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Dec
02
2011

Abstract Expressionism: Redefining Art, Part One

How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art:

Abstract Expressionism and Content

To work as an artist in New York City during the 1940s was to work in what the Chinese curse called “interesting times. The Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School struggled to make art during a catastrophic world war while the entire nation was engulfed in the effort to preserve and protect democracy.  For the past decade, art had been socially conscious and politically activist and its illustrative approach was well-suited to conveying informative content to the public in the Depression period.  But the events of the Second World War implied that art might have a new role—-to express a collective consciousness that transcended any one nation.

Art now has a serious role and a high purpose. The artist has a serious role and a high purpose.  The social responsibility of the artist is nothing less than the renewal of art itself.  The spiritual responsibility of the artist is to translate the felt experience into art.  The Abstract Expressionist artists lived through the Depression and the Second World War. For them, content and the aesthetic values of art were important, as opposed to the literary component or the illustrative role of traditional art.  Their social consciousness raised by the Depression, these artists asked, not just what should I paint but more importantly why should I paint?  What was the existential reason for making art? Moving away from the American Regionalists and from the Social Realists, these new painters turned from representation and looked towards a more ancient and more archaic form of human expression: myth. They scorned academic European art for a collective experience in symbol making, using the “primitive” and the “primeval” as sources of inspiration for a new art in newly terrible times.  The response to the crisis in subject matter was a new way of making art and of seeing a painting.

Abstract Expressionism re-defined subject matter in a time of a crisis in subject matter.  Art had been caught between specific content—representational art and and art that had no content but formal content—abstract art.  But as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko stated in 1943, ”There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.  We assert that the subject matter is crucial…”   The Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with ancient myth and primitive art as way to question an insular European tradition and to show their opposition to Social Realism and American Scene.  Seeking a profundity that would respond to the shift in mood, Newman and Rothko were particularly interested in the tradition of tragedy from ancient Greek myth. The role that myth played in the painting of Jackson Pollock has been debated and discussed among art historians for decades and it seems likely that the artist picked up on the zeitgeist and used mythic themes in his art of the last thirties and early forties, such as She Wolf  (1943).  That said, Pollock dropped the crutch of myth as his subject matter and moved towards exploring new ways of making painting the content of painting.

Indeed,  the Abstract Expressionist artists also had to establish their own territory in New York City.  Pollock is often given the credit for a “breakthrough,” as Willem de Kooning expressed it, or a breaking away from European art.  But, for the New York artists, the process of discarding a tradition had to begin with the reexamination of Modernism.  To counter the American Modernism of the aging Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, which tended to be representational and local, the artists looked to the waning styles and movements of European art to see what they could salvage.  The American artists were less interested in the theories and philosophies of Dada and Surrealism and were more interested  in the possibilities of Dada’s use of chance and displacement  and in the neutral and innovative practices of automatism they learned from Surrealism.  The task was to wrest chance from the idea of “anti-art” and to appropriate automatic writing to the practice of painting, as seen in the work of Joan Miró.

For Mark Rothko, the goal was to eliminate figuration and to retain his vertical zones of stacked content.  During the 1940s, Rothko shunned the dream content of Surrealism in favor of multiple floating areas of color roaming a raw canvas.  For some artists, such as Jackson Pollock, the work of art was understood as a “duration,” supported by the  “directness” of art.  Derived from the “automatic writing” of Surrealism, Pollock’s “drip technique” shifted the content of art from an illustrated scene to an abstract kinetic process captured on his unprimed canvas and sealed beneath skeins of paint. To critics, such as Harold Rosenberg, the physical action of the artists’ mark-making was sufficient in and of itself for the art to become an “act.”  Rosenberg’s  American Action Painters of 1952 recreated painting as an existential act, the sole means of existence in a world without God. For other artists, such as Robert Motherwell, abstraction could be used to express the lingering sorrow over the failure of the Spanish Republic.  The hanging pendulous black figures slung against the raw blank white background  of Motherwell’s Elegy series evoke the black and white ethos of an era of great sadness and loss.

Abstract Expressionism re-defined the purpose of art from Social Consciousness to Human Consciousness, stressing the universal instead of particular.  Painting was seen as the elimination of past traditions to clear the way to return to primal means of expression.  The artists, alienated from society, attempted to devise a new language for mythic thought, a language that was non-discursive, expressing the deep truth of myth.  The artistic and conceptual gulf between illustrative nationalist art practiced by Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood and art that communicated through the collective unconscious of Jungian myth is vast and deep and unbridgable.  Abstract Expressionism marks the transition from lack of subject matter—abstract art—to abstract content with “meaning” as concept.  After not painting for years, Barnett Newman took up art again and began a remarkable and long-lasting series of “zip” paintings, in which, acting like a god, he cleaved the whole of his canvas into two separable worlds of color. Onement I of 1948 is a statement of oneness and division made by a Holocaust survivor. “I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone,” he stated, “as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”

Meaning is to be Felt rather than spoken or directly explained.  Art as Experience became one of the defining characteristics of Abstract Expressionism.   Art must be a response to modern life and thus, in order to move forward into the next half of the broken century, the New York School rejected the exhausted European tradition of Modernism in favor of a tradition more universal.  Willem de Kooning whose birth city of  Rotterdam was pulverized by Nazi bombers renounced figuration and began creating layers of shards of crashed paint, enhanced by painful attempts at rudimentary drawing.  The Dutch artist alternatively built and destroyed, constructed and excavated a series of mid-sized paintings that he was notoriously reluctant to finish as if no reconstruction would suffice.  As can be seen, the shift into totally abstract art brought formal elements and formal innovation to the fore as artistic statements to create a new way for art to communicate on a more profound level.  Adolph Gottlieb was deeply concerned with the state of the post-war world. As a Holocaust survivor, he spoke eloquently of the times he lived in:

The role of the artist, of course, has always been that of image-maker. Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.

The search for the atavistic roots of art led to a return to an almost Ur manner of painting.  The painters ended traditional European play between line and color by combining the two, thereby eliminating relationships among elements as content, such as seen in Piet Mondrian and Kasimir Malevich. The act of painting was stripped down to its essence—marking the canvas and covering an expanse with colors. Once the idea of composition was pushed aside, Mark Rothko’s great fields of morphing colors obliterated the division between line and shape, implying a spreading atmosphere rather than a bounded easel painting.  Franz Kline swept large swarths of black paint crashing into chunks of white paint in an expression of clash and combat so characteristic of the era of the warrior.   What was left on the canvas was the artist’s experience—the marks of his making. He explained,

There is imagery. Symbolism is a difficult idea. I’m not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don’t decide in advance that am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me.

Over time, the mere mark of the artist, his touch, the slash of the loaded paint brush was the total content of the painting.  The personality of the artist replaced figurative content and the cult of the artist replaced tragic meaning or universal truths.  A 1948 statement by Barnett Newman: “Terror can only exist if the forces of tragedy are unknown” was replaced by the idea that painting was revelation, a revelation of the artist.  The critical shift, seen best in the formalist approach of Clement Greenberg, can be seen as a political neutralization of Abstract Expressionism.  Greenberg preferred and supported the apolitical work of Pollock and the anti-war messages of Gottlieb’s Blast and Burst series of the sixties were out of step with the increasing need to separate art from the conflicts of the Cold War.

