Stone Formed by Human Hand.’20 Those particular works posed yet other questions relevant to the processes of nature in dialogue with those of art. For while we know intellectually that stones, when we encounter them, owe their forms to immeasurably slow transformations across millennia, the hand’s temporality is that of manipulation within the rapidly passing durée of human culture. How can two widely separated temporalities exist in the same object? Is there not a phenomenological contradiction between them? Playfully alternating between them can be read as a provocation to re-think the notions of ‘unity’ and ‘the organic’ from the very start.21

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20 21

H. Arp, ‘The Germ of a New Plastic Work’, in R. Motherwell (ed), Arp: On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–1947, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., New York, 1948, p 70. See Arp, ‘Stone Formed by Human Hand’, in M. Jean (ed), Jean Arp: Collected French Writings, p 242. Stones of various sizes and materials were of course of special concern to the modern sculptor. Here is Merleau-Ponty, reflecting on how an encounter with an inert object can affect us: ‘We are not this pebble [he is reporting on Bergson’s account of consciousness] but when we look at it, it awakens resonances in our perceptive apparatus, and our perception appears to come from it. Thus our perception of the pebble is a kind of promotion to (conscious) existence for itself; it is our recovery of this mute thing which, from the time it enters our life, begins to unfold its implicit being, which is revealed to itself through us. What we believed to be coincidence is coexistence’; M. Merleau-Ponty, Éloge de la Philosophie, Gallimard, Paris, 1953, here in translation by John Wild and James Edie, in the volume In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1963, paperback edn 1988, p 17.

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Fig 3.5  Hans Arp, Growth, 1938, marble, 80.3 cm high, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2019 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, New York/Scala, Florence.

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Fig 3.6  Hans Arp, Stone Formed by Human Hand, 1937–38, Jura Kalkstein, 41.5 × 50 × 25 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel (Emmanuel-Hoffmann Stiftung).

* It might be said that Arp’s instinct to never court stability projects an ambition that Giedion-Welcker’s phrase ‘double level’ struggles with some difficulty to describe. The citations from Merz alerted us to the fact that concepts of wholeness and unity were being widely discussed among life-scientists at the time, and it is proper to add that, by 1930, the proposition that previously discrete cosmic category-pairs such as space and time, or physical phenomena such as electromagnetism and gravity, were now frequently being theorized together – however paradoxical and threatening to familiar norms of sense. The very cognition of things seemed to be changing fast. In the field of human perception itself, fundamental questions were being asked. What was a whole object, and by what sequence of operations was the mind supposed to know it? Since the beginnings of psychology in the nineteenth century, questions of objecthood and sensory experience were claimed to be no longer purely philosophical, but capable of being tested in the laboratory. The Austrian philosopher Franz Brentano, whose students included Carl Stumpf and Edmund Husserl, had originated a style of thinking in which philosophical and psychological research could be intertwined. Stumpf, for his part, had proposed the ‘constancy hypothesis’, which purported to explain the impression of an object’s enduring shape, colour and position over time by the mind’s ability to recall ‘errors’ in the original percepts and then recover, review and correct them. A paper of 1890 by one of Stumpf ’s students, Christian von Ehrenfels, titled ‘On Gestalt Qualities’, had challenged that assumption. Von

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Ehrenfels had pointed to the tendency of an auditor to hear complete melodies rather than disconnected successions of notes, and had realized that no conscious ‘associative’ activity was needed to assemble those elements together into a whole.22 A young psychologist in Berlin, Max Wertheimer, had then demonstrated in an experiment of 1912 that light stimuli displayed to an observer in sequence are experienced not as unrelated but as an unimpeachably single phenomenon or event, the more so if the stimuli are spatially close together. ‘It was the beginning of Gestalt psychology’, according to Wolfgang Köhler, who as a young experimenter in 1913 had taken the step of further dismantling Stumpf ’s constancy hypothesis by insisting that perception never worked as error-and-correction; rather it functioned in accordance with quite ordinary tasks that the perceiver might be doing or preparing to do. ‘The facts [of any perceptual interpretation] might be more easily explained’, Köhler insisted, ‘if we regard as the “immediately given” … not “sensations” but (for the most part) things.’23 It is part of the background against which worries about the unity of things, their completeness and unimpeachability, their meanings and functions, came to lie at the very centre of twentieth-century modern art. Husserl, in his lectures on the philosophy of arithmetic in 1889–90, had spoken of the Gestaltmoment in mathematics – the moment of unity of a demonstration – a phrasing that Ehrenfels certainly knew.24 Whole-part phenomenology had already found its counterpart in music, particularly that of Richard Wagner, whom Ehrenfels lionized and whose musical inventions provided layered ascending and descending patterns, seldom completed but forever deferred against the promise of ever grander or more tragic wholes.25 Almost immediately, the idea of Gestalt became extended to questions of class coherence, sexual identity and ethical 22

23

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C. von Ehrenfels, ‘Uber Gestaltqualitäten’, Vierteljahresshrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 14, 1890, pp 249–92; in translation as ‘On Gestalt Qualities’, in B. Smith (ed), Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Philosophia, Munich, 1988. W. Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology, Liverlight Publishing, New York, 1947, p 73; and Köhler, ‘Űber unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstauschungen’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 66, 1913; here ‘On Unnoticed Sensations and Errors of Judgement’ trans H.E. Adler, in M. Henle (eds), The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, New York, 1971, pp 38–9. These events are reviewed at length in M. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp 135ff. E. Husserl, ‘Ausgewählte Fragen aus der Philosophie der Mathematik’ (1889–90) and Philosophie der Arithmetik, 1890. It was Wagner’s distinction to cast the problem in the dimension of time. ‘A ready-made melody’, he famously wrote, ‘remained unintelligible to us, because open to arbitrary interpretations; a ready-made situation must remain just as unintelligible, even as Nature herself remained unintelligible to us so long as we looked on her as something made – whereas she is intelligible enough, now that we know her as the Being, i.e. the forever Becoming: a Being whose Becoming is ever present to us’; R. Wagner, Opera and Drama (1851), trans W. Ashton Ellis, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1995, p 342.

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consistency, even nationhood and national destiny. At a time when the German state was wrestling with its self-formation and eventually its crisis at the end of the First World War, the question was perceived as relevant to political policy too. In fact, the Berlin Gestaltists were careful not to inflect their laboratory findings with metaphors of the ‘whole’ state, especially in the early years of the Weimar Republic after 1919; yet they found that others were already reading ‘organicism’ into state-formation on the analogy of a growing and developing body. For instance, writings by the controversial Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, such as ‘Volk und Staat’ [People and State] of 1916, set the tone for some dangerous metaphors according to which ‘wholeness’ and ‘health’ in the state organism belonged together, with the implication that parasites in the form of ‘alien races’ should be cleansed away. For von Uexküll and those who followed him, the principles of democracy as levelling and in-principle non-hierarchical in the Weimar period constituted an obvious threat to the ‘natural’ coherence of the whole.26 To several artists of the post-1918 generation, it must have seemed that Gestalt principles and metaphors could be activated at virtually any level of consistency or scale. Take the celebrated book by Köhler’s contemporary, Kurt Koffka’s Principles of Gestalt Psychology, published in 1935 at the very mid-point of Hans Arp’s career, at a moment when political and cultural life in Europe had become highly unstable once more. The passage entitled ‘Things and Not-Things’ posed the question of wholeness and ambiguity in relation to any phenomenon or experience indiscriminately. What is actually in the perceptual and cognitive field, Koffka asks; to which he adds that, all too often, we are ‘in doubt whether one of our data is to be counted as a thing or not, or as a live or a dead thing. Are clouds things? If yes, is fog, air, light, cold? If clouds are things, they are surely different in kind from stones and sticks, and the twinkling stars are again different.’ Nebulous or vague objects could be put to the test as well. ‘A fog we see creeping up a mountain valley has a thing-like quality similar to that of clouds’, says Koffka, ‘but a fog which makes our ocean liner reduce speed and sound its piercing horn is not thing-like at all.’ The distinction was that the latter ‘has no boundary or shape and is absolutely static, whereas the drifting fog has 26

Von Uexküll’s ‘Volk und Staat’ was published in the conservative journal Die Neue Rundschau, no 26, 1916, pp 53–66, and his Staatsbiologie (Anatomie-Physiologie-Pathologie des Staates) in Berlin, 1920, before being reissued in a revised version in 1933. See A. Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996, pp 56–63.

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shape and motion’. Koffka’s conclusion was that, though the distinction between things and not-things can vary with circumstance, in the end it comes down to three characteristics which ‘severally and jointly’ are constitutive of things: ‘shaped boundedness, dynamic properties, and constancy’.27 These are qualities that Arp’s paintings, drawings and sculptures of the 1930s and later do not always have. More usually it is as if, in them, two or more principles abut or collide against each other and that the collision – the ambiguity – between them is the very purpose of the work. Marital Sculpture of 1937, made by Arp and Sophie Taeuber together, is a work of this kind. We find its lathe-turned, rounded forms interrupted, so to speak, by two sawn planar sections made as if to expose an ‘inside’ to matter; a wound, perhaps, or a blemish, one implying a time-lag between an initial generative moment and a second, more destructive act. Giedion-Welcker’s speculation is that ‘the intersection of purely organic forms by sharp geometrical planes implies the introduction of a new element that is semi-architectural and, one might almost say, intentionally civilising’. The remark is from her celebrated book Modern Plastic Art of 1937.28 Her implication was that Marital Sculpture’s ‘semi-architectural’ elements redeem the sculpture’s ‘primitive’ or inchoate appearance by introducing a modern, even technical planarity and edge. Yet the artist’s deeper motivation may have been to mobilize plasticities that work not with but against each other, in this case by ‘sharp geometrical planes’ disturbing a bounded shape and form, one most likely prior, in the order of manufacture, to the application of the saw. The sculpture’s ‘ambiguous effect’ in that case stems from a wish to wreck, complicate, or throw into doubt the object’s coherence as a complete and completed thing, to render unstable the temporality – even, by implication, the authorship – of the work. Such speculation is consistent with Arp’s personal allegiance to the Dada idea. We may even say that so abrupt are the discontinuities in this and other sculptures as to make them appear charged with an active and persistent

27

28

See Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 1935, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, pp 71–2. ‘Dynamic’ properties in Koffka’s system occupy an interesting place. ‘The terrifying quality of thunder is its outstanding characteristic’, he says, ‘its description as a noise quite secondary; a snake is uncanny before it is brown and spotted, a human face happy before it is of a certain hue and chroma. All these descriptions employ something like a force, something that goes beyond the mere static thing and affects ourselves’ (p 72). He calls this kind of description ‘phenomenology’ – not (here he refers us to Köhler) a return to vitalism but a way of enhancing mechanist descriptions of life-processes which are compatible with the scientific method (p 73). Carola Giedion-Welcker: ‘Introduction’, in Modern Plastic Art: Elements of Reality, Volume and Disintegration, Zürich, 1937; reprinted in: Jon Wood, David Hulks and Alex Potts (eds), Modern Sculpture Reader, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2007, pp 145–58; here p 152.

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Fig 3.7  Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marital Sculpture, 1937, turned and sawn wood, 30.0 × 29.5 × 27.5 cm. Fondation Arp, Rolandseck. © DACS 2019.

anacoluthon – a kind of semantic jumping from one form-assertion to the next as if possessed by what lexicographers call ‘a want of grammatical sequence; the passing to a new construction before the original one is completed’.29 And that duality has connections with another term, ‘irony’, in the sense of Friedrich Schlegel’s short polemic ‘Über die Unverständlichkeit’ [On Incomprehensibility] of 1800, which we know Arp to have read and admired. Irony, Schlegel had said,

29

Entry in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1964.

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is double-assertion, one element of which is more prominent, more conscious, than the other. In irony, by Schlegel’s lights, ‘everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open yet deeply hidden’. Irony originates in ‘the union of savoir vivre and scientific spirit, in the conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and a perfectly conscious philosophy’.30 If our speculations here are correct, Arp’s life-long enthusiasm for Romantic Naturphilosophie was paying dividends in his character-formation as a modern artist, but specifically as a Dada. It was as if, by the 1930s, Arp was using some venerated tactics – anacoluthon or irony or both – to satirize, even ridicule, Gestalt theory’s most cherished conclusions and ideas. For example, Koffka’s concept of ‘shaped boundedness’ had by the mid-1930s become the mainstay of a widespread regulative principle known as ‘holism’, to which almost everything in the Dada mentality was instinctively opposed. ‘Holism’ asserted perception’s de facto preference for intelligible and practical unities – of societies, communities and also works of art. This particular term had come into usage in 1926 in the writings of the South African conservative politician and theorist Jan Smuts, who developed a metaphysics of natural and human organization according to which the universe of matter organically arranges itself into ever larger (and enlarging) ‘wholes’, up to and including a supreme cosmic personality – Christ – who exemplifies and in effect dominates the totality. On the way to that synthesis, Smuts also took ‘holism’ to designate the ‘natural’ coherence of nation and race.31 It was a reading that the Berlin psychologists seemed powerless to resist. Perhaps the idea of ‘wholeness’ was too easy to commandeer and redefine. Yet the psychologists were not above some arbitrary stipulation themselves. A notable instance occurs in a passage of Koffka’s book on the perception of unity in Gestaltism. He presents two simple line diagrams drawn so as to offer a choice between seeing a single bounded volume interrupted by an internal division or seeing the same configuration as a discrete individual volume with a supplement added – a choice between a single bounded whole and two wholes each with a boundary of its own, what he called a ‘unum’ and a ‘duo’. Koffka says that the ‘best’ configuration

30

31

F. Schlegel, ‘On Incomprehensibility’ (probably 1800), in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinda, and the Fragments (trans P. Firchow), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1971, p 265. On Schlegel’s indebtedness to Fichte, see P. de Man, ‘The Concept of Irony’, Aesthetic Ideology, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp 163–84. Published in 1926, the synthesis advanced in Smuts’ Holism and Evolution had originated in the theories and personalities of Walt Whitman and Goethe, both of whom Smuts revered. Harrington, Reenchanted Science, note 94, p 269.

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is where an exterior boundary obeys a law of ‘good continuation’ – but then asks what is seen in conditions when the claims of ‘unum’ and ‘duo’ are equal? The answer he gives is that a figure appears ‘best’ when ‘good continuation’ favours the impression of individual boundaries around each part. However, in using terms like ‘good’ and ‘best’ he appeals to the existence of an alleged law of prägnanz – succinctness – which is to say, something very like ‘holism’ but in different terms. The psychologist Herta Kopferman responded to Koffka’s question differently, proposing that an enclosing outline rather than an interior one will generally predominate, to which Koffka replied by ruling that ‘it is at least extremely difficult, if not impossible, to produce such patterns as will fulfil the [equal-weight] conditions’.32 He seemed to deny that ambiguity in perception was ever possible at all. Much modern sculpture of the interwar period made repeated attempts to refute – at least complicate – that blanket assumption. By the time of Koffka’s book, Arp had already made a pair of works that do not have a single enclosing boundary and that stimulate in fresh ways the difficult question of the conditions under which a thing was considered one, or many. His Three Disagreeable

Fig 3.8  (left) Diagrams by Kurt Koffka and (right) diagram by Herta Kopfermann, from Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1935, p 153. 32

Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, p 153 and figure 24, citing Herta Kopferman, ‘Psychologische Untersuchungen über die Wirkung zweidimensionaler Darstellungen Körperlicher Gebilde’, Psychologische Forschung, no 13, 1930, pp 293–364.

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Fig 3.9  Hans Arp, Three Disagreeable Objects on a Face, 1930, plaster, 19 × 37 × 29.5 cm, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. © DACS 2019.

Objects on a Face of 1930 as well as his Sculpture to be Lost in a Forest of 1932 both comprise a larger form with three smaller forms loosely placed on top. Not only are the pieces physically discontinuous and lack a single surface, but the smaller forms can be moved, within limits, by the viewer’s hand.33 One work was reproduced in the London journal Axis in early 1935, along with other sculptures that can be described as multi-part, dislocated, fragmented – the terminology was necessarily unclear. In Henry Moore’s Carving of 1934, a sense of unity might be said to devolve from the implication that its four discontinuous parts all belong to a body (moreover the same body) of the ‘reclining nude’ type for which he was becoming known, its deep stone base playing a role in that unity too. The provisional unity of Two Forms, 1934, each part of which is carved in pynkado wood, relies not on the sense of a body but on a suggestion that the forms, one convex, one concave, were joined to each other before a slow process of erosion left them related, but apart. Some of Barbara Hepworth’s works from 1935 and published in Axis for July that year raise the question of unity in a more drastic way. In common with the principle underlying Arp’s Three Disagreeable Objects, the three pieces of her 33

The extent of manual manipulations for these works is in practice limited. In the plaster versions of the sculptures, the smaller forms could slide off if positioned awkwardly. In the bronze versions, the smaller forms are attached by pegs which allow limited movement around the peg. Movement is also limited in practice because the bronze surfaces are easily damaged by contact with an ungloved hand.

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Fig 3.10  Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934, pynkado wood, 27.9 × 54.6 × 30.8 cm (including base) as it appeared in H. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, 1936.

Three Forms (Carving in Grey Alabaster) of 1935 are not all fixed in position, nor do they belong to a single morphological type (Plate 9a). The taller piece might be said to ‘parent’ the smaller volumes, but that imagined kinship is not very convincingly implied. The viewer can see that the work gains its literal unity from the rectangular slab which is its base; but with one of the elements not permanently fixed, a mobile grouping comes into being which is like an organism on a level higher than that of any individual part. The young critic and classicist Henri Frankfort noticed this in saying ‘one is tempted to consider these works as living organisms in which distinct organs each with a character of its own exist independently within a larger unit which is more than the mere sum of its constituents’.34 The Axis writer Hugh Gordon Porteus made another suggestion: that this new kind of sculpture has ‘split itself up’, like primitive organisms that divide ‘in order to propagate their kind’.35 A third possibility is that the parts attract one another gravitationally like the planets, keep each other in orbit and moderate their flying apart. A fourth posits incompatible magnetic poles repelling each other. The very range of phenomenological readings is further evidence of how powerfully ambiguous the new part–whole relationships in art could be. It is a different matter when the parts of a sculpture move without being manually assisted. Alexander Calder was no closer to Dada than Hepworth was, 34 35

H. Frankfort, ‘New Works by Barbara Hepworth’, Axis, no 3, July 1935, p 14. My emphasis. H. Gordon Porteus, ‘New Planets’, Axis, no 3, July 1935, p 22.

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but, trained as an engineer before turning to sculpture, he had an instinctive eye for the light-hearted and the entertaining. Sometimes his sculpture’s motive power was the wind, in which case movements would be graceful and gentle. Relevant here is Calder’s cleverness with hinges, fulcra, parts sliding or gliding jerkily relative to one another – or other tricks of mechanism that ensured his sculptures never presented the same configuration because they were never still. Working in Paris before returning to the States in 1933, Calder’s work was known to both Barr and the editors at Axis; and both would publish the 1934 sculpture known as A Universe to exemplify Calder’s inventiveness with organic form. Powered by an electric motor, the red and white balls of A Universe ascend or descend at different speeds on wire paths, while the enclosing wire circles tremble, suggesting the vibration of space itself.

Fig 3.11  Alexander Calder, A Universe, 1934, motor-driven mobile: painted iron pipe, wire and wood with string, 102.9 cm high. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1934. © 2020 Calder Foundation, New York/DACS, London.

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Albert Einstein was once observed paying close attention to its entire (in practice unrepeatable) revolution over the course of some forty minutes. The wider implication of these early motorized works was that sculpture could be a material configuration in space signifying nothing – an entity ‘defined by its movement and non-existent without it’, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later say of Calder’s works.36 Such examples demonstrate that much interwar sculpture was itself a field of reflection on objecthood, identity and change. They also show how philosophically complex that visual-ontological agenda was – and how complex it remains. At the least, the assumption that every entity must have a determinate form was by now in disarray. More generally, we observe a curious symmetry between Gestalt theory’s obsession with unity in the 1930s and Dada’s commitment to its avoidance at any cost. Both projects shared an interest in the conditions under which form becomes broken, fragmentary or undecidable – Dada’s ‘ambiguous effect’ no less than the Gestaltists’ ‘segregated wholes’.37 The differences between them are now clear. While the scientific instinct was to resist duality or multiplicity, these were the qualities that the Dada artist wanted most urgently to pursue. What the Gestaltist wanted to render undesirable, even non-existent, the Dada artist was determined to find. * Anxieties about wholeness and sense-making can be found in almost every part of European culture between the wars. In Freudian and Jungian systems of psychoanalysis, designed ostensibly to reconcile fragmented parts of the psyche and perform an eventual ‘integration’ of the whole, metaphors of ‘splitting’ and ‘division’ were already well established. The neuroses could be defined accordingly, while the achievement of ‘good’ or even ‘whole and hearty’ psychological objects was held up as a self-evidently desirable goal.38 The same or similar metaphors contributed to judgements of modern art’s ‘incoherence’ 36

37

38

See J-P. Sartre, ‘Les Mobiles de Calder’, in Alexander Calder: Mobiles, Stabiles, Constellations, Galerie Louis Carré, Paris, 1946. The phrase ‘segregated whole’ appears in W. Köhler, ‘Bermerkungen zur Gestalttheorie (in Anschluss an Rignanos Kritik)’, Psychologische Forschung, no 2, 1928, pp 188–234; in translation, as ‘Reply to Eugenio Rignano’, in W. Ellis (ed), A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, with an Introduction by Kurt Koffka (1939), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1999, pp 389–96, here p 394. The term ‘whole and hearty object’ occurs in a later review by the Manchester psychoanalyst Michael Balint, ‘Notes on the Dissolution of Object-Representation in Modern Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol 10, no 4, 1952, reprinted in Balint, Problems of Human Pleasure and Behaviour, London, 1957, p 123. In modern art, Balint insisted, ‘objects are dismembered, split, cruelly deformed, messed about. The dirty, ugly qualities of objects are realistically and even Surrealistically revealed’ (p 121).

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and ‘incompleteness’ – hence its ‘ugliness’, its threat to the bourgeois sense of form.39 In physics also, the phenomena of quantum behaviour, uncovered during the later 1920s, could be viewed as opening a rift with the regularities of the macro-level as well as causing panic at the very idea of indeterminacy – and by implication the limits of what can be securely known. In political theory, the choice faced by the democratic nations around 1930 between a totalizing revolutionary Marxism on the one hand and a radical völkisch conservatism on the other was also frequently figured as one about ‘organicity’ and ‘wholeness’ (Ganzheit) at the level of the social community and even of the state.40 The place of Gestalt theory in the Weimar democracy is unquestionably problematic. Despite some impatience on Köhler’s part with the early claims of the German Republic, the wider affiliation of the Gestalt school was initially internationalist and republican, in the sense of promising a healing of the rift between science and everyday life, between man qua individual and man qua member of a group.41 Yet those ambitions could easily go awry. When Köhler claimed in his William James lectures at Harvard in 1938 that modern man had ‘unmediated experiences’ of ethical obligation, in the sense of knowing without reflection what to do in given circumstances, he surely trod on dangerous ground. It must have been obvious then – as it is now – that Gestalt theory could not possibly assist in deciding how rival moral obligations should be judged. Yet Köhler insisted that in the types of behaviour he assumed to constitute a moral norm, consciousness of symbolic meaning must always take second place to transparent outcomes. Here too, the Dada project saw matters very differently. Take the line diagrams that Köhler liked to publish to demonstrate the intrinsic patterns of cognition. In them, he proposed, it was just as necessary ‘that they should strive towards their own definite closure’ as it was that a human being ‘should proceed towards the intrinsically appropriate end of a behaviour sequence’. The goal of either was to 39

40

41

D-H. Kahnweiler’s remark in Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920) to the effect that at Cadaqués in 1910 Picasso had ‘shattered the closed form’ in his paintings of that year might be read in the same light. The coincidence of his comment – a staple anecdote of Cubist theory – and the first elaborations of Gestalt theory is deserving of further work. See my ‘Picasso’s Psychoanalytic Critics’, in A. Pop and M. Widrich (eds), Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, London, 2014, pp 49–68; and Chapter 4 below. Oswald Spengler’s call for an ‘organic wholeness’ in modern technological experience, published in 1918 as The Decline of the West, bore the subtitle ‘Gestalt and Reality’, and marks one symptom of a traditionalist cast of mind. Ash reports Köhler’s impatience with the Republic’s tolerance of artistic freedom, its chaotic parliamentary processes, its ‘general slovenliness’ [allgemeines sich gehen lassen] in defining a version of democracy; see Ash, Gestalt Psychology and German Culture, referring to a letter from Köhler to Hans Geitel, March 1920, p 292.

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become a ‘meaningful [sinnvolle] figure, organization or design’.42 It was another instance in which behaviour was said to require a practical coherence that, for any self-respecting Dada, it should wherever possible be denied. For an independent European Marxist such as Ernst Bloch, meanwhile, ‘holism’ as a synthetic philosophical outlook could never prevent its obsession with wholeness and order spilling over into some of the more toxic social proscriptions of the times.43 And Bloch had good reasons for his disquiet. Köhler’s disciple Wolfgang Metzger, who succeeded Wertheimer in Frankfurt when the latter moved to the USA, proved willing to ingratiate himself with the Nazis by adapting Gestalt metaphors of perception to the character and social conformity of ‘the whole person’. For Metzger, firmness of definition, durability and a will to permanence were qualities to be found in sense-perception and in political action alike.44 In a further degradation of Gestalt theory, this time at Leipzig under the leadership of Felix Krueger, a concept of Ganzheitspsychologie [wholeness psychology] was claimed to provide grounding for a version of social coherence supported by the most reactionary theories of race, communitarian identity and territorial entitlement. Metzger’s and Krueger’s adaptation of Gestalt theory to suit the Nazi agenda relied upon an assumption that cognition of natural wholes is structurally intrinsic to the organism when freed of cultural infiltration from outside. The Berlin school meanwhile was denigrated as Jewish, analytical, mechanistic and potentially chaotic. Even the notorious Führerprinzip [leader principle] could be supported by the Gestalt idea. In the words of the Austrian Ferdinand Weinhandl as early as 1931, that principle was ‘nothing other than the Gestalt quality that determines and rules the whole; [it is] the new, perhaps just-developing physiognomy of the whole’.45 In such a context, it 42 43

44

45

W. Köhler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts, Liverlight Publishing Corporation, New York, 1938, p 393. Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit [Heritage of Our Times], 1935 (reprinted Frankfurt am Main 1962; Ash, Gestalt Psychology and German Culture, p 305. Metzger joined the Sturmabteilung in 1933 and the Halle branch of the NSDAP in 1937. See his ‘Ganzheit und Gestalt: Ein Blick in die Werkstadt der Psychologie’, Erzieher im Braunhemd, no 6, 1938, p 92; Ash, Gestalt Psychology and German Culture, p 349 and n. 19, p 489. In his 1941 book Psychologie: Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einführing des Experiments [Psychology: The Development of Its Fundamental Assumptions since the Introduction of the Experiment], Darmstadt, 1941, Metzger argued that holistic thinking in Gestalt social psychology demonstrated a ‘spiritual battle’ with the atomistic approaches of the French enlightenment of Descartes and with the British empiricism of David Hume; that it proved, on the evidence of ‘dominance relations’ occurring naturally in the animal kingdom, that Gestalt theory and ‘the newest and experimentally best-founded form of political theory’ were in agreement; Ash, Gestalt Psychology and German Culture, p 352; also Metzger, ‘Der Auftrag der Psychologie in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Geist des Westens’, Volk und Werden, no 10, 1942. See further U. Geuter, The Professionalisation of Psychology in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992. F. Weinhandl, ‘Führer und Ganzheit’, Forschungen und Fortschritte: Nachrichtensblatt der Deutschen Wissenschaft und Technik, no 7, 1931, pp 211–12; cited in A. Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1996, p 179. The Austrian van Bertalanffy joined the Nazi Party in 1939 in the belief that his theory of ‘organicist holism’ validated the outlook of the Hitler state.

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became the mission of the Dada sensibility to show that ambiguity, randomness and incompletion were values that should at all costs be maintained. * Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber’s resistance to ‘holism’ – to bring her fully into the argument now – was from the beginning both determined and precise. In 1939 they undertook a series of line drawings together to which they gave the name ‘collaborations’, ‘cooperations’ or sometimes ‘duets’, continuing a working partnership of which Marital Sculpture had been one recent exemplification. In fact the 1939 Duet Drawings continue an experiment that reached back to the very beginning of their careers. They had met at Hans’ Galerie Tanner exhibition in Zürich in November 1915, at the time when Sophie was attending Rudolf Laban’s School of Expressive Dance in that city.46 She had done some crossstitching pictures collaboratively with Hans in 1916–17, had performed on stage at the opening of the Gallery Dada in Zürich in 1917 and had made a succession of ‘duo-collages’ with him in 1917 and 1918 (Plate 9b). She had made further collaborative works with him in the early 1920s in addition to her main solo output of applied art, puppets, dolls and dress designs, until at least the time of their jointly undertaken Aubette dance-hall project in Strasbourg of 1926. There had also been Cadavres Exquises carried out by the two of them with Óscar Domínguez, Marcel Jean and Raoul Hausmann in various combinations in 1938, and there would be further collaborations between them, Alberto Magnelli and Sonia Delaunay for the Album de Grasse that the foursome completed in wartorn France in 1941–42. In the 1939 Duet Drawings it is their double character, their split unity, that pulls one up short today. In the one configured here – and except for the spine that runs down the drawing’s left-hand side – no single reading seems to anchor a unitary perceptual grasping of the whole. No single, first-order intentional impulse can be attributed to what the viewer sees. One thinks of the puzzle-pictures that Köhler devised for his book Gestalt Psychology of 1947 in order to demonstrate how coherent unities will dominate a given percept even when other configurations are present in the array. Köhler had no great difficulty (to take one example) in persuading the reader that a numeral ‘4’ maintains its identity even when set amidst other elements of a tangled design, 46

She had also met Mary Wigman, Suzanne Perrotet and Katja Wulff at Laban’s school at Monte Verità. See S. Burkhalter, ‘Machines and Kinaesthesia: Dance in the Art of Sophie Taüber-Arp’, Today Is Tomorrow, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 2014, p 227.

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Fig 3.12  Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Duet Drawing, 1939 [from R. Motherwell (ed), Arp: On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–1947, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., New York, 1948, p 73].

but in Hans and Sophie’s drawings, by contrast, two separate identities are all but impossible to find. Sophie herself, it should be noted, had successfully uncovered a sort of programmatic doubling in her applied-art designs as early as 1917–18, in which sharply regular and cursively fluid linearities seem to vie with each other in the context of a single design. She had used a similar idiom in her Coquilles et Flames circular wood reliefs of 1938, painted all white in three or four levels of depth in quite another register from Ben Nicholson’s better-known white reliefs of that decade. The same subtle combination would appear again in the pages of her Sketchbook 6 of 1940–42, now at Clamart, in which straight-edge geometry and curvilinear grids regulate and demarcate each other on more-or-less equal terms. She used the mixture in some illustrations for Hans Arp’s Poèmes sans Prénoms [Poems without First-names] booklet, published in 1941; and finally it is the visual language used in the important Lignes d’été [Lines of Summer] and Lignes géométriques et ondoyantes [Geometrical and Wavy Lines] series of 1940 and 1941 (Plate 10). What is

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surprising is that, in the latter, the apparently fluid lines are not drawn freely but crafted from carefully drawn double-tracks, then coloured in centimetre by centimetre with a view to establishing curvatures that are precise and yet, when examined carefully, suggest some highly temporalized terms. A recent description will make the point. ‘She shaped the contours of this form’, says the critic Rahel Beyerle, ‘from two lines that run straight out of a nearly 90-degree angle, then (a) in a flowing transition or (b) following a blunt angular offset, bend in such a way that they approach one another, leaving only a narrow neck between their courses, until moving away from one another again due to a synchronized counter-flexion. A short while later, they turn toward one another again, to (c) merge into one another in the continuation, or (d) lead in another counter-bend to the zenith of two pointed angles, which are connected via a straight or curved line’. The lines ‘meander’, ‘stroll’, ‘separate’, ‘cross’, ‘float’, ‘accelerate’ and ‘stabilize’. They do so ‘precariously’, ‘exploringly’, ‘tentatively’ – as if the language of animated movement is essentially required.47 In the Duet

Fig 3.13  Diagram from Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology, Liverlight, New York, 1947, p 115. 47

The author is Rahel Beyerle, in ‘Sophie Taüber-Arp: The Line of Focus: A Linear Quartet in a Theoretical Context’, Today Is Tomorrow, Aargauer Kunsthaus, pp 250–1. My emphases. A few drawings of the series, taken in pairs, are mirror inversions of each other. This was also a concern of Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane (1926), in which he discusses ‘independently undulating curves … a broad, definite thrust upwards and to the right. Decreasing tension in leftward arc. Four waves are subordinated to an energetic impulse from lower left to upper right’, attached to which is a footnote which proposes that the directional energies ‘be examined by holding the book in front of a mirror … [or] by turning the book upside down’. Kandinsky notes that ‘The “mirror image” and “upside down” are still rather mysterious matters of great significance for the theory of composition’: Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 2, p 606.

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Drawings, in which two agents are involved, the instability is greater still. They were done at a time of uncertainty for both artists as they wrestled with the question of whether to leave Paris on the approach of war – and if so, precisely when (they left for the south of France in the spring of 1940). In this case it is a doubling of the work’s agency that produces paradoxes of intention that are not easily resolved. On the one hand, the viewer witnesses a dilution of intention, a kind of abandonment or ceding of desire that comes with closeness to another person – even a mutuality that implies a weakening or a surrendering of the self. Yet equally, the drawings can be seen as incarnating a higher and more developed form of will, one that wishes not to dilute but to intensify authorship – authorship now recast as delegation or permissiveness, aimed not at Ganzheit but at a differentiated and distributed kind of whole. Probably the alternatives are not supposed to be clear. In Dada collaborations of such a kind, and in such circumstances, agency is both lapsed and supercharged at the same time: a deflection of ordinary sense-making to facilitate sensemaking of another and more speculative kind. It is further evidence that the anomalies that Gestalt ‘holism’ liked to deny, Dada artists chose to mobilize and even enjoy. * It is time to elaborate on Hans Arp’s statement that his work must ‘find its humble place in the woods, in the mountains, in nature’.48 It is implicit in what has been said already that Dada’s relation to nature was never simple. In a statement known as ‘Strasbourg Configuration’, written by Arp in 1931 shortly after his turn to the ‘hewing’ of three-dimensional forms, we find an extended syllogism in which he connects the terms ‘Dada’, ‘nature’ and ‘sense’ in a manner touching upon all the themes discussed in this chapter so far. Written in four paragraphs with minimal punctuation and no capitalization, its main components are as follows: ‘Dada is for nature and against art’/‘Nature is sense-less’/‘Dada is for the sense-less which is not nonsense’/‘Make way for  nature’/‘Make Dada-way for Dada-nature’ [dada ist für die natur und gegen die kunst/natur ist unsinn/dada ist für den unsinn

48

From H. Arp, ‘Looking’, in J. Soby (ed), Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p 15.

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das bedeutet nicht blödsinn/platz da für die natur da/platz dada für die natur dada] – in which ‘sense-less’ [der Unsinn] carries the implication of lack of sense rather than madness, and where ‘nonsense’ [der Blödsinn] implies recklessness or stupidity.49 Unsinn is the term that articulates how a sculpture can ‘find its humble place in nature’ without denying the kind of agency that initially brought the work into being. Yet Arp’s method also depended upon a technique that we have not had cause to mention until now. From roughly the mid-1930s onwards, he developed an interest in photography as a technique for showing how der Unsinn works. By this time he was himself photographing, or having others photograph, his sculptures in different locations as well as in different orientations relative to the ground. In the important On My Way, published under the editorship of Robert Motherwell in America in 1948 in the Wittenborn Schultz series Documents of Modern Art, we find his stone Human Concretion

Fig 3.14  Photo-spread of Hans Arp, Human Concretion, 1936, stone [from R. Motherwell (ed), Arp: On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–1947, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., New York, 1948, pp 130–1. Photos Rolf Tietgens]. 49

H. Arp, ‘Strassburgkonfiguration’ (1931), in Worte mit und ohne Anker, Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1957, pp 11–13; in translation in M. Jean (ed), Jean (Hans) Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1974, pp 47–8.

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of 1936 photographed not once but four times, lying not on a firm rectangular base but outdoors, in a bed of clover. Arranged in a double-page spread, the sequence carries the implication that the object is in cinematic movement from one frame to the next. The sculpture’s trumpet-like protrusion is turned to the ground in one, faces half-up in two more, while in a fourth it is fully raised, like a creature initially asleep but with a power to rouse itself, then slowly elevate its neck and face the sky. The photographer was the Hamburg-born Rolf Tietgens, who after arriving in the USA from Germany in 1939 had become enamoured of popular Surrealist conceptions of the photograph that owed nothing to the radical practices of Man Ray or Jacques-André Boiffard, but rather embodied a sort of trivial Surrealism that urged exploitation of camera angles, truncation, conjunction, inversion and the like that any owner of a small hand-held camera of that time could practice.50 No doubt Arp had instructed Tietgens in how Human Concretion should be photographed. As presented in On My Way, the sequence conveys the impression that the object is scarcely a sculpture at all. At least, the suggestion that a sculpture could have several distinct modes of contact with its support was unique within the larger Western tradition of three-dimensional work.51 Yet photography’s ability to animate and destabilize Arp’s work was by now becoming the norm. One can find the granite Mirr of 1936 pictured in four alternative positions relative to its base, of which three are shown in On My Way; the granite Lunar Armor of 1938 in three, of which two are in On My Way; the plaster Interregnum of 1938 (in a later granite version known as Shell Crystal) in four, of which two are in On My Way; while Oru, a work of 1953, would elsewhere have three; and so on.52 Tietgens also trained his camera on Arp’s Giant Seed of 1936 (titled Plant Organism in the 1948 publication), making it appear like a large bird-like creature pausing

50

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52

Writing in the American popular magazine Minicam of the ‘super-reality’ that can be achieved by looking through the camera lens inventively and by capturing objects in surprising conjunctions with each other, Tietgens enthused about a hidden dimension to things that ‘comes out of the life of the objects, touches us somehow and gives the feeling that something previously unknown has sprung into life’. See Tietgens, ‘What is Surrealism?’, Minicam Magazine, July 1939, pp 30–7; here p 30. Tietgens’ four-part sequence was also published in C. Giedion-Welcker, ‘Contemporary Sculpture IV: Jean Arp’, Horizon, vol 14, no 82, October 1946, between pages 232 and 233. A slightly later example is the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s folding bichos sculptures that can be placed in different orientations both internally and with respect to a support. I have touched upon the photographic character of On My Way in ‘A Dada among Pragmatists’, in M. Steinkamp and L. Wurtenburger (eds), Hans Arp in the USA, Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp e. V., Vol I, Berlin/Rolandswerth, 2016, pp 69–87.

