Abstract painting in France since Kandinsky's death
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We are now coming to the present time, when the works to be discussed are so recent that some errors of assessment are bound to occur. I shall do my best to be generous, as understanding is out of the question unless one keeps an open mind. However it is hard to be generous in the 'jungle' of art, in which we sometimes meet people who put us on the defensive instead of arousing our admiration.
The second world war, in which millions lost their lives, also thinned the ranks of artists of all kinds. It was not survived by Delaunay, Freundlich, Mondrian and Kandinsky. Delaunay died in 1941; Freundlich in a concentration-camp in 1943; both Mondrian and Kandinsky in 1944, the first in New York at the beginning of that year, the second in Paris three months after the liberation. The war and the German occupation sent art underground in France. Fear was the dominant factor. But as soon as 'degenerate' art was able to come into the open it was seen that the artists had carried on their work in secret. At the first important exhibition of abstract art after the war -- it was called Concrete Art (Art concret) and was held at the Drouin gallery in the Place Vendôme in June 1945 -works painted during the war by Kandinsky, Herbin, Magnelli, Gorin, Pevsner, Freundlich, and Domela were shown together with pre-war canvases by Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Arp, Sophie Taüber, Mondrian and Van Doesburg.
The most important event immediately after the war was the immediate success of Alberto Magnelli. Thanks to him Italy was able to make up lost ground in abstract art, in which her painters had so far made only a mediocre showing. As is well known Alberto Magnelli had painted a few geometrical abstracts in Florence in 1915 after a short stay in Paris. After those first attempts he returned to figuration, and for about ten years produced mainly artificially-constructed landscapes and monochrome seascapes. He returned to Paris in 1933, where he painted broken pieces of rock and thus made his way back towards abstraction. During the war Magnelli fled to Grasse in the south of France where he met Arp, Sophie Taüber and Sonia Delaunay. The four of them worked together as a team, producing drawings and designing lithographs which were later published in Paris. Magnelli's fame grew by leaps and bounds after the war, and he was soon the most important abstract painter in Paris. With the strong support of the critics in Paris, Switzerland and Italy (who called him ' "Kandinsky's disciple of genius"') he held an unforgettable exhibition at the Drouin Gallery in 1947. He is a hard worker with great reserves of strength. He is, of course, a disciple of Kandinsky, but is more robust and massive than the Russian painter. You can feel behind his work the background of the sturdy Florentine palaces of his native city, and it has sometimes the sober green and white lyricism of the famous Baptistery near which he was born. Magnelli has tirelessly strengthened and refined his style. One of his most successful discoveries is the multicoloured line which acts like a kind of transparent skin, surrounding or even sectioning his forms and subtly changing whatever area it penetrates while respecting the values it finds there.
While the return to liberty in France was marked by the death of Kandinsky and the sudden rise of Magnelli, perhaps the main contribution of the immediate post-war period lay in the sudden inrush of a host of new painters who brought every kind of talent to the service of abstract art. The crowd of young artists who spontaneously turned to abstractions as though it represented the main tradition of art fully justified the founding of a separate Salon which would be devoted exclusively to the various forms the new plastic language has taken. That is how Réalités Nouvelles came to be founded by Fredo Sidès, though oddly enough he was an antique-dealer.
Altan, Boumeester, Bryen, Chesnay, Coulon, Dewasne, Deyrolle, Engel-Pak, Folmer, Gorin, Hartung, Kosnick-Kloss, Lardeur, Leppien, Malespine, Ney, Piaubert, Poliakoff, Quentin, Marie Raymond, Schneider, Villeri, Vajda, Warb, Wendt, Wols, Léo Breuer, Jeanne Coppel, Duthoo, Fleischmann, Gtœz, Loubchansky, Lhotellier, Mathieu, Evelyn Marc, Néjad, Soulages, Smadja, Vasarely, Vulliamy, Davring, Del Marle, Dufour, Gœbel, Germain, Maria Manton, Nina Negri, Pillet, Pons, Bott, Closon, Dumitresco, Istrati, Koskas, Montlaur, Hella Guth, Fahr-el-Nissa Zeid, Neuberth, Marcelle Cahn, Nemours, Staritsky, Tsingos, Lapoujade -- the above is a list of only a few of the painters, and to name them all would be impossible, who represented the French contingent at the Réalités Nouvelles shows. The same Gallery also did good work in showing exhibitions by foreign artists, some of which were of great interest, such as the Swiss and Swedish sections in 1948.
At the same time the other Salons became increasingly willing to make room for abstract art. The May Salon in particular drew some of its best contributors from Réalités Nouvelles in 1949. The same May Salon brought together the widely different abstract talents of Lanskoy, Estève, Palazuelo, Singier, Manessier, Le Moal, Bazaine, Hosiasson, Tal Coat, Gischia, de Staël, Riopelle, Lutka Pink, Chastel, Diaz, Lapicque, Lombard, Messagier, Pallut, Springer, Szobel, Rezvani, Léon Zack, Vieira da Silva, Geer van Velde, Ubac, Szenès and many others.