By making the artist himself (women were usually not included in the ranks of the New York School) the content, Abstract Expressionism became more formal in its content and the very real need of many of the artists to come to grips with the tragedies of their century was covered over by a new discourse of “American triumphalism” over European Modernism.  To come full circle, in 2009, the art historian Irving Sandler recently published his own reevaluation of his 1970 history of Abstract Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation.  The period during which Abstract Expressionist artists were struggling with the problem of how to express an entirely unprecedented content was a complex one, fraught with political peril, roiled by critical rivalries, and marked by artistic camps.  A balance between the intentions of the varied group of disparate artists and the need of historians to define movements can perhaps be reached, but before we can get to that point, we need to have a fuller view of the landscape.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Nov
25
2011

Abstract Expressionism, The Definition

DEFINING ABSTRACTION EXPRESSIONISM

“Abstract Expressionism” was term coined by Alfred Barr in 1929 in reference to Vasily Kandinsky’s art.  “Abstract Expressionism,” as a term, was revived by Robert Coates in The New Yorker in 1946  to characterize work by American artists in the Fifties in New York.  Abstract Expressionism refers to the style used by a certain group of artists in New York, a style that is, as its name states, abstract, non-figurative, and expressionist, nonrepresentational.  The movement, called the New York School, dated from 1942 to 1952, according to some sources.  Stylistically, total abstraction was developed by different artists at different times in their art making.  Jackson Pollock became totally abstract by 1947, Willem de Kooning by 1949, but both de Kooning and Pollock returned to figuration by 1950. Therefore, “The New York School,” as a designation can encompass both abstraction and figuration as practiced by the artists. While de Kooning and Pollock went back and forth from abstraction to figuration, the other artists of Abstract Expressionism remained totally abstract for their entire careers.

Over time stylistic variations among the artists resulted in a division between the Gesture and Color Field branches of The New York School.  There was also a division between a downtown group and an uptown group that roughly coincided with the binaries of painterly and linear.  In the Gesture group were de Kooning and Pollock and Franz Kline with the possible inclusion of Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston.  In the Color Field Group were Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko with the possible inclusion of Robert Motherwell and Adolph Gottileb.  As a group the artists knew each other well, but their friendships tended to fluctuate with the passage of time.  As the School became commercially successful, the support system became a group of rivals, all competing with each other.

Thanks to early and important exhibitions on Cubism, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the ironies of art history is that it was the rude, crude, ignorant barbarians of America, the lowly “colonials absorbed, adapted and advanced European avant-garde art years ahead of the Europeans.  During the years of the Second World War, the Americans reshaped and reformed European intellectual and spiritual and psychological abstractions into a more “American” idiom.  The painters, who were mature artists reaching the peak of their collective powers, sought to both use and to get beyond their European precursors and create work that expressed their unique contributions.  The New York School implicitly rejected the small (and feminine) size of the easel paintings favored by the market driven European artists.  They had been impressed by the mural of the Mexican artists and wanted to adapt the wall-sized works for portable paintings that would be as big as America.

During the War, most of the artists experimented with combining old traditions of European modernism into new forms.  Arshile Gorky seemed to take the early lead in rethinking the inherited tradition, but he committed suicide in 1948.  After the war, American artists were aware that Europe was in ruins and that they had momentum of European art had been broken by war.  Just as America had “won” the Second World War, Abstract Expressionism reveled in the American post-war spirit of “triumphalism” and celebrated yet another victory over the exhausted Europeans and their dead traditions.   Riding high in the Forties and the Fifties, the group of New York artist who came to be called the Abstract Expressionists revitalized a tiring European tradition by infusing abstraction with an idealistic desire to fuse and merge with a (Jungian) universal consciousness, replacing a Freudian neurosis with a Jungian dream of deep, trans-cultural connections common to all living culture-creating beings.  In other words, the New York School rejected a “local” European theory from Sigmund Freud from his erstwhile follower, Carl Jung, who had a far more universal approach to collective consciousness.

Jung, like Freud, worked with symbols that could be decoded as messages from a deep consciousness and although Pollock worked with Jungian archetypes, he ultimately abandoned figuration. When working on a large painting for Peggy Guggenheim’s hallway, fittingly called Mural of 1943, Pollock faced the difficulties of painting abstract forms that were energetic and spontaneous on an easel format.  Physically, such painting strokes were difficult and Pollock would mull over the final solution to the problem of how to paint freely on a large scale for the next four years.  Only in 1947, when he was removed (by his wife, Lee Krasner) from the hard-drinking artists in New York, did he solve the problem.  “Drip Painting” in which chance and accident became the raison d’être for his work, paintings that were now totally abstract.

From the beginning the members of The New York School coalesced around two leading figures, Willem de Kooning, respected by all, and Jackson Pollock, admired by many. It was Pollock who “broke through” the wall of European traditions when he fused Cubism and Surrealism and created a new form of painting as drawing and of kinetic accident as automatic writing.  In contrast to de Kooning’s continuation of the easel tradition, Pollock tossed a large cut of canvas onto the floor of his studio on Long Island and turned the paintbrush into a throwing tool.  It was de Kooning who managed to take the European tradition of Cubism and abstracted fragmentation and turned the idea of multiple points of view into multiple layers of paint.  De Kooning constructed or built up his paintings while Pollock flung his paintings through the air and dripped them off the end of a stiffened brush.

Suddenly, the art scene in New York was awakened to this new School that had at last overtaken the Europeans, beating them at their own game.  In contrast to Surrealism’s tastefully small home decoration-sized easel paintings that reeked of self-absorption, their works showed an ambitious desire to create huge, all-encompassing works of art to enfold, engulf, and envelop the artist in the creative process and to swallow up the viewer’s vision.  Perhaps because it ws a post-War movement, Abstract Expressionism was as high-minded as it was ambitious: genuine high culture at its best, seizing the falling torch of Western culture before the onslaught of totalitarianism, before the six years of Total War could extinguish it.  Aware that they were, in effect, Holocaust survivors, Newman and Rothko were especially sensitive to the need to make sure that art mattered, had power and majesty, that art inspired and moved the viewer as a bastion of humanity in an inhuman world.

Whatever their concern with abstraction as a transcendental art, the Abstract Expressionist artists were members of a boy’s club, an all male enclave, with  a “no girls allowed” attitude.   Wives, Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning, were relegated to secondary status and their art was overshadowed by their husbands’ reputations.  The male artists were supported not just by the “wives,” but also by a coterie of male art critics, including Thomas B. Hess, Clement Greenberg, and Harold Rosenberg.  Unfortunately for these artists, the New York art world may have inherited the European mantle of modern art, but this world had to recover financially from the war.  They would have to wait for some years for the evolution of a gallery system that supported contemporary American art.