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Fig 3.15  Hans Arp, Plant Organism [or Giant Seed], 1936, limestone on a ­revolving base, 147 cm high [from Stefanie Poley, Hans Arp. Die Formensprache im plastischen Werk, Stuttgart, 1978, plate 82, p 58].

on its flight and looking upwards to the sky, while in another photograph he takes advantage of the revolving base that the artist had provided for the work and photographed it from below, the sculpture now turned against the passing clouds and the sun’s glare, one bud or protuberance melting into the fluffiness of the cloud behind it, while the other looms threateningly above, darkened in shadow as if announcing a sudden change in the weather.53 This endowment of mutability in the artwork – the sculpture no longer a fixed entity but a quasi-animal being belonging to no fixed order of nature, and with an unstable life of its own – was fundamental to Arp’s outlook during the 1930s and 1940s, and his preferred mode of presentation during the whole of the latter part of his career. * So central were questions of wholeness, coherence and sense-making to Western culture in the interval between the two world wars and afterwards that other 53

The former photograph of Giant Seed, taken shortly after its making, can be found in Motherwell (ed), Arp: On My Way: Poetry and Essays 1912–1947, Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., New York, 1948, p 44.

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intellectual projects would devote essential resources to them. Martin Heidegger’s sympathies in modern art may have been limited – even though he was interested in Braque’s later paintings, and in the phenomenology of matter, space and place in Ernst Barlach, Bernhard Heiliger and Eduardo Chillida, whose works he strongly admired.54 There is no record of his having looked at Hans Arp’s work, but had he done so he would have been taxed by a particular problem. Heidegger’s major work Sein und Zeit [Being and Time], published in 1927, spoke to the very anxieties about objecthood and identity that have concerned us in this chapter so far. First, there are suggestive parallels between Heidegger’s altogether dynamic view of how a reading of poetic form must go and Arp’s own articulation of the processes by which many of his sculptural objects (and those of his collaborations with Sophie Taeuber) might be understood. Arp’s fascination for pre-Socratic thought included a special regard for Heraclitus’ maxim ‘Nature loves to hide’ [phusis kruptesthai philei], much later echoed in Schelling’s observations on the tension between modesty and exposure in the constantly changing movement of being. It was Heidegger in the interwar period who now tried to bring Heraclitus’ maxim up to date, identifying the Greek idea of phusis (‘nature’) precisely with that of Sein (‘Being’), not in the sense of object-hood – modernist or otherwise – but in the sense of an active principle of continual withdrawal, disclosure and revelation within the brute appearance of all natural things. ‘What does the word phusis say?’ Heidegger asks in his later Introduction to Metaphysics. ‘It says that which flourishes from itself … the action of unfolding while opening and, within this act of unfolding, to make its appearance, to maintain itself within this appearing, and to remain there.’55 So far as humanly made objects are concerned – metaphors, poems, works of visual art – Heidegger argued that we cannot but come to an interpretive understanding of them with certain presuppositions already in mind. Whereas with an object in nature we look for laws of growth and decay that make prediction possible, we do not thereby claim in any way to understand it. On the contrary, the proposal of Sein und Zeit is that the process of ‘reading’ an intentional object implies a prior understanding, however sketchy or incomplete, of a plan or scheme of intention that we believe to be there. Heidegger admits that the hermeneutic process so

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55

See N. Cox, ‘Braque and Heidegger on the way to poetry’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol 12, no 2, December 2007, pp 97–115; and A.J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford University Press, California, 2010. M. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 1965, cited in P. Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, p 305.

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described sounds like a circle, potentially a vicious one: ‘But if we think this to be a vicious circle and try to avoid it’, the philosopher says in response, ‘even if one merely suspects it of being an imperfection, then the act of understanding has been entirely misunderstood … The circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge is allowed to move. It is the expression of the existential fore-knowledge [Vorhabe] of Dasein [Being-there] itself.’ And what is decisive ‘is not to get out of the circle [of understanding], but to come into it in the right way’, whether that fore-knowledge belongs to one agent, more than one, or to a collective.56 What Heidegger’s methodology shared with Dada was a puzzle about Being per se. The philosopher’s insistence that humankind’s error was to forget Being itself for the sake of ‘beings’, that it was the task of philosophy and art to recover it, enabled him in his later philosophy to formulate Being in explicitly temporal terms. ‘What ambiguously or confusedly we call being’, he said at Le Thor, ‘the Greek philosophers experienced as what presences [das Anwesende], because Being was granted to them as presence [Anwesenheit] and in this presence what was thought together was the passage from prescencing to absencing, from arriving to departing, from emerging to passing away, that is, movement.’57 Form generally in Heidegger’s method comes to be ‘the result of the dialectic interplay between the pre-figurative structure of the fore-knowledge and the intent at totality of the interpretative process’ – in Paul de Man’s words of elucidation. And that totality is not closed but must be immersed in temporality. The completed form ‘is constituted in the mind of the interpreter as the work discloses itself in response to his questioning – but this dialogue between work and interpreter is endless’. Further still, the work’s temporality should remind us ‘that form is never anything but a process on the way to its completion’.58 They are speculations directly relevant to our case. For even if the principle had been glimpsed by the Romantic authors, for example in Goethe’s writings on morphology, the Dada project always demanded that the argument be pressed further, if necessary to destruction. Dadas generally were despairing about the 56

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Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 1927 (in the translation by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1973, Book I, Chapter V, at H.152, p 194). I am indebted here to P. de Man, ‘Form and Intent in the New American Criticism’, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, Routledge, London and New York, 1983, whose translation of the passage from Sein und Zeit I have used here, p 30. The seminars took place in Le Thor, in the Vaucluse area of France, in 1966, 1968 and 1969. See M. Heidegger, Four Seminars (trans A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul), Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2012, p 42. P. de Man, ‘Form and Intent in the New American Criticism’, p 31. My emphasis.

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shortcomings of systematic philosophy, hermeneutic or otherwise. One recalls Theo van Doesburg’s statement – we shall meet it again – that ‘whole generations have inhaled the pernicious fumes of philosophy, religion and art, believing the resulting katapepsis to represent the true condition of life’.59 The Russian adherents of ‘za-um’ [beyond sense] had recently insisted on something very similar. Der Unsinn in Arp’s case – lack of sense, outside it, beneath it, beyond it – developed the spirit of those themes. His ‘Dada-nature’ always implied that the interpretative problem could never be solved; that the question was not how to ‘come into the circle in the right way’, but whether there was a circle to come into at all.

59

T. van Doesburg, ‘What is Dada???????’ (1923), in Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 135.

4

Monstrosity

Monsters played a deep role in European culture between the two world wars. Animal presences with oversized bodies, or bodies seeming to exist beyond the bounds of biological normality – such can be found in film, in fiction and throughout the popular imagination of modernity. In Hollywood classics such as The Lost World (1925), Stark Mad (1929) or King Kong (1933), giant apes or hairy-tentacled creatures would haunt the public mind – and entertain it too. But these are not the monsters that concern us here. In the culture of art, it was the human form in different degrees of deformation that led commentators to bemoan the morality – often the sanity – of the artists involved. To the artists themselves, freedom from the canons of biological normality could prove exhilarating, even necessary – as if extremity was the only result worth pursuing in an age devoted to limits of most other kinds. * Picasso had acquired a reputation for re-arrangements of the human form well before the 1920s. The American journalist Gelett Burgess, on seeing the Demoiselles d’Avignon and other works in Picasso’s Paris studio in 1910, had spoken of ‘ultramarine ogresses … monstrous, monolithic women, creatures like Alaskan totem poles, hacked out of solid, brutal colours … sub-African caricatures, figures with eyes askew’. In describing Picasso as ‘a devil’ – but also as ‘exuberant’, ‘scornful’ and ‘humorous’ – Burgess saw the signs of a personality that a much younger Spanish artist, Salvador Dalí, would respond to in his turn.1 There were important differences in their backgrounds. Picasso was from the 1

G. Burgess, ‘The Wild Men of Paris’, Architectural Record, New York, May 1910, pp 407–8; in G. Schiff (ed), Picasso in Perspective, Prentice Hall, NJ, 1976, pp 30–1.

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south of Spain and had been a child prodigy in art before a mercurial career, first in Barcelona and then in Paris. Dalí was a Catalan, and his attachment to the mysterious coastline near Cadaqués in northern Spain would be ever present. His junior by twenty-three years, Dalí’s first encounter with Picasso in person was at a moment when the older artist was in the throes of freeing himself from the Cubist manner that he himself had invented: it was in April 1926, in Picasso’s rue de la Boëtie studio in Paris, where could be seen a group of paintings in which a single detail seemed to fascinate the younger man. In a medium-sized table-top still-life entitled Studio with Plaster Head, painted by Picasso the previous summer at Juan-les-Pins, in the south of France, could be seen what most writers have called a ‘double-head’, done by painting the shadow of the plaster head itself on the wall behind, giving rise to both a frontal as well as a three-quarter view. Once back in Spain, Dalí himself began mimicking that form of visualization in paintings of his own – Homage to Erik Satie and

Fig 4.1  Pablo Picasso, Studio with Plaster Head, 1925, oil on canvas, 98.1 × 131.1 cm [detail], Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Fig 4.2  Salvador Dalí, Barcelona Mannequin, 1926, oil on canvas, 198 × 148 cm [detail]. Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, Dalí Bequest 1989, no 81.

Still Life by Moonlight, both of 1926, and Barcelona Mannequin of 1927 are all good examples. It was a spatial and imaginative trick that had an immediately liberating effect on Dalí’s work. His friend Sebastià Gasch wrote of the visit to Paris that Dalí, hitherto rendered timid and over-rational by too much reason, ‘could not have remained indifferent to these new vibrations; the receptive antennae of his talent are far too sensitive to underestimate the new direction that Picasso is once again signalling for contemporary painting’.2 The direction in question included other inventions too. It is likely that Dalí saw another work by Picasso on the same occasion, a large painting known as The Three Dancers, also painted the previous summer in Juan-les-Pins, that marked a new level of boldness for Picasso as well signs of a darkening, perhaps despairing mood. Picasso had met the sometime Dada agitator and playboy Francis Picabia at Mougins, near the coast, and had reacted with some perplexity to what he saw of his current work. Picabia had built himself an elaborate home he called Chateau de Mai and was at that moment painting a series that came to be known as Monstres, lampooning the demi-monde of the Côte d’Azur with mercilessly kitschy patterns and a wonkily casual style. Picasso’s Three Dancers was to some degree a raid on that eccentric manner.3 Three hand-linked figures engage in a

2

3

S. Gasch, ‘Salvador Dalí’, Ciutat, February 1927; in F. Fanés, ‘The First Image: Dalí and his Critics, 1919 to 1929’, M. Raeburn (ed), Salvador Dalí: The Early Years, South Bank Centre, London, 1994, p 92. For example, Picasso’s painting Le Baiser [The Embrace] of the summer of 1925 has proved difficult to altogether dissociate from Picabia’s scabrous and lampooning style. See A. Verdier, ‘Monstres délicats. Été 1925, Picasso avec Picabia’, in A. Verdier (ed), Picasso Picabia, Musée Granet, Aix-enProvence, 2018, pp 54–62 for a recent discussion.

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macabre dance at once desperate and celebratory before a balcony window inside a first-floor room. For Dalí and for others who have been struck by the painting since, a particular detail stands out: Picasso had painted, scratched out and then several time re-painted the left-hand figure in a lavishly destructive idiom. The figure is bent backwards in what seems like an ecstatic trance. Furthermore, she seems both visible and invisible, solid and transparent at the same time, a frenzied maenad whose eyes, teeth and sexual attributes evoke unavailability and illusion, danger and temptation simultaneously. Under any description the figure is monstrous – in her energy, in her skeletal ambiguity, in her grimacing expression; and Dalí would respond to it some three years later by duplicating those attributes in a smaller but powerful painting of his own. His The Rotting Donkey of 1928 – the adjective could be ‘putrid’ or ‘decayed’ – conjures up a frenzied dancing creature on the seashore whose principal attributes, once more, comprise a catalogue of impossible conjunctions: upright and bending, hairy and soft-skinned, naked and clothed, sundered by light and dark, animal and viscerally humanoid – yet anchored by the familiar form of the Cadaqués shoreline, complete with a sandy beach on which the figure and the rotting

Fig 4.3  Pablo Picasso, The Three Dancers, 1925, oil on canvas, 215.3 × 142.2 cm © Tate, London 2019. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019.

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donkey both stand (Plate 11). It should be pointed out too that the left body-side of Dalí’s painted figure is surfaced with actual sand, recalling the scratched and re-worked surface of Picasso’s maenad of three years before. None of this is to suggest that Dalí would follow Picasso closely, and the relationship between them was never personally close. Yet Dalí would revere Picasso as much as he revered anybody in art, and it is unlikely – as Gasch implied – that the mercurial Catalan would have found his scandalous and scandalizing manner without Picasso’s mesmerizing lead. They would become – they still are – modern art’s great manipulators of the human form. To turn to Picasso first. Early in 1926 he had done the first of two large grisaille paintings of crowded interior scenes (The Milliner’s Workshop and Painter and Model), distinguished by swirling curvilinear contours that tended to swallow up and rearticulate the disposition of the figures they help to define. The paintings themselves are a riot of formal invention with the looping line – yet equally the figures themselves, squeezed and disarticulated in the process, have had to put up with whatever distortions, elongations and truncations those lines might happen to have imposed. We can see now that they functioned as a prelude to a further set of paintings done in 1927 and the following three years in which the human and specifically the female figure would be reimagined as never in Western art before. For example, the beginning of the year saw the completion, after many studies, of a Seated Figure that deploys those looping cursive lines to define a woman of uncertain age, seated in a mostly grey room (the tonality of indecision, perhaps) who confronts the viewer with a no less uncertain expression on her intense and crowded face (Plate 12a). Or the expression could be described as confusion, for, in the area of the head and face, we see the most concentrated arrangement of double as well as upside-down profiles that has occurred in his painting hitherto. A vaginal eye – that is, a vertical slit or almond-shape – is positioned low in the face, where the mouth might be. The figure’s right ear doubles as an eye that the painter has displaced to that position below. Two more dot-like eyes or nostrils assemble in between, while a mass of dark brushed hair sweeps down one side of the head as if in competition with the lighter-coloured hair on the right. Taking the figure as a single personality, one reads those formal contraries as a sign of what one scholar calls her ‘complex psychological experience … her deepening withdrawal from “reality” and her mental turmoil’.4 And in one sense there is no gainsaying the singularity of the 4

The phrases are from E. Cowling, Picasso, Style and Meaning, Phaidon, London, 2002, p 484.

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figure presented in the frame. Yet the likelihood is that the sitter is not one, but two – two-in-one or even one-in-two, in a sense that is simple to explain. The many – too many – speculative biographies of the artist tell us that his relations with his wife Olga were at that moment in decline, and that his meeting with the young Marie-Thérèse Walter at the beginning of 1927 marked the start of a period of intense erotic attachment that runs alongside, and interferes with, the relationship with his wife. Given the moment when Seated Figure was painted, it is difficult not to see the painting as ‘double’ in the sense of containing two women occupying the same physical space, in the same room and at the same time. And that space – as a reading of the period by T.J. Clark has persuaded us – is both the actual room-space of the literal world, the space of tangible possessions, of things measurable and ownable, but also a space of projection, a kind of screen-space onto which can be thrown the real images and phantasms of the mind.5 Seated Figure in that case becomes the literalization of a psychic process, a place where self and ‘other’ meet. ‘Thrown’ is perhaps too cinematic a metaphor for the processes involved – too cut-and-dried to convey the element of self-modification that the artist must undertake in his give-and-take with the canvas, the sequence of discoveries that for him the painting always came to be.6 And if Picasso’s marital conflicts were the only topic of the painting – this or any other – we would be quickly bored by the performance of them, however daringly or convincingly done. As it is, we see him repeating the attempt to redefine a female imago in a dozen or more paintings of this and the following three years, years in which he is regularly described as a ‘Surrealist’ and courted by André Breton’s faction of that movement in the form in which it existed then. We find, for example, that the doubling of light and dark (Marie-Thérèse against Olga, in Seated Figure) could also become a painterly way of suggesting the sudden illumination of an interior space from the outside – even the literal outside where the literal viewer stands. In the large and important Painter and His Model, also from the spring of 1927, we now see a wholly grotesque female figure seemingly caught in some form of exterior illumination as it flashes, from a lantern perhaps or from lightning, from our 5

6

The Toronto Seated Figure of early 1927 is not referred to in T.J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2013, but the argument about roomspace is chapter two, ‘Room’, pp 59–110. ‘At one time’, he said to Zervos in 1935, ‘my paintings proceeded by progression. Each day brought something new. A painting was a sum of additions. With me, a painting is [now] a sum of destructions. I make a painting, then I destroy it’; C. Zervos, ‘Conversations avec Picasso’, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, 1935, pp 173–8; my translation is from M-L. Bernadac and A. Michael, Picasso: Propos sur l’Art, Gallimard, Paris, p 33.

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side of the canvas into the room – a room in which a stick-figure artist attempts to paint the female’s appearance on a stick-like canvas positioned somewhere behind. As so often in Picasso, the artist-and-model motif has become a cipher for the activity of looking itself – sometimes erotic, sometimes despairing or alienated – as much as an in-folding of Picasso himself as a painter inside the scene. The female figure herself is extremely difficult to describe. Medusoid in her general appearance, the body that sags below the diminutive head is roughly triangular and heavily gravitational, her generous breasts protruding sideways into the flashes of light that enter the scene. It could almost be a stage set, with an

Fig 4.4  Pablo Picasso, The Painter and His Model, 1927, oil on canvas, 214 × 200 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran.

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ageing cabaret girl attempting a risqué performance, or else a moment from an Alfred Jarry play. Inevitably, we notice the figure’s lower anatomy too. Her legs are footless, the larger leg a stump that anchors the unfortunate creature to the ground. It is a figure-type and a body-posture that Picasso would repeat, with extraordinary variations, throughout that summer and into the following year. During the summer of 1927, spent at Cannes, Picasso produced a group of drawings that isolate a single female figure on a beach-like setting – no longer confined to an indoor space but suddenly exposed to the sun and glare of the outdoors. From one drawing to the next, we feel it is the same figure from her posture and morphology alone. In several of them a leg, elephantine and seemingly swollen, goes somewhat forward, the other pointed and preserving balance, while the misshapen torso above has been fitted out anatomically with buttocks, phalluses, orifices-by-suggestion – and in the most frightening instances a grimacing picturebook smile. In their scale alone, these beach-figures are massively large (it is the period in which Picasso is toying with a design for a monument to

Fig 4.5  Pablo Picasso, Bather by a Cabin, 1927, graphite, 30 × 23 cm, Sketchbook 35, Inv. MP. 1874. Folio 31, recto. Musée Picasso, Paris. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019.

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Apollinaire, and seems to have wanted monumental dimensions as well as a quasioutdoor space). At least, those drawings are the precursor to a further assault on the monument-female idea, once Picasso is back in Paris that autumn. Two paintings especially mark this moment as the zenith – or nadir – of the artist’s horror-story style. In a quickly done (perhaps incomplete) grisaille Figure of the autumn of 1927 the beach horizon has been so lowered that the monster-woman towers above where the viewer notionally stands. Her smile has become a leer, cheesy and insincere. One breast is weaponized into a sharp point, below which a cruel phallus springs up to nearly touch its dangerous tip. The elephantine forward leg now protrudes from somewhere near the elbow, the figure kneeling on that forward knee in a supplicant posture somehow incompatible with her towering scale. Figure’s partner painting – given its nearidentical dimensions – is the work known as Nude on a White Background, also done in the autumn, in which a kneeling figure is this time inside a more-orless definable room, naked in front of a bathroom mirror perhaps, before an

Fig 4.6  Pablo Picasso, Figure, 1927, grisaille, 133 × 103 cm, Private Collection, Estate of Pablo Picasso.

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Fig 4.7  Pablo Picasso, Nude on a White Background, 1927, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019.

open window that casts light-and-shadow on her as she preens, holding aloft a comb with which to give attention to her flailing hair.7 Meanwhile, her left hand goes to one nipple, the other and sharper nipple pointing upwards from her shoulders, while her head is thrown backwards in a cliché of erotic display. Is she looking at herself – or at the viewer/painter who may be glimpsing her from somewhere outside the room? Her expression is worth noting carefully. 7

The down-on-one-knee posture (it would be adopted by Dalí in due course) has numerous possible origins. Designating allegiance or fealty in much older traditions of art, it may derive, however remotely, from the toreador’s ‘taking the knee’ towards the end of the bull-fight as he holds the cloth low to tempt the bull to lower its head. ‘Taking the knee’ is understood as a gesture of victory but also one of partnership in the ritual.

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In accordance with the ironic glamour that Picasso has given her, her mouth is verticalized, armed with more teeth than have ever been given to an individual of anthropomorphic kind. The figure’s kneeling posture itself looks strained, almost too uncomfortable to bear. Of course, that facial expression may also be understood as a version of summer sunshine sex appeal just then being popularized in the weekly glamour press – with the caveat that the topic of feminine glamour was already subject to the complex identifications, projections and recoilings of which Picasso was proving himself to be the century’s most controversial barometer. And he was by no means finished with the theme. In their turn, the works of 1927 were a prelude to further canvases, small ones in 1928 and larger ones in 1929, painted in the much chillier ambience of the Dinard on the Atlantic coast. He was already expert in modulating from linear painting, which diagrammed reality by outline, to fully volumetric illusion in which roundedness became palpably situated in a closed-in space. We know that spatiality – distance – was never one of Picasso’s themes. ‘I never saw a landscape’, he once said to Geneviève Laporte, explaining that ‘I’ve always lived inside myself.’8 With the seaside again as the setting, his works become disturbingly airless and enclosed. Now it is Marie-Thérèse who takes up the monster-glamour role, frolicking with a beachball or attempting to enter a beach-hut whose door never seems to open, her body contracting and elongating as she does so, carving out strange bits of geometry from the spaces between legs, arms, beach and sky (Plate 12b). In other paintings of the series she morphs into a praying mantis or a crab, or simply stands still like a monument made of sand-coloured wood or stone. As for the Apollinaire monument, several maquettes were made in the autumn of 1928, a series of linear wire constructions on the one hand, but on the other some small, kneeling and animalish tumescences known as Metamorphosis I and II respectively, clearly related to the eroticized bather figures of the recent paintings. André Billy, of the Monument Committee, described the one he saw as ‘bizarre, monstrous, mad, incomprehensible, almost obscene, a sort of unidentifiable lump that looks as though it’s got sexual organs sticking out of it here and there’.9 8

G. Laporte, Si Tard le Soir, Plon, Paris, 1973, p 44; in M-L. Bernadac and A. Michael (eds), Picasso: Propos sur l’Art, Gallimard, Paris, 2015, p 138.

9

André Billy, reported by Paul Léautaud, in P. Read, Picasso and Apollinaire: The Persistence of Memory, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2008, p 160. The tenth anniversary of the death of Apollinaire was 9 November 1928.

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Fig 4.8  Pablo Picasso, Metamorphosis II, 1928, painted plaster, 22.6 × 18 × 11.5 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019.

Monstrosity and erotic allure seem part and parcel of each other, on this evidence, the one or the other prevailing according to circumstances, or according to the viewer by whom the work was being seen. It is monstrosity alone that prevails in the well-known 1929 painting Large Nude in a Red Armchair (Musée Picasso), Picasso’s seriously ill wife Olga now an unhappy presence rendered flat and sagging in a claustrophobical interior space, her anguish echoing through the painting’s high-register colour scheme of red, green, violet and yellow. Back on the Dinard beach that year, against a windless and cloudless sky, a statuesque Nude Standing by the Sea (Metropolitan Museum), whose subject must be Marie-Thérèse, raises her right arm over her head to grasp her left, her prominent belly signifying a full erotic humanity, even an imagined pregnancy. Then, in the early days of January 1930, with Picasso back in Paris and with the weather quite unsuitable for the beach, a series of sketch-like paintings that imagine an altogether new kind of being: an over-towering figure somehow disarticulated, as if made of bones or roughly carved wood that barely connect with each other. What passes for the figure’s head in these sketches can seem like

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a vacant volume defined by two miniature arms meeting somewhere near the figure’s mouth. They were in fact studies for a well-over life-sized Seated Bather in which an even more disarticulate figure, seemingly made of bone-and-wood, sits incongruously on the pale sand against the backdrop of the open sea and sky (Plate 13). Monument-like, the figure’s parts scarcely touch each other, yet taken as an ensemble may still be said to form a bodily Gestalt of some kind – as if Picasso had modulated a body-scheme invented for one purpose into a situation responsive to quite another. Painted well before the beginning of spring, Seated Bather must be one of the strangest seated females in all of twentieth-century art, and it has never been clear how to describe it. An early attempt was made by the Marxist critic Max Raphael. He had spent the period before 1930 teaching art history to workingclass students at the Volkshochschule in Berlin and preparing a book on art and ideology; it was published to wide acclaim after his move to Paris in 1933. ‘The woman seated on the ground before the sea and the sky encloses in both arms the knee of her bent right leg’, says Raphael. ‘It rises above the horizon’ (in fact it does no such thing). Yet the painting is significant to Raphael because in it, he suggested, could be seen the inner contradictions of the bourgeois mind. He responds, like other viewers, to the dialogue of fleshy bodyparts and more wooden – even carved – components that play havoc with any unitary understanding of how the figure is made. Here we have at least three functions juxtaposed; the pressure of the body against the ground and the resulting resistance; withdrawal into oneself; and the rising of the torso above the ground. In order to develop simultaneously these three functions with the woman’s body, Picasso had to strip away the flesh to the point where all that is left is a translucent jointed doll. This bold idea of expressing the most intense life through contrast with a skeleton is already the sign of an inner split.10

It was a ‘split’ that had started in Picasso’s ‘Blue’ period, according to Raphael, in the form of a ‘setting-off of delimited figures or groups against a limitless background’, and in the period after Cubism in the simultaneous use of classicism and abstraction. It pointed to Picasso’s failure to reconcile idealism and materialism – his inability to solve the problem of dialectics except in terms of a ‘static balance’ between two poles. And this split and this manner of overcoming it, states Raphael in conclusion, ‘are to be found in every area ofmodern life [such as] in the antagonistic opposition between private property and monopolism, and the manner in which a law-making 10

M. Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso (Paris, 1933); in the translation by I. Marcuse and edited by J. Tagg, Humanities Press: Atlantic Highlands, NJ, and Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1980, p 133.

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machine seeks to overcome it by means of dictatorship’. Such excessive multiplicity, both simultaneous and successive, is ‘the symbol of the bourgeois ruling class’; and as its most brilliant representative, ‘Picasso most purely and most powerfully represents the nature of the bourgeois world of our day.’11 It is not a reading that has stood the test of time – any more than it responded to the complex bodily projections and introjections that this phase of Picasso’s painting seems more widely to contain. The problem of the image that seems to crack, or divide, or fall apart in unrelated pieces, we have encountered before. What test or tests are being applied to determine whether a given fragment belongs to a larger whole – or falls beyond it? Picasso’s friend and dealer DanielHenry Kahnweiler reports a later conversation with Picasso in which the subject of Gestalttheorie was being raised. Picasso said he was struck by how Gestalt theory had been proposed at the very moment of Cubism – how the psychologists had submitted all visual detail to the tremendous pressure of the law of the whole, not just for the laboratory subject but for ‘everything in the life of the spirit’.12 Picasso understood that every question of form had been subjected to it; and that life-attributes such as ‘organicity’ and ‘vitality’ had been coerced to conform. A convention had arisen, and a restrictive one, that a sense of living unity could not to be defined without it. Disunity was the grounds on which Picasso’s bather paintings attracted other comment too.13 Mostly, those comments depended upon moving rapidly from unassailable evidence of splitting and dissociation to some larger generalizations of theory, but without prior agreement on what counts as a ‘split’ or a ‘fragment’ in the first place. In the fledgling science of psychiatry, for instance, it had long been assumed that splitting and dissociation were symptoms of mental dysfunction. The terminology had been adopted in both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, and in 1930 it was being applied to visual art as well. The Freudian canon already contained one theory – that ‘art-work’ on the part of 11

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Raphael, Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, pp 133, 134, 138. In his other comments, Raphael alleges Jung ‘curries favour like a philistine with the small-minded bourgeoisie who make their own monied impotence the measure of all things’; see M. Raphael, ‘C.G. Jung vergreift sich an Picasso’, Information, 6 December 1932, pp 4–7. D-H. Kahnweiler, ‘Entretiens avec Picasso au sujet des Femmes d’Alger’, Aujourd’hui, no 4, September 1955; in Picasso: Propos sur l’Art, p 76. Picasso’s biographer John Richardson has claimed that Andreas Vesalius’ illustrated anatomical treatise De humani corporii fabrica of 1543, with its images of dissected bone-structures of the body, was the immediate source for the Picasso’s Seated Bather. But bones are not entirely what we see in Seated Bather, nor the articulation of vertebrae and ligaments that Picasso is claimed to have admired. See J. Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years 1917–1932, Pimlico Publishing, London, 2009, pp 391–4.

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the painter (the term proved less well suited to sculpture) could be likened to ‘dream-work’ on the part of the dreamer, made evident in the revisions made by the so-called secondary processes to the hideous dismemberments enacted at the primary level beneath. In a celebrated 1929 paper by Melanie Klein, to take one instance, a process of reparation – or restitution – lay at the heart of all creative work by restoring a sense of wholeness to parts of a unity torn asunder by the primary process. From this perspective, not one but two operations were seen to be contained in the fractured modern work of art, or in works of art tout court: destruction and often violent deformation on the one hand, and an urge to wholeness and repair on the other.14 To the Freudian school more broadly, Picasso’s splits and fragmentations of the period – Dalí’s too, as we shall see – seemed so violent as to make it impossible to say (or to see) whether reparation had even been attempted. If to Max Raphael the Seated Bather mirrored the dialectical crisis of the European bourgeoisie, for those active in psychoanalysis the most prominent artists thrown up by Surrealism were struggling to attain the integration required of any work of art at all. ‘Integration’ was not to Picasso’s purpose, however – nor to Dalí’s. Yet by 1930 they were becoming public figures, and both were aware of the pressure to give some kind of psychological explanation for their newest work. Dalí would announce some provocative principles of his own that he wanted to govern his paintings; principles of vision, principally, and of the necessity of the mind’s delusions with respect to what it thinks it sees. Picasso preferred to couch his self-commentary in general and abbreviated terms. ‘I want nothing but emotion to be given off by a picture of mine’, he said to his friend Christian Zervos in 1935. ‘A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.’ And importantly, ‘art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon’.15 He is explaining to Zervos that ‘normality’ has become the enemy; that the artist must disregard it, go beyond it, exceed it, come what may. As to Freudian ‘science’, Picasso was beyond that kind of arcana too. His biographer John Richardson asked Jacqueline Roque some time later what Picasso thought of Freud, to which she replied ‘Il preférait l’autre’ – he preferred Jung.16

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M. Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol 10, 1929, pp 436–43; here from the edition J. Mitchell (ed), The Selected Melanie Klein, Penguin Books, London, 1991, pp 84–94. C. Zervos, ‘Conversation avec Picasso’, Cahiers d’Art, special number, 1935, pp 173–8; here, Picasso: Propos sur l’art, p 37. Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol 3, p 485.

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The reasons for that preference are at least partially clear. Neither Roque nor Picasso could forget that it was Jung who had recognized what the artist thought of as his shamanic side – in a burning critique of the artist’s great retrospective staged at the Kunsthaus, Zürich in the autumn of 1932. It seems that Picasso admired Jung for his outspokenness, his recognition of the alluring horror he had been courting in his work. Here were 460 works from the span of Picasso’s career up to the early 1930s, including many of the controversial female-figure paintings that have occupied us so far. In his short review, published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in November 1932, Jung admitted that this ‘strange art’ was ‘too wide, too difficult, and too involved’ for him to cover adequately. Picasso’s works ‘communicate no unified, harmonious feeling-tone but rather contradictory feelings or even a complete lack of feeling’. What Jung called their ‘fragmentation’ and ‘lines of fracture’ are ‘psychic faults in the geological sense that run right through the work’. Picasso’s pictures ‘leave one cold, or disturb one by their paradoxical, unfeeling and grotesque unconcern for the beholder’. It was as if the artist had taken a hazardous journey to Nekyia, the underworld, only to be swallowed up by those fractures and grotesqueries and potentially become their victim. ‘Even an

Fig 4.9  Picasso exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich, 1932. Kunsthaus Zürich, Collection of Photography. Photo: Ernst Linck.

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occasional touch of beauty seems only like an inexcusable delay … It is the ugly, the sick, the grotesque, the incomprehensible and the banal that are sought out … What quintessence will Picasso distil from this accumulation of rubbish and decay, these half-born or aborted possibilities of colour and form?’ The conclusion asking to be drawn is that the artist is bent on mastering his conflicts by violence, just as in Gnostic myth, and finds himself positioned just before his own fateful dénouement. Nor can we speculate on the outcome. We should admire the artist for striving to become a great personality, Jung concludes – ‘one who bursts the shell’ even if – he adds in warning – ‘this shell is sometimes the brain’.17 Such words were by no means unwelcome to Picasso. Not so the standard Freudian reaction to the seemingly grotesque bodies that were being imagined in his art. The British psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn discussed Picasso and Dalí together a few years later, having visited the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in June 1936 and having read, with more or less sympathy, the book of essays by Herbert Read, Breton, Paul Éluard, Georges Hugnet and the poet Hugh Sykes Davies published to mark the event. Perturbed and even disturbed by what he saw, Fairbairn gave a talk to the Scottish Branch of the British Psychological Society in which he stated that on the evidence of that and other exhibitions, works by modern artists ‘produce in the man in the street an impression of chaos, giving expression … to that sadistic “tearing in pieces” tendency to which Melanie Klein has drawn our attention’. The tension between destructiveness and repair in the work of art had become radically compromised in comparison to the enduring harmonies of Greek sculpture and architecture or the Gothic cathedrals of the late Middle Ages, in which we find an ‘integrity’ in art defined by balance, symmetry, proportion – what Fairbairn refers to as humanity’s search for ‘truth, goodness and beauty’. By these standards Picasso’s paintings were worrying betrayals, while those of his compatriot Dalí show ‘a low coefficient of regression in relation to the strength of the unconscious urges expressed’. Their artwork is ‘comparatively meagre’. Surrealism as a phenomenon ‘does not provide us with art of a very high order’.18

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C. Jung, ‘Picasso’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, CLIII: 2, 13 November 1932; from the translation in C.G. Jung, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (Collected Works, Vol 15), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, pp 135–41. Picasso’s Seated Bather was no 188 in the Zürich catalogue. For a full bibliography of reactions to the Zürich show, see Picasso by Picasso: His First Museum Exhibitions 1932, Zürich, Kunsthaus, 2010, and S. Giedion, G. Jedlicka et al., Pablo Picasso in Zürich 1932, Piet Meyer Verlag, Berne, 2010. W. Fairbairn, ‘Prolegomena to a Psychology of Art’, British Journal of Psychology, vol 28, no 3, January 1938, pp 297, 300, 295, 302.

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Of course, Fairbairn’s critique is itself symptomatic of the contamination of psychiatry by bourgeois expectations of emotional comfort and ‘the good’. The standard of moral-aesthetic attainment should be ‘integrity of the object’, as Fairbairn wrote in a second paper of 1938, ‘something intact, whole, complete or perfect’. What looked like unconstrained regression in Surrealist art was incompatible with the canons of culture as we know them. After all, as he put it, the Greek achievement marked the end of a period of ‘simpler and primitive forms of art’, the period in which restitution did not and could not occur because the super-ego as the voice of conscience did not – so he alleges – yet exist. It followed that accusations of infantilism in modern art were appropriate. A work by Stanley Hayter in the International Surrealist Exhibition could have been done by a child of three. André Breton’s Poème-Objet of 1935 assimilates to ‘arrangements of stones and tins’ that a child might make in the garden. Miro’s Maternité of 1924 involves ‘negligible art-work’ in the Freudian or Kleinian sense  – so Fairbairn complains. The female figure of Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair of 1914 (the Cubist precursor to the figures of 1927–30) remains ‘grossly distorted or broken up into fragments … or both’. Dalí’s The Spectre of Sex Appeal of 1934 shows a body ‘deformed, contorted and mutilated’, with various parts of the body ‘missing’. Declares Fairbairn triumphantly of these and other works, ‘the super-ego will judge them harshly too’.19 * It is time to examine the deformations and mutilations of which Dalí himself was being accused. By the date of The Spectre of Sex Appeal he had become the author of some highly provocative writings on the mechanisms of looking and knowing, and like Picasso had little time for psychoanalytical readings of the Freudian type. Like Picasso too, he always insisted that explanatory readings are a posteriori to the work – more or less satisfactory groupings, most of them rhetorical, offered by commentators once the painting has been done. Yet by 1934 his methods were very different from Picasso’s, even though certain Picasso motifs continued to crop up in his work. 19

Restitution is nothing other than a form of tribute to the super-ego, Fairbairn thinks, whose real embodiment is religion. In language reminiscent of the confessional, he states that the true artist experiences an urge ‘to do something by way of restitution for destructive acts committed or destructive impulses harboured’, so that ‘the work of art thus becomes … analogous to the moral act’. See W. Fairbairn, ‘The Ultimate Basis of Aesthetic Experience’, British Journal of Psychology, vol 29, no 2, 1938, p 179.

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A certain parting of the ways had begun in 1928, in a group of works that, in common with his The Rotten Donkey of that year (and like Picasso’s paintings too), situate a figure on a beach. Dalί’s small painting entitled simply Bathers shows what seems to be a giant foreground toe that balloons like a cuttlefish across the view, while two semi-transparent creatures hover in the watery distance, each dangling an enlarged hand that seems ready to tickle a body part situated elsewhere in the scene. The toe-or-bather creature in the foreground is uncomfortably close to us and violently exposed to sight – while its quasi-biological form places it in that category of ‘bare life’ guaranteed to both fascinate and repel. Dalí was by this time agent provocateur among the younger artists of his group and relished presenting his audiences with sensations of repugnance and decay, of putrefacció [literally putrefaction] as he gleefully called it, designed to trigger alarmed reflection on what polite society generally assumes nature to be. In a text ‘Saint Sebastian’, published in L’Amic de les Arts the previous July, he had covered both those concerns. The terms putrefacció (Catalan) or putrefacción (Spanish)

Fig 4.10  Salvador Dalί, The Bather, 1928, oil and collage on panel, 52.1 x 71.8 cm. The Dalί Museum, St Petersburg FL. © Salvador Dalί, Fundació Gala – Salvador Dalί/ DACS 2019.