It was also in 1949, in April, that my book 'Abstract Art, its origins and founders' was published, while at the same time the accompanying exhibition of 'Founders of Abstract Art' was held at the Maeght gallery from April to June.
Then André Bloc brought out the first number of the review Art d'aujourd' hui ( June 1949-December 1954) which served to amplify the book and exhibition already mentioned, and which was the first review in the world entirely given to a defence of abstract art. It contained important studies of the principal abstract painters, and special numbers appeared on America, Italy, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries. The complete collection of thirty-six parts, notwithstanding occasional errors, provides a unique documentation of abstract art in France and indeed all over the world.
Among the numerous painters mentioned above there are a few who stand out and deserve closer attention. First of these are Hartung, de Staël and Wols.
These three are all intuitive painters. The line together with spots or patches of paint make up Hartung's medium, while most often de Staël uses only the patch and Wols the line. The latter's painting is a display of spasms. His work gives off a sort of mental electricity, full of involuntary references and unconscious perversity. Wols died in 1951, leaving behind him an enormous number of strange scrawls which provided a nervous outlet for a somewhat indolent character, as well as some large canvases in which his over-cerebral intellectual dream is directly expressed through the act of painting in itself, without the slightest interpretation or process being allowed to come between him and the work.
De Staël, on the other hand was a completely conscious, deliberate painter. His first aim was to bring the canvas to life, and this he did with the energy of a virile temperament. He used to give everything he had to the canvas, coming back to it again and again till he achieved the finish and subtlety he wanted. Often enough he would wring the neck of his own painting, as Verlaine talked of wringing the neck of eloquence, and this gave de Staël's work its intimate warmth, its own personal accent, its eloquence. The painter ended his life by hurling himself from his studio window at Antibes in March 1955.
The eldest of the three, Hartung, is also the richest. His work as it stands at present is the most restrained and yet there is no stiffness about it, nor are there any signs of a wilful self-discipline. Hartung's apparent ease is a discipline in itself. He anticipates the very gesture of painting, breaks it up into its natural parts and renews it at the level of direct action, with a studied slow sincerity which heeds only a few faint echoes of what was decided in advance and has already joined the deep reserves of the unconscious mind. Painting thus becomes a religious act, an act of faith. And religion implies revolution, though in his case, however deep it may be, the revolution is bloodless like those of Beethoven or Gabriel Fauré.
Schneider, Soulages and Hosiasson will, I trust, not object if I count them among the spiritual family of Hartung. This is not to suggest that they are in any way his followers, but that there is a certain affinity between them.
Gérard Schneider's style is much less smooth than Hartung's. He has a liking for black shapes, which are stretched and roughly hacked out, looming threateningly from their lighter ground. There is more sorrow than joy in his work, in which an obvious anguish seems to be furtively craving for elegance.
Soulages has the gift of a simple and natural strength. His dark canvases, with pale wisps of colour that seem to lurk or survive in the half-light, are successful dramatic works. His strength is in the kind of discoveries he makes, in the way the amplified structure or framework is enough to make the whole composition. He gives this something like a soul, and out of a terse gesture of the brush he evokes a monument or a temple. No other contemporary painter has such a calm, reliable strength.
Hosiasson works in mud -- but there are no work or mud equal to his, which strive after and achieve the pure quality of tonal harmony with an underlying wave-like movement. The wave springs from the obscure depths of the consciousness, and loses nothing of its immensity even in his smallest works.
Mathieu owes some of his symbols to Hartung, as well as something of his private apprenticeship to freedom, but otherwise the resemblance goes no further than a few external features. Their technique is just as different as their minds. Mathieu takes refuge in himself, his passion is deliberately intense and short-lived, and perhaps its impulse lies in contempt. He shows no signs of remorse: the harm is done and is better left as it is. He is a painter who has no scruples about squeezing a whole tube of bright red over a surface of twenty square centimetres, or brushing over an enormous canvas in two hours.
Manessier, Singier and Le Moal, the worthy trinity of the Galerie de France are much more serious painters. They are close friends and have obviously influenced one another, though there are marked differences between them. Manessier is as grave as Le Moal is fresh and lively, while Singier holds the balance as a scholarly and sometimes precious painter. The work of all three is typically French, with its love of order and restraint and unadorned gracefulness. They have created an abstract art of their own, related to the tradition that goes back to the stained glass of Chartres and the Arras tapestries.