Ironically, just as the artists were beginning to find gallery support, museum recognition, and a respectable level of income in a New York recovered from the Second World War, they were challenged by a new generation of artists, the Neo-Dadaists, Rauschenberg and Johns.   By 1955, Abstract Expressionism had been rejected by younger artists at the same time the style was finally achieving some acceptance.  After Pollock’s death in 1956, de Kooning assumed the mantle of leadership.  Unlike Pollock’s idiocyncratic style, de Kooning’s style or his touch or brushwork was easy to assimilate and his followers were characterized as having the “Tenth Street Touch,” after the de Kooning studio on Tenth Street.  At the moment Abstract Expressionism garnered the Second Generation, the older artists were eclipsed, much to their dismay, by the young upstarts of the Neo-Dada group.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Nov
18
2011

Abstract Expressionism: The Field of Cultural Production

The Historical Context of Abstract Expressionism

The historical context of Abstract Expressionism can perhaps best be mapped out according to the theories of Pierre Bourdieu who coined the phrase “the field of cultural production.”   What was the “field” which “produced” the culture of Abstract Expressionism?  One should also add the thinking of Giesele Freund who wrote of the “preparedness” or the “readiness” of society for photography.  Abstract Expressionism marks the shift of Modern Art away from Paris and towards New York, the movement of the avant-garde from Europe to America.  New York, as Serge Guilbault remarked, “stole the idea of modern art.”  The theft of modern art was the result of the preparedness of the artists in New York City in the 1940s to take advantage of the shift of the field of cultural production from the Old World to the New.

First, European politics stymied and stifled the free circulation of avant-garde art around the continent.  Fascism in Italy in the 1920s, Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and their totalitarian control of art was prefaced by the crushing of the vanguard Russian artists in the Soviet Union.  Totalitarian regimes cannot tolerate freedom in the arts and a political party that seeks absolute power will always move against the artists first.   Major sources of art making and art thinking were shut down and many of the artists impacted simply packed up and left.  Many artists came to America, bringing with them ideas of art theory and concepts of art practice to provincial shores.

Second, even in Paris, where there was open acceptance of avant-garde art, the art market had a dampening effect upon the development of new and innovative ideas.  The time between the wars in Paris was a conservative one, an era of consolidation of the pre-War avant-garde movements.  Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, et al. were now “historical” movements and their leaders were now Old Masters.  A tendency towards a conservative approach to art evidenced itself very early on, during the Great War, in the work of Picasso.  After the war the mood was one of “Return to Order” and restoring all that was classical in French art in The School of Paris.  Nostalgic conservatism after a devastating war is a common reaction and would be exemplified by the Ingres-esque classicism of Amedeo Modigliani.  After post-War economic recovery, French collectors were eagerly flocking to the revived and expanded art market.  The dealers sold their clients “a Picasso,” or  “a Matisse,” art done in the characteristic styles of the masters, but tamed down.  A case in point is Picasso’s 1921 Three Musicians, which is a painted collage, in other words, not innovative mixed media, but a conservative and salable painting.

Surrealism emerged in 1924 out of the ashes of the last provocative avant-garde movement, Dada.  Conservative Surrealism was an inward looking   movement that possessed no particular stylistic “look,” but was a placeholder for the avant-garde.  In contrast to the pre-war avant-garde movements which were stylistic change, Surrealism produced not so much new styles as new approaches to the process of making art, such as automatic writing.  Another historical footnote worth noting was the fact that the history of pre-War avant-garde movements was largely written by the art dealers, such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Léonce Rosenberg, thus legitimating their art and elevating the price.  During the Nazi occupation of Paris, avant-garde artists either sought safety in America—-Chagall, who was Jewish, moved to New York—-or were forced to keep a low and safe profile in France to survive the Nazi occupation.

Third, European artists immigrated to America over the course of ten years.  Some of these artists, such as the Bauhaus architects, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, simply moved their practices to the American cities of New York and Chicago.  The coming of the Bauhaus architects to the United States paved the way for the International Style that would characterize architecture after the Second World War.   Indeed, Modernist architecture was a case in point of how inhospitable Europe had become to avant-garde architects.  While those in Russia were doomed to produce mostly “paper architecture” or models, other architects concentrated on domestic architecture, such as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and the De Stijl architect Gerrit Reitveld’s Schröder House in the 1920s.  Thwarted by wars and oppression, Modernist architecture finally found itself in great works of public and corporate works only after the Second World War.  The Seagram Building by Mies van der Rohe in New York was the achievement of the prosperous Fifties in America.

But architects weren’t the only Europeans to seek safe haven.  Even as Hitler was moving into power in Germany, Hans Hofmann was moving out to become an art teacher in New York in the winter and Providencetown in the summer.  Bauhaus faculty members, Josef and Anni Albers, found themselves at the famous Black Mountain College where they taught the next generation who would overtake the Abstract Expressionist artists.  Piet Mondrian, who had fled Holland for London, had to leave London for New York, where he died in 1945.   The American Dada photographer, Man Ray, came home and spent the next eleven years in Los Angeles.  These artists were joined by intellectuals, such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, who changed the climate and the quality of American thinking during the Second World War.

Fourth, the presence of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City was of great significance in educating American artists on European avant-garde art.  Since Alfred Stieglitz had closed down his gallery, 291, in 1916, there had been no reliable gathering point were artists could see the cutting edge art of Europe.  And then MoMA opened in 1929, headed by Alfred Barr.  Barr ended the somewhat specious relationship between the dealers and the museums: dealers would organize and mount shows in museums, giving their art greater legitimacy, and subsequently raising the prices.  Like Christ in the Temple with the Moneychangers, Barr barred such practices and art was set apart from commerce.  The look of MoMA, the “pure” White Cube, gave the museum of modern art a sanctified air, where art and commercialism did not consort.  Most importantly, Barr was able to bring in avant-garde European art in a series of shows that would be hard to mount in many European countries.  It could be argued that, thought these important exhibitions, American artists had better access to this new art than did European artists, particularly those who were stranded in totalitarian countries.

Fifth, American artists were being brought together as never before during the Thirties.  Government programs employed artists as either easel artists or as mural artists for public buildings, granting them the status of professionals.   Many artists were able to take advantage of these employment programs, others, such as Willem de Kooning, who was not in American legally, or Newman, who had political qualms, did not take part.  Whether or not one participated or not, the result of the government programs was to bring artists together, to create an artist community that included art critics, such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. This community was ready to hear the new ideas of the European émigré artists and intellectuals.  Greenberg learned studio talk at the feet of Hofmann who gave his American audiences a synthesis of Cubist and Expressionist art theories.

Although in the post-war, art history glossed over the art commissioned by the New Deal, the murals and photographs and easel painting stirred up creativity and provided challenges to American artists.  In contrast the European artists who were essentially running in place, American artists were keeping active, forced into the innovation demanded by new conditions.  Sensing an opportunity, Americans watched closely as nation by nation, territory by territory, Europe shut art down.  American artists respected European art, but many felt that the avant-garde movements were played out. The best artists were old and long past their prime.  Surrealism was already twenty years old, for instance.  No new generation had emerged in Europe.

Sixth, Americans wanted to go beyond European art, but the question was how?  Painters in New York wanted to create a new avant-garde art that was uniquely “American,” being robust, reflective of the greatness of the nation.  The local artists liked the all-over effects of Cézanne and Mondrian, but found the easel art small and confining.  Mondrian, especially, seemed “effeminate” in the precise preciousness of his meditative approach to painting.  The New Yorkers were interested in the concept of the powers of the unconscious mind, suggested by Surrealism, but did not like the realistic dream paintings or Freudian theory.  They did, however, appreciate the freedom from convention that the practice of écriture automatique or automatic writing could give to artists.