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designate not merely rotting matter but anything bourgeois, sentimental or provincial. Dalí had declared his purpose to be to outrage ‘families who buy objets d’art to go on top of the piano, the clerk of public works, the associate committee member, the professor of psychology’, in short, any bourgeois person whatsoever.20 Putrefacció also governs a slightly larger painting of 1928, (Bather) Female Nude, which presents a solitary figure, no longer vertebrate but now reclining on a rock, masturbating herself with a kind of fish-tail left hand, while her right hand, a gnarled working-man’s hand with dirty fingernails, makes a gesture that, despite its grotesque scale, seems to summon the viewer into the torrid and sweltering scene. Her swelling pink flesh rises, droops and softens in a manner claiming unmistakeable affinity with Picasso’s female bathers of those years (Plate 14a). At the same time Dalí had come to think that Heraclitus’ maxim ‘nature likes to hide’ points to something ironic in how nature discloses itself; that a special kind of modesty or self-shame interposed itself between ordinary perception and more interesting cognitive truth.21 To Dalí, the enigmatic maxim suggested that another level of representation must penetrate the superficial screen of cognition and reveal it as a kind of joke. As he would write in a major statement, Conquest of the Irrational of 1935, my whole ambition in the pictorial domain is to materialise the images of concrete irrationality with the most imperialist fury of precision, so that the world of imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident, of the same objective clarity, of the same consistency, of the same durability, of the same persuasive, cognitive and communicable thickness as that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality

By then, he had found that the ideal instrument for penetrating the natural irony of Heraclitus was a patently old-fashioned painting technique. As he himself explains: ‘The illusionism of the most abjectly arriviste and irresistibly imitative art, the paralyzing tricks of trompe l’oeil, the most analytically narrative and discredited academicism, all these can become sublime hierarchies of thought

20

21

S. Dalí, ‘Saint Sebastian’, L’ Amic de les Arts, no 16, 31 July 1927, pp 52–4; in H. Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p 24. The relevance of Bathers to Boiffard and Bataille’s reflections on the base body is unlikely to be missed: see G. Bataille, ‘The Big Toe’, Documents, no 6, November 1929, pp 297–302. He mentions a conversation about Heraclitus with the artist Antonio Savinio (Giorgio de Chirico’s brother) who had recently returned to Paris after travelling with his opera designs to New York and elsewhere, and whom Dalí had grown to know well.

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and the means of approach to new exactitudes of concrete irrationality.’22 In that sense it would become Dalí’s proposal in those years that the monstrous bodies delineated in his paintings should not be understood as misty imaginings, but as truth: not truth as fidelity to perceptual fact, but truth as real consciousness, the proper content of awareness. His sources in systematic philosophy were both eclectic and precise. ‘Collective study of phenomenology’ in subjects having ‘utmost Surrealist opportuneness’, as he put it, was earnestly advised. Disgust, revulsion and arousal in their complex relations to looking, touching and being were to be studied intensively and heeded – for instance Aurel Kolnai’s book On Disgust, published in German and Spanish in 1929, whose account of the aversions (fear, disgust and hatred) is now regarded as a pioneering statement in its field. ‘By means of [Kolnai’s] analysis’, Dalí proposed in his inimitable and aggressive style, ‘one may discover the objective laws applicable scientifically in fields hitherto viewed as fluctuating or capricious.’23 Putrefaction, liquescence, nauseating and fascinating proximity, aquatic and swarming insect life – these were Kolnai’s subjects, and they were the subjects of Dalí’s Bather paintings too. The next step in Dalí’s self-revelation had been to show how the study of revulsion together with his ‘abjectly arriviste’ and ‘imitative’ style in fact required joining to a third psychological mechanism, that of paranoia. It was in 1929, as Dalí also narrates in Conquest of the Irrational – now in the third person – ‘that Salvador Dalí brought his attention to bear upon the internal mechanism of paranoiac phenomena and envisaged the possibility of an experimental method based on the sudden power of the systematic associations that are peculiar to paranoia. This method afterwards became the delirio-critical synthesis which bears the name “paranoiac-critical activity”.’ He adds two definitions, the second in italics: ‘Paranoia: delirium of interpretive association bearing a systematic structure. Paranoiac-critical activity: spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.’24

22

23

24

S. Dalí, Conquest of the Irrational, Éditions Surréalistes, Paris 1935; in Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, p 265. S. Dalí, ‘The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment’, This Quarter, vol 8, no 1, 1932; referring to A. Kolnai, ‘Der Ekel’, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, no 10, 1929, pp 515–69; and as ‘El Asco’, Revista de Occidente, XXVI, 77 and 78, Madrid, 1929, pp 161–201, 294–347 respectively. For further reflection on Dalí’s indebtedness to Kolnai, see R. Radford, ‘Aurel Kolnai’s “Disgust”: a source in the art and writing of Salvador Dalí’, The Burlington Magazine, no 141 (1,150), January 1999, pp 32–3. S. Dalí, Conquest of the Irrational (1935); Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, pp 266–7.

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Dalí’s progress towards a system rooted in the experience and theory of paranoia seems almost a natural one when narrated in reverse. But let us check the context that Dalí found himself in. We know that by 1928 the question of Surrealist orthodoxy had become very active. Breton was courting him heavily, and wrote a flattering text to accompany his Paris exhibition of November 1929 – ‘the most hallucinatory art known until now, a real menace’, as he put it, and therefore a brilliant demonstration of the Surrealist line.25 In the meantime, Dalí’s work had been noticed by a rival group, that of Georges Bataille’s journal Documents, in which there had already appeared, in the early summer of 1929, an article by Carl Einstein concerning a sixteenth-century anamorphic painting of Saint Anthony of Padua being embraced by the infant Jesus that had caught Einstein’s eye. ‘It is as if the de-figured deity and the Saint together make the form of a cloud’, said Einstein of this curious work. Under anamorphosis the monk’s cord and his elongated cross ‘provide a bridge to celestial realms’, so that the picture’s symbolism ‘resides in the deformation’.26 As it

Fig 4.11  Photo-layout in C. Einstein, ‘Saint Antoine de Padoue et l’Enfant Jésus’, Documents, no 4, 1929, p 230. 25

26

A. Breton, ‘The First Dalí Exhibition’, 1929; in F. Rosemont (intr and ed), André Breton: What is Surrealism? Pathfinder Press, New York, 1978, p 64. C. Einstein, ‘Saint Antoine de Padoue et l’Enfant Jesus’, Documents, no 4, 1930, p 230.

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appeared in Documents, Einstein arranged to print the painting directly above Dalí’s two Bather paintings of the previous year – and on seeing the layout Dalí must have noticed the correspondence between his own tumescent painted bodies and the way in which, under anamorphosis, the head of the infant Jesus bulged rearward in the manner of a cephalic disorder. Those disfigurements were not the same thing, yet placed together they helped imply that by systematic perceptual distortion an altogether new version of reality could be obtained. The sequel is well known. A young psychologist named Jacques Lacan was just then becoming interested in a possible convergence between Surrealist ‘automatism’ and the ‘inspired’ writings and vocalizations of the psychologically disturbed. It was in July 1931 that he read a text of Dalí’s own in a Surrealist publication and phoned the artist immediately to suggest meeting for a discussion.27 The text in question was Dalí’s ‘The Rotting Donkey’ of July 1930, titled after the painting of two years before. Here, Lacan could read of the artist’s ambition to achieve ‘a total discrediting of the world of reality’ with the aid of simulacra ‘having the clarity of physical and diurnal appearances’. It was with another nod to Heraclitus that Dalí was now urging that the ‘truth’ of perception lies elsewhere than in the forms it superficially seems to present – nature’s irony once more. ‘And it is by a distinctly paranoiac process’, he now wrote, ‘that it has been possible to obtain a double image: in other words: a representation of an object that is also, and without pictorial or anatomical modification, the representation of a different object entirely.’28 Meanwhile, his instinct for public provocation had to be maintained. Citizens addicted to ‘decent and reasonable ideas’, Dalí told a lecture audience in Barcelona in March of 1930, ‘had better watch out lest I spit on them’. His paintings were not intended to present anything other than ‘disappointment, foul sensation and repulsion … of demoralisation and confusion’. They would contribute to ‘the collapse of reality … [and] bring us back to the clear sources of masturbation, exhibitionism, criminality and love’.29 The achievement of ‘disappointment’ and ‘foul sensation’ was possible, Dalí now claimed, ‘thanks to the violence of the paranoiac thought which has made use, with cunning and skill, of the required quantity of pretexts, coincidences, and so on, taking advantage of them so as to reveal the second image’. He describes 27

28

29

For an account of this meeting see E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France 1925–1985, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, pp 110–11. S. Dalí, ‘L’Âne Pourri’, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution, 1 July 1930, pp 9–12; here, Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, p 223. My emphasis. S. Dalí, ‘Posicío moral del surrealisme’, Hèlix, Barcelona, 10, 22 March 1930; in translation in Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, pp 221–2.

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a painting of his own to illustrate the procedure. ‘A double-image – one of a horse that is at the same time the image of a woman – may be extended in the paranoiac process by another obsessive idea that can make emerge a third figure (of a lion, for example) and so on in succession until the concurrence of several images limited only by the mind’s paranoiac capacity.’30 He is referring to Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion of 1930, which contains not two but three well-formed identities for the painting’s central figure, each requiring extended looking and thinking before any one of them comes properly into view. It should be explained that the structure of that demand is itself somewhat more than it seems; for it is one thing to see a woman, a horse, a lion – so Dalí implies – quite another to see one as the other, the other as the one. The further step is to realize that to see the lion in the horse or the reclining woman in the lion is also to see oneself seeing, to become, in language that Lacan would much later propose, the recipient as well as the origin of the gaze. And to do so is to

Fig 4.12  Salvador Dalí, Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion, 1930, oil on canvas, 50.2 × 65.2 cm. © Centre Pompidou, Paris. MNAM Paris. © Salvador Dalí, Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalí/ADAGP Paris. 30

Dalí, ‘L’Âne Pourri’, pp 224,

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depart from ‘decent and reasonable’ ideas in favour, not of the dream-world, but of the world as possibility. It is to become an active participant in the conscious interpretation of reality according to will and destabilizing desire. It is also to assume a subject-position in which delusion in the sense of ‘error’ or ‘falsehood’ plays no part at all. On the contrary, Dalí’s proposal is that the viewer’s selfconsciousness has finally become processual, even dialectical, a temporal unfolding in which opticality has become epistemology’s essential guide. Truth, in this perceptual universe, never accords with appearances but never quite departs from them either, for the mind’s paranoiac activity can find several alternative realities inside a given optical field. Unlike dream activity in which nothing is willed and for which interpretation must be supplied from without, paranoia-critique is the perceptual model for nothing less than a revolution of consciousness itself. With such vehemence Dalí would insist repeatedly that, guided by such an optic, ‘decent and reasonable’ is no longer the test by which reality is to be known or understood. To Jacques Lacan, who would complete his doctoral thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis and Its Relations with the Personality in 1932, Dalí’s new philosophy of the image had an obvious relevance. Lacan’s researches had begun by examining children’s early-life responses to mirrors in Henri Wallon’s laboratory experiments, and his fascination with paranoia coincided for a limited time with Dalí’s own.31 Both of them published essays on paranoia in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in 1933. Lacan, associating his own studies with those of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (he claimed inspiration from the latter’s Sur la fuite des idées of 1933) now insisted on the importance of the ‘lived experience of paranoia’, its status as a ‘coherent structure of immediate noumenal apprehension of the self and the world’. He insisted too on the symbols engendered in psychosis; the fact that their value as reality is not diminished by their exclusion from reason. Lived paranoiac experience is ‘an original syntax’, he proposed, ‘that goes to affirm the human community in its own ways, [moreover] knowledge of this syntax seems an indispensable introduction to understanding the symbolic values of art, especially the problems of style’.32 ‘It is thanks to Lacan’, says Dalí in his own Minotaure piece, ‘that we have for the first time a homogeneous and complete idea of the 31

32

Lacan’s doctoral thesis On Paranoiac Psychosis and Its Relations with the Personality (1932) was published as De La Psychose Paranoiaque, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1975. For Henri Wallon, see his ‘Comment se développe chez l’enfant la notion du corps propre’, Journal de Psychologie, November– December 1931, pp 705–48, and Les Origines du Charactère chez l’Enfant, Bovin, Paris, 1934. J. Lacan, ‘Le Problème du Style et la conception Psychiatrique des Forms Paranoïaques de l’Expérience’, Minotaure, no 1, 1933, pp 68, 69. His reference to Binswanger is to his Űber Ideenflucht, Zürich, 1933; translated as Sur la fuite des idées, 1933.

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phenomenon beyond the mechanistic wretchedness in which current psychology is bogged down’ – he is referring to the laboratory methods and publications of the Gestalt school in particular.33 And he supplies a telling anecdote of his own. A picture postcard of some African villagers had been lying on his desk but, turned on its side, he had read it as a face containing a Picasso-like doubleprofile. His misrecognition had value, he reflected, one whose ‘concrete and truly phenomenological essence’ had taken the form of a conscious and eroticized delirium, ‘assuming a tangible character that cannot be contradicted, one that situates it at the very antipodes of automatism and the dream’. Put differently, there was now a way beyond Surrealist automatism – ‘fixed, abstract, feeding on its own ashes’.34 The paranoiac-critical method had been born. Sensation then is Dalí’s subject: even foul sensation, disappointment, demoralization and confusion, all of which could be achieved by paranoiacriticism and anamorphosis combined. They were now part and parcel of each other, as well as antithetical to the platitudes of the Gestalt school. Dalí lampooned the latter explicitly in Conquest of the Irrational. ‘The conduct of living beings’, as he put it in a vertically arranged free-verse form, remains / totally external / to the understanding / of the / Gestalt theory / since / this theory of the strict / figure / and of the structure / does not possess / the physical means / permitting / analysis / nor even / the recording / of human behaviour / vis-à-vis / structures / and figures / appearing / objectively / as physically delirious / for / as far as I know / there does not exist / nowadays / a physics / of psychology / a physics of paranoia.35

On the contrary, his paintings already incorporated ambiguity, double-vision, perspectival exaggeration and disorientation, in short an arsenal of monstrous depictions of some sort. The much-maligned The Spectre of Sex Appeal is an example of those devices working together. We shall need to examine it carefully. * 33

34

35

S. Dalí, ‘Interprétation Paranoïaque-critique de l’Image obsédante “L’Angélus” de Millet’, Minotaure, Paris, 1, June 1933, pp 65–7; translated under its subtitle as ‘New General Considerations Regarding the Mechanisms of the Paranoid Phenomenon from the Surrealist Point of View’, in Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, p 259. S. Dalí, ‘New General Considerations’, in Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, pp 258, 260. In Lacan’s subsequent thinking on the origins of selfhood and the structure of the gaze he would adhere, often very strictly, to the logical structures inherent in the geometry of sight itself. See Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan XI, Editions de Seuil, Paris, 1973, in translation in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, 1977. Dalí, Conquest of the Irrational, 1935 in the section ‘The Abjectness and Misery of AbstractionCréation’; Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, p 271.

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The painting measures just over seven by five inches and is by any standards a miracle of patient detail; so cleverly crafted as to suggest it must have been done with the aid of a magnifying glass (Plate 14b). But the viewer does not look at it with a magnifying glass – with the result that the painting is in practice unusually difficult to see. Yet Dalí’s game of scale and visibility has only just begun. The viewer must peer and peep, only to see a vast decaying female figure who towers above a diminutive child in sailor-boy costume who looks up at her from below. We seem to see a female who kneels, in spite of a withered right foot and missing left one, in what is a clear postural borrowing from any one of Picasso’s beach paintings from Cannes or Dinard in the years before. Dalí’s supplicating female is different, however, for she ‘kneels’ with the help of two fetishistic crutches that prop her upright against the backdrop of Cap Creus and its rocky coves and beaches – in reality just north of the artist’s village of Port Lligat, near Cadaqués in the Alt Empordà region of northern Spain. The bulging sacks of potatoes that form the woman’s breasts, and the pillow that is her belly, have become much more than inanimate replacements for soft female flesh. Their materiality is disgusting, as are the rags that stand in for the beach towels that this version of sex appeal has taken to the beach. She is unlikely to swim, clearly, or to have already swum. The term ‘sex appeal’ is a provocation too. It was by now a film industry coinage that had arisen in American and European advertising earlier in the century, and Dalí’s painting is a pitiless irony on the kind of glamour defined by the market mechanisms of the day.36 As for ‘spectre’ and ‘spectral’, they are explained in an article in the journal Minotaure in 1934. The terms signified glamour in the consciousness of modern woman – but to Dalí they have become attributes of appearance open to rearrangement and (if need be) replacement according to the fashion of the moment, or according to whim. ‘The anatomy of spectral woman can be disassembled [démontablée]’, he says, ‘taken apart and exhibited separately, according to her will.’ The spectral-démontable is everything brittle and projective, iridescent, blazing, instantaneous – ‘démontabilité is the aspiration and verification of female exhibitionism’. And ‘spectre’ is for him different from ‘phantom’, which for Dalí is everything receptive, opaque, spongy, a silhouette of anxiety, ‘a simulacrum of volume … an envelope … that dematerialises its content and its volume, rendering it virtual, anguishing’.37 It was 36

37

Sex appeal as a merchandizing technique appeared first in soap advertisements of the early twentieth century (‘A Skin You Love to Touch’, USA 1911), but by the 1930s the term had taken on a distinctively Hollywood ring. S. Dalí, ‘Les nouvelles couleurs du sexe-appeal spectral’, Minotaure, 1934; Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, pp 201–7.

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a difference intended to make a contrast, perhaps a foundational one, between the rigid and the melting, the inedible and the edible, the hard and the soft. It was the rigid penis versus the flaccid one, the potent versus the impotent. The spongy cephalic and bodily extensions that rest on rigid crutches in Dalí’s paintings – they suggest such a reading too. Of course, those verbal dualities translate inexactly into what any painting shows. Are we sure that the fluid shadow across the figure’s ribcage is not a violent incision in her side? Is her decaying right hand performing a mimicry of the rocks behind her, far across the bay? And for whom? One puzzle of the painting is that the small boy’s viewpoint is evidently not the same as ours. He is diminutive in relation to her – though Dalí has made him look gigantic in relation to the crumpled folds of the beach-towel lying before him. They read like a hilly landscape spread out panoramically to his own superior view.38 Dalí’s game is one of scale, partly. I said the spectre ‘towers above’ the boy; but perhaps we should say that she miniaturizes him, hence mimicking the technique that governs the manufacture of the painting as a whole. The viewer’s own scale meanwhile could be either – or could it be both at once? As for the boy’s perspective, it is certainly unusual. What he sees is monstrous in the Kantian sense of something horribly large – horrible as well as large. Meanwhile she presents us with a feature that the boy himself cannot see; in fact two features that exemplify Dalí’s best discoveries in the period prior to the painting’s completion. For we are surely meant to see the tied sacking of the figure’s left breast as a miniaturized skull (or dog’s head) in the position where her own head should roughly be. But if we refuse that perception, or try to correct it, we find the features of a female’s head in the inert craggy surfaces of the rocks behind, across the bay, such that head and face get lost there, proliferating in the much vaster scale of the wild mountainside as a whole. By all accounts the painting is nothing if not a lesson in shared and mutually reinforcing paranoia. Whichever version of reality the painting shows us, the sailor-boy cannot yet see what we do. It is Dalí himself, of course. For now at least, what the boy sees is an image of sexual decrepitude that he will grow up to wrestle with in his art. *

38

I owe this observation to a comment of Dawn Ades at the symposium Dalí/Duchamp, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 3 November 2017.

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‘This leads me to state’, said Georges Bataille in an early article in Documents, ‘that the paintings of Picasso are hideous, while those of Dalí are frighteningly ugly – and that is the only similarity between two bodies of work which differ from each other as much as a cloud of flies differs from an elephant.’39 Bataille is writing approvingly, of course, taking each artist as a brilliant exponent of how monstrosity – our catch-all terminology here – demonstrates the bankruptcy of all systematic methods of defining the real and the true. Normality for each artist was the enemy of life; their radical morphologies and optical conundrums demonstrated just how and why. Picasso’s paintings of 1928 were to be celebrated because they sought no relation at all to verifiable reality, and none to metaphor or allegory either. Documents had all the arguments now. In Picasso’s latest works, Carl Einstein wrote early the following year, one is ‘beyond “normal” [en dehors du normal] … one has pushed aside biological monotony, which can never be hallucinatory’. Picasso’s decisions ‘are not based on the biological canon … they surpass biological conservatism’.40 To the writers of Documents, ‘normality’ was a construction of the Enlightenment, whose normative science depended upon measurement and comparative taxonomy in pursuit of natural law. But in an age still wrestling with the paradoxes of space-time and unpredictability at the quantum level of scale, every claim to normality must be shown to lie in ruins.41 In the words of Bataille’s contribution to the Critical Dictionary late in 1929, ‘the universe has a form only to keep academic men happy. The whole of philosophy has no other purpose than to give a frock-coat to what is; a mathematical frock-coat’ – the frock-coat here evoked as superficially covering, and in so doing hiding, the body that it claims to fit.42 Einstein too was scathing about mathematics: ‘puritanical knick-knacks, empty cocktails of the absolute’ as he described the works of Malevich, Vantongerloo and others that he saw

39

40 41

42

G. Bataille, ‘The Lugubrious Game’, Documents, no 7, December 1929; here, Visions of Excess, p 27 followed by note 2, p 30. C. Einstein, ‘Pablo Picasso: Quelques Tableaux de 1928’, Documents, no 1, 1929, pp 35, 38. Surrealism à la Breton would soon acknowledge the same, but on different terms. The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the 1830s would be cited by Breton in his ‘Crisis of the Object’ essay of 1936 as ‘opening up’ the body of Cartesian and Kantian rationalism to ‘a total disruption of sensibility … erasing the distinction between good and evil, expressing strict reservations about the hegemony of the cogito, and revealing the marvellous in everyday life’. His prompt was a display of mathematical models at the Charles Ratton Galerie in Paris in 1936 – models that had been manufactured for teaching purposes since the 1850s and recently drawn into the Surrealist orbit following Max Ernst’s visit to see them at the Institut Poincaré. The episode is discussed in G. Parkinson, Surrealism, Art and Modern Science: Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Epistemology, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008, pp 69–88. G. Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents, no 7, 1929, p 382.

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in October 1929.43 ‘First, the Renaissance posited mathematical perspective as nature’s truth’, Einstein had written earlier that year, ‘then it claimed beauty itself to reside in mathematical capture.’ Yet today we distinguish clearly ‘between the freedom to analogize on the one hand and the coherence ascribed to biological form on the other’. He adds: ‘Our conception of nature has become so impregnated with calculations and constructions as to render it no more than an intellectual hallucination, emptied of direct reality: a world of rational but almost arbitrary signs.’ A morphology that claims to attribute coherence ‘is a measure of our bondage’.44 Monstrosity and Enlightenment science could not, from Documents’ perspective, exist together. Picasso and Dalí had arrived at propositions – it was not an exaggeration – of signal importance to an understanding of Western culture at that time. The journal’s onslaught was unremitting and severe. In the opening issue, Bataille had brought forward the evidence of wild horses on Gallic coins, depicted as if they were monsters, ugly and misshapen, in abrupt contrast to the noble equine creatures of the classical world. The coins showed that the Gauls ‘calculated nothing, conceived of no progress, and gave free rein to immediate sensations and violent sentiment’. These Gallic monsters,

Fig 4.13  Image from Georges Bataille, ‘Le Cheval Académique’, Documents, no 1, 1929, p 30, showing coins from (left) Transylvanian Celts and (right) Eauze, Gers. 43 44

C. Einstein, ‘L’Exposition de l’Art Abstrait a Zurich’, Documents, no 6, 1929, p 342. C. Einstein, ‘Aphorismes Méthodiques’, Documents, no 1, 1929, p 34. Compare Bataille’s remark: ‘The great constructions of the intellect are finally prisons; that is why they are obstinately overturned’; in ‘Le “Jeu Lugubre”’, Documents, no 7, 1929; from the translation in Visions of Excess, p 27.

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asserted Bataille, like ‘the hideous or comical bodies of spiders or hippopotami’, are creatures that can never respond to elevated and irrevocable ideas. They represent nature’s unruly response ‘to everything on earth that is harmonious and ordered, that seeks to give authority through its “correct” appearance’. Their value resides precisely in their opposition to concepts of normality, of average, even of kind.45 Bataille’s argument here is that those monsters’ logic could be completed by humanity’s own ‘discrepancies’ or ‘deviations’. Turning to the forty-two engraved plates of Nicolas-François and Geneviève Regnault’s Les Écarts de la Nature of 1775, with its graphic renditions of le double-enfant, l’enfant semi-acéphale, ou

Fig 4.14  Image from Georges Bataille, ‘Les Écarts de la Nature’, Documents, no 2, 1930, p 80, showing a plate of ‘Le double-enfant’ from J-F. Regnault, Les Écarts de la Nature, 1775. 45

‘And the same thing goes for the cellars of our houses where spiders lurk and eat each other, among other haunts of natural ignominies. As if a polluting horror was the constant and inevitable counterpart of elevated forms of animal life’; Bataille, ‘Le cheval acadèmique’, Documents, no 1, 1929, pp 28–9; from the translation in D. Ades and S. Baker (eds), Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, Hayward Gallery, London and MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006, pp 237–8. Another, image, that of spiders invading clothing, appears in Bataille’s ‘Figure Humaine’, Documents, no 4, 1929, p 200.

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sans cerveau, le petit pepin, l’enfant monstrueux and other deviations, he once more took the reader to the historical moment when an appetite for rarity and the curious found itself in collision with Enlightenment science. He had to admit that he was outnumbered by some great names from the past. Most recently, experiments with composite images by Francis Galton, made by exposing several different faces on a single photographic plate, had claimed to show how an ‘average’ or ‘normal’ face could exemplify a type – even a standard of ‘beauty’ that resided in the norm to which every mediocre instance contributed. It was a ‘beauty’ that arose from the geometric regularity (symmetry, balance, Pythagorean harmony) in every example of such a norm. The composite images of Georg Treu, meanwhile, author of Durchschnittbild und Schönheit [The Composite Image and Beauty] of 1914 had also argued for the relationship of all instances of a kind to a common norm. Bataille may have known – though he does not mention it – that Galton and Treu had themselves been anticipated by Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher of categories par excellence. Consider the case of a full-grown man, Kant had proposed in the Critique of Judgement. The mind can recall ‘the image and shape of an object out of countless number of others of a different, or even of the very same, kind’; can then ‘superimpose as it were one image upon another, and from the coincidence of a number of the same kind arrive at a mean contour which serves as a common contour for all’. If the imagination ‘allows a great number of images (perhaps a whole thousand) to fall one upon the other … one gets a perception of the average size, which alike in height and breadth is equally removed from the extreme limits of the greatest and smallest statures’. Such is the Normal-Idee [normal-idea], Kant suggested, ‘something intermediate between all singular intuitions of individuals with their manifold variations – a floating image [schwebende Bild] for the whole genus, which nature has set as an archetype underlying those of her products that belong to the same species, but which in no single case she seems to have completely attained’.46 Before Kant, Aristotle’s own pedigree in the question had been the famous statement in Historia Animalium to the effect that features of animals of the same genus (birds, or fish) – by extension humans – can be counted as the same ‘save only for a difference in the way of excess or defect’ in relation to a stabilizing

46

I. Kant, Critique of Judgement (1790), para 17, in the translation by J.C. Meredith, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007 [1952], pp 64, 65.

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norm.47 But Bataille had noticed something more – namely Galton’s wish to also uncover a ‘normal’ physiology for criminals, lunatics, racial groups and sub-classifications of them; and he knew that while particular social and ethnic groups were claiming privilege, others were being threatened with suppression and even eradication – that eugenics and evolutionary sociology were on their way. Bataille’s answer was simple yet effective: that by Galton’s own argument, incongruity manifests itself ‘to a definite but imperceptible degree in any given individual’.48 A second manoeuvre was to the effect that the ‘excessive’ and the ‘defective’ do not in fact meet in the middle and are not in fact mediated by the existence of the typical. Put differently: since every individual is an exception, however slight, then to that degree every individual is also monstrous, beyond classification, literally déclassé. Furthermore, even if the monstrous and the typical in some sense conceptually require each other, they do so centrifugally, forever pulling apart. Each individual, Bataille says, which is to say each monster, ‘is situated dialectically in opposition to geometric regularity’. And that opposition is ‘irreducible’.49 Such were the arguments available to show that ‘monstrous’ depictions launched by certain artists – Picasso and Dalí among them – evidenced a state of mind adventurously at odds with what Bataille bemoaned as ‘the current conditions of human life’. In 1929 and 1930 those conditions included the crises of the Western economies, unemployment, racial stereotyping, and the early signs of totalitarianism on every side. History itself proceeds as if through an oscillation, as he put it, ‘stirring itself in motions of anger … beating and

47

48 49

‘Within the limits of the same genus’, as Aristotle puts it, ‘most of the parts exhibit differences … in the way of multitude or fewness, magnitude or parvitude, in short, in the way of excess or defect. For “the more” and “the less” may be represented as “excess” or “defect”’: Historia Animalium, I, para 1. Like Galton much later, Kant had in fact qualified his thinking on the Normal-Idee by remarking that the average measurement of a full-grown man is ‘the figure that underlines the idea of a beautiful man in the country where the comparison is instituted’; and that ‘a black man must necessarily … have a different normal idea of the beauty of forms from what a white man has, and the Chinese person a different one from the European’; see Critique of Judgement, para 17, p 65. G. Bataille, ‘Les Écarts de la Nature’, Documents, no 2, 1930, p 79. Bataille, ‘Les Écarts de la Nature’, p 82. He ends with the words of Sergei Eisenstein, noted during a lecture given at the Sorbonne in January 1930, to the effect that ‘nothing evokes the human spirit better, or ravishes the senses better, or terrifies as much’, as such an irreducibility (p 82). Will Grohmann wrote in a similar spirit that Picasso ‘carries every creative act through to the point where it tips over into its opposite’. Grohmann’s opposition of concept and percept within the individual work ‘is not a use of antithesis to arrive at a comfortable synthesis, but [an attempt] to abandon the quest for a definitive resolution in favour of a truth which cannot be grasped but only intuited’; Grohmann, ‘Dialektik und Transzendenz im Schaffen Picassos’, Cahiers d’Art, vol 7, nos 3–5, 1932, p 156, in translation in M. McCully (ed), A Picasso Anthology: Documents, Criticism, Reminiscences, Arts Council of Great Britain in association with Thames and Hudson, London, 1981, p 187.

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frothy like a wave on a stormy day’. His insistence that nature herself proceeds in opposition to the noble, the normative and the true – nature ‘in constant revolt against itself ’ – in turn evoked the inventiveness, the extremity, of the contemporary artist’s latest forms. Above all – this also from the short essay on Gallic coins – ‘deteriorations [altérations] of plastic form often represent the principal symptom of a great reversal’.50 And he gives ‘altération’ the signification of redemption too, even of sacrifice in pursuit of the sacred. Hopeless incoherence must sometimes predominate, he urges, over rational methods of organization. Formal ‘altération’ was both symptom and cure. It was in something like this sense that Dalí had called for a ‘total discrediting of the world of reality’, or that Lacan would shortly claim in Minotaure that the phenomenological approach in psychoanalysis was flatly incompatible with a human anthropology wedded to ‘le réalisme naif de l’objet’ [naïve realism of the object]. The bourgeois psychoanalysts above all, we found, seemed to require things to remain as they immediately appear. Their complaint that modern art was ‘fractured’ had been based solely on its appearance ‘to the man in the street’. Even Jung had started his Picasso review with the comment that a ‘normal’ (by implication healthy) consciousness contains ‘images of objects as they are generally seen’.51 The Documents writers could lay claim to a complete destabilization of that view. Carl Einstein in his piece on Picasso’s paintings concluded that his female figures come less from a realm of monsters than from one whose terms and categories are unknown – from a formal beyond [‘un au-delà formel’].52 We know that Michel Leiris had the close ear of Picasso himself in the period, and may well have wished to give a close account of what the artist told him. Picasso’s heterodox and tortured women, Leiris explained, had nothing to do with Breton’s cult of automatism and the dream. They were ‘absolutely direct, fresh, spontaneous, naïve, without any of those fake armourings which only tamper with the subject’. Picasso in his approach to painting ‘is on level ground [terreà-terre] with all things, completely familiar with them’. Despite appearances, his world is one of limbs, heads, landscapes, animals and objects that are human:

50

51

52

Bataille, ‘Le cheval acadèmique’, Documents, no 1, 1929. In a text on children’s drawings the following year Bataille says ‘Le terme d’alération a le double intérêt d’exprimer une décomposition partielle analogue à celle des cadavres et en même temps le passage à un état parfaitement hétérogène correspondant à … le sacré’; ‘L’Art Primitif ’, Documents, no 7, 1930. Dalí, ‘L’Âne Pourri’, p 223; Lacan, ‘Le Problème du Style’, p 69; Fairbairn, ‘Prolegomena to a Pychology of Art’, p 298; Jung, ‘Picasso’, p 136. C. Einstein, ‘Picasso: Quelques Tableaux de 1928’, Documents, no 1, 1929, p 38.

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His figures are not in the least ‘Surrealist’ … They are of a cyclopean race, to be sure, but natural, however well or beautifully they achieve such a degree of truth … If one should choose to use the term ‘sur-human’ [sur-humain] it would have to be in the sense that they are the height [combles] of humanness, just as were the grandiose creations of mythology: disproportionate, but never ceasing to feel the earth under their feet.

It is remarkable testimony. Picasso’s females are not phantoms or monsters, Leiris wrote on Picasso’s behalf, ‘They are creatures unlike us, but the same, albeit with a different form, a more startling structure, above all a marvellous clarity.’ Each new combination of forms, each novel rearrangement or bodily rearticulation ‘is a new organ we attach to ourselves, a new instrument that allows us to insert ourselves more humanly into nature, to become more concrete, more substantial, more living’.53 Nothing as incisive has been written about Picasso’s painting since, despite volumes of speculation about his love life and his state of mind. The best recent opinion has followed where the Documents writers led. Picasso was neither a scoundrel nor a madman, we can now agree, but one who reimagined the female body only to show what embodiment in general – female or male – must be. Clark has emphasized how Picasso’s creatures figure the point where inner fantasy and outer reality meet. For Picasso ‘monstrosity … is otherness, alarming and even hurtful … the product of a psychic to-and-fro between subjects – between male and female, pre-eminently – in which the moment that matters is when something else takes form in the mind. Something specific … but that collapses the normal terms of identity and difference.’ Picasso’s tortured females, trapped in an interior space or caught in the thick atmosphere of the beach, ‘they are the pictures we have – in some sense our pictures, sharing our strange myth of individuality – of bodies belonging fully to a world; pictures of self-possession and self-movement; of elation and abandon and composure … They are images of identity in the making, of the body turning itself to others, without self-loss or abjection or mere ruthless projection of its wishes.’ Picasso’s female ‘monsters’ may enact scenes and take up postures which can look flirtatious or exhibitionistic, but their bodies, again in Clark’s words, are ones in which the question of gender ‘is ultimately a secondary ascription, in which being takes gender’s place’.54 53

54

M. Leiris, ‘Toiles récentes de Picasso’, Documents, no 3, 1930, pp 64, 70; Clark, Picasso and Truth, pp 206 and translation, p 305. Clark, Picasso and Truth, pp 225, 230, 231. His verdict on the truth-dimension of these figures is that they evoke – if anything – the chaotic world of projections and introjections characteristic of the first stages of ego-formation, the moment of misrecognition, méconnaisance, trial-and-error – even the moment of the mirror stage in the speculations of Henri Wallon in the late 1920s, soon to be systematized by Lacan in his Marienbad presentation of 1936.

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Fig 4.15  Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, Surrealist Figures, 1933, drypoint engraving, 36 × 42.5 cm [detail]. Musée Picasso, Paris.

The extent of agreement between Picasso’s monsters and Dalí’s is now reasonably clear. At a particularly febrile time in their respective careers, each welcomed a degree of delirium in which appearances could be mercilessly scrutinized – and then entirely remade. In matters of human form, nevertheless, they followed different paths. Dalí liked to play the enthusiastic paranoid. He needed his delirium to be eroticized – ‘sthenic emotion’, as he called it in Minotaure – always transgressive, often openly disgusting. In Picasso the very opposite is generally the case.55 In the wake of the great experiments in roundness inspired by Marie-Thérèse in 1932 he became preoccupied with bones, and bone-like forms, and by implication with the question of what bodily roundness really was in art. Training close attention upon Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar

55

Sthenic: ‘applied to diseases characterized by an excessive accumulation of excitability or vital power in the system … excessive vital or nervous energy,’ OED, 1964.

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(1512–16) in the autumn of 1932 enabled him to speculate freely on matters of density, solidity, rigidity, mass, gravity and corporeal being as such. He followed that investigation in the early weeks of 1933 with thirty pencil drawings known as An Anatomy: standing figures that pile up all manner of forms, sometimes precariously, sometimes with a certain authority. Some bodyparts are chiselled, others smooth, some invertebrate and drooping – as if Dalí’s own vocabulary of form suddenly seemed relevant to him. An anecdote from that spring of 1933 serves to bring our discussion to a close. Picasso was working for a while at the Lacourière Studio in Paris, by coincidence at the same time Dalí was there to make forty engravings of Count Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror for the publisher Albert Skira – Picasso having introduced him. Picasso, forever the cannibal of other artists’ ideas, invited the younger man to complete a group of his own standing figures by adding to them in his own way.56 Dalí’s contributions are the invertebrate ones here – helpless, collapsing, self-cannibalizing – while Picasso’s are self-supporting and outward-facing enough to present a stagelike presence to the onlooker. The result is a set of creatures that appear stable and collapsing at the same time; a new version of the monster theme. Yet their monstrosity is continuous, perhaps it can be said, with the great figure-paintings Picasso had done between 1927 and 1930. They still present ‘a marvellous clarity’ (Leiris), enacting ‘not a personal predicament’ – Clark again – ‘but the human one. They have life.’57

56

57

See R. Descharnes, Salvador Dalí 1904–1946: The Paintings, Vol I, Taschen Verlag, Cologne, 1994, p 210. Clark, Picasso and Truth, p 230.

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The proliferation of zoomorphic and humanoid curvatures in art of the 1920s and 1930s can be contrasted with another kind of vitalist thinking in art – a kind that wants real, dialectical relations to be forged between elemental components of artistic matter and living form. ‘Living’ is not just a metaphor here. The term lies at the centre of a Europe-wide debate among artists stretching from before 1920 until well beyond the Second World War. It designates modern culture’s deep anxiety about its own survival and continuity in conditions of standardization, regulation, machinery and war. The question of the artwork’s generation and becoming was a necessary one. It must remain in active discussion today. In the spring of 1917, in Amsterdam, the painter Piet Mondrian wrote to his friend Theo van Doesburg, editor of the journal De Stijl, offering him a long article titled ‘De Nieuwe Beelding in de Schilderkunst’ which promised to explore relations between the experience of nature and the making of a work of art. Mondrian’s proposal was that by abstracting from what he called the ‘concreteness of appearances’ by a ‘process of simplification’, the artist could arrive at ‘abstract-real’ painting, a modality standing ‘between the absoluteabstract and the concrete-real’.1 The terminology is already bewildering. The title of Mondrian’s article is conventionally translated as ‘The New Plastic in Painting’; but the meaning of ‘beelding’ is actually more subtle. The Dutch art historian Hubert van den Berg has reminded us that beelding is a gerundive noun from the verb beelden – a recent coinage in 1917 – which itself derives from beeld (‘image’ or ‘picture’) and beeldend, (‘plastic’, but also 1

P. Mondrian, ‘De Niewe Beelding in de Schilderkunst’ was published in van Doesburg’s journal De Stijl, no 1, part 3, 1917. Its translation here as ‘The New Plastic in Painting’ is from H. Holtzman and M. James (eds), The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987, pp 35–6.