The same French lyrical use of colour which found its great champion in Delaunay, has new exponents in Bazaine, Estève, Lombard, and Germain, while it is also noticeable in the work of such oriental artists as Néjad and Rezvani. The most popular is Bazaine, who writes as well as paints. Rezvani is from Persia and produces work as rich and urbane as a Persian carpet. Néjad's characteristically broken shapes can be disturbing and often irritating, but they spring from a genuine painter's temperament in that they have no use for grace and facility alone. His mother is Princess Fahr-el-Nissa-Zeid, well known for her very large compositions executed in bright colours, again something like oriental carpets and redolent of the pungent perfumes of Asia Minor.
Let us turn now to geometrical abstracts. The first names to suggest themselves are Vasarely, Dewasne and Pillet. Vasarely prefers a refinement of forms which is enhanced by his sober colour. Dewasne on the contrary is more concerned with colour for its own sake and the interplaying contrasts he can get out of it. He is at his best in ambitious mural compositions in which he seems more at home than with the easel. Pillet's often linear compositions are governed by his pursuit of subtle inflections of colour.
Davring and Leppien are two painters of German origin who have been settled for a long time in the south of France. They both have a very linear style which reconciles the straight and curved line. Leppien is the more light-hearted of the two and perhaps the more consistent, but although Davring is occasionally disappointing he is much more resourceful. Davring was at one time the youngest of the German Expressionists, and went under the name of Davringhausen.
Jean Piaubert is another geometrical painter who is known for his very severe canvases and for the remarkable lithographs he made for Jean Cassou's 33 Sonnets. Sergei Poliakoff's geometrical designs have something unpolished about them which is not without admirers, and sometimes his touches of awkwardness are successful in their effect.
Geer van Velde is of Dutch origin and is a painter of exceptional crafstmanship. He was slow in his approach to abstraction and has shown no haste in his exploration of it since. Every one of his work has behind it the weight of a painter's training and experience, and the brush offers us a selection of his rich powers which are painstakingly conveyed on the canvas. His canvases are worked up slowly in a polished economical style in which the colour is always discreet. His restrained undertones are modulated in a polytonality in which the ryhthm is marked by a rectilinear stress which never degenerates into stiffness.
Geer's brother Bram van Velde has an engaging temperament which nevertheless is full of smouldering revolt and denial. His few canvases seem to be painfully drawn from an undecided personality, fluid and frameless, which together with their cold lucidity makes them all the more expressive.
Much has been said in Paris in the last year or two about Tachisme. This term is used to describe a movement which runs parallel with abstract Neo-Expressionism, originating in America. Its immediate ancestors are Henri Michaux (whose works are always closer to figuration than to abstraction because they are full of literary allusions) and Hans Hartung, whose painting, has been strictly abstract over the past twenty years. Its more distant origins lie in the work Kandinsky produced in his so-called dramatic period of 1910-1912. The real tachistes are Bryen, Mathieu, Greta Sauer, Lee Hersch, Bogard, Riopelle and a number of others. Under Riopelle's influence there has developed a certain uniformity which enables painters to avoid the slightest problem of composition and to reduce the act of painting to a physical gesture. The American, Pollock, prepared the way for this in 1950, In Paris, Chelimsky and Sam Francis have taken this up, and more recently Wendt, Istrati and Nallard.
Meanwhile a number of painters who rely on pure colour-sensibility are going their own way between all these extremes, though they do no go so far as to cut out all content from their 'dialogue' with the canvas. They are thus continuing a tradition of finesse and adaptability which is always a pleasure to the eye. These painters include Vulliamy, Kolos Vary, Lagage, Debré, Van Haardt, Bott and Szenès.
Women painters have made a contribut to the phenomenology of abstract art which must not be underestimated. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt were the only female Impressionists, while Marie Laurencin, Maria Blanchard and Tour Donas were the only women of note among the Cubists. After Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taüber there has been no lack of women painting on abstract lines. It might be asked whether they are less creative than the man, whether they are inferior in strength or invention, or whether they show less restraint. My own sincere opinion is that this is not so. It cannot be denied that the greatest painters are men, and the same goes for the other arts. But such men are few and can be counted on one hand. If we carry on counting on the other hand the women find their place as equals with the men. Some of them, such as Evelyn Marc and Christine Boumeester paint with more delicacy than the men; others such as Jeanne Coppel, Marcelle Cahn, Nathalia Dumitresco and Aurélie Nemours are their equals in restraint and discipline; some are in no way inferior in their creative improvisation, such as Vieira da Silva, Karskaya and Staritsky, while others equal the men in their energy, for instance Sonia Delaunay and Nina Tryggvadottir. The part women have to play is not always easy. Their work is examined with the same aggressive suspicion by feminists and anti-feminists alike, the former expecting them to prove more than they are capable of and the latter pouncing on the slightest pretext for running them down. There is no such thing as sex where sensibility is concerned, and I know many a highly-regarded canvas which would meet with derision if it were signed with a woman's name.
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