The promise of the all-over effect expanded beyond the portable easel painting could be fulfilled by mural painting, as practiced and taught by the Mexican muralists.  The Mexican muralists were highly political and highly specific and many of them had an unfortunate track record of having their murals defaced: Rivera by the Rockefellers in New York and Siqueros by Christine Sterling in Los Angeles.  Wary of political content, the American artists preferred the universality of message combined with an impressive scale found in Picasso’s Guernica, temporarily housed at MoMA.

Seventh, as can be seen, it is as important to take note of what the younger generation of American artists rejected.  In addition to the Communist statements of the Mexican painters and the dream content of the Surrealists, American artists did not want to continue the nationalistic art of the Regionalist artists, such as Benton and Wood, nor did they want to continue the political art of the Social Realists, such as Ben Shahn and the other Depression artists.  During the Depression and the Second World War, much art was dedicated to propaganda which promoted the benefits of the New Deal and then the need to support the War.  The new artists appreciated abstract art, and, indeed there was an active group of abstract artists, the American Abstract Artists, but theirs was an old-fashioned abstraction of European formalism.  The American artists coming into maturity in New York wanted a new kind of abstraction.

And, last, there was one factor, seldom emphasized but often mentioned in passing—the age of the Abstract Expressionist artists.  They were all middle-aged men who had been developing their painting techniques and styles for years, working in obscurity.  Unlike their European counterparts, the painters of the New York School had uninterrupted careers, untouched by political oppression or war.  When America was drawn into World War II in 1941, these men were too old or too unfit or too ineligible to serve in the Armed Forces.  While younger men went to war, sacrificing their careers and sometimes their lives for their county, the Abstract Expressionists were able to remain in the safety of New York City.

These crucial war years were the very years that preceded their individual styles, which would emerge in the fifties.  When peace returned, the New York artists had benefited from a period of maturation that placed them at the forefront of the art world.  Much of Europe was in ruins, and the European artists had to endure a period of rebuilding and restoration.  In contrast, the American artists had to wait only for the emergence of a professional gallery scene   that could support their ambitions.  In ten years, it had become apparent that New York had inherited the idea of Modern Art.

What did the American artists in New York City want?  They wanted to take over the reins of avant-garde Modernist art.  They wanted to make modernist art American.  The artists, who would form (loosely) the New York School in the Fifties, were ready, they were prepared.  The field of cultural production had shifted to the East Coast of America.  The result would be Abstract Expressionism.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

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Nov
04
2011

Abstract Expressionism and Meaning

How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art:

Abstract Expressionism and Meaning

The American artists had early training from Modernist masters in New York City that prepared the ground with the abstract Cubism of Piet Mondrian and with Surrealist ideas and techniques of André Masson and Matta.  The famous expatriate teacher, Hans Hofmann, taught a synthesis of Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism and taught the Americans to be distrustful of the figurative aspects of Surrealism.  The East European émigré, John Graham, taught the Americans to assimilate Surrealism through “primitive” art and through the works of Pablo Picasso.  The Mexican Masters, Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, taught the New York artists about mural painting and about working on a large scale, using experimental techniques.  However, Americans ultimately rejected the imagery of the Mexican painters as being too verbal, that is too message based.  On the other hand, they were also wary of decorative art as being empty.  The Abstract Expressionist painters searched for a new kind of meaning, a transcendental meaning.

Picasso’s monumental work, Guernica, 1937 was hanging at the Museum of Modern Art.  The great work had been commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion of for the Paris International Exhibition but had been stranded in New York City by the outbreak of the Second World War.  Here was a work that was large scale with a universal meaning that transcended any local events.  The Abstract Expressionist artists were attempting to get beyond, not only the European tradition in painting but also the regionalism and localism of American art. It was important for these artists to free art from any parochialism and to establish art as an act of transcendence.  Content had to be not only personal but the individual style of one artist was only a vehicle for the expression of larger and more universal concerns.

With Abstract Expressionism, art and artists took up new positions and roles.  The artist as a human being was an extension of humanity, seeking universal knowledge through self-knowledge.  Making art was a journey of discovery.  The writings of André Breton were of help by suggesting that any painting, any work of art, could be an “event,” a “revelation,” a risk,” thus rescuing abstract art from the shame of “mere (feminine) decoration.”  The personality of the artist became part of the content but that meaning remained ultimately unknowable or beyond understanding.

Understanding an Abstract Expressionist painting was an event rather than an intellectual act of perception.  The abstract content of pure paint, pure line, pure color became a meaning that could only be felt, not spoken, undefined but discernible, incapable of being verbalized but nevertheless abstractly expressed. Freed from rules and conventions of art making, the artist could assert his (or her) personality through the unique signatory ‘touch.”  This ego-oriented art puts the artist above the subject matter; indeed, the artist becomes the subject matter. In an example of the “pathetic fallacy,” the work of art became the carrier of the artist’s soul, which was somehow embedded in the very pigment and the surface affects themselves.  The facture or “surface” became fetishized as a result of the belief that the pigment embodied the artist.

For the viewer as well as the artist, Abstract Expressionist art was pure experience.  The paintings were large and overpowering, often stretching beyond the viewer’s field of vision and activating the peripheral vision.  As art historian, Robert Hobbs, pointed out, the artists often wanted to control the lighting by diming gallery atmosphere to a quiet contemplative experience.  The artists also wanted the viewer to come close to the art to become enveloped by the purely visual experience.  The painting becomes the universe and universal.  But in order for the experience to be purely visual, traditional composition had to be jettisoned.

One of the breakthroughs of early Modernism was the introduction of the “all-over” composition in Cubism.  It was Mondrian who took the suggestion of boundlessness beyond the frame to fruition by eliminating a centered composition and creating an asymmetrical composition that was also balanced.  But Mondrian’s paintings were small and precisely painted with a discipline and control that lacked spontaneity. Abstract Expressionism brought an end to relationships-as-content. Compositional relationships were either eliminated, as with Jackson Pollock, or simplified, as with Mark Rothko.  The resulting mass image implied an infinite expansion beyond the optical field, just as the way in which Mondrian brought black lines and colors to the end of the canvas.

With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint.  In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America.  Nineteenth century American painting had sough God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Sep
02
2011

Bauhaus: The Fate of the Bauhaus

Das Staatliche Bauhaus

The Fate of the Bauhaus Buildings

The decline of the school probably began in 1928 when the founding Director, Walter Gropius departed but the last two directors were under pressures that Gropius escaped. Mies was able to do little more to save the Bauhaus than to turn it into a vocational school, training people for trades.  Clearly he was trying to be as circumspect as possible in an increasingly hostile political climate.  The Nazis won a political majority in Dessau and immediately took aim at the Bauhaus and its “cosmopolitan rubbish” and withdrew all public funding.  Architect Paul Schultze-Naumberg took over at the school to restore pure German art and architecture and purge the Kisten or the boxes of Bauhaus furniture.  The Nazis were unique among the fascists in their hatred of modern architecture, for, in Italy, the government appropriated modernism for its own purposes. However, the Nazis reverted to imperial architecture inspired by Rome and it is fortunate that Schultze-Naumberg limited his destruction to the curriculum of the school.