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Fig 5.1  Piet Mondrian, Composition 10 in Black and White, 1915, oil on canvas, 85 × 105 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

‘provocative’). Beelden then means ‘to make plastic’ or ‘to bring to form’. De beelding in that case means ‘the making plastic’, ‘the plasticizing’, ‘the bringing to form’. The German gerundive Bildung might be compared – sometimes Gestaltung [forming] – where emphasis lies on the process of making an image from material.2 Rendering Mondrian’s ‘Nieuwe Beelding’ as ‘New Plasticizing’, then, would better convey the sense of his comment in the same essay that plastic creation in art is a process of resolving tensions between universality of form (line, planarity, colour) and form’s most fundamental tendencies and potentialities in nature. For Mondrian, the question of how nature’s basic potentialities can be ‘brought to form’ was the question of art. In so far as ‘bringing to form’ had its roots in nature, beelding might already sound like a kind of vitalism, a matter of bringing things to life that were only inert or implicit before. In 1917 that way of putting it was perhaps to be expected; 2

Hubert van den Berg, The Import of Nothing: How Dada Came, Saw and Vanished in the Low Countries (1915–1929), G.K. Hall and Co., New Haven, CT, 2002, p 132.

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yet Mondrian’s terminology of ‘absolute-abstract’ and ‘concrete-real’ also sounds Hegelian – which is to say, concerned with the relations of art to nature in the absence of an idea of ‘beauty’ as a measure of the good. In Hegel’s system, Geist – roughly ‘spirit’, or societal mind-in-general – is a kind of ground or basis for a dialectics of thinking in which all fixed and determinate notions ‘inherently self-sublate and transition into their opposites’, as he put it, in prelude to a third stage, that of ‘Reason’.3 In practice, Mondrian’s allegiance was less to Hegel than to the works of the Dutch thinker M.H.J. Schoenmaekers, whose books The New Image of the World (1915) and Principles of Plastic Mathematics (1916) offered a version of the dialectic in which the new art would be grounded in mathematics, understood as a field of a priori relations as well as being a measuring system applicable to units of visual form. For Theo van Doesburg, meanwhile, plasticizing as a process requiring elements was from the outset his dominant concern, suggesting that he and Mondrian shared a conviction that relations between nature and geometry could provide an essential key. Presciently, van Doesburg had himself published a lengthy article, ‘De Nieuwe Beweging in de Schilderkunst’ [New Exploration in Art], as early as 1916 in which a process of constructing art out of ‘elements’ had been tentatively explored. ‘When we remove from a work of art all practical, naturalistic (perspectival, anatomical etc.) and time elements’, he had said, then ‘only purely constructive elements’ remain. ‘Only then is a composition aesthetic, that is, when those elements form the expression of the composition itself.’4 Several years later, by now an admirer of Berlin Dada and well connected internationally, van Doesburg accepted for De Stijl an ‘Appeal’, written in October 1921 by Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni and László Moholy-Nagy that announced ‘we pledge ourselves to elementarist art. It is elemental because it does not philosophize, because it is built up of its own elements and nothing more. To be receptive to the elements of form is to be an artist … [yet] those elements are not to be found by individual whim, for the individual does not exist in isolation. Moreover, the artist uses only those forces that can give artistic form to the elements of our Hegel’s Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1812/1832), W. Wallace translation, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975, Para 81, p 115. 4 T. van Doesburg, ‘De Nieuwe Beweging in de Schilderkunst’ was published in five parts in De Beweging, vol 12, May–August 1916, and republished as a book of the same time by Technische Boekhandel en Drukkerij. J. Waltman, Delft, 1917; here from the Amsterdam 1983 edition, pp 58–9. I am grateful to Johanna Lohse James for bringing this text to my attention and to Toos de Peyer for help with the translation of this passage. 3

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world.’5 No doubt the phrase ‘elements of form’ stemmed originally from van Doesburg himself. At any rate, he added an editorial comment saying ‘it will depend on how this is put into practice’ whether De Stijl would be responsible for the statement made.6 * Perhaps neither van Doesburg nor the four signatories really knew what those ‘elements of form’ should be – or could not agree on how to define them. Be that as it may, it was a demand he himself would repeat two years later, in Hans Richter’s Berlin magazine G: Zeitschrift für Elementare Gestaltung [Journal for Elemental Forming], in which he called for an art free of individualism and capable of ‘precision’, ‘generality’ and ‘perfection’, one no longer ‘speculative or ‘impulsive’. A clue lies in the fact that, simultaneously, he published a polemical statement ‘Anti-Tendenzkunst’ [Against Tendenzkunst] to the effect that the new plasticizing is against class identification – whether proletarian or bourgeois – because proletarian art with its commitment to class war is in effect ambitious to become another bourgeois art. ‘Art must be free to find its own means’, he insists, since ‘it is tied to its own laws and they must be nothing other than its own laws.’7 He was in agreement with Mondrian’s general insistence that the new painting be purely plastic, ‘must use plastic means that do not signify the individual’, that there be ‘oppositions, rhythms, techniques, compositions that give scope for the plastic expression of life and movement’.8 But Mondrian’s vitalist leanings were no longer palatable to him. The new plasticizing must proceed by ‘disciplining the means [of art]’, van Doesburg insisted. Only by ‘mastering his elementary means of expression in a conscious manner’ and then establishing ‘laws creating a system’ can the artist reach ‘elementary, monumental, plastic expression’.9 Some still earlier background may help to elucidate van Doesburg’s artistic path. The proposal that the work of art should be a process beginning with, and grown from, its elements – that it should be a ‘becoming’ and not a ‘being’, as he 5



6 7



8



9

‘Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp, Ivan Puni, László Moholy-Nagy: Aufruh zur elementaren Kunst’, De Stijl, vol 4, no 10, 1922, p 156; reprinted as ‘Appeal for an Elementarist Art’, in S. Bann (ed), The Tradition of Constructivism, Viking Press, New York, 1974. Van Doesburg, cited in Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 48. T. van Doesburg, ‘Towards Elementary Plastic Expression’, G (Berlin), no 1, July 1923; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 141. My emphases; and ‘Anti-Tendenzkunst,’ De Stijl, VI, 2, April 1923; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 135. The phrases are from P. Mondrian, ‘A Dialogue on Neoplasticism’, De Stijl, vol 2, no 5, March 1919; in Holzman and James (eds), The New Art – The New Life, p 79. Van Doesburg, ‘Towards Elementary Plastic Expression’.

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had put it in 1915 – had been stimulated by seeing Mondrian’s Composition 10 in Black and White of that year in a group exhibition at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum. ‘The feeling I had from [the work] was spiritually pure, almost religious, but without the zeal’, van Doesburg wrote in an admiring review of the show. ‘To limit his means to so little, using only white paint on a white canvas, with some horizontal and perpendicular lines … that is extraordinary.’ ‘Religion without zeal’ was the more pointed way of describing it – to which his own Composition VII (The Three Graces) of 1917 would also correspond (Plate 15a).10 In the same review van Doesburg paid homage to two figures: first Picasso, for his Cubist reductions of line and tone, then the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, whose book Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung [Building Blocks towards a Biological Worldview] of 1913 must have struck him as consonant with the theory of artistic elements he was attempting to evolve.11 Building a functional worldview from basic elements seems to have suggested to van Doesburg a method for building a particular kind of art. As to the prehistory of ‘elements’ in art, van Doesburg might already have noticed the relation of the single brushstroke to the whole in Impressionism, or the relation of the ‘point’ to Post-Impressionist ‘pointillisme’, even M-E. Chevreul’s system of colour complementaries, particularly their mutually generative properties within the optical whole. It seems that from an early age van Doesburg instinctively veered towards a conviction that all ontologies, from representational regimes to the personality itself, are matters of perpetual negation and re-synthesis into evernew but dynamically unstable totalities. It had been Goethe’s outlook in his On Morphology, of course. Self-applied, it nourished a conviction that personal identity, his own included, was a matter of constant cancellation and overcoming

10

11

T. van Doesburg, ‘Kunst-kritiek. Moderne kunst. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Expositie Mondriaan, Leo Gestel, Sluijters, Schelfhous, Le Fauconnier’, Eenheid, no 203, 6 November 1915; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 105. Mondrian had responded to an inquiring letter from van Doesburg: ‘Only the rendering must express the general idea, not the representation.’ And the following month: ‘I believe this is what most expresses what I think possible as abstract-real (that is why I call my work plasticising [beelding] in these times)’: in J. Joosten, Piet Mondrian: Volume II: Catalogue Raisonée of the Work of 1911–1944, V+K Publishing, Blaricum, 1998, pp 108–9. See J. von Uexküll, Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung: Gesammelte Aufsätze, Munich, 1913. It was a book in which von Uexküll had begun to modulate his concept of the Umwelt – effectively an animal’s total instinctual and sensory capacities and limitations – towards an analysis of national identity and the qualities of particular nation states. Also worthy of notice is von Uexküll’s attraction to the property of Anschaulichkeit – ‘clarity’ or the quality of being ‘self-evident’ (not unrelated to Gestalt), both of which van Doesburg would make use of in his work. See the exposition of Umwelttheorie given in Harrington, Reenchanted Science, pp 38–48.

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– and he began to adopt various alter egos to confirm it.12 But now, in the years of Dada and De Stijl, he found himself with several versions of the dialectic from which to choose – Hegel’s and Schoenmaekers’ among others – the one emphasizing the sublation of art into religion and ultimately philosophy, the other proposing a synthesis of dialectical philosophy with mathematics in visual form.13 It was by acknowledging both, it seems, that van Doesburg was able to develop a visual practice in which everything appears alongside its contrary. The febrile atmosphere of Dada seemed to support that outlook well. Dada was the tendency that ‘does not want to be understood’, as van Doesburg himself described it. It was one that supports only ‘spontaneous action’; the words are from his own spirited defence of Dada published in 1923. It is as if he had come under the spell of Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto 1918 and its declaration that ‘as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too – I am neither for nor against them, and I won’t explain myself because I hate common sense’.14 More precisely, the appeal of Dada lay in its being ‘an outlook on life opposed to anything we take to be of vital importance’, as well as being ‘the strongest possible negation of any cultural evaluation’, a posture driven not by clarity of motivation but by its very absence, the model for which is nothing other than ‘nature’ itself. He warmed to the saying of Hans Arp’s friend Richard Huelsenbeck that ‘Dada is based upon itself and acts for itself as does the sun when rising, or a tree when growing. The tree grows without wanting to grow. Dada does not give motives for its acts’, rather it reaches for a ‘point of indifference’ beyond all dualities.15 The idea of indifference was particularly important to him. It had appeared as ‘religion without zeal’ in his Mondrian review in 1915. In Dada circles too, the German writer Salomo Friedländer had advocated ‘creative indifference’ [schöpferische Indifferenz] as an antidote to the deep subjectivity of the Romantics, a position in turn descended from Max Stirner’s essay The Ego and Its Own [Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] of 1844; and it was now becoming an essential component

On van Doesburg’s many aliases and doublings, see M. White, ‘Theo van Doesburg: A Counter-Life’, in G. Fabre (ed), Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, Tate Publishing, London, 2010, p 69. 13 We are told that Schoenmaekers viewed Hegel’s system as an example of ‘contemplative-concrete pantheism’, in contrast to his own ‘visual-concrete pantheism’. In Schoenmaekers’ words, ‘visual-concrete pantheism’ acknowledges Creation and Nature as counterparts but not as opposites … but conceives externality as a plastic union of counterparts’; Baljeu, ‘Life and Work’, Theo van Doesburg, pp 98–9. 14 T. Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918, in Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, John Calder, London and Riverrun Press, New York, 1977, p 4. 15 T. van Doesburg, ‘What is Dada???????’, De Stijl, 1923; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 134. 12

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of an ‘elementarist’ foundation for systematic art.16 Evolutionism was in van Doesburg’s spotlight too. There was a time when he had been under the spell of Darwin, and of Kandinsky, whose early Reminiscences abounded in evolutionist as well as quasi-Hegelian ideas. But ‘Dada denies evolution’, van Doesburg now wrote, meaning that in the work of art ‘each movement evokes a countermovement of equal force’, the one cancelling the other ‘through a simultaneous negation of any affirmation’. Dada is a ‘yes-no’, ‘a bird on four legs, a ladder without steps, a square without angles’. Actual nature is a ‘smelling corpse spoiling our spiritual pleasures and bringing everything into immediate decay’. ‘We neo-vitalists, Dadaists, destructive Constructivists have laid bare the entire abscess which hides the world’s body by crying “Look look look here here here nothing nothing nothing”.’17 It is the background against which van Doesburg now introduced diagonal lines into his paintings, each line counterposed to another as an embodiment of the self-cancelling idea – the yes-no, the ladder without legs, the angle-less square. Diagonals would constitute ‘counter-movements’ both to neighbouring diagonals as well as to the orthogonality of the painting’s frame. And these ‘counter-movements’ would establish an inner, dynamic dimension that was still something less than ‘organic’ nature translated into visual form. His sympathy for Mondrian’s approach to plasticity was at an end. ‘What we miss in so-called natural man’, he now insisted, ‘is opposition, contrast, resistance, struggle – in a word, spirit.’ The message is in most respects clear. His paintings titled CounterComposition from the years 1924 to 1930 would be a strong exemplification of a powerful dialectical idea.18 It will not have escaped notice that the invention of ‘counter-movements, the one cancelling the other’ in their simultaneity corresponds to one further emphasis in van Doesburg’s outlook, that of radical opposition to the aesthetics of the Baroque. To him, the Baroque signified lack of precision, vagueness of means, contrasts of form and colour, compositional tensions – dualities that obstructed the workings of the dialectic by forcing contrasts irreconcilably apart.

See S. Friedländer, Schöpferische Indifferenz (1918), Vol 10 of Gesammelte Schriften (ed H. Geerke and D. Thiel); M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1844. Georg Simmel’s concept of blasé might even be compared; see Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1908) and my Prelude, above. 17 T. van Doesburg, ‘What Is Dada ???????’, De Stijl, 1923; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, pp 133, 134, 135. 18 Van Doesburg, ‘Painting: From Composition to Counter-Composition’, De Stijl, vol 13, nos 73–4, 1926; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 153. I have amended the translation in line with H. Jaffé, De Stijl, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, p 203. 16

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Fig 5.2  Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition VI, 1925, oil on canvas, 50.0 × 50.0 cm. © Tate, London 2019.

A view of the Baroque as a compositional centrifuge now served van Doesburg well – as it was doing for Strzemiński during those years – by supplying a foil to the genuinely dialectical possibilities of their work. Yet that concordance would not last. We saw earlier that Strzemiński would lose faith in the methodology of his Architectural Compositions and turn his attention to the phenomenological and physiological determinants of a painted work.19 Meanwhile van Doesburg, with the confident production of the Counter-Compositions underway, now moved towards an authoritative statement of the ‘visual-concrete pantheism’ whose possibilities he had glimpsed over a decade before. See Chapter 1.

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In hindsight it can look like an inevitable development. By 1927, Theo and his wife Nelly had become close friends with Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and the two couples were planning to live together, perhaps collaborate, in a new studio in Meudon, Paris, as soon as a suitable plot of land could be found. In the first plan for the ménage the two families’ houses would be contiguous, though with separate entrances. In a second plan, dating from 1928, Theo’s and Hans’ studios would be physically joined, possibly connected by a window. A third design was for separate houses on the same plot. But van Doesburg’s health was failing – he had always suffered badly from asthma – and the project was abandoned. Yet it was the time during which he worked intensively on plans for a painting based on the properties of the square, whose appearance would encapsulate both his ‘elementarist’ ambitions as well as a version of the dialectical practice he had been striving for up until this time. Finished in the early part of 1930, Arithmetic Composition is an ordered array of squares within a square painting, each square with discernible scale-relations to every other square and to the enclosing one (Plate 15b). Inescapably, Arithmetic Composition could also look like a quasi-cinematic sequence of Malevichian Black Squares, turned on their corner and then organized into an ascending or descending diagonal order in a generative relationship stemming visibly from the properties of the enclosing square itself. The fact that a viewer cannot tell whether the sequence of squares is ascending or descending, approaching or receding, increasing or decreasing, is constitutive of the aesthetic character of the work. At the same time, the painting presents a concise exemplification of van Doesburg’s statement, drafted shortly after the painting was completed, that ‘the square represents a stable element, which must be arithmeticized if it is to become animated’.20 But how would the implications of the new method become widely known? Despite his poor health van Doesburg arranged to publish, in Paris in 1930, over his own signature and that of four others (Otto Carlsund, Jean Hélion, Léon Tutundjian and Marcel Wantz), a set of short manifestos under the general title Art Concret [Concrete Art]. We can assume that van Doesburg was the prime mover and probably their sole author. Their publication was timely, given that he and his group needed decisively to oppose a movement – Surrealism – that appeared to them as the most baleful incarnation of the Baroque. ‘We are not interested in providing “Luna-park” sensations’, they say in one Art Concret Van Doesburg, ‘Elementarism (the elements of the new painting)’, signed ‘Paris, 13 July 1930’, published in De Stijl: Van Doesburg Issue, Jan 1932, pp 17–19; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 184.

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manifesto, ‘nor sadistic or sexual attractions designed to tempt a snobbish and surfeited bourgeoisie.’ Without Concrete Art, one statement says ‘there is only the Baroque, Fauvism, animalism, sensualism, sentimentality, and that superBaroque testimony of weakness, phantasy’. The language is nothing if not confrontational. ‘Looking around us we see only manure, and it is in manure that filth and microbes live. Well, let them amuse themselves down there in the depths.’ And more threateningly, ‘our spirit has muscle’.21 It was a platform that would depend on real enthusiasm for the precision of mathematics. ‘Everything is measurable, even spirit’, says one statement; ‘we are painters who think and measure.’ Declares another, ‘unlike pastry-cooks who do things intuitively … we use mathematical data, whether Euclidean or not’. Painting must be done ‘by the intellect’. ‘Cultural value is bestowed by mathematical, or rather arithmetical control’, and so on. ‘The method leading to universal form is based on calculations of measure and number’ – this from De Stijl’s final issue of January 1932.22 The appearance of mathematics here is not altogether a great surprise. The idea of mathematicizing the plane of the picture has cropped up in our narrative before. It would appear to be fundamental to any attempt to lay foundations for a systematic art. And not only in the visual arts. By 1930 or so, several figures had grappled and were still grappling with the phenomenological experience of mathematical truth, both in Euclidean geometry as well as in the non-Euclidean geometries of Lobachevsky and Riemann, particularly the implications of conceiving time as a fourth dimension of space. In several ways, the philosophy of mathematics and the polemics of modern art had already become mixed together, and by 1930 or so the very status of mathematical statement – its manner of reference, its truth-conditions, its consistency with other statements, above all its relation to experience – these were already defining questions for thinkers as diverse as Poincaré, Husserl, Bergson and Heidegger. Take Edmund Husserl, who had begun his career with a doctorate on the differential calculus, had followed Franz Brentano’s lectures in Vienna in the 1880s, and had then developed an aversion to German Romanticism and moved to Halle to study descriptive psychology with Carl Stumpf – at that time immersed in laboratory experiments on spatial and auditory sensation. It was the beginning of Husserl’s T. van Doesburg and others, ‘Towards White Painting’ and ‘Comments on the basis of concrete painting’, Art Concret, Paris, April 1930; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, pp 183, 181, 183. 22 The citations, in order, are from ‘Comments on the basis of concrete painting’, Art Concret, April 1930; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 182; ‘From intuition towards certitude’, Paris, 1930 (Réalités Nouvelles, no 1, 1947); ‘Elementarism’, De Stijl: Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 184. 21

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life-long obsession with the relation of a priori truth to sense-experience, with the psychological and phenomenological foundations of number, arithmetic and geometry. For Husserl, what was the relation of the visual line or diagram to exactitude, to supra-personal validity and truth, let alone to actual movement and change? These would become van Doesburg’s questions too. How could the individual artwork instantiate a valid general law? ‘From the very beginning’, Husserl would insist during a discussion of Galileo’s observational method, ‘one is not concerned with the free fall of this body: the individual fact is rather an example, embedded from the start in the concrete totality of types belonging to intuitively given nature.’ Husserl’s ‘Origins of Geometry’ essay, written in 1936 and published shortly afterwards, emphasized forcibly that abstract algebraical regularities must stand to experience in empirical as well as law-like ways.23 There can be no doubting the conflicts that van Doesburg’s mathematical turn – and not only his – was beginning to provoke. By the time of the Art Concret statements, van Doesburg and Strzemiński had both come to perceive their activities as incompatible with Surrealism; and artists and critics were taking sides accordingly. The curator Wilhelm Wartmann attempted an early synthesis of the two positions in a show titled Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik [Abstract and Surrealist Painting and Sculpture] at the Zürich Kunsthaus in 1929, in which the claims of ‘abstract’ art were placed alongside examples of the Surrealist school. The curatorial project was to explore possible reconciliations between them. Van Doesburg, Lissitzky, Mondrian, Pevsner, Malevich, Vantongerloo and Vordemberge-Gildewart represented the ‘abstract’ or geometry-inclined camp, with Arp, Dalí, Picasso and numerous Surrealists chosen to represent the other, non-geometrical side. The critics and writers of Documents had already taken up cudgels against the mathematical tendency. Georges Bataille’s well-known accusation that ‘the whole of philosophy has no other purpose than … to give a frock-coat to what is, a mathematical frockcoat’ was just one metaphor crafted to mock the aspirations of mathematics to superior clarity and knowledge. Meanwhile Documents reserved particular opprobrium for the short-lived organization Cercle et Carré. Founded in 1929 by 23

E. Husserl, ‘The Origins of Geometry’, Revue internationale de philosophie, vol 1, no 2, 1939. See also The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, written between 1934 and 1937 and finally published in 1955 (in translation and introduced by D. Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1970), from which the citation comes, p 41.

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Joaquín Torres-García and Michel Seuphor, Cercle et Carré provided a home for a motley of artists committed to linearity and ‘clarity’ of geometrical form. It held a large exhibition at Galerie 23 in Paris in 1930 and published a journal in the spring of that year before folding. Carl Einstein took every opportunity to attack. Even professional mathematicians have renounced total certainty, he pointed out: ‘it is plain reactionary to imagine that any change can be rendered as a mathematical solution’. Artists were amateurs, he said, who by making a fetish of linearity and measure were inflating mediocrities to the status of generalizations. ‘Standardised and hygienic … hypertrophies of order … puritanical knickknacks … empty cocktails of the absolute’ – such was his verdict on artworks of measure and line. All of them stood in denial of the complexity of the psyche. We look to a new generation, says Einstein, ‘to revive the psychogram and the ideographic curve’ in the manner of André Masson and Joan Miró.24 The gulf between geometrical art and Documents was clear – Documents fixated on the particular, and was never attracted to mathematical law. Exceptionalism was its watchword; the consequence of a radically divisive logic in which disjoint categories made an ‘alternating’ rhythm in such a way as to ensure that contraries were kept far apart – in Bataille’s famous example, like crime in relation to the law.25 For Einstein, not only intangible notions like infinity were tainted (and good riddance, given its religious heritage), but the laws of causality were suspect too. No less a figure than Hans Reichenbach, a pioneer of probabilistic mathematics shortly to be active in the Erkenntnis group in Berlin with Rudolf Carnap, himself supplied a statement to Documents urging that nature can no longer be deterministically known, even in principle. Scientific prediction, Reichenbach proposes in his piece, ‘should rather be compared to an endless game of dice’.26 Very well; but in 1930 it was still legitimate to ask how to animate the spirit of measurement in visual terms. It is never easy to tell, of course – either then or now – whether artists who appealed to mathematical precision in their work were proposing analogies, whether terms such as ‘fourth dimension’ or 24

25

26

C. Einstein, ‘L’Exposition de l’Art Abstrait a Zurich’, Documents, no 6, 1929, p 342. Commenting elsewhere on Hans Arp’s oval pictures of the later 1920s, he says about those Constructivists ‘who raise to the heights of dogma the authenticity of mathematical form’ that they are ‘strangers to that artist. Those pedants of the circle and the square obstruct all inventiveness.’ The know-alls ‘must give up their fetish of unification and place some limits on their so-called laws’: C. Einstein, ‘L’Enfance Néolithique’, Documents, no 8, 1930, p 42. Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Dialectic’, in Y-A. Bois and R. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1997, p 71. For more on the idea of ‘scission’ in Bataille, see D. Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, MIT Press, 1989, pp 46–57. H. Reichenbach, ‘Crise de la causalité’, Documents, no 2, 1929, p 108.

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‘infinity’ were metaphors or mathematical facts, whether such language was being used with the necessary epistemological finesse. Operations of recursion and repeatability had been used before. They had been an artistic resource since the beginning of the 1920s, when the Russian artist Rodchenko used them in his Equal Form sculptures of 1921–22. Lissitzky, Klee, Vantongerloo and others were toying with geometry and mathematics at the same time as van Doesburg’s efforts to animate them both dialectically at the end of the 1920s.27 A full decade earlier, van Doesburg had been content to argue that the temporal dimension was a phenomenon of the cinema; that time could receive embodiment in neoplastic architecture, at best; that temporality in painting was achievable ‘only by mechanizing the plane of the canvas’ – literally.28 Now, at the end of the decade, he saw how ‘plasticizing’ the artwork could be achieved by mathematicizing the picture, not only to exorcise imprecision, but to do so without losing the energies of unfolding time. His Arithmetic Composition, I am suggesting, presented the same question in a particularly consequential way. The choice it offered the viewer between ‘ascending’ and ‘descending’ shape-sequences was itself a choice involving time. Admittedly Bergson – whom van Doesburg had once grouped with Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin as ‘one of the most outstanding and intelligent’ people of his day – had chastised ‘cinematographical’ thinking for constituting temporality as a one-directional sequence of time-slices. Such a construction is the inverse of sensation, according to Bergson, which must always be constituted as ‘a true evolution, a radical becoming’.29 And something of that Bergsonism was appearing in van Doesburg’s painting. It seems that Arithmetic Composition offered the viewer both ‘up’ and ‘down’ sequences at once, a diminishing as well as an enlarging movement in time, all within the ambit of what the artist called ‘cultural value … bestowed by mathematical or rather arithmetical control’.30 Or was undecidability, the hallmark of the new

For example, P. Klee, ‘Exakte Versuche im Bereich der Kunst’, Bauhaus: Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, vol 2, nos 2/3, Dessau 1928; reprinted in P. Klee, On Modern Art, Berne 1945; G. Vantongerloo, ‘Exakte Gestaltung’, Bauhaus: Zeitschrift für Gestaltung, vol 3, no 4, Dessau 1929; W. Strzemiński and K. Kobro, Kompozycja przestrzeni: Obliczenia rytmu czasoprzestrzennogo, Łódź, 1931. 28 ‘As a consequence of the newly expanded viewpoints of science and technology, the problem of space in painting and sculpture is compounded by another important problem, that of time. Whereas earlier period of art solved the problem of space in terms of perspective which modelled form, the problem of time approached solution in the juxtaposition of form’, i.e. in the Baroque: ‘An exact expression, a true balance of spatial and temporal entities, could be achieved only through the mechanization of the canvas plane’: van Doesburg ‘The Will to Style’, De Stijl, vol 2, February 1922 and vol 3, March 1922; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 121. 29 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911), Macmillan edition, London, 1960, p 288. 30 Van Doesburg, ‘From Intuition Towards Certainty’, Paris, 1930; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 185. 27

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physics, somehow involved? The evidence is that van Doesburg viewed the sequence as diminishing and enlarging simultaneously. ‘My latest canvas’, he wrote to his friend Antony Kok in January 1930, is in black, white and grey; a structure that can be controlled, a definite surface without chance elements or individual caprice. Lacking in fantasy? Yes. Lacking in feeling? Yes. But not lacking in spirit, not lacking the universal and not, I think, empty as there is everything which fits the internal rhythm: it is both the pyramid and the falling stone, both the stone skimming over the water and Echo, both time and space, the infinitely large and the infinitely small.31

As for that rhythm itself, he seems to have remembered what Hegel had said in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History – that ‘such development in its process’ that forms the Idea – the True – is ‘concrete in its contents’; and further, that ‘if we unite the notion of the concrete with that of development we have the motion of the concrete’, so that ‘what is true is found in motion, in a process in which however there is rest, whereas difference, while it lasts, is but a temporary condition through which comes unity’.32 Such Hegelian intuitions are of a piece with van Doesburg’s final conviction that the ‘concrete’ work of art ‘should be fully conceived and spiritually formed before it is produced … by the power of intellect functioning in a time-space continuum with the real elements of line, colour and surface’; that on the basis of works with titles such as Simultaneous Counter-Composition, Counter-Plastic Composition or even Arithmetic Composition, humankind can become ‘more consciously intellectual, profound and spiritual than ever before’.33 * We cannot know how van Doesburg’s art and thinking might have proceeded had he not died prematurely, in March 1931, at 47 years of age. A month earlier he had convened a meeting to establish a group – it came to be called AbstractionCréation – in an effort to unify ‘abstract’ tendencies in artists in Paris and ‘Therefore rich and not poor … The painting is in progress, and I hope to complete it shortly’; Van Doesburg, Letter to Antony Kok, 23 January 1930; in E. Hoeck (ed), Theo Van Doesburg: Oeuvre Catalogue, Central Museum Utrecht, Otterlo, 2000, p 533. Emphases in the original. 32 G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Introduction’, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (trans of Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie by E.S. Haldane), Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London, 1892; in G.W.F. Hegel: On Art, Religion and the History of Philosophy (ed. J. Glenn Gray), Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1970, pp 230–1. Some emphases added. 33 T. van Doesburg, ‘Art Concret: The Basis of Concrete Painting’, Art Concret, April 1930; ‘Towards White Painting’, Art Concret, April 1930; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, pp 180, 183. 31

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elsewhere ‘even when their tendency is not ours’, as he wrote to the Czech artist František Kupka at the time.34 Convened in the spring of 1932 by a committee comprising Arp, Gleizes, Hélion, Herbin, Kupka, Tutundjian, Valmier and Vantongerloo, Abstraction-Création adopted a sub-moniker ‘Art Non-Figuratif ’, but was too large and unwieldy to follow any particular theoretical path. Coherent only as a general platform for ‘abstract’ art, Abstraction-Création represented no less than fifty-three artists by image and text in the first of its annual cahiers. Several artists who were invited to join could not – Lissitzky, Malevich, Tatlin. Some declined. Others who joined sailed very close to Surrealism – for instance Gérard Vulliamy, Kurt Seligmann, the English artist Edward Wadsworth and the young Arshile Gorky too. Still others favoured a compromise between a kind of Bergsonian geometry and mysticism – for example Auguste Herbin, prominent on Abstraction-Création’s committee from the beginning and its directeur from 1934 until the organization’s demise in 1936. Herbin viewed his paintings of the period as manifestations of pure freedom from any principle other than to advance a pacifist and optimistic humanism, responsive to an underlying order of cosmic and social change. Looped, motionful shapes articulate the majority of his non-figuratif works of that time. ‘Movement embraces, envelops, dominates, penetrates everything’, Herbin wrote in the first Abstraction-Création cahier; ‘nothing is isolated or independent’ (Plate 16a).35 And the founding principles of colour and line were never far from Herbin’s mind – not an elementarism in van Doesburg’s sense but what Herbin would come to call ‘an alphabet of plasticity’ in which line, colour and natural form were placed in a kind of systematic correspondence with the speech-vowels and consonants to which he thought they adhered. Basing his research on writings by Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, augmented by Rimbaud’s reflections on synaesthesia and further inspired by the esoteric ramblings of Günther Wachsmuth’s Le Monde Éthérique [The Etheric World] of 1933, Herbin’s conclusion was a visual alphabet of sorts, a kind of attempted esperanto of visual art, eventually laid out in a book titled L’Art NonFiguratif of 1949.36 His paintings after the Abstraction-Création phase would prove more remarkable for their compressed colour relations and impressively taut design than for their awkward ambition – as we see it today – to reveal the higher verities of the esoteric spirit. Van Doesburg, letter to František Kupka, 9 February 1931; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 103. A. Herbin, in Abstraction-Création: Art Non-Figuratif, no 1, 1932, p 19. 36 A. Herbin, L’Art Non-Figuratif, Non-Objectif, Éditions Lydia Conti, Paris, 1949. For Herbin’s ‘alphabet of plasticity’, see the fine essay by A. Pierre, ‘Le Tableau Logophone: Quatre Hypothèses sur L’Alphabet Plastique’, Herbin, Musée Matisse de Cateau-Cambrésis, 2013, pp 161–79. 34 35

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In the meantime, van Doesburg’s dialectical philosophy of concretion was becoming consequential far away from Paris, and in ways that no one could foresee. For reasons both historical and circumstantial, it was in Zürich and other Swiss cities after 1930 that the adoption of mathematical systems in art was about to flourish anew. The closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the return to Switzerland of Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Camille Graeser, among others, presented an opportunity to take fresh stock of some bitterly contested positions in the arts. Second, the adoption in that country by artists such as Tonio Ciolina, Hans Seiler, Georges Aubert, Theo Eble, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Max Bill of a geometrical modus operandi, combined with a strong national feeling for design, especially graphics, was a feature not duplicated at that moment in any other European country outside Germany. Nor should it be forgotten that only applied art was taught in Swiss colleges at that time, and that returning Bauhaus masters would be expected to adjust to that context. And in Switzerland no less than in the Netherlands, national forms of religious and ethical Puritanism  – in the Swiss case those descending from the Reformation pastor Huldrych Zwingli – played a tangible part. With an eye to the larger European context, influential museum curators in Switzerland made repeated attempts throughout the 1930s to adjudicate the seemingly incompatible claims of geometrical art on the one hand and Surrealism on the other – even to work out the terms of a dialogue between them.37 Following Wartmann’s 1929 Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik exhibition in Zürich, the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne mounted a show in the spring of 1935 with the title Thèse-Antithèse-Synthèse [Thesis-AntithesisSynthesis] that quite openly took Purism, Constructivism and Abstraction (socalled) as its thesis, Dada and Surrealism as its antithesis, and declared its aim to be to identify a new art in a synthesis. In the logic applied by the critic Anatole Jakovski in one statement for the show, the anarchic lyricism stemming from Van Gogh and the constructive stability of Cézanne stood in need of a kind of referee. ‘The immemorial squares of Mondrian’, Jakovski said, ‘and Mirό’s protoplasms of desire, are just the end points of these two branches … and have become completely irreconcilable’ – or rather, are to be reconciled only in

In the influential newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung – to take a relevant symptom – we find vigorous public discussions of the merits of ‘abstract’ as well as ‘Surrealist’ art. See for example the articles in Neue Zürcher Zeitung by Mondrian and van Doesburg respectively; as well as the review by C.G. Jung of the large Picasso retrospective at the Zürich Kunsthaus, 1932. See Chapter 4, above.

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the new art yet to come.38 Jakovski had the previous year curated a Paris show titled Five Swiss Artists under the auspices of Abstraction-Création, comprising Hans Erni, Hans Schiess, Kurt Seligmann, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Gérard Vulliamy, arguing that collectively they constituted just such a synthetic trend.39 It too sounds like a dialectical idea – yet it was bound to remain obscure how a peace treaty between anarchism and order, between biological fantasy and timeless mathematics, could be achieved; and therefore why ‘synthesis’ rather than ‘compromise’ was to be the applicable term. A 1936 painting by Hans Erni illustrates the problem very well. Titled Panta Rhei [Everything Flows] after

Fig 5.3  Hans Erni, Panta Rhei, 1935, oil on canvas, 116 × 80 cm. © Hans Erni ­Foundation, Lucerne. 38 39

A. Jakovski, in Thèse-Antithèse-Synthèse, Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1935, pp 12–13. A. Jakovski, Five Swiss Artists, Abstraction-Création Gallery, Paris, 1934.

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Heraclitus, the painting presents a series of wave motions in incrementally closing and expanding intervals, but in doing so has run the risk of literalizing incrementalism in a manner that leaves little for the viewer to do.40 It was quite otherwise with the forms of visual experiment just about to begin. Switzerland was about to become the home of a mathematical version of painting and sculpture if anything more exacting than van Doesburg’s concretism; a version that would demand, over the decade or more to come, a more complex relation to a viewing audience than any programme of curatorial ‘synthesis’ was likely to achieve. Now it was van Doesburg’s dialectic of centripetence that began to dominate the scene. The young artist and designer Max Bill was in the process of appropriating van Doesburg’s term ‘concret’ and applying it to a kind of painting and sculpture in which a certain determined rationality might prevail; one shorn of the vehemence of the Art Concret manifestos and with few authoritarian connotations to its name. Time spent as a Bauhaus student under Joseph Albers and Paul Klee between 1927 and 1929 had led Bill to a conviction that demonstrable accountability was the standard which a ‘concret’ or ‘konkrete’ artwork should attain; and it may have been Albers’ example together with a single phrase from van Doesburg’s ‘Towards Elementary Plastic Expression’ text of 1923 – his reference to the artist’s need ‘to revise his means, to establish laws creating a system’ – that prompted Bill to write ‘Konkrete Gestaltung’ [Concrete Forming] as a declaration for the exhibition Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik [Contemporary Problems of Swiss Painting and Sculpture], held at the Zürich Kunsthaus in the summer of 1936. Presenting no less than forty-one artists of all styles and manners, its curatorial purpose was to show the vitality of Swiss modernism as an already differentiated creative field, with Zürich a rival to Paris as a centre of artistic power. In common with ThèseAntithèse-Synthèse the previous year, the hope of Zeitprobleme was to establish an alliance of modernists against traditionalist Swiss positions such as that of the Gesellschaft Schweizerischer Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten [Society of Swiss Painters, Sculptors and Architects], hence to ensure the conditions for a progressive Swiss modernism in the face of totalitarianism and even war. Bill’s ‘Konkrete Gestaltung’ would prove to be a breakthrough in the search for a dialectical method in the making and meaning of art. ‘Konkrete’ works, according to him, were those constructed of colour, space, light and movement 40

Erni’s Panta Rhei received some qualified endorsement from the left-wing critic Konrad Farner during the early years of the war; see Farner, Hans Erni: Weg und Zielsetzung des Künstlers: Arbeiten aus den Jahre 1931 bis 1942, Verlag Amstutz, Herdeg and Co; Zürich and London, 1943, pp 28–30.

