Abstract art between the wars - 2
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At the Sacre du Printemps, an art-gallery which has now disappeared but which was at 5, Rue du Cherche-Midi, Paul Dermée and I used to hold exhibitions of abstract art and literary meetings in 1927. Marinetti, Walden, Kassak, Schwitters and many others had their turn at holding forth with recitations and speeches accompanied by catcalls or applause. Canvases by Werkman, Huszar, Vantongerloo, Mondrian, Arp, Sophie Taüber and others who are now forgotten were shown and eagerly discussed there. All this fertile activity, carried on in the face of hostility from the established critics of the day, was brought to an end on the eve of the second world war, though not before it had been strengthened for a time by the effects of Nazism as it emptied Germany of ther intellectuals.
One of the most important undertakings between the wars was the Bauhaus in Germany, a kind of university of pure construction and applied art which was founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919.
There has been much discussion of Van Doesburg's influence on the Bauhaus two years after its foundation. There is no doubt that the ideas of the Stijl group made themselves strongly felt in the Bauhaus, as well as those of the Russian Constructivists which were introduced by Lissitzky. From the Bauhaus these two movements spread through Germany across the whole of central Europe. But the Bauhaus was less a training-ground for abstract painters than a centre for the revival of taste, through the study of matter for its own sake, in spite of the presence of such eminent teachers as Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Moholy-Nagy, Albers and Schlemmer. This study and research at the Bauhaus were founded on a new vision of things, a vision purified of prejudices and conventional ideas, so that its teaching prepared the way in a high degree for an understanding of abstract art. The student as well as the general public were also enabled to share the thoughts of the Bauhaus leaders through the Bauhausbücher, a famous series of works published by the institution. Those dealing with painting or with art in general were written by Malevitch, Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy (vide Bibliography). The Bauhaus was obliged to leave Weimar in 1925 and was set up again in the open country not far from Dessau. The new buildings, designed by Gropius, were officially opened in December 1926. The premises were beyond doubt the most rational and scrupulously functional work that the world had so far seen. I remember my amazement when I visited the Bauhaus in 1928, and my impression that I was standing before the ideas of De Stijl, boldly exemplified and fulfilled in an awe-inspiring block of buildings. The main façade was entirely of glass. The Bauhaus was closed down by the Nazis in 1933. It was certainly thanks to the Bauhaus, which had prepared the public's mind for it, that the first room or gallery was set aside in a public museum, permanently open to viewers, at Hanover in 1925. It was also the first time that any of Mondrian's works found their way into a national collection. This famous "abstract gallery", with its interior strikingly designed by Lissitzky himself, was destroyed by the Nazis in 1937.
1926 saw the first of the travelling exhibitions of abstract art which were sent on tour round the United States by the "Société Anonyme". This Society, founded in 1920 by Miss Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, had an outstanding influence on the teaching of art. In 1927, also in America, the A. E. Gallatin collection was thrown open to the public under the title of the Museum of Living Art; but in this case the Cubists were most strongly represented, the pure abstractionists only being introduced much later, after 1935.
To be historically exact, the second official museum to open permanent shows of abstract painting was the gallery at Lodz, in Poland. This collection was created entirely out of gifts or bequests which were mainly drawn from or arranged in Paris. I myself contributed to some extent with canvases by Baumeister, Huszar, Vordemberge and Werkman which were then my property. Arp, Sophie Taüber, Charchoune, Calder, Sonia Delaunay, Van Doesburg, Foltyn, Gleizes, Gorin, Vantongerloo, Hélion, Herbin, Schwitters and others not so well known, also gave it their support. An illustrated catalogue was issued in March 1932. The abstract rooms in the Lodz gallery are now closed to the public, but the collection itself appears to have remained intact.
In 1937 the Museum of Non-objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) was founded in New York. Finally, in 1939, also in New York, the Museum of Modern Art opened its new premises, destined to become the most important centre in the world for the study of abstract art, thanks to its exhibitions, its well-stocked library and its own publications.