Perhaps the most malicious act of vandalism befell the Master’s Houses, built for Gropius, Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer, Feininger, Miuche and Moholy-Nagy.  Gropius had designed a group of modernist semi-detached and single-family homes, the famous houses for the Bauhaus faculty.  Built according the to the designs of Gropius, these houses included a revolutionary modern concept for the kitchen, replacing traditional kitchen furniture with hanging cabinets and counters.  The homes were furnished with Bauhaus furniture, lamps, fabrics, weavings, and other accessories.  Kandinsky and his wife, Nina, were photographed sitting in a pair of “Wassily” chairs, designed by Marcel Breuer.

When the Bauhaus moved to Berlin, the city of Dessau, which owned the property, sold the houses to the Junker factory and ordered that the “the outer form of these houses should now be changed so that the alien building forms are removed from the town’s appearance.”  The houses were greatly altered with the wide window walls closed in for conventional openings and chimneys sprouted from the flat roofs.  During an air raid, the houses for Gropius and for Moholy-Nagy were destroyed.  The other homes are still standing and have been lovingly restored to their original condition. The mark of the influence of De Stijl architecture is strongly felt with the crisp white exteriors, trimmed in black with an occasional jolt of a red line.  The interiors were colorful in the Bauhaus fashion of using color to demarcate space.  Starting in 2000, these houses were restored by the city of Dessau and today they on the list of UNESCO’s historic buildings.  The question of whether or not to rebuilt the remaining two houses is still under discussion.

The Bauhaus building itself was damaged by bombing in 1945 and was partially restored in 1976.  The building was located in East Germany and the reconstruction was not precise or historically accurate, perhaps due to lack of funds.  For example, the curtain wall of the workshop wing was destroyed and the original steel window frames were replaced with aluminum.  It was thought that the frames were lost but they were relocated as part of a greenhouse and placed back where they belonged.  Extensive restoration of the original restoration began in the early years of the twenty-first century.  Few documents exist about the original building and the restorers took every effort to preserve the original elements of the building, from the innovative plastic floors to the brightly colored walls, painted in accordance to the plan of the wall-painting department, headed by Hinnerk Scheper.  In 1996, the building was registered as a World Heritage site and today it receives two hundred visitors a day.

When Adolf Hitler became dictator in Germany, any intellectuals and artists who remained left the nation…if they could.  It has been said, “Hitler shook the tree and America got the apples.”  The diaspora of the Bauhaus architects were but a fraction of Germany’s creative capital that was drained out of the country’s system.  Albert Speer replaced Walter Gropius as Germany’s most celebrated architect. Gropius, Breuer, Mies, Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers all came to America with enormous impact upon art and architecture in New York and Chicago.

In a free and prosperous society, they were able to build significant modernist buildings and the Bauhaus lived on in buildings and in countless copies of Bauhaus objects for modern life.  Sadly, Walter Gropius did not live to see the restoration of his Gesamtkunstwerk and he died in 1969.  His American home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, built in 1938, was very similar to his home within walking distance of the Bauhaus.

Other Bauhaus posts on this website include: Bauhaus, The Founding, Bauhaus: Modern Design, Bauhaus: Internal Tensions, Bauhaus the End, and Bauhaus: the Fate of the Bauhaus

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Aug
26
2011

Bauhaus: The End

Das Staatliche Bauhaus

The Decline of the Bauhaus

The town fathers of Weimar disliked the high number of Jewish faculty, the surprising presence of too many women as students, and the supposedly left-wing politics of the school and its insistent modernity.  In a move that was prophetic of the regression shown in the Nazi movement a decade later, it was made clear to the Director, Walter Gropius that the Bauhaus was no longer welcomed in Weimar.  The school moved away from the capital of the Republic and to an industrial town, Dessau.  It was here that Gropius built one of the quintessential expressions of modern architecture, the Bauhaus building of 1925-6.  All glass wall and strict rectangles, the new building was a huge step into the modern world when compared the arts and crafts style of the now-destroyed home for Adolf Sommerfeld just a few years earlier in 1921.

When the architect Mies van der Rohe invited him to participate in the now famous Werkbund project of modern building in Stuttgart, the Weissenhof, conceived to integrate art and craft with industry. Gropius was able to pursue the idea of prefabricated architecture. Joining with other important architects, such as Le Corbusier, who was given the most land and the most money, Gropius built two single-family homes with flat roofs and a roof terraces in this 1927 housing estate.  Compared to the works of other architects, such as J. J. P. Oud and Peter Behrens, the houses built by Gropius were stark, simple and pared down, largely due to the use of prefabricated parts that did not allow for embellishment.  The German critics who favored tradition level harsh charges against the development, seeing it as “foreign” and not “German” and did not reflect the national “identity.”  The complaints of these buildings as being too “utilitarian” and severed of Germanic roots were harbingers of things to come from the Nazis.

A year after the famous Weissenhof project, Gropius resigned from the Bauhaus, taking many famous faculty and important students with him. The successor of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect wanted to take the Bauhaus further down the road of industrial design, meaning a final break from the lingering taste for craft and any remaining fine art-ness. When Meyer, who had been the head of the architecture program, took over as director, he narrowed the focus of the school to architecture and industrial design and more students departed.  The school had changed considerably since the departure of Gropius and his vision.  As the old idea of respect for craft eroded, so too had the respect for the Handwerkmeisters and by 1926 “workshop” terminology faded and “masters” became professors.

“As a ‘university of design,’ Meyer stated, “The Bauhaus is not an artistic but a social phenomenon.”  Indeed, Meyer had something new and interesting to say about building, which he saw as a social act.  The built environment should be functionalist in terms of the occupants and the psychological needs and reactions of those who used the structure.  Meyer, a dedicated and articulate Communist, put the needs of the society in the foreground and reduced the role of the architect’s ego as a creator.  This was the Bauhaus dream…supposedly, to create an anonymous object for the modern world.

Under Meyer the Bauhaus actually began to find a way to bring modern designs produced by the school to the industrial market place and the school made a profit.  Regardless of the capitalist profits of the Bauhaus, the presence of a Communist head of the school could not be supported in such a politically turbulent world.  Meyer stepped down and Mies van der Rohe took his place as director in 1930.  Under Mies, the school became very conventional. The priority was still that of architecture and a new emphasis was placed on interior design.  Space, rather than structure, became the major focus. The Preliminary Course was eliminated and the Bauhaus became downright academic with written exams appearing for the first time.

These changes could be seen as an attempt to make the Bauhaus seem more conventional to satisfy the authorities.  Originally, the Bauhaus had been dedicated to collective housing for workers and favored flat roofs, use modern building materials, steel, glass, stucco, with sheer walls painted white or gray or beige, trimmed in black.  As the critics of the Weissenhof made clear, this styeless style was un-German.  Pinned down by such regressive attitudes, Mies had no choice but to retreat to interior design.  But the days of such a progressive school were numbered.  In a last ditch attempt to save the school, Mies privatized the Bauhaus and moved it to Berlin in 1932 where it fought against its fate.  But nothing could save the Bauhaus from a regime that hated all things “modern,” except, of course for weapons of war.  In April 1933, the Nazis closed the Bauhaus.