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‘according to a technique and to laws of their own, without reference to exterior nature or its transformation.’ They are constructed ‘in a clear and specific way … to become objects, visual and intellectual tools [sie werden zu Gegenständen, zu optischen und geistigen Gebrauchsgegenständen]’.41 ‘Konkrete Kunst’, Bill wrote in a later version of the text, ‘when true to itself, is the pure expression of harmonious measure and law … it organises systems and gives life to these arrangements through the means of art.’ ‘Konkrete Kunst’, he claimed in a reminder of both Arp and van Doesburg, ‘is real and intellectual, a-naturalistic [unnaturalistisch] while being close to nature [dennoch naturnah]. It tends towards the universal and yet cultivates the unique. It rejects individuality, but for the benefit of the individual.’42 Bill’s Fifteen Variations on a Theme of 1935–38 is a series of coloured lithographs exploring the formal patterns to be derived from an equilateral figure (a triangle) developed by stages into an octagon by virtue of a rule requiring an n-sided figure to provide a single side for a new figure of (n+1) sides, a method applicable to curved as well as straightline manipulations in which each interval, relationship and sequence – given certain entry and exit conditions – can be reckoned as accountable, living, and therefore ‘true’. Bill’s insistence on the ‘life’ of these dynamic arrangements is now free of the Dada overtones that had once been inseparable from that word. The rhythmic structures of Bach and Schönberg were among the precedents to which Bill often liked to refer. It mattered a good deal to Bill that konkrete, abstrakt and gegenstandlos be adequately differentiated both from one another and from their connotations in both English and French. It is certainly true that ‘konkrete Gestaltung’ and ‘konkrete Kunst’ in the Swiss context proved open to mistranslation and misunderstanding abroad. For example, Bill’s ‘konkrete’ meant something different from van Doesburg’s ‘concret’, and something different again from Arp’s usage in his Concrétion and Concrétions Humaines sculptures of those years. In English, the term ‘concrete’ would always be haunted by its use to denote a building material. Yet the term was already in use in the English-speaking world. In March 1936, shortly anticipating the Zürich Zeitprobleme show and exactly a 41

42

M. Bill, ‘Konkrete Gestaltung’, Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik, Kunsthaus, Zürich, 1936, p 9. Max Bill, ‘Konkrete Kunst’ as presented in the catalogue to the travelling exhibition Zürcher Konkrete Kunst, 1949, in M. Staber (ed), Konkrete Kunst: Manifeste und Kunstlertexte, Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, 2001, p 32; in English translation in K. Stiles and P. Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, p 74.

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Fig 5.4  Max Bill, Fifteen Variations on a Theme, 1935–38 (detail), ­portfolio with 15 colour lithographs, the title, imprint and a text by Max Bill in German, English and French, edition of 20, each 32.0 × 30.5 cm. Published by Editions des Chroniques du Jour, Paris. Printed by Mourlot. Sammlung Angela Thomas Schmid, Zumikon. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. © DACS 2019.

week before the opening of Cubism and Abstract Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the gallerist and artist Albert E. Gallatin had pointedly opened an exhibition in New York that argued for a distinction between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ with the help of the variant term ‘concretionism’. Held at the Paul Reinhardt Galleries at 730, Fifth Avenue, Five Contemporary American Concretionists showed the work of John Ferren, Alexander Calder, Charles Biederman, George L.K. Morris and Charles Green Shaw in a manner designed both to highlight the exclusion of Americans from Cubism and Abstract Art as

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well as to make the deficits of the term ‘abstraction’ entirely clear (Plate 16b). Gallatin, the impresario of the Museum of Living Art at New York University, said that ‘abstract’ was a term ‘with even less meaning than “impressionist” or “cubist”’. He believed that an artistic manner built on sharply defined elemental forms growing within a legible space or field deserved independent recognition. The works of Ferren and company ‘are essentially examples of concrete plasticity and simplification’, Gallatin asserted, and in comparison to the term ‘abstraction’, ‘the term “concretion” seems vastly preferable’.43 There are reasons for thinking that at the semantic centre of ‘concrete’ and ‘concretionism’ lies the important term ‘plastic’. In 1937 Gallatin and Morris co-founded a magazine titled Plastic/ Plastique, edited in Europe by Sophie Taeuber-Arp with assistance from Hans Arp, Domela, Gallatin and Morris. For its short life Plastic/Plastique functioned as a platform for ‘plasticity’ understood broadly as a quality of articulated and dynamic form, as well as a bridge in the arts between Europe and the USA.44 Or take the exhibition Abstract and Concrete, organized by Nicolete Gray in Oxford and London in the spring and summer of 1936 in association with the magazine Axis. Artists in England had already proved themselves tentative in adopting Constructivist principles or the various theories and practices of ‘abstract’ art. A few had become members of Abstraction-Création in 1932 and 1933, and a few others had developed practices of non-objective painting and sculpture earlier in the decade. Ben Nicholson had evolved a form of relief painting between 1930 and 1933 that owed something to the precepts of Russian Constructivism, but no less to phenomenal qualities such as flatness and subtle shadows as they might fall on a whitened interior wall. The presence of his work in Thèse-Antithèse-Synthèse was a virtually unique instance of British art on Swiss soil at that time. Conversely, the work of neither van Doesburg nor Hans Arp, nor the various philosophical traditions of dialectical thought, were familiar to British modernists such as Paul Nash, John Piper, Barbara Hepworth or Henry Moore at the beginning of the 1930s decade. Hepworth visited Arp’s studio in Meudon in 1932 or 1933 but was nonplussed by what she saw.45 Not a single member of the British generation showed an appetite for A.E. Gallatin, Five Contemporary American Concretionists, press-release, March 1936, Archives of American Art. My emphasis. 44 Plastic/Plastique was published with texts in English, French and German until 1939. 45 Hepworth said she disliked the plaster Arp was using – but later reflected that his sculptures in that medium ‘freed me of many inhibitions’ and helped her ‘see the figure in landscape with new eyes’; see A. Wagner, Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2005, p 184. 43

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mathematics or for ‘system’ in their art. Abstract and Concrete was in that sense an exploratory gesture in a nation with little sympathy for modernism of the mainland European sort. Looking back, one suspects that Hélion, Calder and perhaps Erni would have understood the implications of the term ‘concrete’ in the show, whereas Hepworth, Holding, Arthur Jackson, Moore, Nicholson and Piper probably would not.46 Hepworth, for her part, generally avoided the term, and adhered to a conviction that ‘formal abstract relationships’ are the means by which the idea – the imaginative concept – generates scale or poise in sculpture. Hers was a vitalism both universalizing and humanistic. The central idea in sculpture ‘actually is the giving of life and vitality to material’, she wrote in a text of the following year. And vitality is ‘a spiritual inner life’.47 It is unsurprising, then, to find that neither Abstract and Concrete nor its commentary in Axis for 1936 recognized van Doesburg’s principle that ‘concrete’ was meant to exclude and even oppose the various meanings given to ‘abstract’ – never to join them.48 Particular comment should be reserved for the French artist Jean Hélion. For him, ‘abstract’ had become an unwelcome description for his work. Having been a ‘geometric’ artist in the later 1920s and a signatory to van Doesburg’s Art Concret manifestos in 1930, he was now winning friends in England and America by ‘bodying out’ – to use Geoffrey Grigson’s term – the flatness of his painting such as to create ‘a re-synthesis of intellect with emotion, of form with matter, of geometric with organic’.49 Forms ‘without body’, as Hélion put it, ‘lead to a diminution of the field of sight’ and of the ‘possible oppositions’ that can be generated between elements in the work. In his new paintings, then, he strove to unflatten individual forms in such a way as to ‘carry sight around forms, to suppress ignorance of the behind’ in a manner he associated with Poussin or Cimabue, and in such a way as to produce a rhythm between them ‘that goes from simple to complex [and] produces a sensation of time … that of a complex organism in growth’ (Plate 17).50 ‘A pictorial element is real’, Hélion says, ‘when Hans Arp refused to take part on the grounds that Sophie Taeuber-Arp had not also been invited. B. Hepworth, ‘Sculpture’, in J.L. Martin, B. Nicholson and N. Gabo (eds), Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art, Faber and Faber, London, 1937, p 113. For Hepworth, qualities such as proportion and space provide ‘an unconscious manner of expressing our belief in a possible life … [and promise] the same life, the same expansion, the same universal freedom to everyone … A world without form consciousness would scarcely be alive at all’; pp 116, 115. 48 Though Axis for 1936 purported to function as a catalogue for the exhibition, in practice it confined  itself to defences of the term ‘abstract’ by Herbert Read, Hugh Gordon Porteus and Kenneth Walsh – all of them with a commitment to literature as much as to the visual arts. 49 G. Grigson, ‘Painting and Sculpture Today’, in Grigson (ed), The Arts Today, London, 1935, p 87. 50 J. Hélion, ‘From Reduction to Growth’, Axis, no 2, 1935, pp 22, 22, 23, 24. ‘In Poussin one sees not the maximum of one or two oppositions, but the maximum of all conceived oppositions. Fundamental opposition. The concentration of a being in growth’ (p 23). 46

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it coincides with its currents. The field of conception belongs to nature. That is why “abstract” is an imbecile word.’51 * It is the right moment to mention that, by the time of the Oxford and London exhibition, Kandinsky, by then a revered master of the modern movement and one supremely aware of the complications of the term, had moved from Germany following the closure of the Berlin Bauhaus to Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris. He had renewed some old friendships (including with Hans Arp), and was soon in regular communication with his nephew Alexandre Kojève, a young scholar attracting attention for his lecture course on Hegel’s Phaenomenologie at the École des Hautes Études. Kandinsky would soon invite Kojève to write an essay on his work which, though not published until later, amounted to a fully dialectical reading of the distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ in which it was the latter category that became equivalent to the Hegelian ‘absolute’ as well as to the category of ‘the beautiful’, signifying an object that is replete, with a ‘being’ in-and-for-itself [anundfürsich].52 We have Kojève’s reassurance that Kandinsky ‘declared himself in accord with [his essay’s] essential content’; and it is true that Kandinsky’s paintings of the time, such as Division-Unité of 1934, built as a diagrammed grid whose mobile painted compartments contain squirming biological forms amid various Euclidean ones – or Succession of 1935, showing forms ascending as if through a series of transformations of the ones below – can both be read convincingly as a dialectical movement of thought (Plate 18a).53 As with van Doesburg, the Hegelian correspondences should not be exaggerated. Yet Kandinsky himself published statements at the end of the decade emphatically renouncing ‘abstract’ as a term of description for his work. In ‘concrete’ art, he would say, the artist ‘frees himself from the object [and] offers 51 52

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J. Hélion ‘Poussin, Seurat and double rhythm’; Axis, no 5, 1936, p 16. Though written in the 1930s, Kojève’s full account was published as ‘Les peintures concrètes de Kandinsky’, La Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, 90, no 2, 1985, pp 149–71, in which Kojève maintained that ‘Kandinsky was the first to paint (beginning in 1910) objective and concrete paintings’. Kandinsky’s alleged Hegelianism is analysed more fully, but without reference to van Doesburg, Arp or the Zürich group by L. Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, Stanford University Press, California, 2014, from which the citation from Kojève’s 1985 essay is taken (p. 163). For Kojève’s reassurance, see the short version of his text, ‘Pourquoi Concret?’, XXe Siècle, no 27, December 1966 (in English as ‘Why Concrete?’ in Hommage to Wassily Kandinsky, Leon Amiel Publishers, New York, 1975, p 125), and Florman, Concerning the Spiritual and the Concrete in Kandinsky’s Art, p 58. For the ‘biological’ orientation of Kandinsky’s Parisian works, see Chapter 3, above.

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a kind of parallel with symphonic music by possessing a purely artistic content’. In every truly new work, ‘a new world is created that has never existed … Next to the already known world, a new, previously unknown one is uncovered’ which announces ‘Here I am!’ and for which – Kandinsky says triumphantly – ‘I prefer the term concrete art.’54 * But we must return to Switzerland. In April 1937 a new grouping known as Allianz: Vereinigung Moderner Schweizer Künstler [Alliance: Association of Modern Swiss Artists] had been launched in Zürich under the guidance of the artists Leo Leuppi, Walter Bodmer and Hans Erni, aided by the young designer Richard Paul Lohse, with the aim of functioning as an umbrella organization for any persuasive contemporary style. Allianz’s activities proved spectacular. First there was a mixed exhibition in Zürich in 1942 and then, in 1944, a large exhibition titled Konkrete Kunst mounted at the Basel Kunstmuseum under Max Bill’s stewardship, dominated by large numbers of works by Bill himself together with several each by Arp, Bodmer, Klee and Leuppi, with smaller showings by Lohse, Mondrian, Taeuber-Arp and Vantongerloo. It can be said that, by the end of the European war in May 1945, ‘Konkrete Kunst’ had become a distinctive category in Swiss art as well as a broad and significant philosophical enterprise in its own right. Allianz continued to provide a platform for it, first in the Galerie des Eaux-Vives, Zürich, and again in a grouping of Bill, Graeser, Loewensberg and Lohse at the Zürich Helmhaus, both in November 1946.55 The following year saw an eclectic show Konkrete, Abstrakte, Surrealistische Malerei in der Schweiz in St Gallen; as well as the large Allianz: Vereinigung Moderne Schweizer Künstler at the Zürich Kunsthaus, in which both Bill and Lohse published statements relevant to their work. Bill’s task was once more W. Kandinsky, ‘The Value of a Concrete Work’, XXth Century, Paris 1938–39 (Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 2, pp 820–1); and ‘Abstract of Concreet?’, in Tentoonstelling Abstracte Kunst, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1938; Lindsay and Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol 2, p 832. 55 Simultaneously the Galerie des Eaux-Vives published a journal Abstrakt + Konkret between October 1944 and October 1945, including commemorative numbers on Sophie Taeuber-Arp (who had died tragically in Zürich in January 1943) and Kandinsky (who had died in Paris in December 1944). At its centre lay not geometry alone but the processuality lying at the very heart of geometric form. In the issue for April 1945 – to take one example – we find a passage from Aristotle’s Physics: ‘All change is movement: the beginning and the end. The final ground of motionlessness is pure form, pure actuality – the immaterial or the mind of God!’ as well as, from Hegel: ‘Geometry establishes spatial form. Art studies its powers. The former is ongoing research; the latter, a return to the centre’; Abstrakt + Konkret, no 7, April 1945.

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to insist ‘that “abstrakt” is an idealisation of a given quality or thing’, whereas ‘konkrete’ designates the verifiable singular thing, ‘the actual, present, visible and tangible object [das wirkliche, das vorhandene, sichtbare und greifbare Objekt]’. The difference between abstract and concrete art is that in the former, the image content is reliant upon images from nature, while the image-content in concrete art ‘arises independently of nature’. ‘Abstract-concrete’ is a nonsense term, Bill states unambiguously, ‘a freak term, dreamt up by writers … “Abstract” and “concrete” are opposites.’ Concretion to Bill meant ‘making something into an object … by means of analytic thought’.56 By the end of the war period and the late 1940s, Bill’s practice as an artist was achieving its mature form. Many of his paintings of the period are built – constructed – according to the mapping of number rhythms and intervals onto a limited set of colours in accordance with combinatorial rules, such that the task imagined for the viewer was one of clear-eyed inspection of a painting’s elements; then to rise to the challenge of recognizing or reconstructing the process by which its orderings and sub-orderings had been made. The more ambitious claim advanced by Bill was that numerical orderings made over into form can in themselves be conceptually kinetic and interactive. Not only did his works imply a commitment on the viewer’s part to some temporally extended acts of comparison, both of parts in relation to a whole and of their likely sequencing in the order of the work’s manufacture, but such activity was to have the generative quality implied by his phrase ‘give life … to systems through the means of art’.57 There is evidence that Bill had taken advice from the mathematician G.D. Birkhoff ’s Aesthetic Measure of 1933, a book written primarily as an investigation of the aesthetics of music, which proposed that aesthetic quality or level (M) increases with order (O) and declines with complexity in a regular relation of M = O/C, where ‘order’ accrues from symmetry, progression, rhythm and the ordering of parts within the whole, while ‘complexity’ measures extraneous elements, or those that play no obvious function in relation to the work’s equilibrium.58 The implication is that Birkhoff ’s ‘rhythm’, from the field of music, could be directly transferred. The wider picture is that Bill’s central fascination as an artist lay in the imaginative freedoms that could be released from relatively – we use the term M. Bill, ‘Worte rund um Malerei und Plastik’, in Allianz: Vereinigung Moderne Schweizer Künstler, Kunsthaus, Zürich, 1947, np. Bill, ‘Konkrete Kunst’, 1949 and note 42 above. 58 G.D. Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1933. 56

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advisedly – simple orderings of space, interval and number. As early as 1935 he had developed a fascination for the Moebius strip, whose configuration appears to confound Euclid’s law of parallels. Bill made several sculptures to exemplify how. He was certainly willing to acknowledge that the newest concepts of space and energy uncovered by physicists from Einstein onwards had brought to light mathematical and spatial phenomena that any artist with a taste for paradox could enjoy. For example, space that can begin on one side [of a surface] and end in a completely changed aspect on the other, while nevertheless remaining on that self-same side; infinity that may be found doubling back from the far horizon to present itself as immediately at hand; limitations without boundaries; disjunctive and disparate multiplicities constituting coherent and unified entities; identical shapes rendered wholly diverse by the merest inflexion; fields of attraction that fluctuate in strength.

– such phenomena could be mesmerizing from any artistic viewpoint at all. Topology, space-time curvature, field theory: each suggested an unprecedented meeting between an extended sense of mathematical rationality and the structures of ‘nature’ comprehended initially as highly irregular forms. A similar topology, applied to the plane, was exploited in the painting Infinite and Finite of 1947 (Plate 18b). How could a surface be continuous and bounded at the same time? The hallucinatory qualities of the new geometries were as compelling to him as to several Surrealists – Dalí included. There is more than a hint of intoxication in Bill’s welcome into his worldview of ‘latent forces that may be active or inert … that music of the spheres which underlies every man-made system and every law of nature it is within our power to discern’.59 By the end of the 1940s a fully articulate programme for geometrical art in Switzerland was under way. If, for Bill, all art is ‘philosophy presented optically, designed morality [optisch dargestellte Philosophie, gestaltete Moralität]’, his epistemological reach was in the end more fluid, less severe, than that of his compatriot Richard Lohse.60 It was Lohse above all who would conceive of Konkrete Kunst always in dialectical – which for him meant ultimately social – terms. Untrained as an artist but well acquainted with Paris Cubism, Lohse M. Bill, ‘The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art’, Werk, 3, 1949; in translation in E. Stiles and P. Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, p 76. 60 M. Bill, ‘Worte rund um Malerie und Plastik: über den Sinn theoretischer Artikel, Werktitel und Begriffe’, Allianz: Vereinigung moderner Schweizer Künstler, Kunsthaus, Zürich, 1947, np. 59

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Fig 5.5  Max Bill, Endless Ribbon (original 1935) 1953, granite, 134.7 (with base) × 111.7 × 116.8 cm. Baltimore Museum of Art, Alan and Janet Wurtzburger Collection. BMA 1974.62.2. Photograph: Mitro Hood. © DACS 2019.

had during the later 1920s and early 1930s experimented with curvilinear composition and with rhythmic gradations of the picture plane. In Allianz’s very first exhibition, Neue Kunst in der Schweiz, in Basel at the beginning of 1938, he had shown two works from his series Vogelbild [Bird-picture] of 1935 that he understood as ‘expressive spatial curvatures’. He had helped organize the Modern German Art exhibition in London in 1938, staged as a reply to the repressive state practices of Hitler’s Grosse Kunstausstelling [Great Art Exhibition] in Munich in 1937 that had mercilessly pilloried modern European art. By the beginning of the war, Lohse had become a champion of a subtle interplay between visual form and the framing of cognitive and democratic freedoms, and we now find him studying closely the Constructivists, Mondrian and van Doesburg with a view to eradicating the last vestiges of subjectivity and randomness from the truly contemporary work. There were precedents that he could follow. Mondrian’s Checkerboard painting of 1919 and van Doesburg’s Simultaneous Composition of 1929, together with his Arithmetic Composition of 1930, helped persuade Lohse that in systematicity as such lay the foundation of a completely contemporary art, one attuned to the processes as well as the illusions of the age.

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Fig 5.6  Richard Paul Lohse, Vogelbild, 1935, oil on wood, 46 × 37.5 cm. © Richard Paul Lohse Stiftung, Zürich/DACS 2019.

By 1942–43 Lohse had abandoned the last traces of the curved line and had begun to probe dialectically the properties of the rectangle alone. He later summarized his ensuing development in some important phrases: ‘anonymity of the [artistic] media’; ‘logical sequences of structures that give rise to an unlimited, predetermined series of colours’; ‘form structure that becomes colour structure’; ‘the logic of addition contains the logic of colour’; and the statement that ‘serial and modular creative methods, because of their dialectical character, are parallels to expression and activity in a new social reality’, given that ‘the serial principle is a radical democratic principle’. Above all, ‘there is no definition of aesthetics without the definition of its social basis’.61 A serial work such as Concretion I of 1945–46, for example, begins from the specification of an ‘element’ on which the total work is based before achieving an arrangement of self-coherent groups that exist in themselves and in relatedness to each other. He described the compositional method for the painting as follows: R.P. Lohse, from ‘Lines of Development 1943–1984’, in R.P. Lohse and others, Richard Paul Lohse: Modulare und Serielle Ordnungen 1943–84, Waser Verlag, Zürich, 1984, pp 135, 136, 137, 142. My emphasis.

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Eighteen vertical standard elements which are oriented in the same direction have been concentrated into groups. The position and the colour of the elements determine the rhythm of the groups. The vertical arrangement is seven-fold. The height of the standard element consists of four of these parts. The proportion of the standard element to the entire height of the painting is therefore 4:7. All vertical and horizontal intervals are composed of specific dimensions which have been derived from a multiplication of the widths of the elements.

The work evolves in what Lohse called ‘a patient and drawn-out experiment’ (Plate 19a).62 Rhythm, and through rhythm temporality, was of supreme importance to Lohse’s dynamic view of how concrete art should function – not the rhythms of ‘nature’ but on the contrary those beginning from the organization of selfsimilar forms whose size, shape, colour and position determined multiple visual movements within the whole.63 In a set of modular paintings begun around 1950 and continued until 1984, he would undertake a much larger ‘patient and drawn-out experiment’ to exploit the dynamic possibilities, not of the rectangle but of the square, using ‘logically conceived orders built up on the consecutive principle of serial colour arrangement and the consequentiality of the colour circle’. Four, six, eight or twelve colours were permuted with each other to give a systematic variation of visual units in and of the picture’s surface (Plate 19b). What distinguished Lohse’s unfolding project from that of other Zürich concretionists was undoubtedly its philosophical scope. Each of his paintings was by this time conceived as instantiating, never a finished structure but a demonstration of rational, egalitarian relations taking shape in pictorial form. His friend the philosopher Hans Heinz Holz made several claims on his behalf; first, that Lohse’s project finally purged the experiments of Russian Constructivism and De Stijl of any remaining elements of philosophical euphoria and dilettantism that allowed notions such as ‘ideas of the artist’ or ‘a feeling for form’ to play a part in the work; and second, that Lohse’s ‘severe dialectical style’ lent to the work the same level of objective validity as a mathematical deduction based on axioms and rules for the combination of elements. What the scientist could do in the way of theory-construction, Holz argued, Lohse could accomplish by demonstrating how logical procedure could 62

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R. Lohse, ‘Standard, Series, Module: New Problems and Tasks of Painting’, in G. Kepes (ed), Module, Symmetry, Proportion, Studio Vista, London, 1966, pp 146, 147. R. Lohse, ‘Die Entwicklung der Gestaltungsgrundlagen der Konkreten Kunst [The development of the formal foundations of concrete art]’, in Allianz: Vereinigung Moderner Schweizer Künstler, Kunsthaus, Zürich, 1947, np.

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result in a fundamentally democratic sensory form. A further achievement was to show how a painting in its final sensory being can make evident how that form was attained – how its system of relations ‘came into existence through the construction process’ in the manner of what Leibniz had long ago called ‘genetic definition’, according to which infinite variety and possibility can be generated from finite means. For Lohse, every painting was at one and the same time a generic expression of a form relationship and the expression of that relationship’s coming into being, its manner of manifestation.64 A further observation is that each Lohse painting can be viewed as a response to the dilemma posed by Husserl in his puzzlement about the relation of geometry to the testimony of the senses. ‘Pure mathematics, time-theory, space theory and movement theory’, Husserl had said, ‘are all free throughout of any positings of actual fact, of … experience qua experience … Experience functions in them not as experience.’ The geometer who draws his figures on the blackboard produces strokes that are actually there, on a blackboard that is actually there. But his experience of what he thus produces, qua experience, ‘affords as little ground for his geometrical seeing and thinking as does the physical act of drawing itself ’.65 Lohse’s answer, according to Holz, is that the overlapping of genus with species ‘is the basic figure of dialectical logic’ – the general is contained within the particular and vice versa.66 In Lohse’s words, his project was one of generating the image out of its elements, of ‘the bringing-to-visibility of processes’, of ensuring ‘the necessity and succinctness [das Lapidare]’ of the painting regarded as a finality, including ‘its metamorphoses into the kinetic-flexible’. Above all, the project was of serial and modular methods as ‘parallels to expression and activity in a new social reality’.67 Certain affinities belong to Lohse’s methodology for art. His vision of an optimistic social processuality was one he shared with the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, for whom the very existence of future-directed attitudes such as anticipation, wanting and even fear always spoke of a world whose dialectical H.H. Holz, ‘Dialectic – Given Visual Form/Dialektik – anschaulich geworden’, in Richard Paul Lohse: Modulare und Serielle Ordnungen 1943–84, Waser Verlag, Zürich, 1984. 65 E. Husserl, Ideas, I, 1913, Para 7, p 55. See further ‘Der Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem’ (The Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-Historical Problem), Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol 1, no 2, 1939. The speculation is that the text was originally written for inclusion in The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. 66 Holz, ‘Dialectic – Given Visual Form’, p 109. 67 R.P. Lohse, ‘Entwicklungslinien seit 1943, Düsseldorf ’, essay for the exhibition Richard Paul Lohse: Prinzipp seriell, Kunsthaus, Dusseldorf, 1972; reprinted in H.H. Holz, J. Lohse James and S. Markun, Lohse Lesen: Texte von Richard Paul Lohse 1902–1988, Offizin Verlag, Zürich, 2002, pp 188–9. My reading of this text has been aided by conversations with the artist Jeffrey Steele and by his essay ‘Richard Paul Lohse as a Philosopher’, Lohse Foundation, Zürich 2005. 64

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unfolding required a reversal of entropy and the maintenance of hope.68 On a theoretical level, meanwhile – and again in answer to Husserl – Lohse’s attitude to seriality chimed well with the version of ‘constructiveness’ favoured in the intuitionist school of mathematics in which, contrary to the commitments of the formalists and the logicists, the elements of the real number system have their origin not in arbitrary orthographic notation but ‘in the perception of a movement in time, of a falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things’. This, for the intuitionist L.E.J. Brouwer, ‘is the basic intuition of mathematics’.69 Gone were the Platonic certainties. In Lohse’s project for an art of ‘expression and activity in a new social reality’ the ambition of van Doesburg to ‘discipline the means [of art] … by establishing laws creating a system’ had surely reached a kind of fulfilment.70 That said, challenges to Lohse’s dialectical methods were being heard no sooner than they had become known. A new journal called Spirale, founded by two young artists, Dieter Roth and Marcel Wyss, began publication in 1953 and for over a decade supported a more catholic mixture of graphics, poems, notes on architecture and much more. Its sympathies were as eclectic as its visual style. In it could be found work by Hepworth, Moore, Arp, Klee, Mary Vieira and the young Leon Golub alongside poetry by García Lorca and Wallace Stevens. It was as if the high didacticism of Lohse’s ‘severe dialectical style’ was now proving vulnerable to its contrary, the fluid and happenstance work. By 1960, elementarism in van Doesburg’s sense had reached its apogee. A large and unwieldy exhibition titled Konkrete Kunst: 50 Yahre Entwicklung [Concrete Art: 50 Years’ Development] at the Zürich Helmhaus in that year foregrounded the canonical Zürich ‘concretists’ but also embraced works by Georges Mathieu, Mark Rothko, Mark Tobey and Jean Dubuffet, all now claimed as exponents of the ‘concretization of a pictorial idea’.71 The terms ‘concret’, ‘konkrete’ and ‘concrete’ were changing their meanings; and ‘elementarism’ was in danger of being forgotten. For all that, Konkrete Kunst as a mid-European phenomenon had Holz, ‘Dialectic – Given Visual Form’, p 111; see also E. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1959 and its re-telling in H.H. Holz, Logos Spermatikos: Ernst Blochs Philosophie der Unfertigen Welt, Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1975. 69 L.E.J. Brouwer, ‘Historical Background, Principles and Methods of Intuitionism’, South African Journal of Science, October–November 1952, cited in S. Körner, The Philosophy of Mathematics, Hutchinson University Library, London, 1960, p 122 (my emphases). Compare Wittgenstein: ‘Das Wesen des Rechnens haben wir beim Rechnenlernen kennen gelernt’/‘We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate’, On Certainty, para 45, Blackwell, Oxford, 1969. In the same connection see Kant, ‘Preface’, The Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd edn, 1787. 70 T. van Doesburg, ‘Towards Elementary Plastic Expression’, G (Berlin), no 1, July 1923; Baljeu, Theo van Doesburg, p 141. 71 Konkrete Kunst: 50 Yahre Entwicklung, Helmhaus, Zürich 1960. For two critical accounts, see Fritz Laufer, ‘Grabesang für des Konstrukivismus’, Tages Anzeiger, June 1960 and Max Eichenberger, ‘Von Konkretismus zum Konkretinismus’, Die Tat, 17 June 1960. 68

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Fig 5.7  Cover of Spirale, no 1, April 1953, woodcut by Dieter Roth, graphics by ­Marcel Wyss, 50 × 35 cm, 1953. Private collection.

assumed a kind of canonical status, and as a platform it had started to transmute to other contexts. What proved relatively constant in that transmutation was an underlying ambition to exploit the paradoxes and philosophical uncertainties of mathematics for purposes of achieving freedom from imaginative strictures and control. In the symptomatic words of the Neo-Concrete Manifesto published in far-off Brazil in 1959, an artwork based on the regularities of mathematics ‘creates and reveals a universe of existential significance. If we need a simile for a work of art’ the Manifesto proposed, ‘we would not find one in the machine, but in living beings’.72

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F. Gular, ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’, Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janiero, 22 March 1959, signed by Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Aluisio Carvão, Mário Pedrosa and others.

6

Liquefaction

Given the importance of time and the temporal categories to modern visual art – process, possibility, growth, organicity and decay – it is surprising that so little attention has been given to them until now. Form in modern art was never a static Gestalt; always a rising or a falling, always a process on its way somewhere, never complete. Various exemplifications have been given in this book so far. Yet a further principle asks to be examined now; for latent in all of the previous ones is the fact that bringing matter to form – plasticizing, as it can be called – is also inescapably an operation on the material of art, whether paint, ink, water, glue, plaster or clay. Even stone is liquid in its formation, in its original molten or gaseous state. The realization that the viscous or pliant properties of material contain possibilities for art dawned slowly, during the early part of the century and between the two world wars. After 1939 it gathered pace, to become a central preoccupation for artists up until 1950 and beyond. The question is how and where, within what limits and under what circumstances – but also why? European culture already contained rich metaphors built upon matter in its liquid state. Dante’s ‘swamp-like’ river Styx and Shakespeare’s ‘morning dew’ – water dangerous and sublime respectively – mark two ends of a spectrum of meanings to which any poetic, literary or artistic practice could by the time of the Enlightenment quite easily refer. Even earlier, clouds, ponds, water, mud and slime, even soups, permeated the fabric of ordinary language and political rhetoric alike. To bring that background up to date: at the start of the modern psychoanalytic tradition, the affects and emotions proved scarcely mentionable without recourse to metaphors of flowing and merging, defiling and overwhelming, of becoming buried, ungovernable or inchoate. In his 1894 paper ‘The Neuro-psychoses of Defence’, as well as in his long-abandoned

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‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ of 1895, Freud had characterized the concept of Besetzung (‘occupation’ or ‘filling’) as ‘a sum of excitation, which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity … capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge’. With the advent of the spatial and volumetric topologies that marked his writings of the 1920s, the most important metaphor was that of the boundary (open, closed, permeable, impermeable) as well as – by implication – the dissolution of boundaries, the fluid joining and mixing of states. In the wellknown passage at the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents of 1930 Freud reveals that the poet Romain Rolland had written to him about a sentiment that he, Rolland, claimed was widespread and that formed the basis of the religious sentiment: ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were “oceanic”’, to which Freud responded by saying that the sensation was no doubt pathological, that understanding it would contribute to an explanation of the gulf between the life of culture and humanity’s unhappiness under the sway of the instincts.1 It was the very moment at which Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel were filming rotting or excremental stuff for their film Un Chien Andalou; and also the moment of maximum fixation on the part of Documents group with formlessness, stagnancy and decay.2 It cannot be said that in Dalí’s paintings of the period we observe paint itself liquified – on the contrary, we saw earlier that by the end of the 1920s he had channelled his fascination for putrefaction and rottenness into a style of minutely rendered verisimilitude, aided by a glance towards Aurel Kolnai’s 1929 book Der Ekel [Disgust] with its careful phenomenology of insectoid swarming, visceral proximity, slime and suppuration. Dalí’s purpose had been to mobilize ‘foul sensation and repulsion’ in order to bring about the very collapse of ‘reality’ in the form his bourgeois audience claimed to understand it. In his universe, the epoc de mou [epoch of the soft] was to be the essential mode of understanding of the day. ‘All my readers, I am sure’, Dalí begins a typical provocation in Minotaure for 1934–35, ‘will have had the satisfaction of feeling that stubborn tenacity … that anxious perseverance that scoffs at the giddiness preceding the pleasure caused by the intimate act of causing to spurt out of the nose-pores … a slippery, 1

2

See Freud, ‘The Neuro-psychoses of Defence’ (1894), Standard Edition, vol 3, pp 189–221. For Freud’s discussion of the ‘oceanic’ metaphor see Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1930 (J. Strachey translation), W.W. Norton and Co., London, 1961, pp 12–15. Freud’s original title Das Unglück in der Kultur he later changed to Das Unbehagen in der Kultur – both replaced by its present title in Joan Riviere’s original English translation and then used again in Strachey’s. See the latter’s ‘Editor’s Introduction’, Civilisation and Its Discontents, pp 5–6. An influential reading is Y-A. Bois and R. Krauss, L’Informe: Mode d’Emploi, Editions de Centre Pompidou, 1966 (in translation as Formless: A User’s Guide, Zone Books, New York, 1977).

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new, and aerodynamic comedo, more commonly known as a “blackhead”.’ He describes with enthusiasm the ‘enigmatic pleasure, locked in moral conflicts and the mechanics of elasticity’ afforded by the very act of spurting. And in reference to the ‘soft’ streamlining of the latest automobiles – ‘gelatinous, flattened, bumpy … their massive salivary anatomy, their pot-bellied thighs and sagging bellies … their fatty, compressed, exuberant and gluey viscera’ – he asserts that they too are comedoes, squeezed and slippery from out of the nose and flesh of contemporary space. Squeezing nasal blackheads was the ‘ultra-concrete personalisation of what is most vital and lyrical in contemporary moral, scientific and artistic thought … the first aerodynamic être-objets [being-objects] … strange bodies issuing from the flesh of our thick and personal non-Euclidean “space-time”’.3 The possibilities of a liquefactive manner – as I shall call it – had arisen a few years earlier, in André Breton’s First Manifesto of Surrealism. Thought itself ‘does not necessarily defy the fast-moving pen’, Breton announced in that statement: It was in this frame of mind that Philippe Soupault and I decided to blacken some paper with a praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of view. The ease of execution did the rest … producing the illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a considerable choice of images of a quality that we would not have been capable of preparing in longhand.4

It was in this spirit that André Masson in the same year began a series of ‘automatic’ drawings made of fluid motions of the pen, evoking not well-formed words or images but an impression of bodyparts and viscera in the moment of their coming-into-being. Masson described his rapid drawing method as ‘(a) liberating the mind from all obvious ties and entering into a state similar to trance, (b) abandoning oneself to interior tumult, and (c) rapidity of writing’. We see pen and ink marking paper – paper being marked by pen and ink – much as might be experienced in flurries of rain, wind or waves. Masson confessed that his images disturbed him too – induced a sense of shame, ‘combined with a vengeful exultation, like victory achieved over an oppressive power’.5 A group of drawings-cum-paintings, from around 1927, provide another demonstration of ‘automatism’, practised this time with a flowing substance – sand – whose final disposition on the canvas or board is only partially subject to the artist’s control. 3

4

5

S. Dalí, ‘Apparitions aérodynamiques des “Êtres-objets”’, Minotaure, no 6, Winter 1934–35, pp 33–4; here, Finkelstein (ed), The Collected Writings, pp 207–11. A. Breton, ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’ (1924), from the version in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas 1900–2000, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003, p 451. A. Masson, ‘Le Peintre et ses Fantasmes’, Le Rebelle du Surréalisme: Ecrits (ed F. Will-Levaillant), Paris, 1975, p 32.

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Fig 6.1  André Masson, Automatic Drawing, pen and ink, c.1925, 30.3 × 24.1 cm. Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris.