This period could be surveyed in another way, by giving an account of the main personalities involved. But let us first see what happened to the Stijl movement.
After being deflected from its original course by Van Doesburg himself in 1924, the famous review (De Stijl) was carried on without Mondrian, but with the addition of some younger artists ( Domela, Vordemberge, and the scenario-writers Eggeling and Richter). It closed down in 1928, but a posthumous number was published by Mme Van Doesburg in 1932.
After Van Doesburg's death in March 1931, Mondrian's influence increased in both depth and breadth through his work in the studio. He had fervent supporters in every country in Europe, but more especially in Germany and Switzerland. In 1934 he was visited by a very young American, Harry Holtzman, who was to be his first direct disciple in the States. (24) In the same year Ben Nicholson, a painter of experience, came to see him and once again the studio in the Rue du Départ left an indelible memory. As a result Nicholson became the recognized leader of abstract painting in Great Britain.
George Vantongerloo, who had settled in France in 1919 (first at Menton, then in Paris) embarked on a series of fascinating mathematical calculations, all tending to prove by dint of figures and formulas that Mondrian's works -- and of course his own -- were infallibly correct. He gave up this enterprise later to seek refuge, no less infallibly, in the curved line and what he called "the indeterminate".
Of the rest of the Stijl team only the painters Vilmos Huszar and Bart van der Leck remained in Holland. The latter gave up abstraction almost as soon as he tried it. As for Huszar, in 1921 (three years before Van Doesburg) he made use of the diagonal line in compositions whose theme was often based on or intended for stage-sets, and he gradually brought in representational elements. A flower-composition (Fleurs, admittedly geometrical) was shown at the Anonymous Society exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum in 1926.
In Holland there was an outsider, the attractive printer and painter Henry Nicolas Werkman, of Groeningen. He painted, wrote, drew and printed. Like Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, he published his own review, The next call. This he printed with his own hands, and often in an unusual way. One y the numbers could be unfolded so as to make a kind of poster on which the words plattegrond van de kunst en omstreken (a plan of art and its surroundings) were blocked out in rectangles of different colours. For a few years Werkman showed an unusual virtuosity in his creation of large monotypes in brilliant colours. The most interesting are those he painted between 1923 and 1929. After 1935 he returned to occasional suggestions of naturalism, and in the end to figuration. Werkman was very active in the Dutch resistance during the war and was shot by the Nazis on the night before their retreat from Groeningen. A considerable part of his work was lost in the fire.
As we have seen, the other important geometrical abstract stream came from Russia. There it went under such different names as Suprematism ( Malevitch), Constructivism ( Tatlin), Non-Objectivism ( Rotchenko) and Proun ( Lissitzky). When the Soviet leaders began to look unfavourably on abstraction in 1921, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner and Kandinsky left Russia and went to different parts of Europe. Kandinsky went to Weimar, Pevsner to Paris, and Gabo and Lissitzky settled in Berlin. Lissitzky in particular had considerable influence in Germany. Two of his close friends were the Hungarians Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whom he had already met at Düsseldorf in 1920, and Laszlo Peri who had spent some months as an architect in Russia. The first of these in due course achieved fame in Europe and America thanks to his manifold activities as an artist, teacher and writer; but the second is less well-known. Peri kept in the background and produced little, and as far as I know there is only one of his canvases in a public collection. Peri's constructivism is more austere and reserved than Lissitzky's, and more concentrated than Moholy's which is characterised by a lyrical handling of the medium and experiment in new techniques.
I would suggest however that the Constructivist stream found its richest fulfilment in the copious body of work so patiently and quietly produced by Sophie Taüber in Zürich and Paris over a period of thirty years.