Other Bauhaus posts on this website include: Bauhaus, The Founding, Bauhaus: Modern Design, Bauhaus: Internal Tensions, Bauhaus the End, and Bauhaus: the Fate of the Bauhaus

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Aug
19
2011

Bauhaus: Internal Tensions

Das Staatliche Bauhaus

Contradictions within the Bauhaus

In the most recent scholarly work on the Bauhaus, Bauhaus. Workshops for Modernity. 1919-1933, Museum of Modern Art, 2009, for the Museum of Modern Art, Barry Bergdoll wrote about the contradictions that existed within the Bauhaus. In my view, these contradictions were deeply and unavoidably embedded in the school’s heritage and its intentions.  The cultural inheritance that the Bauhaus was working with came from an old way of thinking that may or may not have been capable of being modified for the modern world.  Take the grid, for example.  The grid became the basic ruling concept of the Bauhaus.  Obviously, despite the impact of De Stijl, the grid is far older than the paintings of Piet Mondrian and had long been the underlying structure of any composition.  But with the Bauhaus the grid comes to the foreground and determines the module that was mobilized for advertising and for furniture and for architecture.  Gropius proposed the Baukasten as a cubic element that could be deployed for pre-fab architecture.  However, the architect was a visionary but Germany itself was still in the process of standardizing systems of measurement and it would take years for modular units in building to become an international norm.

Another case in point is the Bauhaus interest in redefining the “book,” a very old object that needed to be updated.  For the Bauhaus, the urgency of this self-assigned task could not be clearer.  The urban dweller of the twentieth century was inundated with visual images through film, illustrated magazines and newspapers, and advertising.  One saw in a flash and read quickly in small graphic units.  People were seeing and thinking in visuals as in no other time in history.  The development of a “new vision” in typography and advertising was perhaps the most impactful contribution of the Bauhaus.  László Moholy-Nagy took up the task of redesigning the format of books and the traditional gray page of blocks of print, breaking up the monotony of lines with graphic insertions.

In order to design the forms appropriate for mass communication and mass advertising everything had to be rethought.  Herbert Bayer attempted to drag Germany into the twentieth century by bypassing the traditional Germanic medieval script in favor of a simplified and updated Roman font.  In eliminating frakur, Bayer sought to eradicate culture and nationality for a more rational system.  The German language is characterized by the capitalization of nouns, which, as with all capital letters, violated the basic tenets of language—to simply translate a sound into letters.  Bayer proposed an all lower case form of print, imposing universal regularity with modern ruler and the French curve. This “universal script” became the familiar architects’ writing, still prevalent today.

However beautiful the productions of the Bauhausbücher, publishers who used mass production faced demands inherent in the proposals of Moholy-Nagy and Bayer, which depended upon handwork.  For a conventional publisher, the old fashioned book was efficient and cost effective.  Stopping the presses to insert some sort of graphically attractive addition or hand-setting hand-made lettering, no matter how “universal,” was simply not conducive to modern methods of manufacture.  Despite the fact that it is clear to us today that the artists and architects of the Bauhaus could see into the future and guessed correctly the needs of future industry and accurately predicted the desires of future consumers, the Bauhaus was caught in a time lag.  Much of the work done by the faculty and students were very dependent upon handwork and upon old-fashioned craft.  Only in advertising did the technology exist to adapt itself to Herbert Bayer’s ideas, simply because there was a profit motive for the profession. Otherwise, it would take decades for technology to catch up with the Bauhaus vision.

The mission of the Bauhaus of a New Vision and a Standard Grammar collided directly with an old idea that simply refused to die: the role of the artist as creator. Faceless murals of Oskar Schlemmer and his mute and masked theatrical production, The Triadic Ballet, all insist upon the anonymity of “The Bauhaus.”  But, for some, the nameless modernity of the Bauhaus was simply too challenging, as was the notion that the school “owned” anything the student designed. Inspired by the construction of a bicycle frame, Marcel Breuer invented the cantilevered chair, now known as the “Breuer chair” and introduced a new controversy over who “owned” “Bauhaus designs,” the Bauhaus, the home base of the students, or the students who came up with the design?  Although Breuer fought to retain his rights to the famous chair, the art designed by the Bauhaus students was always labeled “The Bauhaus.”  Regardless of who owned the lamps, ashtrays, teapots of Marianne Brandt or not, her work still stands for The Bauhaus.”

Other Bauhaus posts on this website include: Bauhaus, The Founding, Bauhaus: Modern Design, Bauhaus: Internal Tensions, Bauhaus the End, and Bauhaus: the Fate of the Bauhaus

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Aug
12
2011

Bauhaus: Modern Design

Das Staatliche Bauhaus

Bauhaus and the Modern World

In the beginning, the Bauhaus was founded upon the precedents of arts and crafts, deeply rooted in a Romantic and Germanic notion of a return to a medieval way of life.  The founding image of the Bauhaus was the Cubist-like cathedral designed by Lyonel Feininger for the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto.  Indeed it was the intention of  the newly appointed director, Walter Gropius to end the academic distinction between the fine arts and crafts by reestablishing the culture of the workshop.  There would be a master of craft, the Handwerkmeister, and the master of form, the Formmeister, who, between them, would join handwork and aesthetics.  Indeed the idea of making things, of getting back to the direct experience with materials which were manipulated with the hands was the basic idea of the early Bauhaus. The ideal sought by Gropius was the mythic and spiritual collective memory of the Bauhüten or the masons’ lodges.  The idea of the cathedral and the Bauhaus was the Einheitskunstwerk or the total work of art translated into the collective needs of a modern society.  But this idea of collectivity was easier stated than achieved.

The Bauhaus student body was definitely a mixed bag, unemployed men looking for something to do, old and difficult veterans, and students who were unprepared for the lofty goals of the Bauhaus.  Gropius brought in a sterling faculty with pre-war credentials, starting with Lyonel Feininger and continuing with Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Johannes Itten from Vienna.  Itten quickly remedied the problem of the lack of student readiness for an art school by creating a “foundation” course that would teach the basics to all students to create a foundation for the more advanced courses. Classes taught by Kandinsky and Klee complemented this “preliminary course”.  Although Itten would be forced out along with the lingering sentiments for Expressionism in 1922, the idea of providing a year of basics in the arts still lingers in art schools a hundred years later.  After Itten’s departure, László Moholy-Nagy took over the Preliminary Course, which would later be taught, most famously, by Josef Albers.

Despite their philosophical differences, Itten and Gropius established significant ideas that would leave their mark on twentieth century design and architecture.  Itten, who was a hippie before his time, taught his students the fundamentals of the body through yogi or stretching exercises that would get them in touch with their own physicality.  This emphasis on the senses was part of the need to give primacy to experience and an awareness of life through exercises in quick sketches in drawing class.  Gropius did not consider that the Bauhaus was engaged in “making art” but in conducting “experiments” in a “laboratory.” At the Bauhaus, “abstraction” took on a different meaning as a search for fundamentalism.  Abstraction did not stand in for “something else,” but was the process of distilling art making down to the essentials.