It was this discord between the hallucination accompanying spontaneous action and conventional structures that presented the possibility of changing the order of things – to close the distance between subject and object – so Carl Einstein would claim of Masson’s work in an early piece in Documents.6 To other artists of that generation, fluidity itself was all. Max Ernst from the mid-1920s exploited visual effects stemming from the adhesive qualities of ink or paint before they are entirely 6

C. Einstein, ‘André Masson, Étude Ethnologique’, Docments, no 2, 1929, pp 93–102.

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dry: frottage (rubbing), and sometimes grattage (scraping), in which matter was not given to a surface but taken away, suggesting textures, shapes and outlines that could never be achieved by design or deliberation. Ernst mastered décalcomanie [decalcomania] as well – pressing one surface to another one with the ink or paint already wet, a technique used since the Enlightenment in fortune-telling and mind-reading games. Ernst describes the mood of some ‘forest-pictures’ he had made by décalcomanie as that of the forest itself, ‘savage and impenetrable, black and moist, extravagant, ferocious, fervent and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow’.7 Breton himself gave practical instructions for Surrealist decalcomania

Fig 6.2  Marcel Jean, Décalcomanie, c.1935–36, from André Breton, ‘D’Une ­Décalcomanie sans Objet Préconcu’, Minotaure, no 8, 1936, p 23. 7

M. Ernst, ‘Les Mystères de la Forêt’, Minotaure, no 5, 1935.

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in a piece published in Minotaure in 1936: ‘Spread a paintbrush loaded with black gouache on a sheet of paper diluted unevenly, and cover it with a similar sheet and then press with an even pressure, then lift it up slowly … What you will then have in front of you won’t perhaps be the old paranoiac wall of Leonardo, but that wall carried to perfection [porté à sa perfection].’8 A short, dream-like story by Benjamin Péret, reflecting various décalcomanies by Breton, Jacqueline Breton, Óscar Domínguez, Marcel Jean and Yves Tanguy then told of an entrancing but dangerous journey in underground caverns that finally resolves itself in a waking realization. Says Péret’s narrator: ‘I had entered Eldorado.’9 It will be clear from such examples that the shared characteristic of the new methods of ‘bringing to form’ was not form itself as a finality, but revelation – of a state of mind or being inaccessible by other means; the revelation of infrequently charted sensations lying beyond the controls of the rational mind and beyond those of routinely purposeful behaviour. In that process or groups of processes it was perhaps inevitable that life-forms that looked primary and unqualified, of miniscule or exaggerated size, should suggest themselves to an artist whose manner with paint or paint-like substance was random and unconfined. But why did European artists during the middle and later 1930s become drawn to practices that gave back to the materials of art – and in so doing released from them – fluidities beyond those the human hand could claim to control? Why, at this historical distance, does a work like Fantasmagoria of 1933 by the Swiss artist Gérard Vulliamy look relevant to the predicament of a society in a moment of radical uncertainty, suspended as it was between one catastrophic military conflict and the prospect – even the likelihood – of another? At a general level, the method’s vigour no doubt spoke to a sensibility already attuned to the attractions of a rebellious experimental technique. More specifically, Vulliamy, at a turning point in his career in Paris, got to know Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris on their return from the Dakar–Djibouti expedition that traversed Africa between May 1931 and February 1933 with its fund of ‘archaeological, topographical, anthropological, entomological, embryological and botanical’ categories – in the phrasing of the Griaule dedication in Minotaure for June 1933. Vulliamy’s nascent interest in magical, irrational and spiritual artefacts from non-European cultures now bore fruit. Fantasmagoria shows us eyes, hands, feet, fibrous tentacles, ghosts, all of them signifiers of a mood of energized otherness that 8

9

A. Breton, ‘Pour ouvrir à volonté sa fenêtre sur les plus beaux paysages du monde et d’ailleurs’, in A. Breton and B. Péret, ‘D’une décalcomanie sans objet préconçu’, Minotaure, no 8, 1936, p 18. B. Péret, ‘D’une décalcomanie sans objet préconçu’, p 24.

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would now dominate his art. Vulliamy’s other paintings of that year and 1934 show a sympathy too for the colours and raw textures of both Oceanic and fourteenth-century Italian fresco art – a mix of sources that helped amplify the dawnings of a powerful style. From 1935 his paintings begin to reflect the mood of malignancy and contamination (the news from Germany) that gripped a generation leading to 1939. Vulliamy’s larger and Bosch-like The Trojan Horse of 1936–37 is explicit about the turbulence whipped up by the generals at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.10 Perhaps it was inevitable that a revulsion towards ideology – the fascist threat – combined with sensations of personal privation and dislocation, should become the condition of a contemporary art during the early years of the European war. The Surrealist movement had itself become conflicted in the approach to 1939. Éluard and Dalí were now cast out from Breton’s circle. Breton himself had had to endure the theoretical strictures of Bataille’s College of Sociology group and its supposedly ‘secret’ journal Acéphale (a term referring to the leader-less crowd) from June 1936. Meanwhile, he continued to support younger artists who explored flux and sensory destabilization in the context of the crisis to come.

Fig 6.3  Gérard Vulliamy, Fantasmagoria, 1933, oil on canvas, 89.0 × 145.5 cm. ­Private Collection. 10

See L. Harambourg, Gérard Vulliamy: 1909–2005, Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, Paris, 2011, pp 29–34.

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He spoke endearingly about the Spanish painter Esteban Francés, for example, whose method of grattage or scraped ground offered a prompt for hallucinatory scenes of swamp-like mystery in such paintings as Barbed Wire of 1937 or The Lake of 1938 (Plate 20a). He praised Óscar Domίnguez too – already expert at décalcomanie – for his swirling meteoric colours and cosmic themes. The young Austrian aristocrat Wolfgang Paalen, a refugee from Abstraction-Création who in 1935–36 had originated a method of staining the canvas with soot known as fumage, was now painting apocalyptic landscapes populated by viscid rather than fully viscous forms, and he too attracted Breton’s support. Paalen’s contribution to the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in early spring 1938 was a floor-surface made of mud from the Montparnasse Cemetery, and an installation named Avant La Mare comprising a pond of water with water-lilies, arranged in a position underneath Duchamp’s ceiling of coal-sacks. Blackness above, hazardous fluids below. A fourth figure of importance to Breton was a young English naval officer named Gordon Onslow Ford, at that moment in Paris in flight from a military career, who worked collaboratively with the architecture-trained Chilean painter Roberto Matta during the summer of 1938 in the small fishing village of Trévignon, Brittany. There, they collaborated on how to understand the mind’s relationship to cosmic force and how to project that relationship within the formats of a truly contemporary art. Matta’s paintings of that time, known collectively as Psychological Morphologies, were made by preparing a washy, fluid ground, then flicking thicker units of paint upon it before twisting them into smudges that gave shape to scenes that might well be understood as landscapes of the mind (Plate 20b). Onslow Ford, meanwhile, worked on a body of theory of which he meant his painting to be the embodiment, in which fluid spatial envelopes were posited as visual correlates of a universal connectedness of mind. He used the term coulage [pouring] to describe the release of paint diluted and allowed to spread wherever it would on a paper or canvas ground.11 It was to prove significant that in the summer of 1939, with several of the Surrealist group preparing to flee to Mexico or New York, Onslow Ford rented a château in Chemillieu, near the French borders with Italy and Switzerland, and invited guests that included Breton and his wife Jacqueline, Matta, Francés, sometimes Marcel Jean, sometimes Yves Tanguy with his companion Kay Sage – as well 11

For Breton’s endorsement of Francés, Dominguez, Paalen and Onslow Ford, see ‘Des tendances les plus récentes de la peinture surréaliste’, Minotaure, nos 12–13, May 1939, pp 16 ff.

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as, on occasion, the American writer Gertrude Stein, to whom some of the Surrealists made return visits in her adopted village of Bilignin, nearby. Stein’s presence among the Surrealists at this point is nothing if not suggestive. It might be expected that her meetings with the artists would precipitate a revision in her ambivalent relationship with Surrealism up until that time. She had written in her book Picasso in 1938 that ‘the Surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century’.12 The comment may be a fair one (it sounds like one of Picasso’s own). Yet she did not yet know much of Masson’s work, or Matta’s or Onslow Ford’s, nor that of Jacqueline Breton or of Francés. Yet the Surrealists would surely have been interested in Stein’s experiments in writing in its relation to time. How much did they already know? She had been a psychology student under William James at Harvard some forty years earlier and had never lost sight of how time and tense and gesture are connected. She had published a paper in 1898 on ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism’ that very precisely presaged her later commitment as a writer to what she called ‘a prolonged present’, and secondly ‘the continuous present’ – two modes of writing that bear close comparison with liquefactive, late Surrealist methods of construction in art.13 And as she had recollected in an lecture text of 1926, it was in her earliest writings that there had been ‘a constant recurring and beginning, a marked direction in the direction of being in the present although naturally I had been accustomed to past present and future, and why the composition forming around me was a prolonged present’.14 It was a revelation that had enabled her to find a speaking or reading voice that embodied the temporality not of the thing or situation described, but of the process of noticing it and formulating it, one aspect at a time. We do not know, of course, what conversations took place between the Surrealists and Stein in that pre-war summer of 1939. The artists worked, engaged in mutual criticism, played cadavre exquis and various 12 13

14

G. Stein, Picasso, Batsford Ltd, London 1938 (Dover Publications, New York 1984), p 43. Stein, ‘Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention’, Psychological Review, 1898. Of one experimental subject engaged in what she called ‘automatic writing’, she reports that ‘he made a spontaneous movement of a circle made with the swing of his whole arm. He began these circles, gradually increasing in speed, not breaking into any other movement; just a continued rush of circles … He described the movement as if it were started not only by him, but by his forearm and hand’ (pp 300–1). Stein’s self-descriptions are from ‘Composition as Explanation’, presented as a lecture in Cambridge and Oxford in 1926; see Gertrude Stein: Collected Writings 1903–1932, Library of America, New York, 1998, p 524.

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wordgames. All the while her ‘continuous present’ – a mode of narration requiring a maximum of verbs, adverbs and conjunctions and a minimum of nouns and adjectives – amounted to a prohibition on the backward glance as well as on the anticipated moment to come. Like the poured mark or coulage, or the tache of paint understood as a mark of consciousness, Stein’s ‘continuous present’ was nothing if not a performed meaning, a semantic becoming that was seldom if ever complete. ‘If you feel what is inside that thing [that you are describing]’, she may well have told them, ‘you do not call it by the name by which it is known.’15 * The dispersal of the Chemillieu community and the exodus of Surrealists to Mexico or to North America opened a further chapter in the liquefactive manner, both across the Atlantic as well as in war-ravaged Europe itself. The case of Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp is significant to the latter case. Before leaving Paris in spring 1940, the instability of their situation had been intense. A small number of Sophie’s paintings survive in which a ‘chaotic’ ground underlies a more measured attempt at articulation in the lines that are painted or drawn on top of it. The watercolour and crayon drawing titled Movement of Lines on a Chaotic Ground reads as colour rhythms only just surviving amid the turbulences of a highly unstable field. Rhythms and becomings seem caught as if in mid-air, as if the political chaos about to engulf them was ready to swallow everything in its path. Once billeted away from Paris, with Hans and the Magnellis in Grasse, near Nice, she was able to bring to perfection a graphic scheme in which a very particular geometry became her own. It began with some drawings done to illustrate Hans Arp’s booklet Poèmes sans Prénoms [Poems without First-names], published in 1941, then proliferated in a group of works titled either Lignes d’été [Lines of Summer] or Lignes géométriques et ondoyantes [Geometrical and Wavy Lines], whose idiom of flow and mergence, entanglement and contradiction has been noted before.16

15

16

G. Stein, ‘Poetry and grammar’, in Lectures in America, 1935, p 210. A group of photographs of Tanguy, Matta, André and Jacqueline Breton and their daughter Aube, together with the photographer Samuel M. Stewart on a visit to Stein at Bilignin in 1939, are published in R. Stendhal, Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures: The Salon, Painting in the 20s, Famous Friends, Alice B. Toklas, Paintings, Wars, and a Lifelong Passion for Sentences, Thames and Hudson, London, 1995. Kay Sage, who did not stay at Chemillieu but visited from a rented house nearby, wrote a two-page dramatic spoof of a meal-time conversation. ‘Château de Chemillieu’ is accessible in Archives of American Art, no 2886; it is summarized in J.D. Suther, A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1997. See Chapter 3 above.

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Fig 6.4  Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Movement of Lines on a Chaotic Ground, 1940, watercolour and coloured crayons on paper, 26.9 × 21.5 cm. © Kunstmuseum Bern. Gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach, 1970 [see cover].

Meanwhile, Hans had embarked on some of the most robustly scatological works of his career: a series of drawings on crumpled paper – papiers froissés, he would call them – that press an existing dialectic of paper-and-paint to what looks like a new limit. Back in 1916 and 1917 he had done a small number of collages in which, rather than being cut by scissors, paper was subjected to tearing, seeming to give the appearance (it had never been very successful) of merely casual action, as when paper is torn hurriedly before being thrown away. What is distinctive about those torn-paper works is actually their rarity. Torn paper edges do not occur in Cubism, nor in the work of other Dadas such as Hannah Höch or Raoul Hausmann or John Heartfield. Even in Schwitters’ early collages torn-paper edges are difficult to find. In hindsight, Arp’s frayed edges can be thought of as having anticipated the dynamics of the fluid painted mark

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or tache. In about 1930, they began to proliferate in his production in tandem with a liquid use of adhesive in the form of smudged glue. He later gave an account of these so-called papiers déchirés, explaining how paper-tearing and gluing at that moment became inseparable from certain creative frustrations of his own. Invited around 1931 or 1932 to exhibit some collaborative works done previously with Sophie, he reported: ‘We brought down some [older] collages from the attic where they had been exposed for years to heat, cold, and dampness. Some of the papers had become unstuck; they were covered with spots, mould and cracks, and between paper and cardboard, blisters had formed that looked more loathsome to me than the bloated bellies of drowned rats.’ It was a moment of reassessment and a new beginning: the manicured edges of his earlier cut-paper collages would now be a thing of the past. As he recollected, ‘I now felt able to tear my papers instead of cutting them neatly with scissors: I tore up drawings and carelessly smeared paste over and under them [such that] if the ink dissolved and ran … and if cracks developed – so much the better.’17 It turns out that paper-tearing had by that time acquired a phenomenology of its own. We find it mentioned in the contemporary writing of Melanie Klein, for instance, where the gesture of tearing contributes to aggressive but ultimately reparative fantasies in normal neonatal development. Her celebrated 1929 paper on infantile anxiety situations relates the occasion when, in a newspaper review of a Berlin performance of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, she read of a frustrated child who, having been rude to his mother and told he will have only bread for supper, ‘flies into a rage … drums on the door, sweeps the teapot and cup from the table … swings the tongs like a sword and begins to tear the wallpaper’ in such a way that, in the tale as told by Ravel, things the child has maltreated come to life. ‘Everything undergoes a terrifying change’, Klein relates. ‘The shreds of the torn wallpaper sway and stand up, showing shepherdesses and sheep … The rent in the paper, which separates Corydon from his Amaryllis [two characters from Virgil’s Eclogues], has become a rent in the fabric of the world’ – until the moment where the child utters the word ‘mama’ and his rage gradually disappears.18 Ravel’s librettist had read the child’s anxiety situation correctly, Klein thinks, in showing how the child calms down only when his primary sadism has been ameliorated by a gesture of reconciliation with the destroyed objects. Hatred and disgust

17 18

H. Arp, ‘Looking’, in J. Soby (ed), Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p 15. M. Klein, ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and in the Creative Impulse’ (1929), in J. Mitchell (ed), The Selected Melanie Klein, Penguin Books, London, 1991, p 85.

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Fig 6.5  Hans Arp, Second papier déchiré, 1932, 28 × 22 cm. Courtesy of Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno.

at the deficiencies of the object-world have become accommodated within a momentarily stable whole. In Arp’s papiers déchirés of the 1930s something similar seems to have occurred. In them we can see how small pieces of fibrous paper, torn with the fingers of both hands so as to give irregular edges, have been stuck down with smears of glue that generate the appearance of a liquefied background field. ‘I had accepted the transience, the dribbling away, the brevity, the impermanence’, Arp later wrote, ‘the fading, the withering, the spookishness of our existence. I had even welcomed transience into my work as it was coming into being.’19 Now in Grasse in the early days and months of the war, he was intensifying that method of picture-construction with whatever means were to hand. Taking damaged brown wrapping paper from where it lay on the floor, he would damage it further by crumpling and uncrumpling it, then smearing its surface irregularly with fluid markings in paint. As Suzi Magnelli recounted, ‘This idea of using the paper he had just thrown out was not, I believe, devised knowingly [i.e. in advance] but rather he discovered the use he could make of it when he saw crumpled sheets of paper on the floor. Then he worked for four or 19

Arp, ‘Looking’, 1958, p 15.

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five days like that without stopping’ both on dessins aux doigts [drawings with the fingers] as well as the papiers froissés themselves.20 Their paint markings, which can resemble minute scratchings or blemishes blown up to a much larger size, bring the viewer into an acquaintance with squalor and disorder on a very particular level of scale – not least because that magnification effect can go into reverse, on occasion evoking images of the ground seen from high above, even of galactic nebulae.21 On the scale of the here and now, it is difficult not to acknowledge that the bumpiness of the already degraded paper, combined with the tactility of brush- and finger-contact, can only have pointed, in the difficult days of 1941 and 1942, to a surrender to loss and pain, partially redeemed by immersion in the qualities of damaged matter itself.22

Fig 6.6  Hans Arp, Drawing on Crumpled Paper, 1942, 64.5 × 49.5 cm. Courtesy of Stiftung Arp, Rolandseck. 20

21

22

‘Propos de Madame Suzie Magnelli’, in Hans/Jean Arp: le temps des papiers déchirées, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1983, p 76. The relation of these images to different levels of scale is noted in B. Fer, On Abstract Art, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1997, pp 62, 69–74. ‘The papier déchiré is a passage from art to nature’, Arp would say in a different context and in an audibly calmer mood: ‘Art exists in it only by a light touch of the hand. The papier déchiré is as beautiful as nature, and as perfect’; see Arp, ‘The Hulbecks’, catalogue preface for the exhibition of works by Beata and Charles Hulbeck (Richard Huelsenbeck), Galerie des Deux Iles, Paris, 1951, in M. Jean (ed), Arp: Collected French Writings, Calder and Boyars, London, 1974, p 267.

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In occupied Paris the mood was inevitably one of darkness, even resignation. ‘We are living in a historical moment sufficiently disagreeable’ – the writer here is the Cairo-born Surrealist poet Georges Henein – ‘to inspire in everybody a violent desire to get out of it … [for which] a good general culture is maybe less important than acquiring a certain sense of despair.’ Yet despair is not a reason for total pessimism: ‘Despair is not a stagnant milieu where the imaginations of weak people are immured’, Henein wrote. ‘Despair does not wait; it is torrential. Despair forces doors to open; blows cities apart. Despair is the thunderstorm under which unprecedented worlds of deliverance will ripen.’23 He is reviewing a Paris exhibition of Kamel El-Telmissany from the Egyptian Art and Liberty group in February 1941, and he captures well the double note of revulsion and redemption implied in tactility, in actual contact with matter in a liquid or semi-liquid state. Just such a doubling had been implied in Jean-Paul Sartre’s celebrated 1938 novel La Nausée [Nausea], in which the antihero Antoine Roquentin uncovers a relationship to nature’s abundance that alternates between engagement and despair in the face of its ‘mildew, blisters, obscenity’.24 In this particular phenomenology, it was organic and often animal matter whose qualities stood in for man’s problematic relations with the exterior world. We know that Roquentin’s disposition was not his alone. Sartre, no less than his novel’s character, was averse to nature’s prolixity. ‘He hated nature’, Simone de Beauvoir tells us. ‘He could tolerate a calm sea, the even sand of the desert or the icy minerals of the Alpine peaks’, but ‘he detested – the word is not too strong – the swarming life of insects and the abundant life of plants … He liked neither raw vegetables nor untreated milk, nor oysters, only cooked things; he even preferred fruit in jam to the natural product.’25 It was a similar attitude to degrading matiére that motivated an important group of artists in Paris at the time. The young Jean Fautrier was already absorbed into a circle of writers and poets including René Char, Francis Ponge and Paul Éluard when he was arrested in January 1943 on suspicion of resistance activities, then released and found living quarters in a mental hospital in the Paris suburbs. His new works exemplify a comparable affective style. Known 23

24

25

G. Henein, ‘Preface’ to the exhibition of Kamel El-Telmissany, Paris, February 1941; cited in S. Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, in S. Guilbaut (ed), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1990, pp 51–2. J-P. Sartre, La Nausée [Nausea], 1938, in the translation of R. Baldick, Penguin Books, London, 1938, pp 183–4. Simone de Beauvoir, cited in Plant, Sartre and Surrealism, p 49, fn 81. Sartre would describe Baudelaire in similar terms: ‘For him, real water, real light, real warmth, was that of the city; they were already objects of art’, while nature, ‘in its sticky heat and in its abundance, horrified him’; Plant, Sartre and Surrealism, p 49 in reference to Sartre, Baudelaire, 1947, pp 121, 122.

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as Otages [Hostages], they were exhibited at the Galerie Drouin in 1945. Yet they are not correctly described as paintings, for they are formed out of paint stiffened to the consistency of paste – pâte – then adhered to paper before being stuck to canvas in a manner that Ponge, in a review published in 1946, described as ‘tumescent faces, crushed profiles, bodies stiffened by execution, dismembered, mutilated’.26 And not only Fautrier, but Jean Dubuffet too, was

Fig 6.7  Jean Fautrier, Hostage no 3, 1945, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 35 × 27 cm. Galerie Di Meo, Paris. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019. 26

F. Ponge, Notes sur Les Otages: peintures de Fautrier, P. Seghers, Paris, 1946, np.

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creating clogged painting surfaces through smearing and pasting paint  – itself now pâte – before scoring and scratching it with a knife. Nor can it be coincidental that the poet and philosopher Gaston Bachelard had devoted an entire chapter to the mechanics of pâte in his remarkable book L’Eau et les Rêves [Water and Dreams] of 1942. There, he had given an account of the intercourse of hand, eye and matter that spoke to a thoroughly novel sensibility regarding the qualities of fluid substance per se. In its basic constitution as earth and water mixed, pâte for Bachelard is a substance in which ‘form is given a secondary role’. Pâte lends itself to ‘a truly intimate materialism in which shape is supplanted, effaced, dissolved’, he writes. In speaking of the ‘mesomorphic imagination … intermediate between the formal and the material’ and associated with ‘sticky, pliable, lazy, sometimes phosphorescent’ experiences having ‘the greatest ontological density of the oneiric life’, Bachelard here reworks Henri Bergson’s figure of Homo faber (one who deals predominantly with geometry and form) by encouraging Homo faber’s hands to dream with matter – to synthesize work and dream, to ‘understand matter in its inmost being’. In the shapes assumed by pâte, says Bachelard, ‘there is no more geometry, no more sharp edges’. ‘Everything melts in a living intuition’, as he puts it, like Dalí’s melting watches that live in a pictorial Heracliteanism of significance and sincerity. ‘The eye becomes tired of looking at solids’, he tells us. ‘It needs to dream of deforming.’27 It was a more lyrical conception of pâte than Sartre himself was prepared to give. In the phenomenological ontology of L’Être et le Néant [Being and Nothingness], published the following year, 1943, Sartre now presented the contrast between pure water and the special properties of viscous fluid as a major dialectical pair. On the one hand, water ‘manifests to us a being which is everywhere fleeing and yet everywhere similar to itself, which on all sides it escapes, yet on which one can float … a being without danger and without memory … on which one leaves no mark and which could not leave a mark on us’. Water is a being, says Sartre, that ‘symbolises a synthesis of eternity and temporality, a possible fusion of the pour-soi as pure temporality and the ensoi as pure eternity’. On the other hand, the visqueux in general – it could be a 27

G. Bachelard, L’Eau et Les Rêves: Essai sur l’Imagination de la Matière, Librarie José Corti, Paris, 1942; here as E. Farrell (trans), Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, The Pegasus Foundation, Dallas, 1983, pp 104, 106. Bergson himself had died in 1941, and was widely celebrated in Paris during the war, to the point that the phrase ‘matière et mémoire’, the title of his book of 1896, became something of a catch-phrase among younger painters and their supporters; see S. Wilson, ‘Bergson before Deleuze: how to read informel painting’, in J. Mullarkey and C. de Mille (eds), Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2013, pp 80–93.

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contaminating or sticky substance before it congeals – is ‘an aberrant fluid … essentially ambiguous because its fluidity exists in slow motion’. ‘It represents a dawning triumph of the solid over the liquid.’ Slime, says Sartre with finality, ‘is the agony of water’.28 Sartre’s interest in matter itself, more particularly matter in decline, or in a liminal ontological state, made him an important ally of painters and sculptors whose attitudes corresponded more or less exactly to his own. His gift for articulating the moral values of visual appearances was evident from the start (he had published pieces on visual art in the magazine Verve before the war). Yet his meeting with the German artist Wolfgang Schulze in 1945 was of special importance to them both. The pre-war career of Wols – as Schulze preferred to be known – had been in some ways typical of those fascinated by fluid and organic life. He had lived in Paris in 1932–33, painting in an ‘abstract’ Surrealist manner before being called up to the German army in 1935. He first fled to Spain, then returned to Paris in 1937 to work as a photographer, turning his lens upon various forms of lowered matière including rotting or remaindered food, rainsoaked drains and gutters, vegetables and – importantly in the present context – torn poster remnants hanging from forlorn hoardings, their once-hopeful messages now lying in ruins. Interned in France as an enemy alien in 1939, Wols had then been released on marriage to his French-passported partner Gréty and had spent the rest of the war in Cassis, near Marseilles, then in Dieulefit in the Drôme, his movements restricted and his artistic activities reduced by poverty. Yet it was that social and artistic confinement that paradoxically gave power to his work. His ink-and-watercolour drawings of the period, no larger than 20 centimetres tall or wide – ‘little scraps of paper’, as he called them – show him in his self-regard as an ‘outsider’ figure whose imaginative ambience had by circumstance become that of a scratched and dystopian micro-world of tentacles, spicules, squirming and creeping organisms. Back in Paris and supported materially by friends and well-wishers, Wols was eventually able to produce a handful of oil paintings by scraping and marking the canvas as if it was not being done by human hand at all. The paintings look as if agency has disappeared from the canvas in favour of some chaotic activity within matter itself – matter in its raw state, tangled, entropic, imploding (Plate 21). Sartre would remark on the dishevelled manner of Wols’ appearance, his rambling speech and his self-destructive urges with alcohol. He was ‘a 28

Sartre, L’Être et le Néant, Gallimard, Paris, 1943; in the translation by H. Barnes as Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, Routledge, London, 1998, pp 609, 607.

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Fig 6.8  Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), from Group of Etchings, c.1937–50, etching and drypoint on paper, 12.4 × 9.5 cm. © Tate, London 2019. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019.

tramp-prince [who] pursued his fruitful suicide night and day’, Sartre wrote, while in his paintings and drawings ‘he deciphers himself on the knots of tree bark, in the fissures of a wall; roots, rootlets, vacuoles, pullulating viruses under a microscope. The hairy furrows of women and the turgid flaccidness of male fungi compromise him. In them he discovers himself … fissure, root, centipede and seaweed.’ Such evocations were the stuff of which art itself could be made. ‘With his eyes shut, withdrawn inside his night, Wols feels the universal horror of being-in-the-world … He can fascinate himself on external objects when they appear to him as products of his automatic writing; while his automatism is only the fascinated attention he has for his productions when they give themselves to him as external objects.’29 The language and the artwork spoke as one. It is to Aurel Kolnai’s Der Ekel [Disgust], which Wols in his wartime isolation may have seen, to which we can once more turn. In that essay of 1929 Kolnai had 29

J-P. Sartre, ‘Doigts et non-doigts’, from P. Inch (ed), Circus Wols: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Schulze, Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 1978, np. The complete English text of ‘Doigts et non-doigts’, first published as a preface to En Personne: Aquarelles des Dessins de Wols, Paris, 1963, is J-P. Sartre, Portraits (Situations IV) (trans C. Turner), Seagull Books, London and New York, 2009, pp 603–41. For Wols’ early biography see C. Van Damme, ‘The Path to the Ocean: The Early Career of Wols 1913–1942’, in P. Inch (ed), Circus Wols.

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drawn attention to the sensations of ‘smell, putrescence, decay, secretion, life and nourishment’ – the disgust arising from ‘the pullulation of swarms of creeping insects’ and the revulsion to be witnessed in the face of ‘viscous, semi-fluid, obtrusively clinging’ substances like mucus, which seem to possess, said Kolnai, ‘an indecent surplus of life … that point once more to death and putrefaction, towards life which is in decline’. Thus in the face of decomposing flesh, whether animal or human, we find ‘a relation of disgust to what is positively vital, to what is animated’, showing paradoxically that the extinction of life in putrefaction is accompanied by a sense of ‘a certain quite remarkable augmentation of life’, a heightened revelation of the fact that ‘life is there’. Notwithstanding that the disgusting object ‘seems to “grin” at us, “stare” at us, “stink” at us’, as Kolnai puts it, one must strive where possible for an ‘intimate grasping’ of the features of an object – its Sosein – rather than its mute objectivity – its Dasein – alone.30 * But we must diverge from Sartre’s ‘agonies’ and Kolnai’s ‘indecent surplus’ and cross the Atlantic to discover how fluidity of facture had entered the culture there. A brief answer is: very differently. The dispersal of the Paris Surrealists had brought Breton, Ernst, Masson, Matta and the Swiss-born Surrealist Kurt Seligmann to New York from late in 1939. Simultaneously, there had converged upon New York three American artists whose experiments of the period are certainly relevant to our theme. Gérôme Kamrowski arrived in New York City in 1938 from the Midwest, following employment with the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Federal Art Project where he worked on murals and paintings before a spell at the Chicago Bauhaus. Living in Greenwich Village, he met William Baziotes, from Pennsylvania but otherwise with a similar background; the Italian-American Peter Busa; and Robert Motherwell, who by 1940 was a graduate student at Columbia University on the point of renouncing his studies with the art historian Meyer Schapiro in order to pursue a career as an artist. It was within that group that, by the end of 1940 and the beginning of 1941, an anxious interplay between European Surrealist attitudes and native American talent was under way. Motherwell and the film-maker Francis Lee both spoke good enough French to act as go-betweens with the émigré Surrealists, and from 30

A. Kolnai, Der Ekel (1929), published in France as Le Dégoût (trans Olivier Cossé), Paris, 1997; the citations here from B. Smith and C. Korsemeyer (eds), Aurel Kolnai: On Disgust, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, IL, 2004, section III.I, pp 48–62. Some emphasis added.

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this ferment a number of qualities specific to the newest American painting began to evolve. An incident from the winter of 1940–41 contributes to the narrative here. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Kamrowski had taken some gouaches to show Baroness Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (eventually the Guggenheim Museum) and had obtained from her a stipend – it would last some ten years – to support him in his work. Early on, Kamrowski encountered some workmen in the museum’s basement who were melting down old 78 rpm records and using the dark lacquer to mark packing cases. Back in his studio, Kamrowski used the same liquid to experiment with ‘automatist’ techniques by dripping and smearing it onto paper surfaces. Decalcomania and flottage (floating oil paint on water and dipping the paper surface in it), sometimes also fumage (exposure of a surface to soot and smoke) now entered Kamrowski’s repertoire. ‘It was a period of adventure’, he said in recollection, ‘and you weren’t particularly interested in turning out an art commodity unless it was something to please the Baroness.’31 William [Bill] Baziotes was meanwhile developing similar interests on his own, and at some stage during the winter of 1940–41 Baziotes brought a young painter from Wyoming, Jackson Pollock, to Kamrowski’s loft on Sullivan Street to experiment with the methods of facture that Baziotes thought he had found. Inside, he offered to show Pollock how liquid enamel paint could be ‘spun around’; and as Kamrowski relates the occasion, ‘Bill [Baziotes] began to throw and drip the white paint on a canvas [an unwanted one, about to be rejected], before handing the palette knife to Jackson, who with his intense concentration was flipping the paint with abandon.’32 The result was a three-way collaborative work in which a sequence of carnal forms emerges from the fluid dispersal of paint alone – not a cadavre exquis exactly, but a demonstration of the freedoms that ‘flipping’ liquid paint could bring. Perhaps the right-hand section was painted by Pollock, the centre section by Baziotes and the left-hand part by Kamrowski – we cannot easily tell. It is not likely that each artist worked in and across the painting as a whole. By all accounts, the mood in the younger painters’ studios was intense. Exploration and uncertainty were the norm. Dialogue with the émigré Surrealists 31

32

The story is due to the research of Martica Sawin. See her ‘“The Third Man”, or Automatism American Style’, Art Journal, Fall 1988, p 184. Kamrowski, letter to William Rubin, 10 April 1975; from M. Hadler, ‘William Baziotes: Four Sources of Inspiration’, in William Baziotes: A Retrospective Exhibition, Newport Harbour Art Museum, Los Angeles, California, 1978, p 83.

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Fig 6.9  W. Baziotes, G. Kamrowski, J. Pollock, Collaborative Painting, 1940–41, oil and enamel on canvas, 48.6 × 65.9 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco. Photo: Nicholas Pishvanov.

was taking many forms. Gordon Onslow Ford, in the process of basing his new life in Mexico, arrived in New York in the spring of 1941 to lecture on Surrealism at the New School for Social Research, and attracted avid audiences to hear his talks on de Chirico; Ernst and Miró; Magritte and Tanguy; and finally Brauner, Seligmann, Paalen, Matta and himself. We know from Onslow Ford’s lecture notes that for each slide he gave a dramatized narrative reading in the hope of inspiring in his audience (which included Baziotes, very likely Motherwell, and possibly Pollock) a sense of ‘the marvellous’ locked up in what he calls ‘the ignored powers of man and the unknown aspects of nature, to tear down the veils one by one that hide the reality of our incomprehensible universe’.33 In his own paintings of the period we see an attempt to capture rhythms both visible 33

The story of Onslow Ford’s and Paalen’s painting in Mexico is still not well known. See A. Leddy and D. Conwell, Farewell to Surrealism: The Dyn Circle in Mexico, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2012; and M. Sawin, Gordon Onslow Ford: Paintings and Works on Paper 1939–1951, Francis Naumann Fine Art, New York, 2010, which contains a full transcript of the lectures; here, p 58.

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and invisible that are latent in experience of any kind. Perhaps in retrospect a quasi-mystical manner was unlikely to attract support in the bustling East Coast city following America’s entry into the war. Onslow Ford then proceeded to Mexico, where his appetite for mysterious visions and ecstatic sensations found expression in a venture for a new magazine, Dyn, that he would help Paalen (already in Mexico) to edit in the years to come. European Surrealism needed adapting and altering, that is to say, in order to flourish in its new transatlantic home. Robert Motherwell, for his part, prompted perhaps by Onslow Ford’s lectures as well as his close friendship with Matta, himself now travels to Mexico in the summer of 1941 with Matta as his tutor and companion. The trip for him was decisive. In the ink-and-wash drawings of his Mexican Sketchbook, for instance, we see two contrary formal impulses on every page: a sort of post-Euclidean space-frame of thin dancing lines that evoke horizons and enclosures, yet constantly curving and converging back upon itself; and thicker brushed-on areas containing ragged-edged smudges and blurred outlines that perform a counterpoint to the space-frame, moderating

Fig 6.10  Gordon Onslow Ford, Temptations of a Painter, 1941, oil on canvas, 116.8 × 152.4 cm. Collection of the Lucid Art Foundation.

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and sometimes cancelling it. It is important to notice that, as in Matta’s practice at that time, Motherwell’s space-frames and his flat, more ragged areas seem to move in different temporalities relative to the viewer’s eye, the dryness of the space-frame contrasting with the fluidity of the brushed or watery parts in a dualism of stasis and change. One consequence of the Mexico visit for him was that the type of Surrealistic universe conjured up in paintings by Max Ernst or Kurt Seligmann – the latter for a while his mentor in New York – no longer held any appeal. Motherwell wrote to the Seligmanns in July 1941, at the time of the Sketchbook, ‘I have rather radically changed the way I paint – much more flatly than I was – and I think perhaps I am on a track which will lead to some good things.’34 He would later reflect that Matta’s example helped him recognize what an authentically American manner in art could be; an ‘original creative principle’, he would call it, ‘the thing lacking in American modernism’. ‘Not a style’, he went on to say, yet something ‘entirely personal … that originates in one’s own being.’ For Motherwell, Surrealist automatism was a technique for finding form within matter itself; in his own words, ‘a means for getting at the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception’.35

Fig 6.11  Robert Motherwell, Mexican Sketchbook, 1941, page of 17 July, ink on paper 22.9 x 29.2 cm. Dedalus Foundation, New York/VAGA at ARS, New York and DACS London 2019. 34 35

Robert Motherwell, letter to Kurt and Arlette Seligmann, 9 July 1941. Robert Motherwell, ‘Beyond the Aesthetic’, 1946; in D. Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 2007, p 54.

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It will be understood that ‘individual being’ and ‘American modernism’ were unfamiliar phrases in 1942 – yet had to be used in any description of what Motherwell called ‘the terrible isolation, inevitably the lot of the American painter struggling with the problems of l’art moderne in this country’.36 By the autumn of 1942, at any rate, the group comprising Baziotes, Peter Busa, Kamrowski, Motherwell and Pollock was in a mood of anxious reassessment of the recent European past. At Matta’s invitation they began to meet in Matta’s studio each Saturday to examine varieties of ‘automatist’ practice that they felt might provide a way forward, independent of European Surrealists. The record of those meetings tells of a determined effort to examine some unfamiliar morphologies of paint – its resource as a medium when smeared, brushed, impregnated into a resistant surface, or spread and blotted on a paper page. Matta’s own Psychological Morphologies, done in the company of Onslow Ford back in the summer of 1938, were generally admired. As Busa later said, ‘It was from him [Matta] we got the idea that paint could transcend the fact that it was just something on the canvas … [that] it could become crushed jewels, air, even laughter. It had tremendous possibilities of transformation.’ Yet for Busa, their work at that stage ‘was not mixed up enough with life’. He adds tellingly that in learning to ‘mix art up with life’ their work sometimes went the other way. Their first efforts with Matta ‘looked like vomit’ – after which, he recollected, it could be ‘sheer catharsis’. Or as Matta himself said about the energies within the group, ‘You were all ready to explode.’37 It was a confluence that could not and would not last. Motherwell and Matta were soon falling out. Meanwhile Peggy Guggenheim, in planning the programme for her new gallery, was issuing invitations to certain artists to submit works for an Exhibition of Collage scheduled for the spring of 1943. Holed up with Pollock in Pollock’s studio to find out whether either of them

36

37

With the opening of Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th Street in 1942 we find Motherwell chastising Mondrian’s work for having an expressive range ‘still too limited to fulfil wholly the requirements of the accurate and complete language for expressing reality which we all seek … [for being] too impoverished to reflect the complexities of our basic needs and desires’. He takes Hans Arp to task for having reverting to a romantic conception of nature ‘wholly irrelevant to the problems confronting men living in civilization’. See R. Motherwell, ‘Review of Art of This Century: Objects, Drawings, Photographs, Paintings, Sculpture, Collage 1910–1942’, Art of This Century, New York, written c.1942, in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, pp 21–2. P. Busa, ‘Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School: 1939–1943’, Art International, vol 11, no 6, Summer 1967, pp 17, 18.