Mention must be made of two painters in the Stijl tradition, the Polish artists Henry Stazewski and Ladislas Strzeminski, who painted works of exceptional purity during the 'thirties. The first of these in particular impressed me with his white canvases on which the handling of the paint alone contrived to present an extremely simple design of planes arranged in a strictly horizontal-vertical relationship. Both of them were members of the Cercle et Carré group in 1930. Another Pole, Henri Berlewi had already composed abstract works before them, which he called mechanofaktur and which aimed at a kind of alphabet of simple plastic forms.
In Germany there were also Domela ( Berlin), Vordemberge (Osnabrück), Baumeister ( Stuttgart) and Schwitters ( Hanover). The first two of these worked at first according to orthodox Stijl principles, but later developed towards a more varied form of expression.
Domela settled in Paris in 1933. He is now best known for his 'objectpaintings' in which the curve is most prominent and into which he introduces all kinds of themes and substances which he combines or sets off against each other with unequalled craftsmanship.
Vordemberge fled from Germany just before the war and went to live in Amsterdam. He is now teaching art at Ulm and paints very sober Neo-constructivist compositions in delicate pastel-like tones.
Baumeister attracted attention as far back as 1921 by some mural compositions of a very personal quality in which the curve is exploited in harmony with the straight line and the circle with the square. On one occasion ( 1922) he produced a mural relief consisting entirely of horizontals and verticals.
As for Kurt Schwitters, he is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding personalities of that period. His varied activities, full of surprises, and the unusual disinterestedness of his work and thought, have already made him something of a legend. Among his plastic productions are a large number of collages (Papiers collés) which can only be described as being beyond description. Everything he does has the same decisive and genuine candidness.
In Paris the fluid Hélion, as elusive as quicksilver, first flirted a little with Neo-plasticism, then invented a strong and sensitive style of his own, after which he proceeded to run wild.
In about 1930Herbin began painting abstracts full of curves, from which basis he gradually evolved his own alphabet of geometrical features for which he is now famous.
Sergei Charchoune, a thorough romantic who is often capable of subtlety and is sometimes obscure and disturbing, composed some sober canvases between 1925 and 1935 which were painted in an ochre, maroon or olive monochrome and which he unfortunately baptised "ornamental cubism". There is nothing ornamental about them but they are moving in their gentleness, having a kind of repressed sentimentality which none the less, thanks to their transparent honesty, manages to show through their hazy indecision.
Albert Gleizes's intellectualised Cubism helped him to discover personal forms of abstraction which range from the extremely simple to the extremely sophisticated. His study of art-history afterwards led him away from that initial manner until he settled down to the interpretation or schematisation of a kind of religious painting based on the Romanesque style. Gleizes will also be remembered for restoring Robert Delaunay's faith in himself by his praise of Delaunay's intuitive work in 1912-13, and for having brought him back to abstract painting in 1930 or thereabouts.
Alfred Reth, one of the 'forgotten children' of Cubism along with Van Rees, Tour Donas and others, found himself driven by some inner necessity to all sorts of unrewarding experiments in new materials and themes. The results he achieved in this way were often surprising but often disappointing. It was only after 1945 that he found himself, in a monumental style which leaves no further doubt that he has a genuinely creative personality.
Henri Nouveau began as a musician, then took up plastic art in 1920 when he produced some abstract collages of miniature proportions. He led and is still leading a very secluded life, still keeping an eye on the outside world, an essentially humorous eye, like Klee's, though he almost always avoids the slightest hint of figuration. His painting is immensely amusing, full of discoveries and arrangements which are often comical and always discreet and rhythmical.
Finally, another outstanding personality was Otto Freundlich, a painter, sculptor and poet who began as a member of the German Expressionist school. After he came to Paris he began to paint in primary colours, laid on in flat tints. It was 1919 before he broke away from representation. In the twenty years that followed Freundlich painted a series of large canvases composed of rectangles of unequal size painted in lively hues, in which the darker areas were balanced with lighter areas. His works are impressive in their concentrated strength and there is something exhilarating in their controlled lyricism.
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