This basic core that the post-war artists were seeking initiated a search for artistic forms stripped of any cultural “baggage.”  The idea of a tabula rasa was not just a quest for the visual arts; philosophers also turned their attention to the epistemology or the grounds of perceptual knowledge and linguistic understanding.  Edmund Husserl wrote extensively of “bracketing” reality and attempting to discern the essentials of perception.  Fernand de Saussure proposed a system where in the structure of language could be determined, breaking down linguistics into the “sign,” the “signifier,” and the “signified.”  Certainly the thinking of De Stijl was crucial in the Bauhaus’ process of stripping down to a basic code of line and color.  As Yves-Alain Bois pointed out in his 1985 book on De Stijl the “elementarization” which narrowed composition to the primary colors, white and gray, and the ruled line at right angle, and “integration,” which binds the resulting forms into a unified whole were the basis of De Stijl philosophy.

What had to be unlearned were outmoded and outdated aesthetic conventions and received ideas of beauty as taught by the academy.  The artist of the twentieth century needed to have a mind cleansed of received wisdom and to return to a tabula rasa from which new and clarified forms would emerge.  Gropius sought basic modules as elemental building units.  Having achieved that level of creative clarity, the artist could be redefined as “a builder of systems.”  The emphasis on experience over knowledge meant that communication between viewer and maker should be pre-linguistic and immediate due to the eloquence of “fundamental forms.” In his influential book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911, Vasily Kandinsky asserted that a form of “psychic shock” would result when the viewer encountered these strong forms.  Key to the idea of gaining experience, which would replace conventions was the idea of “play.”  The importance of play at the Bauhaus was inspired by the foundational work of Friedrich Froebel who invented the “kindergarten” or the “children’s garden” where children played and learned from their play.

By 1923, Gropius was ready to announce the new philosophy for the Bauhaus.  This “reversal of values” moved the school away from the reform of arts and crafts to an engagement with the industrial world.  Clearly, the Bauhaus had been profoundly impacted by the art and design done by the De Stijl movement in Holland and by the example of “laboratory work” done in the new Soviet Union. De Stijl founder, Theo van Doesburg, moved to Weimar and gave individual lessons to Bauhaus students but was never a professor there.  In Berlin, German art audiences go their first look at the new art of the Soviets at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin in 1922.  The world had changed and the Bauhaus reacted with alacrity.  Gropius, speaking at a 1923 exhibition of faculty and student work, announced that the Bauhaus had moved into the present and had a new slogan, “Art and Technology: A New Unity.”

Thus the philosophy of the Bauhaus passed beyond the Werkbund spirit that the artist should be a craftsperson first and any aesthetic must be based upon sound craft.  The whole notion of “craft” and making had to get beyond the medieval mystique and into mass manufacture. 1923 was the year that Walter Gropius invited the Hungarian artist, László Moholy-Nagy to join the faculty.  Moholy-Nagy embodied the new industrial spirit of the new Bauhaus.  A photographer, painter and typographer, Molholy-Nagy pioneered in what his called “New Vision,” his version of “the grammar of modern design” sought by Gropius.  Like many designers, Moholy-Nagy knew that the visual forms of the nineteenth century had to be updated for the new century.  Most importantly, he understood that the modern mind perceived the world in a fundamentally different fashion.

Other Bauhaus posts on this website include: Bauhaus, The Founding, Bauhaus: Modern Design, Bauhaus: Internal Tensions, Bauhaus the End, and Bauhaus: the Fate of the Bauhaus

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Aug
05
2011

Bauhaus: The Founding

Das Staatliche Bauhaus

Founding the Bauhaus, 1919-1923

Historically as an art school and as a design movement, the Bauhaus stands as a counterweight to the solipsism and Surrealism in Paris and the anger and turmoil in Berlin.  To a certain extent, the Bauhaus can be linked to New Objectivity in its rejection of Expressionism, but the school set itself apart from the mainstream art world in Germany by redesigning the world for the twentieth century.  The goal of the Bauhaus was to create the kinds of design that would lend itself to mass production and that would be accessible to the masses.  To a certain extent, the Bauhaus also shared the post-war utopianism that clean modern design would have a beneficial impact on society, but the goals were more practical than dreamy.  From the beginning the school was split among factions—art versus craft—and individual creation and corporate ownership—hand work verses factory production.  The school also reflected the tensions in early twentieth century society, controversies over the Jewish members of the faculty and the dis-ease over having so many female students.  Divided at its heart, the Bauhaus nevertheless created the “modern.”

As an art school, the Bauhaus was the continuation of a long-held dream of reforming the bad design and bad taste unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.  Its precedents were the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements in England and the Art nouveau styles in Europe and America and, more locally, the Deutscher Werkbund, founded in Munich in 1907.  In their desire to return to the integrity of medieval craft, these predecessor movements were flawed in their core, for the products, hand-crafted by artists, were far too expensive and rarified for the ordinary person to afford.  Only the Werkbund, fully engaged in the twentieth century, was positioned to join art and craft and industry. In contrast, the nineteenth century reform movements, for all their good intentions, were expressions of luxury, and the Werkbund established the most immediate precedent for the Bauhaus.

In fact, it was one of the founders of the Werkbund, Henry van der Velde, who was head of the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, and it was his post that Walter Gropius took over.  Van der Velde was forced to leave Germany and return to this homeland of Belgium, but, after the war, it seemed clear that his medieval sensibilities had become obsolete.  By the time the Bauhaus was formed by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimer it was clear that it was impossible to return to an imagined medieval paradise and that design needed to express the modern industrial world that had come so horribly into fruition during the Great War.  Gropius combined arts and crafts into one school, under one roof, combining all the arts under one roof in the name of architecture: Bauhaus or “house of building.”  Gropius stated,

“Let us collectively desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one structure: architecture and sculpture and painting, which, from the million hands of craftsmen, will one day rise towards heaven as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.”

Although we tend to think of “the Bauhaus” as an organic unity that created a “look” that is read as “modern,” the school actually went through numerous stages.  Existing during the span of the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933, the Bauhaus lived a precarious existence, and, like the wider German art world, evolved out of Romanticism and Expressionism into the modern era.  Far more than any other movement in the period between the two wars, the Bauhaus was actively engaged in an attempt to redefine “art” and “artist” for the modern period of mass production and mass communication for mass audiences.

The school went through its founding phase from 1919 to 1922, shifting to a more rational and less medieval approach to design, only to be disrupted by the move to Dessau in 1925, where Gropius brought in László Moholy-Nagy, who had a profound impact on the philosophy of the Bauhaus.  Gropius was succeeded by Hannes Meyer in 1928, but he was considered politically unsuitable and was removed in favor of Mies van Der Rohe in 1930.  After that final transition, the Bauhaus went into survival mode and Mies presided over its final demise in Berlin in 1933.