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could produce work suitable for the show, Motherwell tells us that Pollock ‘worked with a violence that I had never seen before’. He ‘burnt his [collages] with matches and spit on it’ – meaning fumage and spittle applied to the paper itself – even though he evidently preferred paint to collage as a material for art.38 Motherwell, by contrast, describes himself ‘taking to collage like a duck to water’, producing works such as Pierrot’s Hat and an Untitled work at a scale of some 50 × 40 cm before being persuaded by Matta – despite their differences – to work at well over twice that size. Here was one way of developing Hans Arp’s torn-paper idiom, in a technique that could include ink, gouache, oil paint, crayon, graphite and fabric as well as torn-and-pasted paper, scaled up to easel-painting size. Motherwell’s Joy of Living of 1943 – exhibited alongside Baziotes’ The Drugged Balloonist and a small work by Pollock from that year – were among the most striking pieces in Guggenheim’s show (Plate 22a).39 While Baziotes’ work gave full rein to spreading fluid effects, Joy of Living contained moods, experiments, revisions, found or marked material, assembled in a spirit of what Motherwell would come to call ‘risk’. He tells us that his technique at that stage ‘consisted of a dialectic between the conscious (straight lines, designed shapes, weighed colour, abstract language) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes, automatism) resolved into a synthesis which differs as a whole from either’ (Plate 22b).40 The function of the modern artist, he now said, is also by definition the expression of a modern reality, a reality that ‘has a historical character’. And remember what that history was now becoming. The USA had joined the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, and the Spanish Civil War was still vivid in the memory. In the USA too, the atom bomb was in preparation. The historical character of reality had been Hegel’s insight, Motherwell notes. ‘With Marx the notion is coupled with the feeling of how material reality is.’41 38

39

40

41

Motherwell, in S. Simon, ‘Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School 1939–1943: An Interview with Robert Motherwell conducted by Sidney Simon in New York in January 1967’, Art International, vol 11, no 6, Summer 1967, p 22. Thirty-four other American and Europeans were shown in the Exhibition of Collage, 1943, including Ernst, Grosz, Arp, Gris, Picasso, Schwitters, Cornell, David Hare, Rice Pereira, Reinhardt, Sterne and Vail. The identity of the Pollock work in the show is not known with certainty but may be one of those listed in F.V. O’Connor and E.V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1978; Vol 4: Other Works 1930–1956, nos 1023, 1024, 1025. Motherwell, plate caption in Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, 1944, in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, p 36. Motherwell, ‘The Modern Painter’s World’, Dyn, vol 1, no 6, Nov 1944; in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, p 28.

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That material reality was not Motherwell’s uniquely. By late in 1944, several figures in New York were finding techniques for revealing how material might be persuaded – or allowed – to become form. Motherwell’s torn-paper and painted works of the period showed one way to treat the surface as a field of action and rhythm. Perhaps he and others were learning about the image-field from Masson, who until 1946 lived in upstate New York; or were looking, as Pollock must surely have done, at the paintings of Janet Sobel at Peggy Guggenheim’s in 1943; or those of the Danish artist Knud Merrild, based in California but exhibiting on occasion in New York. Merrild was painting in a manner he called ‘flux’, and was pouring enamel paint onto canvas by 1942. Or consider the following, from Stanley Hayter, on the approaches to print-making he was developing in 1944 and 1945, at the time he was teaching Pollock: ‘It is in the artist’s exposure of his idea and his [etching] plate to the accidents of a method’, Hayter says, ‘to the imminent risk of destruction, that the greatest result may occur.’ Or on the necessity of risk: ‘The artist needs a certain courage to follow wherever it may lead without editing, formalizing or modifying it … The first essential … is a powerful urge to make a latent image visible.’42 What can securely be said is that fluid matiére subjected to some basic technical and interpretive freedoms had by 1944 and the beginning of 1945 installed themselves in New York culture in tandem with some new languages and valuations for art. In Motherwell’s case – to hear him once more – the running and dripping of non-standard paints such as enamel when applied to canvas; effects such as the crumpling and bulging of dry paper when covered with gouache; the bleeding of ink into uncontrollable growth-patterns when applied to an absorbent ground; even the change in appearance of paints, inks, papers and other unstable matter with the passing of time – such resources were analogical to the flow of the affective life in whatever situation that life was to be found, but especially in the give-and-take between artist and resources in the studio. ‘No wonder that the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations’ in his work, Motherwell wrote in the spring of 1946.43

42 43

S.W. Hayter, New Ways of Gravure, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, 1949, p 270. Motherwell, ‘Beyond the Aesthetic’, Design, vol 47, no 8, April 1946; reprinted in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, here pp 54–5. Describing the process of applying inks to Japanese rice paper in the mid-1960s, Motherwell reported that: ‘Unable to control the spread of ink, which varied according to heat and humidity … each picture would change before my eyes after I had finished working with it, sometimes for hours – as the ink spread, like of spot of oil’; Motherwell, ‘Addenda to the MoMA Lyric Suites Questionnaire – From Memory with Possible Chronological Slips’, autumn 1969; S. Terenzio, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992, pp 171–2.

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Fig 6.12  Knud Merrild, Perpetual Possibility, 1942, enamel on canvas over composition board, 50.8 × 41.1 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mrs Knud Merrild. © 2019 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

‘My pictures have layers of mistakes buried in them. They are a succession of humiliations resulting from the realisation that only in a state of quickened subjectivity – of freedom from conscious notions … do I find the unknown … [and] for which I am always searching.’ Or again: ‘An X-ray of them would disclose crimes, layers of consciousness, of willing.’44 (Plate 23). It was an outlook 44

R. Motherwell, ‘Statement’, for the exhibition of his work at the Kootz Gallery, 1947, in Ashton (ed), Writings of Robert Motherwell, p 57.

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that remained more or less constant in his work. Modern paintings are ‘residues of a moral process’, he told an audience of students in 1949. ‘Sometimes my essential loneliness creeps into the work, or anguish, [and] I resent it when I see that I was unable, on occasion, to muffle the shriek that lies deep in nearly everyone.’ And he anticipates another and better-known recommendation. ‘Art is a form of action’, he proposes, ‘a drama, a process, a dramatic gesture itself in modern times … One enters the studio as one would an arena.’ ‘One’s entire character is revealed in the action, one’s style, as we say, which differs from individual to individual and from tradition to tradition.’ And then a universal judgement: ‘Everyone undergoes risks just by living.’ It is the modern artist’s special function ‘to give each risk its proper style’.45 * In Paris, the wartime mood among artists had been more anguished, more resentful, one of less certainty as to how to proceed. Art history seemed to be at an end; at best, at a point from which artists would need to take drastic measures in order for it to recover. Before the start of the war Breton had been insistent that on no account should artists ‘hide the sickness of the world under a carpet of flowers’. With the winds of destruction in Europe howling, with Spain overwhelmed by misery, ordinary pleasures and intimacies had had to be suspended. ‘We [Surrealists] condemn as tendentious and reactionary any image in which the painter or poet offers us a stable universe’, Breton had announced in May 1939. The work of art must be ‘a happening [une oeuvre d’art-événement], with perceptible bifurcations and breaks in time, no longer a ridiculous search for formal perfection, but the power of revelation alone’.46 The pressure was for discharge, for bursts or spasms not altogether dissimilar from the electric flash whose startling image he had published in Minotaure in 1934, where he likened it to an event of automatic writing. The demand had been for the work of art to be, not a civilized dialogue with matter but a contest in which unity was not to be expected and where harmony was no

45

46

Robert Motherwell, ‘A Personal Expression’, lecture presented on 19 March 1949 at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Committee on Art Education, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art; in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, pp 76, 79. The better-known statement of art as action is that of H. Rosenberg – ‘a friend of mine’, Motherwell adds (p 76) – in ‘The American Action Painters’, Art News, December 1952. A. Breton, ‘Prestige d’André Masson’, Minotaure, nos 12/13, May 1939, p 13; Surrealism and Painting, p 151.

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Fig 6.13  Photo of an electric flash, from A. Breton, ‘La beauté sera convulsive’, Minotaure, no 5, 1934, p 10.

longer welcome or desired: a performance that should be neither reassuring nor ever still. We saw already how in war-torn Paris the demand had been for a work of art no longer similar to a living organism, but rather for a living organism itself, a restless protozoon, life in a bare state. A group of writers and artists calling itself La Main à Plume (from Rimbaud’s ‘la main à plume vaut la main à charrue’, [La Saison En Enfer, 1873]) had helped keep the flames of dissent burning throughout the occupation – Picasso, Arp, Hugnet, Raoul Ubac and Vulliamy belonged to this group – until October 1946, when one of its literary members, Édouard Jaguer, published a declaration, ‘Les Chemins de l’Abstraction’ [The Paths of Abstraction], that gave further expression to the need for the dangerous and the raw, for the

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artwork to function as a sharp obstacle to any cosy return to bourgeois life and order. Jaguer’s primary target was now ‘géométrisme’ [geometric art], as he called it. ‘Faced with such cheerful or austere mosaics’, Jaguer had said about the geometricists, ‘we remain indifferent, notwithstanding the optical pleasure they give. These decorations have no connection with our apocalyptic age. We cannot recognize ourselves in them.’47 It was a call soon answered by a trio of artists comprising Michel Tapié, Georges Mathieu and Camille Bryen, who organized a group show in December 1947 at the Galerie du Luxembourg titled L’Imaginaire (also the title of Sartre’s book of 1940) that would be the platform of a ‘movement of psychic non-figuration’ [mouvement de la non-figuration-psychique]. The artists of L’Imaginaire (Arp, Atlan, Brauner, Bryen, Hartung, Leduc, Mathieu, Picasso, Riopelle, Solier, Ubac, Verroust, Vulliamy and Wols) Mathieu endorsed for their achievement of ‘absolutely free creation’ in which form, inspiration and content [fond] were inseparable, and in the face of which the champions of géométrisme would have to retreat (Plate 24a).48 The same trio organized a show in April 1948 whose programme was similar. Named after the initials of its members (Hartung, Wols, Picabia, Stahly, Mathieu, Tapié, Bryen), H.W.P.S.M.T.B. gave further expression to the tragic mood in the Parisian après-guerre. A second show of that year was prompted by Mathieu alone. White and Black (the grouping this time was Arp, Bryen, Fautrier, Hartung, Picabia, Tapié, Ubac and Wols) was a further effort to prise art away from the remnants either of orthodox Surrealism or geometric art. Two textual statements were commissioned. In Jaguer’s, the ‘banal rectangles’ of the geometric manner ‘do not have anything to do in a world turned upside down by pure expressivity … What matters is the conquest of a subconscious but real place, not merely the derisory accomplishment of a plastic duty.’ Tapié, himself a participant in the show, added a note denouncing ‘the pedants of the geometric style and all notions of rhythm, style and plasticity beloved of fake professors’, urging that the schools and clinics of the city be ‘flung open to release the incoherent and the inchoate, that they may immediately invade and burst apart all paintings with a magico-psychic but nonetheless real force’.49

47

48

49

E. Jaguer, ‘Les Chemins de l’Abstraction’, Juin, 1 October 1946; cited in S. Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, in Guilbaut (ed), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1990, p 49. The words are from G. Mathieu, Au-Delà Du Tachisme, René Julliard, Paris 1963, p 47 and n 16. Mathieu describes the shows of that period as ‘The Anti-Geometric Offensive’ (p 31). Jaguer and Tapié’s statements for White and Black, Galerie Florence Bank, Paris 1948 are recorded in Mathieu, Au-Delà Du Tachisme, pp 55–8. Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick’, pp 49–50, gives a slightly different translation.

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The use of liquid techniques within a substantially new repertoire of artistic behaviours was now well underway. Smearing, dripping and smudging with more or less rapid movements of the arm or implement was becoming de rigeur to those for whom ‘discharge’ was important – in answer to Breton’s pre-war demand that the work of art be a ‘happening, a revelation’. Yet Paris was very different from New York. It is true that in New York in the later 1940s some important European thinking was becoming known. At least according to Kahnweiler, Kierkegaard and Jaspers were already fashionable, and Jung and Binswanger were being read.50 Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté [Roads to Freedom] of 1945 and his L’Existentialisme est un humanisme [Existentialism is a Humanism] of 1946 were becoming available in translation. Yet existentialism American style was not like its Parisian original. A 1947 pamphlet ‘What is Existentialism?’ by William Barrett, then an associate editor at Partisan Review, located the contemporary crisis of subjectivity in the context of a much larger question, namely ‘Will America ever have a culture?’, to then answer it by stating that Beethoven, Flaubert and Picasso had all given anxiety as the distinguishing awareness of the modern artist, and the achievement of what he called ‘authenticity’ the implied or stated goal.51 The question was how much of this could be transplanted to American soil. ‘Americans are interested in process above all else’, Motherwell wrote in 1950. Theirs is an emotional rather than an intellectual position, he would claim, ‘a kind of dumb, obstinate rebellion at how the world is presently organized’. American art is ‘lyrical, often anguished, brutal, austere, and “unfinished”’, he added at that time.52 He tried to speak for others in pleading that ‘the problem [in America] has been to project an experience, rich, deeply felt, and pure, without using the objects and paraphernalia, the anecdotes and propaganda of a discredited social world … Major decisions in the process of American painting are on the grounds of truth, not taste.’53 His view of Paris was scarcely an accurate one. ‘In “finishing” their paintings’, Motherwell wrote in 1950, ‘the French assume traditional criteria to a much greater degree than we do.’ The French artists ‘have a particular something that 50 51

52

53

See D-H. Kahnweiler, Juan Gris: sa vie, son oeuvre, ses écrits, Gallimard, Paris, 1946. W. Barrett, What Is Existentialism?, Partisan Review pamphlet no 2, New York, 1947, pp 38, 41. See further, Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, Doubleday, New York, 1958. Motherwell, contribution to ‘Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35 (1950)’, in R. Motherwell and A. Reinhardt (eds), Modern Artists in America, Wittenborn Schulz, New York, 1951, p 13; and Motherwell, ‘The New York School’, a paper prepared for a conference of the College Art Association in October 1950; in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, p 95. R. Motherwell, ‘Preface’ to Seventeen Modern American Painters, Frank Perls Gallery, Los Angeles 1951; in Ashton (ed), The Writings of Robert Motherwell, pp 154–5.

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makes them look like a “finished” painting’, added de Kooning in support. ‘They have a touch which I am glad not to have.’54 There is of course no mid-Atlantic vantage-point from which these assessments can be judged. For some artists in New York, a kind of ‘integration’ of self and nature could be the model – not insectoid or suppurating nature, rather one that harked back to the endowments of the Native Americans, whose mode of life constituted ‘the primitive’ of the American mind.55 It was a kind of ‘integration’ that became visible in Pollock’s paintings from the beginning of 1947, in which techniques of pouring and dripping liquid paint were first used on a dramatic scale, an ‘integration’ ostensibly aimed at a balance between the rhythms of paintdischarge and the rhythms of the body while painting. At least up until his Autumn Rhythm of 1950, Pollock’s testimony was that his body-rhythms were not distinct from those of the natural world but equal to them and belonged among them – as if to exemplify phusis or a perpetual ‘becoming’ in nature whose energies originated inside the human organism as much as beyond it. Outside and inside the body were regarded as in some sense the same. ‘When I am painting I am not much aware of what is taking place’, Pollock famously said. ‘It is only after a sort of “getting acquainted” period that I see what I have done… The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.’56 Other New York artists said similar things. ‘Let me flow, affect things, and dissolve, be, and be no more, and be forever’ – this is Richard Pousette-Dart, writing in 1940 – ‘for such is to be one, in accord with nature. For nature is that which I am [and] shall be.’57 Phusis here grades into kairós, arguably, the latter understood as the leading temporal edge of action, the tip of the guided arrow of conscious will and volition that constitutes semicontrolled intention, but lacking the randomness that for the Surrealists was true spontaneity.58 When Hans Hofmann suggested to Pollock that he try to work from 54 55

56

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Motherwell and de Kooning, contributions to ‘Artists’ sessions at Studio 35 (1950), p 13. See M. Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1993, chapter 4, pp 203–74, in which he refers to popular books of the order of H. Fergusson, Modern Man: His Mind and Behaviour, 1936, copies of which Pollock and others owned. J. Pollock, Draft statement for Possibilities, 1947, published in O’Connor and Thaw, p 230; and statement, Possibilities, I, 1947, in Problems of Contemporary Art, Vol 4, Wittenborn, New York, 1948; and J. Pollock, ‘My Painting’, Possibilities, I, winter 1947–48, p 79. His description of a painting having ‘a life of its own, [that] I try to let it come through’ is echoed in Peter Busa’s recollection that Pollock ‘gave painting an organism of existing [sic], a canvas pulsating with the heart of a new-born creature’; see Simon, ‘Concerning the Beginnings of the New York School’, p 20. R. Pousette-Dart, ‘notebook entry, 1940’ cited in Hobbs, ‘Confronting the Unknown Within’, in R. Hobbs and J. Kuebler (eds), Richard Pousette-Dart, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1990, p 82. For phusis in relation to kairós see A. Negri, Time for Revolution, Continuum Books, London and New York, 2003, pp 139–69.

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nature, Pollock’s reply – ‘I am nature’ – expressed a willingness to be immersed in pattern and flow; to make it the case that the work of the work of art was not entirely his, yet not beyond his control either. The watery evocations of so many of his titles for 1947 – Sea Change, Watery Paths, Vortex, Full Fathom Five – point unerringly to a preoccupation with paint itself and the metaphorics of matter. It is true, on the other hand, that these were not the only metaphors that frame Pollock’s pre-1950 works. Other metaphors were galactic, or otherworldly.59 Some

Fig 6.14  Jackson Pollock, Vortex, c.1947, oil and enamel on canvas, 52.3 × 46.3 cm. Private Collection. 59

‘The world [in these paintings] was a world of delight, of fulness and strangeness, the transmuting of base metals into gold, the suspension of weight and gravity, the slow turn of things in a green sea’: thus T.J. Clark on this group of works, before arguing that Pollock’s painting is in the end ‘a work against metaphor, against any one of his pictures settling down inside a single metaphorical frame of reference’; Clark, ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’, in S. Guilbaut (ed), Reconstructing Modernism: Art New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1969, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990, pp 199, 201.

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observers could connect his fluid fields of energy with the much larger force of America’s atomic bomb. ‘The present painting has a spattered technique’ wrote the veteran critic Henry McBride of a paint-on-paper work of 1949, ‘but the spattering is handsome and organized and therefore I like it. The effect it makes is that of a flat, war-shattered city, possibly Hiroshima as seen from a great height by the light of the moon.’60 * In the different cities the new manner was bound to mean different things. In Paris it was now Tapié – with Mathieu’s advice – who convened a show called Véhémences Confrontées [Oppositional/Confronted Passions] in Paris in March 1951, in an effort to give expression to what they claimed was an international rather than a local idea. With Bryen, Mathieu and Wols representing France, work was obtained by Hans Hartung from Germany, by Giuseppe Capogrossi from Italy, by Jean-Paul Riopelle from Canada, and by Pollock and de Kooning from New York. As its title suggested, Véhémences Confrontées was an attempt to demonstrate the existence of what Tapié would call un art autre – a deliberate and programmatic ‘other’ to geometric as well as social-realist styles. ‘Art autre’ was premised on the precedent of Dada – ‘the great break’ as Tapié would call it in a book of the following spring – as much as on the exhaustion of European humanism after the end of the war. Tapié’s more startling claim was that ‘form’ itself was no longer worth studying if doing so worked to the detriment of what he called ‘an intoxication with life itself and an openness to mystery’. Pollock’s She-Wolf of 1943, already known in Europe through reproduction, exemplified painting as ‘violence born of a gesture whose limits are vertiginous, beyond comprehension’. The artist’s paintings are ‘magic, thaumaturgy, transcendence’. And in the process, Tapié observed, ‘life has become estranged from form’ – witness the work of the many painters who ‘deliberately act without need of it’, who proceed ‘with a casual indifference to conventional wisdom, acting without form in a spirit of profound anarchy’.61 What did Tapié mean by his insistence that, in the struggle against form, the artist would need to go beyond even non-form to achieve ‘non-non-form’, 60

61

H. McBride, ‘Jackson Pollock’, The New York Sun, 23 December 1949; in D.C. Rich (ed), Henry McBride: The Flow of Art: Essays and Criticisms, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT 1997, p 425. The painting is Number 14, 1949, oil on paper, 57.1 × 78.7 cm, now destroyed except for two fragments. See F.V. O’Connor and E.V. Thaw, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, Vol 2: Paintings 1948–1955, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 1978, p 77. M. Tapié, Un Art Autre: où il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel, Gabriel-Giraud, Paris, 1952. Emphases added.

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as he chose to state it? ‘Non-non-form’ seemed to designate less a refusal of form than a pronounced uncertainty about how form could signify; whether it could any longer have a relation to biological – let alone human – life. The artist to mention here is Camille Bryen, in the later 1940s and early 1950s reckoned to be a leading figure on the Paris scene.62 His reputation has become lost – yet Bryen exhibited in or helped curate virtually every experimental exhibition of the postwar period, from L’Imaginaire of 1947 to Tapié’s Signifiants de l’Informel at Studio Fachetti in 1952. From the middle of the war he had become celebrated in Paris for his conviction that humanist culture was at an end, that its accounts of subjectivity were no longer possible to uphold. As a young artist in the mid-1930s he had practised a version of ‘automatism’ with candlesmoke and soot; had met Wols at that time; and formed a lasting friendship with Hans Arp, whose Dada sympathies corresponded closely to his own. By the later 1940s and early 1950s, Bryen was describing his own painting, not as achieving oneness with nature or a lucid balance between matter and the artist’s efforts to control it, rather as a performance of grimacing, masticating, digging, as a scraping and shredding of paint and surface, all with a degree of purposiveness no more coherent than that of a marauding aquatic creature such as a sea anemone or a swarm of ants (Plate 24b). * Such were the terms of a new anti-humanist or post-humanist attitude in Paris. In the early 1950s Bryen published a book with the playwright Jacques Audiberti with the title L’Ouvre-Boîte: Colloque Abhumaniste [Can-Opener: Abhumanist Coloquium] – the prefix Ab insisting on a separation from what they called ‘humanist chauvinism’ and replacing it with a version of base materialism opposed to any larger confidence in an anthropocentric ordering of values. Audiberti himself likened Bryen’s paintings of the period to mould, fungus, the growth pattern of a viral disease. He tells us that they ‘plunge into the poisonous vegetation of the depths or soar out of the abysses of a gnat’s rotten tooth towards the blink of our eye and the fist of our hand’. His paintings ‘throb and settle under the horizontal shower of our look … its forms or non-forms keep changing in space ahead of the canvas or the paper … ahead of everything’. 62

Bryen is captured in the painting by Georges Patrix of 1950, Les Gloires de 6ième Arrondissement [The Glories of the 6th Arrondissement], standing like an impish schoolboy in front of Boris Vian, Jacques Prévert, Jean Genet, Juliette Greco and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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Eventually, ‘we see the work of art dehumanising itself, freeing itself from man’s signature, reverting to an autonomous movement that electronic meters (if only we knew where to plug them in) would love to measure’. For Bryen and Audiberti, painting was an ‘abhumanist hypothesis’, and Bryen was its abhomme.63 For them, at least, the modes of life and livingness that had been under discussion since the Enlightenment were no longer usable. The project of the work of art as organism was approaching a kind of end.

63

C. Bryen and J. Audiberti, L’Ouvre-Boîte: Colloque Abhumaniste, Gallimard, Paris, 1952, pp 34, 35. I have been guided here by I. Slavkova, ‘Surviving the Collapse of Humanism after World War II: The “Abhumanist” Response of J. Audiberti and C. Bryen’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol 17, no 3, 2013, pp 318–27, together with Slavkova, ‘L’Humanisme, aussi, est un mythe: Prolégomènes à une peinture abhumaniste’, in F. Flahutez and T. Dufrêne (eds), Art et Mythe, Presses Universitaires de Paris Nanterre, pp 73–83. For Bryen as ‘abhomme’, see D. Abadie, Bryen, abhomme, La Connaissance, Brussels, 1973.

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It was not the end, of course – or not quite. Audiberti and Bryen’s exhortation to think away from humanism – apart from it, beyond it – sounds like a final refusal to conceive the work of art by analogy with a natural organism. What abhumanisme implied in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not only that human nature was a myth, but that ‘natural’ nature was too; that both of them required historicizing. Roland Barthes expressed it well in his Mythologies, published in 1957, in insisting that the demand must now be ‘constantly to scour nature, its “laws” and “limits” in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical’.1 Barthes knew well that the phenomena of ‘life’ were not only cultural and ideological, but that by the early 1950s morphology and biometrics had begun to be superseded by information theory with its techniques of recursion, feedback and systems analysis. ‘Nature’ no longer appeared as a set of shapes produced in micro-photography. Life-scientists were now occupied with genetics and the organization of DNA; with patterns of sequencing, symmetry and repetition. The paradigms of man-as-nature and nature-in-man that had seemed adequate since the eighteenth century were undergoing transformation – and artistic behaviour was changing too. Perhaps Michel Tapié’s idea of ‘nonnon-form’ in his book Un Art Autre also implied it. For even though mobilizing liquid matter had lent itself to a certain singularity of effect throughout the war period, that effect had become vulnerable to a paradox. After all, if liquid discharge and selfhood had gone together in that period, then selfhood could only be claimed under conditions in which a certain dispersal of selfhood was a consequence of that discharge occurring. Liquid matter could function not 1

R. Barthes, ‘The Great Family of Man’, a response to the photography exhibition of that name shown in New York in 1955 and in Paris early in 1956; in Mythologies, Paris, 1957; from the English translation as Mythologies, Vintage Books, London, 2009, p 172.

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Fig 7.1  Robert Rauschenberg, This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time, c.1948–49, pencil on tracing paper, and fourteen woodcuts on paper, bound with twine and stapled, 30.8 × 22.5 cm, Collection of the artist, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida.

only as nature’s obvious mobility and changefulness, but as an index of nature’s vanishing, its disappearance into the gesture that scrapes or flings matter but in so doing loses itself and forgets how to regain it. In ceding control to matter’s viscosity in the first place, in ‘letting things go’ creatively, the artist’s subjectivity might no longer be visible in the work. If matter was being invited to assume its own forms, one implication was clear. The artist need no longer be there. We can exemplify that withdrawal in different ways. We know that the 22-year-old Robert Rauschenberg was in Paris in the summer of 1948, enrolled at the Académie Julien under the auspices of the GI Bill and apparently unhappy with the instruction that he was receiving there. Did he see either of the two shows organized by Mathieu, Bryen and Tapié, in April and June of that year? He is described during his time in Paris as ‘painting passionately, often dispensing with brushes and using his hands’.2 But if this is true, it was a manner that was shortly to change. Back in the USA in the autumn and enrolled as a student at 2

J. Young with S. Davidson, ‘Chronology’, Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p 551.

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Black Mountain College, we find him producing works based on accident and happenstance – footprints and random marks on various surfaces – in an attitude that was substantially new. This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time is a work of Rauschenberg’s dated c.1948–9 and is an example of his withdrawal from the spirit of Tapié’s ‘véhémence’ by insisting on quietness and modesty alone. Fourteen sheets of paper, one for each day of a fortnight, have been printed from a wooden block, the first one with the block entirely uncut – hence black – followed by sheets from which progressively more wood has been removed, ending with a sheet from which exactly half the wooden block has been cut away. The fourteen pages have then been bound together with twine and presented in the manner of a flip-chart or wall-calendar, to be opened in a sequence by the viewer, or imagined as such on the evidence of the title alone. The work declares little other than itself as a sequenced process in time. Yet it contains an obvious implication – that This is the Second Half might come to exist, in which fourteen more printed pages would run from half-black-andhalf-white to all white – in other words, to complete absence. Absence is the motif of Rauschenberg’s work here – more precisely, absence and presence as interdependent states. It isn’t clear how much the artist conceptualized these things, yet we cannot but notice how many of Henri Bergson’s themes are still there: puzzlement over the cinematographic account of reality;

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the idea of duration; above all Bergson’s lengthy discussion of what in Creative Evolution he calls ‘the idea of nothing’. To the question whether ‘somethingness’ [l’existence] is a victory over ‘nothingness’ [le néant] and in that sense implies it, Bergson had suggested we should ask a different question: what the thought of nothingness would be like. He had answered it by saying that in such a thought experiment the fact of the experiment would itself guarantee that nothingness – a complete vacuum, say – would be supplanted by something existent in the consciousness that appraises it. Rather than the full supplanting the empty, in lived reality ‘the full always succeeds the full, [moreover] the conception of a void arises here only when consciousness, lagging behind itself, remains attached to the recollection of an old state … [whereas in fact] it is a comparison between the full and the full’. Therefore ‘the idea of the absolute nought, in the sense of the destruction of everything, is a self-destructive idea … a mere word’. In matters of ontology, as he always insisted, and as Rauschenberg instinctively understood, ‘we must install ourselves within duration straight away’.3 It is not that the young Rauschenberg was philosophically well read (he was not), rather that his appetite for ontological paradox – positive versus negative, increase versus decrease, white versus black – was being supported by those he spoke to or knew. We have the recollections of John Cage, here on a walk through the city of Seattle in the late 1930s in the company of Mark Tobey – uncoincidentally one of Tapié’s choices for Un Art Autre and also for Les Signifiants de l’Informel in 1952: One day we were taking a walk together [to a Japanese restaurant] which meant we crossed through most of the city. Well, we couldn’t really walk. Tobey would continually stop to notice something surprising everywhere – on the side of a shack or in an open space … he would stop on the sidewalks, sidewalks we didn’t normally notice when we were walking, and his gaze would immediately turn them into a work of art … That walk was a revelation for me. It was the first time someone else had given me a lesson in looking without prejudice, someone who didn’t compare what he was seeing with something before.4

Cage understood immediately that future music must explore the tension ‘between noise and so-called musical sounds … [that] the composer will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time’.5 Meeting Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s confirmed 3

4 5

H. Bergson, Évolution Créatrice (Henry Holt, New York, 1911); in the translation of A. Mitchell as Creative Evolution, Random House, New York, 1944, pp 289–314, here pp 298, 299, 315. John Cage, in J. Cage and D. Charles, For the Birds, Marion Boyars, New York, 1981, p 158. J. Cage, ‘The Future of Music: Credo’ (1937), in Silence, Calder and Boyars, London, 1968, pp 4, 5.

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in both of them the suspicions they already had. In the words of an essay Cage wrote about Rauschenberg a few years later, the effect of works like This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time of c.1948–49 and Erased de Kooning Drawing of 1953 was to ‘unfocus attention’, to organize matter in the work of art such as to establish the possibility of ‘looking anywhere, not just where someone arranged you should’. Furthermore, ‘there is no dripping when the paint is squeezed from a tube … there is the same acceptance of what happens, and no tendency towards gesture or arrangement’.6 He would say of Rauschenberg’s Combines a little later, ‘Here we are concerned with the co-existence of dissimilars. Their disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.’ Something and nothing, says Cage as if Rauschenberg himself was speaking, ‘need each other’.7 No tendency towards gesture or arrangement: in the view of another young New York artist, Allan Kaprow, the lesson of art-as-action was not to make things, but to let things happen, to relax consciousness to the point of becoming ‘dazzled’, in his words, ‘by the space and objects of our everyday life, our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-second street’. The artist was no longer concerned with ‘form’. We intend to use ‘sight, sound, movements, people, odours, touch … chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things’.8 Literalness, ordinary materiality, the continuity of the full-empty present – such was the template that could now guide the passage of matter as well as non-matter into form. It was an attitude to the making of a work of art that was already being adopted elsewhere. When Kazuo Shiraga, in far-off Japan, turned in 1953 to the making of paintings by smearing lumps of paint with his feet, or to ‘grappling’ with a heap of mud and plaster in demonstration of what he and his group called gutai-ism – gutai means ‘concrete’ but also ‘body-tool’ – his artistic indebtedness was to Cage rather than to Pollock or Mathieu. The aim of Shiraga’s group was to use the body to smear, 6

7

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J. Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and his works’ (1961); Silence, pp 100, 102. Whether Rauschenberg heard Cage deliver his ‘Lecture on Nothing’ at the Artists’ Club on Eight Street in 1949 (convened by Motherwell) must remain speculation. One member of the audience, Jeanne Reynal, screamed and walked out. Cage reported: ‘during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen’: Cage, Silence, p ix. J. Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ (1957); Silence, p 12; and ‘Lecture on Something’ (1949) in which he quotes and glosses Meister Eckhart: ‘Earth’ [that is my something] ‘has no escape from heaven’ [that is nothing], ‘flee she up or flee she down, heaven still invades here, energizing her, fructifying her, whether for her weal or for her woe’; Silence, p 145. A. Kaprow, ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’, Art News, vol 57, no 6, 1959, pp 24–6, 55–7; in J. Kelley (ed), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: Allan Kaprow, University of California Press, Berkeley, California, 1993, pp 1, 7, 9.

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break or shatter something – anything – to alter it as well as to degrade it, not with skill so much as with understanding. In the words of its manifesto, Gutai aimed ‘to call material to life’, to make something happen to matter by doing as little as possible to it.9 Kaprow himself, shortly to enrol as a student in John Cage’s experimental music class in New York in the late 1950s, would continue to speculate on the interplay between painted and literal space and the randomness and simultaneity that must operate there. It was an attitude that brought ordinary occurrences into the place where the paradigms of biological vitality had once stood. Action without commitment had replaced them. The complicity of things had become interesting. The fragile and impermanent had a value. ‘Only the changing is really enduring’, Kaprow concluded. ‘All else is whistling in the dark.’10

Fig 7.2  Kazuo Shiraga, Challenging Mud, first Gutai exhibition, Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1955.

9

10

See Jiro Yoshihara, ‘Gutai bijutsu sengen’, Genijutsu Shinchō, vol 7, no 12, December 1956, pp 202–4; in translation as ‘The Gutai-ism Manifesto’, in K. Stiles and P. Selz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, pp 695–8. A. Kaprow, ‘Notes on the Creation of a Total Art’, notes for Environment, Hansa Gallery, New York, November 1958; in Kelley (ed), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: Allan Kaprow, p 12.

Afterword and acknowledgements

The origins of this book merit a brief explanation. Some years ago I found myself becoming fascinated by the visual properties of clouds, rivers, lichen, sand-piles, convection-patterns, bacterial organization and other systems of material being and becoming. Perhaps it was inevitable that those preoccupations should transfer themselves – find themselves mirrored in – a no less intense absorption with the complex linearities, curvatures and formvalues of modern art; not, I hasten to add, their static shapes or configurations, so much as the suggestion carried in them and through them of dynamic and process-driven change. Two books in particular were already my companions at that time: Pierre Hadot’s The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (2006), and Philip Ball’s Nature’s Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts (2009). These and other writings helped me think in different ways about Western modernism in the period spanning the burgeoning of a culture dominated by industry and mechanization and the dawning of a very different culture, one of information and computation. The present book is the result of the research agendas that opened themselves to me then, first as to the phenomena of nature versus the machine, and second, as to the formal strategies of post-representational art. Successive chapters evolved approximately in step with invitations from scholars and curators to speak on aspects of those concerns. Chapter 1 has its origin in the conference ‘Władysław Strzemiński: Readability of Images’ held at the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland, in October 2011, thanks to a kind invitation from Pawel Polit and Jaroslaw Suchan, of the Łódź Museum. An invitation from Kasandra Nakas the following year to address the conference ‘Verflüssigungen: Ästhetische und semantische Dimensionen eines Topos’, held at the Universität der Künste, Berlin in November 2012 allowed me to air some larger themes of

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Afterword and acknowledgements

entropy and fluidity in art, and I am very grateful for that opportunity. Chapter 3 stems from a period in 2014–15 spent as a visiting scholar at the Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Berlin, and from an invitation to speak at the conference ‘Hans Arp and the USA’, organized by Maike Steinkamp, Director of the Stiftung, at the American Academy, Berlin in June 2015, and for that I am indebted to both her and Dr Engelbert Büning, President of the Berlin Stiftung. Chapter 5 began to take shape following an invitation from Sabine Schaschl of the Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, to contribute to the catalogue and the exhibition Um die Ecke Denken: Die Sammlung Museum Haus Konstruktiv (1986–2016) in the summer of 2016, and I warmly thank both her and her assistant Jasmin Eckhardt for their guidance. James Fox and Vid Simoniti of the University of Cambridge invited me to speak at the Company of Ideas Forum on Art and Knowledge in the Twentieth Century, held at the Rubinoff Sculpture Park, Vancouver, Canada, in June 2017, at which I was able to rehearse some of the material now in Chapter 4. I am grateful to them both. Chapter 2 originates in an invitation from Eric Robertson and Frances Guy to speak on the idea of biomorphism at the conference ‘Hans Arp: The Poetry of Forms’, held at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, England in November 2017 to mark the conclusion of their excellent exhibition of that name; I am grateful to them also. Chapter 6 stems indirectly from some paragraphs of an essay on Robert Motherwell, first prepared for the catalogue of the exhibition Robert Motherwell: Early Collages, curated by Susan Davidson at the Guggenheim Museum, Venice in 2013 and subsequently in New York – though the material appears significantly extended here. More recently, my understanding of twentieth-century theoretical biology was sharpened by the invitation of Matthew Jarron to speak on ‘D’Arcy Thompson and Surrealism’ at the conference ‘On Growth and Form 100’ at the University of Dundee, Scotland in October 2017, a lecture which is to be published thanks to the enthusiasm of Charissa Terranova of the University of Dallas in her volume, edited with Ellen Levy, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: Generative Influences in Art, Design and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2020). Many others have helped me along the way. They include Johanna Lohse James of the Richard Paul Lohse Foundation, Zürich; Barrie Bullen, Jason Gaiger and Tim Horder, all of the University of Oxford; David Cottington of Kingston University; the artist and writer Jeffrey Steele; Michele Greet of George Mason University, Virginia; and Cara Manes, of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. To Marie-Elisabeth Deroche-Miles, Isabelle Ewig, Mario Luescher, Germain Viatte and Miranda Welby, I am grateful for conversation and advice.

Afterword and acknowledgements

243

For permission to reproduce images I thank Sophie Bowness, Yseult Riopelle, Martin and Marcin Stażewski, Eva Sapka-Pawliczak and Mme Fautrier. For many kinds of practical help I am grateful to Rainer Hüben and Simona Martinoli of the Fondazione Arp-Hagenbach, Locarno; to Debra Bricker Balken; to Astrid von Asten of the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck; to Fariba Bogzaran of the Lucid Art Foundation; and to Jana Teuscher of the Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Berlin; as I am to rights administrators in many organizations: Mercedes Aznar, Valentina Bandelloni, Karl Buehlmann, Melanie Cameron, Kelly Carpenter, Sophie Collomb, Lydie Di Méo, Suzanne Gerber, Kelsey Hallbeck, Colleen Hollister, Franca Kandrian, Kerrigan Kessler, Shirin Khaki, Joe Kitchen, Emily Lenz, Donna McClendon, Maddy Martin, Begoña Muro Martín-Corral, Clara Sampson, Melanie Staub, Sébastien Tardy, David Thompson, David Whaples and Lee-Ann Wielonda. Importantly, I owe a debt of gratitude to the library staffs of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, the Schweizer Intitut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zürich, and Southampton and Winchester Universities. For advice on French, German and Dutch translations respectively I thank Jean Halford, Frances Taylor and Toos de Peyer. My editors Margaret Michniewicz and Deborah Maloney have been models of enthusiasm and good humour from the start. My wife Lucia and the rest of the family have been unfailingly supportive throughout. Finally, a word about my title. Henri Focillon’s Vie des Formes was published in Paris in 1934 and marks an early attempt to keep in view the importance of the idea of form in art and to confront some of its many challenges. It came out in translation as The Life of Forms in Art from Yale University Press in 1942; and under the same title from Zone Books, New York in 2015. Though the present book shares little with Focillon’s in either method or topic, I am grateful to the relevant rights holders for allowing me to use his title in my own way.