Other Bauhaus posts on this website include: Bauhaus, The Founding, Bauhaus: Modern Design, Bauhaus: Internal Tensions, Bauhaus the End, and Bauhaus: the Fate of the Bauhaus

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jul
29
2011

New Objectivity in German Art

New Objectivity

New Theories of Painting in Germany, 1920s

The Great War ended with the notorious Treaty of Versailles, a treaty, which inflicted humiliating reparations upon the German peoples, leaving them with feelings of despair and anger and a stunned disbelief.  Germany had not been invaded, Berlin had not fallen, there had been no victory parades by the allies down the wide expanse of the Unter den Linden—so how could the war have been lost?  The fact that there were few young and fit men left to fight was   not nearly as resonant as the notion that somehow Germany had been sold out.  Instead of fighting on, the reasoning went, powerful forces negotiated with the allies and made a peace that the German people would never have wanted.  Just who was responsible for this horrifying turn of events was unclear but the favorite theory was that the Jews were responsible for the defeat.

Regardless of why Germany lost the war, the Kaiser went into exile and a new Republic, based in the university city of Weimer, was formed.  The Weimer Republic emerged after the November Revolution of 1918 and presided over one of the most brilliant creative periods of artistic activity of the century.  A weak and divided government, riven with clashing factions, uprisings, assassinations and economic chaos, nevertheless held the country together until the final victory of Nazi rule in 1933.  Had Charles Dickens been writing of this tumultuous period he surely would have repeated, “It was the best of times and the worst of times.”  On one hand, the streets of major German cities were marked by the presence of disabled and maimed veterans, desperate women, prostituting themselves in order to earn a living, businessmen grown fat with profiteering, and disaffected malcontents of all kinds.  But, on the other hand, in the face of the adversity and the corruption and downright decadence, especially in Berlin, this city became the mecca for what was left of the avant-garde as a provocative protest movement.

It was noted in an earlier posts that first, the avant-garde impetus had been quelled in Paris by the sentiments of Recall to Order and second, that Surrealism was a conservative movement that went inward into the subconscious.  The innovative impulse shifted to literature and jazz. Because the history of art in the twentieth century has been largely a formalist one, the avant-garde in Berlin was often neglected due to its insistence on representation.  But it was here in Berlin that painting became confrontational to the point of artists being censored and put on trial by the government.  It was here in Berlin that a tired and discredited Expressionism migrated into a thriving and exciting film industry nurturing the talents of Fritz Lang.  It was here in Berlin that the concept of “theater” was severed from its connection to illusionism through the work of Bertold Brecht.  It was here that German philosophy reinvented itself for a modern era based upon mass communication in the writings of Walter Benjamin.  And it was here that the visual arts had an unexpected and unprecedented flowering as a “New Objectivity.”

As a counterweight to the Expressionist romanticism and internalized and dramatized subjectivity, German artists, disillusioned and sickened by the carnage of the Great War, turned towards an art that was clear and clean, objective and cool, utilitarian and functional—a “New Objectivity.”  As painter Ludwig Meidner said in 1919, “What will matter tomorrow, what I and all the others need, is a fanatical, fervent naturalism.”  “Naturalism,” “realism,” and the increasingly heard phrase, “rappel à l’ordre,” were the key words of the era.  The new path towards representation, or to be accurate, the use of representation to recreate an imagine “reality” had already been evident with the Italian movement, Pitture Metafisica and the works of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà as early as 1917, and by the artists of the Novecento group (Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, Udaldo Oppi, Felice Castoraati), founded in Milan in 1922.  The Italian magazine, Valori Plastici supported the return of neoclassicism, combined with traditional realism and mixed together to provide a taste of dreams. But in Germany, this new objective approach to art had a particular urgency.  The representation of reality had to take a different path.  The truth had to be told.  If artists simply reveled the true state and conditions of everyday life, then the nation would never again be misled into another futile, life-wasting war.

While Italian artists were reacting to the chaos of Futurism which evolved into Fascism, the German artists were responding to the end of the War with a mixture of cynicism and hope for a better future and focused their goals on the obtainable ones of the here and now.  The result of the new scrutiny of the everyday, whether pleasant or unpleasant, was a movement located and named in 1922 by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunstalle in Mannheim, who sent out a survey inquiring as to whether there is “Ein neuer Naturalismus?”  In May, 1923 he began informing his fellow art critics of the new exhibition he was planning to form under the title of Neue Sachlichkeit in Mannheim.  Hartlaub arranged the artists of this new movement into bipolar groups: the conservative, classical right wing and the truth-telling Verist group on the left that came to the New Objectivity from Dada and Expressionism. Hartlaub’s exhibition in 1925 was paired by a book on Post-Expressionism and Magic Realism by Franz Roh. Writing in Nach-Expressionismus – magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäisches Malerei, Roh coined the term “magic realism.”

Although “magic realism” was almost immediately adapted by Latin American writers for their own purposes, Roh described the term as being deeply rooted in “objects.”  Roh stated,

“We will indicate here, in a cursory way, the point at which the new painting separates itself from Expressionism by means of its objects…it resorts to the everyday and the commonplace for the purpose of distancing it, investing it with a shocking exoticism…if a picture portrayed a city, for example, it represented the destruction produced by volcanic lava and not just a play of forms the booty of an agitated cubism…We recognize this world, although now—not only because we have emerged from a dream—we look on it with new eyes…we are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane…instead of the remote horrors of hell, the inextinguishable horrors of our own time (Grosz and Dix)…”

Roh seems to veer toward some of the ideas offered by Dada when he uses the term “convulsive life,” but he was actually looking back to the long traditions in German art of imbuing ordinary objects with meaning, a kind of symbolic knowledge, and the heritage of extreme expressionism as a mechanism for telling the truth, no matter how terrible.  The Isenheim Altarpiece comes to mind, and Roh states,

“…the new art does not belong to the series of initial artistic phases that includes Expressionism.  It is a moment of decantation and clarification that was fortunate enough to find right at the start an almost exhausted artistic revolution that had begun to discover new avenues…Post-Expressionism sought to reintegrate reality into the heart of visibility.  The elemental happiness of seeing again, or recognizing things, reenters. Painting becomes once again the mirror or palpable exteriority.”

Despite the strength of the new movement, few galleries and art dealers in Berlin, Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Galerie and the galleries of Bruno Cassirer and Alfred Flechtheim were not particularly interested in the emerging art style.  Only the gallery Neumann-Nierendorf, run by Karl Nierendorf, favored New Objectivity.  As examination of the art by the New Objectivity artists quickly reveals that there would be few buyers for art that brutally depicted the ugliness of the world of prostitutes and their customers, Otto Dix, or the attack on ineffectual bureaucrats, George Grosz, or the decadence of the upper classes in Berlin, Christian Schad and Max Beckman, not to mention the fevered murder scenes of Rudolf Schlichter and the paintings of torture and torment by Max Beckmann.  These artists constructed a portrait of an era that blazed up and was quickly doused by the icy waters of the Nazis. And yet, it is these paintings that come to mind when one says the words “Weimer Republic.” The portraits of Otto Dix appear throughout the film, Cabaret, and the metamorphosis of George Grosz to a war dissenter to a Dada agitator to a scathing critic of the inept regime to an exile in New York, waiting for the end of Hitler, tell the story of these “best of times, worst of times.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

 

 

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