Index Aalto, Alvar 85n30 abhumanisme 232–3, 235 Abstract and Concrete, Oxford 85–6 Abstraction-Création 23–4, 42, 47–8, 152 Abstrakt + Konkret 188n55 Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik, Zürich 175, 180 Agamben, Giorgio 73–4, 88 Albers, Joseph 182 alēthia see Heidegger Allianz organisation 188–93 Allianz: Vereinigung Moderner Schweizer Künstler 188–9 altération 166 American Artists’ Association (AAA) 87n52 amoeba 54, 82–5 see also Pycraft amoeba proteus 83–4 anacoluthon 108–9 Apollinaire, Guillaume 20–1, 134–5, 137 ‘a.r.’ group 42, 46–7 Aristotle 2, 23, 158–9, 188 Arp, Hans 42, 43, 44n30, 46, 47n34, 59, 65, 68, 79, 80, 82–3, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91–104, 107–11, 117–8, 120–3, 167, 168, 173, 175, 179, 183, 185–8, 195, 207–8, 209–10, 221n36, 222n39, 226, 227, 232, 242 Bird Mask Plate 8a Human Concretion Plate 8b Pre-Dada Drawing Fig 3.2 Abstract Composition Fig 3.3 Head Fig 3.4 Growth Fig 3.5 Stone Formed by Human Hand Fig 3.6 Three Disagreeable Objects on a Face Fig 3.9 Human Concretion Fig 3.14 Plant Organism [or Giant Seed] Fig 3.15 Second Papier Déchiré Fig 6.5 Drawing on Crumpled Paper Fig 6.6

with Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Composition vertical-horizontale Plate 9b Marital Sculpture Fig 3.7 Duet Drawing Fig 3.12 Art Concret 100–1, 173–5, 178, 182, 186 Art and Liberty Group, Cairo 211 Art of This Century Gallery, New York 221, 223 Ash, Mitchell G. Gestalt Psychology and German Culture 105n23, 115n41, 116n44 Atlan, Jean-Michel 227 Aubert, Georges 180 Auden, W.H. 69, 72 Audiberti, Jacques L’Ouvre-Boîte: Colloque Abhumaniste 232–3, 235 Axis 66–7, 69, 71–3, 87–8, 111–3, 185–7 Azilian culture 70–1 see Fig 2.6 Baargeld, Johannes 97 Bachelard, Gaston 89, 213 Bakairi, Brazil 87–8 Balint, Michael 114n38 Ball, Hugo 95 Ball, Philip Nature’s Patterns 241 Barlach, Ernst 124 Barr, Alfred H. 79–90 Cubism and Abstract Art 79–86, Fig 2.12; Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism 90 Barrett, William What Is Existentialism? 228 Barthes, Roland Mythologies 235 Bataille, Georges 89, 98, 146n20, 148, 155–60, 175, 176, 203 Bauhaus 62, 64, 65, 180, 182, 187 Baziotes, William 216–18, 221–2

Index The Drugged Baloonist, Plate 22a (with Kamrowski and Pollock) Collaborative Painting Fig 6.9; beelding 165–6 Bergson, Henri 6–8, 14–16, 19, 24, 32–3, 53, 83, 102n21, 174, 177, 213, 237–8, 239 Berlewi, Henryk Mechano-Faktura 33 Besetzung see Freud Beyerle, Rachel 119 Biederman, Charles 184 Bildung 7, 166 Bill, Max 180, 182–4, 188–91 Infinite and Finite Plate 18b; Fifteen Variations on a Theme Fig 5.4; Endless Ribbon Fig 5.5 Billy, André 137 Binswanger, Ludwig 151, 228 Bio-mechanics see Meyerhold Birkhoff, G.D., Aesthetic Measure 189 Bloch, Ernst 116, 194–5 Blok 33–5 Bodmer, Walter 188 ‘bodying-out’ see Grigson Boehme, Jakob 93 Bogdanov, Alexander 13 Bois, Y-A. 9n10, 37n18, 176n25, 198n2 Bosch, Hieronymous 203 Botar, Oliver 5n1 Braque, Georges 16, 124 Brauner, Victor 218, 227 Brentano, Franz 104, 174 Breton, André 143, 148, 155n41, 199, 201–4, 206n15, 216, 225, 226; Fig 6.13 Breton, Jacquéline 202, 204, 205, 206n15 Brouwer, L.E.J. 195 bruitism 20 Bryen, Camille 68, 227, 231–3, 235 Hépérile No 12 Plate 24b Brzękowski, Jan 42, 65n14 Bunuel, Luis Un Chien Andalou 198 Burliuk, David 11–12

245

Burgess, Gelett 127 Burkitt, M Our Early Ancestors 70–1 Busa, Peter 216, 221 Cabaret Voltaire 93 cadavre exquis 205–6, 217 Cage, John 238–40 Cahiers d’Art 65, 86, 97, 132n6 Calder, Alexander 68n17, 82n43, 86, 112–4, 186 A Universe Fig 3.11 Capogrossi, Guiseppe 231 Carnap, Rudolph 176 Carvão, Aluisio 196n72 Cercle et Carré 42, 64n13, 99, 175–6 Galerie 23 Exhibition, Paris 176 Cézanne, Paul 29, 180 Chaplin, Charlie 177 Char, René 211 Charchoune, Serge 42 Chevalier, Denys 59 Chevreul, Michel-Eugène 169 Chicago Bauhaus 216 Chwistek, Leon 53–4 and Formism 53n49 Cimabue 186 Ciolina, Tonio 180 Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art 186n47 Clark, Lygia 122, 196 Clark, T.J. 132, 161, 163, 230n59 Coleridge, S.T. 13 College of Sociology 203 Constable, John 51 Cook, Theodore The Curves of Life 6, 76–8 Cornell, Joseph 222n39 Cowling, Elizabeth 60, 131 Cozens, Alexander 51 Cubism 1, 9n10, 14, 15n25, 16, 29, 34, 35, 60, 69, 81, 82, 86, 139, 140, 190–1, 207 Cubism and Abstract Art, New York 79–86, 112, 184–5 Dada 19–20, 26, 84, 90, 93, 95–7, 102, 107, 109, 112, 114–7, 120–6, 129, 167, 170–1, 180, 183, 231, 232 Dakar-Djibouti Expedition

246 Dalί, Salvador 65, 69, 127–31, 136n7, 141, 143, 144–56, 159, 160, 162–3, 175, 190, 198–9, 203, 213 The Rotting Donkey, Plate 11 (Bather) Female Nude, Plate 14a The Spectre of Sex Appeal, Plate 14b Barcelona Mannequin Fig 4.2 The Bather Fig 4.10 Invisible Sleeping Woman, Horse, Lion Fig 4.12 with Picasso, Surrealist Figures, Fig 4.15 and putrefacció 145–6 Dante 197 Darwin, Charles The Origin of Species 2, 7n3 Dasein 40, 89, 125, 216 Davies, Hugh Sykes 143 de Beauvoir, Simone 211 De Kooning, Willem 86, 229, 231 de Man, Paul 109n30, 125 de Segonzac, Dunoyer 16 De Stijl 16, 70, 165, 167–8, 170–1, 173–4 Décalcomanie 201–2, 204 Deleuze, Gilles (with Guattari) What Is Philosophy? 53 Der Blaue Reiter Almanac see Kandinsky Derème, Tristan 16, 19–20 Descartes, René 82, 116n44 Die Koralle 65 Die Kultur der Gegenwart 65, 67, 68, Fig 2.5 Dimensionisme Manifesto 68 Dismorr, Jessica 16 DNA 235 Documents 65, 98, 99, 100, 148, 149, 155, 156, 157, 160, 161, 175, 176, 198, 200; Fig 4.11; Fig 4.13; Fig 4.14 see also Bataille; Einstein, Carl; Leiris Dionysus 82 Domela, César 68n17, 70, 80, 83, 185 Domínguez, Óscar 202 Driesch, Hans The Science and Philosophy of the Organism 3, Fig 0.1; Philosopie des Organischen 2

Index Dubuffet, Jean 195, 212 Duchamp, Marcel 68, 80, 90, 154n38 Rotoreliefs 68 durée 8, 8n7, 19, 53, 102 see also Bergson. Dwight, Y ‘The Significance of Bone Architecture’ 75 Dyn 218n33, 219, 222n41 Dźwignia 35, 38n19 Eames, Charles 85n50 Eble, Theo 180 Ehrenfels, Christian von ‘On Gestalt Qualities’ 104–5 Ensteigerung 18 see also Goethe Einstein, Albert 114, 177 Einstein, Carl 60, 99, 148–9, 155–6, 160, 176, 200 El Lissitzky 96, 175, 177, 179 El-Telmissany, Kamel 211 Éluard, Paul 143, 203 Engels, Friedrich Anti-Dühring 19 Erkenntnis group 176 Entarte Kunst, Munich 88 entelechy 2, 25 see also Aristotle entre-temps see Deleuze and Guattari Erni, Hans 71, 88, 181–2, 186, 188 Bios Plate 7b; Panta Rhei Fig 5.3 Ernst, Max 42, 46, 59–60, 80, 97, 155n41, 200–1, 216, 218, 220, 222n39 Euclid 6, 74, 155n41, 174, 187, 199, 219 Evans, Myfanwy 87 Exhibition of Collage, New York 221–2 Exhibition of New Art, Vilnius 31, 33n8 Fairbairn, Ronald 143–4, 160n51 faktura 11–14, 22, 24 Fautrier, Jean 211–12, 227 Hostage no 3 Fig 6.7 Ferren, John 184–5 Fibonacci 6, 36, 78 Filonov, Pavel 10

Index First Five Year Plan 41 Five Swiss Artists, Paris see Jakovski, A. First Working Group of Constructivists 12, 13 Five Contemporary American Concretionists, New York 184–5 flottage 217 Forma 39, 47, 52, 54, 55n53 Formism see Chwistek Francé, R.H. 88 Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt 88n56 Francés, Esteban 204 Barbed Wire Plate 20a Frankfort, Henri 112 Frelinghuysen, Suzie 86 Freud, Sigmund 141, 198 Civilisation and Its Discontents 198 Friedländer, Salomo 170–1 frottage 201 fumage 204, 217, 272 Futurism 19, 34 Gabo, Naum 76, 78, 91–2, 186n47 Construction in Space: The Crystal Fig 2.11 Construction in Space with Balance on Two Points Fig 3.1 Galerie Charles Ratton, Paris 155n41 Galerie des Eaux-Vives, Zürich 188 Galerie Florence Bank, Paris 227n49 Galerie Drouin, Paris 212 Galerie des Deux Iles, Paris 210n22 Galerie du Luxembourg, Paris 227 Galerie Goemans, Paris 98–9 Galerie Pierre, Paris 98 Galerie Tanner, Zürich 117 Gallery Dada, Zürich 117 Galileo 175 Gallatin, A.E. 86, 184–5 Galton, Francis 158–9 Gan, Alexei 13–14 Konstruktivizm 14n21 Ganzheit 115–16, 120 Ganzheitspsychologie 116 Gasch, Sebastià 129, 131 Genet, Jean 232n62

247

Gesellschaft Schweizerischer Maler, Bildhauer und Architekten 182 Gestalt psychology 105–119, 140, 152 see also Ehrenfels; Koffka; Köhler; Metzger; Stumpf; Wertheimer Gestaltmoment see Husserl Giacometti, Alberto 62, 63, 80n39, 87, 90 ‘Objets Mobiles et Muets’ Fig 2.2 Giedion-Welcker, Carola 93, 96, 97, 104, 107, 122n50 Modern Plastic Art 107 Gleizes, Albert (with Metzinger) Du Cubisme 14, 19 Goemans, Camille 60 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 18, 93, 96, 109n31, 179 Bildung und Umbildung Organischer Naturen 7n5; On Morphology 7n5 Golub, Leon 195 Gorky, Arshile 86, 179 Image in Khokhom Plate 7a Graeser, Camille 180, 188 Graham, John 86 System and Dialectics of Art 86 grattage 201, 204 Gray, Dorothy 85; Fig 2.14 Gray, Nicolete 185 Greco, Juliette 232n62 Griaule, Marcel 89, 202 Grigson, Geoffrey 69–74, 79, 87–9, 186 Grohmann, Will 64, 159n49 Gropius, Walter 62 Grosse Kunstaustellung, Munich 191 Grünewald, Matthias Isenheim Altar 162–3 Guattari, Félix 53 Guggenheim Museum, New York 217, 242 Guggenheim, Peggy see Art of This Century Gallery Guilbaut, Serge 211n23, 227n47, 227n49 Gular, F. 196n72 gutai 239–40 H.W.P.S.M.T.B., Paris 227 Hadot, P The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature 127n55, 241

248

Index

Haeckel, Ernst 4–6, 13, 65 Diagram from Kristallseelen Fig 0.2 Hambidge, Jay 78n35 Hare, David 222n39 Harrison, Charles 9n10 Hartung, Hans 87, 227, 231 Hausmann, Raoul 117, 167–8, 207 Hayter, Stanley 144, 223 Hegel, G.W.F. 19, 167, 170, 178, 187, 188n55, 222 Heidegger, Martin 40–1, 124–5, 174 Heiliger, Bernhard 124 Hélion, Jean 69, 71, 80, 83, 173, 179, 186–7 Standing Figure Plate 17 Henein, Georges 211 Hennings, Emmy 95 Hepworth, Barbara 69, 76, 111–12, 185–6, 195 Three Forms (Carving in Grey Alabaster) Plate 9a Heraclitus 4, 93, 124, 146, 149, 181–2 Herbin, Auguste 42, 179 Spirale, Plate 16a Herder, Johann Gottfried von 96 Hiller, Karol 42, 44, 49–50 – Heliographic Composition Fig 1.11 Hitler, Adolf 54, 64, 72, 87, 88, 116n45, 191 Höch, Hannah 207 Holding, Margaret 76, 87, 186 holism 25, 109–10, 116–17, 120 see Gestalt psychology; Bloch; Smuts Holz, Hans Heinz 193–5 Huelsenbeck, Richard 19–20, 23, 95, 170, 210n22 Hugnet, Georges 90, 97, 143, 226 Hulbeck, Charles, see Huelsenbeck, R. Hume, David 116n44 Husserl, Edmund 104, 105, 174–5, 194–5 ‘The Origins of Geometry’ 175; Gestaltmoment 105 Huxley, Julian 76 Institut Poincaré 41n41 Institutions 89 International Collection of Modern Art, Łódź 42–4; Fig 1.7 International Surrealist Exhibition, London 143–4 International Surrealist Exhibition, Paris 204

Intuitionism 195n69 Itten, Johannes 180 Jackson, Arthur 76, 186 Jaguer, Édouard 226–7 ‘Les Chemins de l’Abstraction’ 226; and géometrisme 227 Jakovski, Anatole 180–1 James, William 24, 115, 205 Jaspers, Karl 89, 228 Jean, Marcel 117, 201–2, 204 Décalcomanie Fig 6.2 Juler, Edward 61n8 Jung, Carl 114, 140–3, 160, 180n37, 228 Kahnweiler, D.H. 140, 228 Der Weg zum Kubismus 115n39 Kairiūkštis, Vytautas 31 kairós 229 Kamrowski, Gérôme 216–8 (with Baziotes and Pollock) Collaborative Painting Fig 6.9 Kandinsky, Nina 64, 88 Kandinsky, Wassily 21–2, 62–5, 67–8, 84, 487, 88, 119, 171, 187–8 (with Franz Marc) Der Blaue Reiter Almanac 22 Capricious Forms Plate 5b Succession Plate 18a from Point and Line to Plane Fig 2.3 Kant, Immanuel 19, 92, 154, 155n41, 158 The Critique of Judgement 92–3 Normal-Idee 158–9, 69n69 Kaprow, Allan 239–40 Kapists 55n53 Kiepuszewski, Łukasz 51, 53 Kierkegaard, Søren 228 Klee, Paul 69, 79, 80, 99, 177, 180, 188, 195 Klein, Melanie 141, 143, 208–9 ‘Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art’ 141, 208 Kobro, Katarzyna 27–8, 32–34, 39–42, 46–8, 55–6 Spatial Composition 3 Plate 2b ToS75-Structure Fig 1.1 ‘The uniform rhythm of calculating individual elements of composition’ Fig 1.5 Nude Fig 1.9

Index Spatial Composition 9 Fig 1.10 Koffka, Kurt 106–7, 109–10, 114 Principles of Gestalt Psychology Fig 3.8 Köhler, Wolfgang 105–7, 114n37, 115–19 Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology 105 Kojève, Alexandre 64n12, 187 Kok, Antony 178 Kolnai, Aurel Der Ekel 147, 198, 215–6 Konkrete Kunst, Basel 188 Konkrete Kunst: 50 Yahre Entwicklung, Zürich 195 Konkrete, Abstrakte, Surrealistische Malerie in der Schweiz, St Gallen 188 konstruktsiya 14, 24 Kopferman, Herta 110 Krauss, Rosalind 9n10, 91, 176n25 Krueger, Felix 116 Kupka, František 179 L’Art Contemporain – Sztuka Współczesna 42, 44n29, 46 L’Imaginaire, Paris 227, 232 La Main à Plume 226–7 La Phalange 21 Laban, Rudolf von 117 Lacan, Jacques 149–52, 160–1 On Paranoid Psychosis and Its Relations with the Personality 151; De la Psychose Paranoiaque 151n31 Lachert, Bohdan 36 Laporte, Geneviève 137 Lautréamont, Comte de 163 Les Chants de Maldoror 163 Lawrence, D.H. 79 Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution 62n9, 65 Lebensphilosophie 26 Lebensreform movement 93 Leduc, Fernand 227 Lee, Francis 216 Léger, Fernand 42, 43, 46 Lehmann, Otto 3–5 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 24n44, 194 Leiris, Michel 58, 89, 98–101, 160–3, 202

249

Les Signifiants de l’Informel, Paris 323, 238 Leuppi, Leo 188 L’Imaginaire, Paris 227, 232 Linnaeus, Carl 84 logarithmic spiral 6, 76, 78 Lohse, Richard Paul 188–94 Concretion I Plate 19a Two and Two Colour-Groups Plate 19b Vogelbild Fig 5.6 Lohse James, Johanna 167n4 Lorca, Federico Garcίa 194 Lukács, Georg 16 Macke, August 21 MacNeice, Louis 69 Magnelli, Alberto 117 Magnelli, Suzi 209–10 Maldonado, Guitemie 57 Malevich, Kasimir 15n25, 27–30, 38n19, 41, 1810n37, 82, 155–6, 175, 179 The additional, formative element in Cubism Fig 1.2 Suprematist Drawing Fig 1.3 Malinowski, Józef 36 Man Ray 40, 97, 122 Manes, Cara, 85n50 Marc, Franz 21 Marcoussis, Louis 42 Markov, Vladimir 11 Marx, Karl 19, 24, 222 Masson, André 58, 79, 80, 97, 176, 199–200, 216, 223, 225n46 Automatic Drawing Fig 6.1 Mathieu, Georges 195, 227, 231, 236, 239 Au Delà Du Tachisme 227 Matisse, Henri 21 Matyushin, Mikhail 10–11, 14 Running Figure Fig 0.3 Matta, Roberto 204–6, 216, 218–22 Psychological Morphology Plate 20b McBride, Henry 231 Medunetsky, Konstantin 32 Mechano-Faktura see Berlewi, H. Meister Eckhart 239n7 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 102n21 Merrild, Knud 223–4 Perpetual Possibility Plate 6.12

250

Index

Merz 96–7, 104 Metzger, Wolfgang 116 Metzinger, Jean 14–15 La Goûteuse (The Taster) Fig 0.5 with Gleizes, Du Cubisme 14, 19 Meyerhold, Vsevelod 50–1 Minicam Magazine 122n50 Minotaure 151, 152, 153, 160, 162, 198–9, 212–2, 225–6 Miró, Joan 58–9, 62, 68n17, 69, 71, 79–81, 82, 83, 84, 90, 97, 144, 176, 218 Painting Plate 6b sketches for Oh! Un de ces messieurs qui fait tout ça and Un oiseau poursuit une abeille et la baisse Fig 2.1 Modern German Art, London 191 Moebius strip 190 Moholy-Nagy, László 49, 62, 68n17, 167–8 Mondrian, Piet 38n19, 69, 70, 79, 81, 82–3, 165–70, 175, 180, 188, 191 Composition 10 in Black and White Fig 5.1 Monistenbund 5, 12, 13 Monte Verità 117n46 Monument to the III International see Tatlin Moore, Henry 69, 72, 74, 77, 80–1, 112, 185 Two Forms (ironstone) Plate 6a Ideas for Sculpture: Transformation of Bones Fig 2.10 Two Forms (pynkado wood) Fig 3.10 Morris, G.L.K. 86–7, 184–5 Motherwell, Robert 216–7, 218, 219, 220–5, 228–9, 239 Joy of Living Plate 22b The Pink Mirror Plate 23 Mexican Sketchbook Fig 6.11 Mundy, Jennifer, 69n18 Murry, John Middleton 16 Museum of Living Art, New York 86, 185 Museum of Modern Art, New York 79, 80, 81, 85, 183–4, 225n45 Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York 217 Mussolini 87 Muybridge, Eadweard 17

natura naturans; natura naturata see Spinoza Naturphilosophie 95–6, 109 Neo-Concrete Manifesto 196 Neo-Plasticism 70 Neue Kunst in der Schweiz, Basel 191 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 142–3, 180 Nicholson, Ben 68n17, 69, 80, 82, 185–6 Nicolas of Cusa 93 ‘non-non-form’ see Tapié Normal-Idee see Kant Obermaier, Hugo Fossil Man in Spain 70–1 OBMOKhU 32 Oiticica, Hélio 196n72 Onslow Ford, Gordon 204–5, 218–9, 221 Temptations of a Painter Fig 6.10 Ostwald, Wilhelm 5, 12–13 Paalen, Wolfgang 204, 218–9 Palucca, Gret 62 Papapetros, Spyros 5n1 Pape, Lygia 196n72 Park Avenue Cubists 86 Parkinson, Gavin 155n41 Partens, Alexander 95 Partisan Review 228 pâte 212 Patrix, Georges 232n262 Paul Reinhardt Galleries, New York 184 Pedrosa, Mário 196n72 Peiper, Tadeusz 32–3, 38 Péret, Benjamin 202 Perrotet, Suzanne 117n46 Pevsner, Antoine 82, 175 phusis 124, 229 Picabia, Francis 68n17, 80, 129, 227 Monstres 129 Picasso, Pablo 16, 42, 54, 58, 60–2, 69, 72n27, 80, 87, 89, 90, 97, 115n39, 127–44, 152, 155, 156, 159–63 Mandolin and Guitar Plate 4a Musical Instruments on a Table Plate 4b Still Life Plate 5a Seated Bather Plate 13

Index Studio With Plaster Head Fig 4.1 The Three Dancers Fig 4.3 The Painter and His Model Fig 4.4 Nude on a White Background Fig 4.7 Bather by a Cabin Fig 4.5 Figure Fig 4.6 Metamorphosis II Fig 4.8 Exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich Fig 4.9 with S.Dalί, Surrealist Figures Fig 4.15 Piper, John 69, 73, 76, 87, 185–6 Construction Fig 2.7 Plastic/Plastique 185 Plate, Ludwig 5 Plato Philebus 69, 82 Polarität 18 Polish Republic 41 Pollock, Jackson 217–8, 221–3, 229–31, 239 Vortex Fig 6.14 (with Baziotes and Kamrowski) Collaborative Painting Fig 6.9 Ponge, Francis 211, 212 Porteus, Hugh Gordon 112, 186n48 Possibilities 229n56 Pousette-Dart, Richard 229 Poussin, Nicholas 186–7 Praesens 36, 39n20, 41–2 prägnanz 110 Prampolini, Enrico 42, 43, 68 Prévert, Jacques 232n62 Priestley, J.B. 74n29 Productivism 31–2, 37, 38 Protarchus 69 Proteus 7, 83 Przyboś, Julian 42, 44, 52 Puni, Ivan 167–8 Purism 70, 180 putrefacción, putrefacció see Dalί Pycraft, W. The Standard Natural History: from Amoeba to Man 83–4; Fig 2.13 Pythagoras 82 Raphael, Max Proudhon, Marx, Picasso 139–40 Rauschenberg, Robert 236–9

251

This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time Fig 7.1 Ravel, Maurice L’Enfant et les Sortilèges 208–9 Read, Herbert Art Now 69–70 Rebay, Hilla 217 Regnault, N-F. and G. Les Écarts de la Nature 157–8 Reichenbach, Hans 176 Reinhardt, Ad 222n39, 228n52 Rhythm 16 Rice Pereira, Irene 222n39 Richardson, John 140n13, 141 Richter, Hans 168 Rignano, Eugenio 114 Rimbaud, Arthur 179, 226 Riopelle, Jean-Paul Jardin Nocturne Plate 24a Robertson, Eric 93n6 Rodchenko, Alexander 12, 32, 177 Equal Form sculptures 177 Roque, Jacqueline 141n37 Rosenberg, Harold 225n45 Roth, Dieter 195–6 see also Spirale Rothko, Mark 195 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 82 Rozanova, Olga 10–11 Rubin, William 217n32 Russian Revolution 13, 26 Saarinen, Eero 85n50 Sage, Kay 204, 206 Saint Anthony of Padua 148 Sarató, Charles Sartre, Jean-Paul 114, 211, 213–15, 232n62 Satie, Eric 128 Sawin, Martica 217n31 Schapiro, Meyer 80n38, 216 Schiess, Hans 181 Schlegel, Friedrich 13, 18, 19, 71, 108–9 Schoenmaekers, M.H.J. 160, 170 The New Image of the World 167; Principles of Plastic Mathematics 167 School of Expressive Dance, Zürich see Laban

252 schöpferische Indifferenz see Friedländer Schulze, Wolfgang see Wols Schwitters, Kurt 42, 43, 80, 96, 100, 207, 222n39 sea urchin see Driesch Seiler, Hans 180 Seligmann, Kurt 179, 181, 216, 218, 220 Serner, Walter 95 Serpa, Ivan 196n72 Seuphor, Michel 176 Shaw, Charles 86, 86n52 Bone Structures Plate 16b Shiraga, Kazuo Challenging Mud Fig 7.5 see gutai Simmel, Georg 25–6, 171 simultanéité 15, 16, 19, 20, 24 Smith, David 86 Smuts, Jan 109 Socrates 69, 82, 84 Solier, René de 227 Soupault, Philippe 199 Spengler, Oswald 115n40 Spinoza, Benedict de, 101 Spirale 195, 196; Fig 5.7 Stahly, Francis 227 Stażewski, Henryk 31, 33, 42–3, 52n43 Abstract Composition Fig 1.6 Stein, Gertrude 69, 205 Steiner, Rudolf 179 Stenberg brothers 32 Stepanova, Varvara 12 Sterne, Hedda 222n39 Stevens, Wallace 195 Stirner, Max 170, 171 The Ego and Its Own 171 Strzemiński, Władisław 27–37, 39–42, 44–7, 49–56 Synthetic Composition I Plate 1a Unist Composition No 4 Plate 1b Architectonic Composition 5b Plate 2b Unist Composition 13 Plate 3a Rainy Seascape of 25 July 1934 Plate 3b Diagram from ‘B=2’, Blok 8/9 Fig 1.4 Evicted (Deportation Series) Fig 1.12

Index Stumpf, Carl 104–5, 174 Suprematism 15n25, 29–31, 34, 35, 38 SVOMAS 27 Sykes Davies, Hugh 143 Symbolist movement 21 Syrkus, Helena 36 Syrkus, Szymon 36 Szanajca, Józef 36 Szczuka, Mieczysław 31, 33–4, 37–8 tachisme see Mathieu Taeuber-Arp, Sophie 42, 47n34, 68n17, 91, 93–4, 99, 107–8, 118–19, 124, 173, 180, 181, 185, 186n46, 188, 206–7 Lignes géometriques et ondoyantes Plate 10 Movement of Lines on a Chaotic Ground Fig 6.4 and Cover with Hans Arp: Composition vertical-horizontale Plate 9b Marital Sculpture Fig 3.7 Duet Drawing Fig 3.12, Tanguy, Yves 62, 65–7, 80, 82n43, 90 ‘Poids et couleurs’ Fig 2.4 Tapié, Michel 227, 231–2, 235, 236, 237 Un Art Autre 231, 235, 238 ‘non-non-form’ 231–2 Tarabukin, Nikolai 12, 13 Tatlin, Vladimir 12, 13, 27, 32, 179 Monument to III International 32 Letatlin Fig 0.4 Tauler, Johannes 93 tektologia 13, 14 tektonika 14, 24 Thèse-Antithèse-Synthèse, Lucerne 180–1, 182, 185 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth 6, 74–76, 78 Human Scapulae Fig 2.9 Tietgens, Rolf 122–3 Tobey, Mark 195, 238 Torres-Garcίa, Joaqίn 42, 176 Treu, Georg 158 Turowski, Andrzej 36, 51 Tutundjian, Léon 173, 179 Tzara, Tristan 20, 92, 95, 96, 170 Dada Manifesto 1918 170

Index Ubac, Raoul 226, 227 Uexküll, Jakob von 106, 169 Bausteine zu einer biologischen Weltanschauung 169 Union of Youth 10, 11–12 Unism see Strzemiński; see Kobro Unism in Painting see Strzemiński UNOVIS 27–8, 29 Unsinn see Arp Vail, Laurence 27–8, 29 Valmier, Georges 179 van den Berg, Hubert 165–6 van Doesburg, Theo 22, 42, 43, 70, 100, 126, 165, 167–75 Composition VII (The Three Graces) Plate 15a Arithmetic Composition Plate 15b Counter-Composition VI Fig 5.2 see also Art Concret Vantongerloo, Georges 42, 43, 70, 165–6, 175, 177, 179, 188 Véhémences Confrontées, Paris 231 Verroust, Jacques 227 Verve 214 Vesalius, Andreas 140n13 Vian, Boris 232n62 Vieira, Mary 195 Virgil 208 vitalism 2, 10, 22, 25, 40, 56, 107n27, 166, 186 Vordemberger-Gildewart, Friedrich 175 Vulliamy, Gérard 179, 181, 202, 203, 226, 227 Fantasmagoria Fig 6.3 Wachsmuth, Günther Le Monde Étherique 179 Wadsworth, Edward 71, 73, 76, 179 Composition Fig 2.7

253

Wagner, Anne 185n45 Wagner, Richard 105 Opera and Drama 105n25 Wallon, Henri 151, 161n54 Walsh, Kenneth 186n48 Walter, Marie-Thérèse 132 Wantz, Marcel 173 Wartmann, Wilhelm 175, 180 Watson-Baker, W. The World Beneath the Microscope 74; Fig 2.8 Weimar Republic 106, 115 Weinhandl, Ferdinand 116 Wertheimer, Max 105, 116 Whitman, Walt 109n31 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 195n69 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 17–18 Wöllflin, Heinrich 93n7 Wollheim, Richard 9n10 Wols 214–5, 227, 231, 232 It’s All Over Plate 21 Group of Etchings Fig 6.8 Woolf, Virginia 69 Worringer, Wilhelm 21–2 Abstraktion und Einfühlung 21–2 Wulff, Katja 117n46 Wundt, Wilhelm 88 Wünsche, Isabel Biocentrism and Modernism 5n1, 11n14, 61n8 Wyndham Lewis, Percy 69, 72–3 Wyss, Marcel 195, 196 see also Spirale Żarnower, Teresa 31, 33–4 Zeitprobleme in der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik, Zürich 182, 183 Zervos, Christian 65, 132n6, 141 Zürcher Konkrete Kunst 183n42 Zwingli, Huldrych 180 Zwrotnica 28, 32, 33, 38n19

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Plate 1a.  Władysław Strzemiński, Synthetic Composition 1, 1923, oil on canvas, 62 × 52 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak

Plate 1b.  Władysław Strzemiński, Unist Composition No 4, c.1925, oil on canvas, 64 × 64 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak

Plate 2a.  Władysław Strzemiński, Architectonic Composition 5b, 1928, oil on canvas, 96 × 60 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak

Plate 2b.  Katarzyna Kobro, Spatial Composition 3, 1928, painted steel, 40 × 64 × 40 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa SapkaPawliczak

Plate 3a.  Władysław Strzemiński, Unist Composition 13, 1934, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Museum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak

Plate 3b.  Władysław Strzemiński, Rainy Seascape of 25 July 1934, 1934, distemper on cardboard, 20 × 25 cm. Collection of Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. © Museum Sztuki, Łódź and Ewa Sapka-Pawliczak

Plate 4a.  Pablo Picasso, Mandolin and Guitar, Juan-les-Pins, 1924, oil with sand on canvas, 140.7 × 200.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2019 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, NY/Scala, Florence

Plate 4b.  Pablo Picasso, Musical Instruments on a Table, 1924, oil on canvas, 162 × 204.5 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (Private collection). © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019

Plate 5a.  Pablo Picasso, Still-Life, 1925, oil and sand on hardboard, 97.8 × 131.2 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019

Plate 5b.  Wassily Kandinsky, Capricious Forms, July 1937, oil on canvas, 88.9 × 116.3 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Founding Collection. © 2019 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/Art Resource, New York/Scala, Florence

Plate 6a.  Henry Moore, Two Forms, 1934, ironstone, 9.1 cm high. Reproduced by kind permission of the Henry Moore Foundation. Photo: Michel Muller

Plate 6b.  Joan Miró, Painting, 1933, oil on canvas mounted on board, 132.0 × 197.2 cm. Mildred Land Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St Louis. University Purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1945. © Successió Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019

Plate 7a.  Arshile Gorky, Image in Khorkom, 1936, oil on canvas, 91.44 × 121.92 cm. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund and Partial gift of David K. Anderson to the Martha Jackson Collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1999 (1999:8). © Estate of Arshile Gorky/Artists Rights Society (RS), New York. Image courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Plate 7b.  Hans Erni, Bios, 1941, tempera on Pavatex, 120 × 150 cm. © Hans Erni Foundation, Lucerne

Plate 8a.  Hans Arp, Bird Mask, 1918, wood, 19 × 23.5 × 3 cm. Stiftung Hans Arp und Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Berlin/DACS 2019

Plate 8b.  Hans Arp, Human Concretion, 1934, plaster, 35 × 42 × 34 cm. Fondation Arp, Clamart, Paris. © DACS 2019

Plate 9a.  Barbara Hepworth, Three Forms (Carving in Grey Alabaster), 1935, alabaster on marble base, 26.5 × 47.3 × 21.7 cm. © Tate, London 2019

Plate 9b.  Sophie Taeuber with Hans Arp, Composition verticale-horizontale, 1916, embroidery, wool, 50 × 38.5 cm. Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno

Plate 10.  Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Lignes géométriques et ondoyantes [Geometric and undulating lines], Supplement to special edition of Poèmes sans Prénoms (1941), coloured pencil on paper, 21.2 × 13.3 cm. Fondazione Marguerite Arp, Locarno

Plate 11.  Salvador Dalί, The Rotting Donkey, 1928, oil on wood, 61 × 50 cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. Salvador Dalί, Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalί/ADAGP, Paris

Plate 12a.  Pablo Picasso, Seated Woman, 1927–28, oil on canvas, 130 × 97 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with assistance from the Women’s Committee and anonymous contributions, 1964. © Succession Picasso/DACS 2019

Plate 12b.  Pablo Picasso, Bather, 1928, oil on canvas, 24.0 × 35.0 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes. © Succession Picasso/DACS London 2019

Plate 13. Picasso, Seated Bather, 1930, oil on canvas, 163.2 × 129.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2019 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

Plate 14a.  Salvador Dalί, (Bather) Female Nude, 1928, oil and beach sand on panel, 63.5 × 75 cm. The Dalί Museum, St Petersburg, Florida. © Salvador Dalί, Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalί/DACS 2019

Plate 14b.  Salvador Dalί, The Spectre of Sex Appeal, 1934, oil on wood panel, 17.9 × 13.9 cm. Dalί Theatre Museum, Figueres. © Salvador Dalί, Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dalί/DACS 2019

Plate 15a.  Theo van Doesburg, Composition VII (The Three Graces), 1917, oil on canvas, 85 × 85 cm. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St Louis. University purchase, Yeatman Fund 1947

Plate 15b.  Theo van Doesburg, Arithmetic Composition, 1930, oil on canvas, 101 × 101 cm. Kunst Museum Winterthur (on permanent loan from a private collector). Photo: Lutz Hartmann, SIK-ISEA, Zürich

Plate 16a.  Auguste Herbin, Spirale, 1932, oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019

Plate 16b.  Charles Shaw, Bone Structures, c.1935–36 oil on canvas, 35 × 43.5 inches. Image courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc., New York

Plate 17.  Jean Hélion, Standing Figure, 1935, oil on canvas, 130.2 × 88.9 cm. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Room of Contemporary Art Fund, 1944 (RCA1944:5). © Estate of Jean Hélion/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Albright-Knox Art Gallery

Plate 18a.  Wassily Kandinsky, Succession, 1935, oil on canvas, 80.96 × 100.01 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Acquired 1944

Plate 18b.  Max Bill, Infinite and Finite, 1947, oil on canvas, 110.0 × 103.0 cm. Sammlung Angela Thomas Schmid, Zumikon. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Plate 19a.  Richard Paul Lohse, Concretion I, 1945–46, oil on pavatex, 70 × 70 cm. © Richard Paul Lohse Foundation, Zürich/DACS 2019

Plate 19b.  Richard Paul Lohse, Two and Two Colour-Groups, 1952/68, oil on canvas, 60 × 60 cm. © Richard Paul Lohse Foundation, Zürich/DACS 2019

Plate 20a.  Esteban Francés, Barbed Wire, 1937 oil and grattage on canvas, 76.2 × 91.4 cm. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Plate 20b.  Roberto Matta, Psychological Morphology, 1938, oil on canvas, 73 × 92 cm. Private Collection.

Plate 21.  Wols (Wolfgang Schulze), It’s All Over, 1946–47, oil on canvas, 81 × 81 cm. Menil Collection Houston. Photo: Paul Hester. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2019

Plate 22a.  William Baziotes, The Drugged Baloonist, c.1942–43, collage of printed paper, pen and ink, and graphite, 46.4 × 60.9 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Bequest of Saidie A. May, BMA.1951.266. © Estate of William Baziotes

Plate 22b.  Robert Motherwell, Joy of Living, 1943, collage of construction paper, mulberry paper, fabric, and printed map with tempera, ink, crayon, oil and graphite, 111.5 × 91.2 cm. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Bequest of Saidie A. May. Photograph: Mitro Hood

Plate 23.  Robert Motherwell, The Pink Mirror, 1946, oil and pasted papers on paperboard, 99.1 × 74.9 cm. © Dedalus Foundation, Inc./Licensed by VAGA, New York and DACS London 2019

Plate 24a.  Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jardin Nocturne, 1947, watercolour and ink on paper, 21.0 × 26.5 cm. Galerie Jean-Pierre Valentin, Montreal. © Estate of Jean-Paul Riopelle/SOCAN/DACS 2019

Plate 24b.  Camille Bryen, Hépérile No 12, oil on canvas, 146 × 97 cm, 1951, Centre Georges Pompidou/Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. © ADAGP Paris and DACS London 2019