Turning points in twentieth-century art, 1890-1917 PDF
Preview Turning points in twentieth-century art, 1890-1917
TURNING POINTS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ART: 1890-1917 TURNING POINTS CENTURY WERNER HOFMANN I N TWENTIETH- ART: 1890-1917 TRANSLATED BY CHARLES KESSLER GEORGE BRAZILLER NEW YORK Copyright © by George Braziller, Inc. All rights reserved For information address the publisher: George Braziller, Inc. One Park Avenue New York, N. Y. 10016 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-15826 Designed by Jennie R. Bush Printed in U.S.A. First Printing CONTENTS ~ Foreword 9 I FINALE OR PRELUDE? 17 II THE PIONEERS AND THEIR NINETEENTH- CENTURY BACKGROUND 27 III NEGATIVE BEAUTY 71 IV LAWFUL BEAUTY AND TRUTH TO LIFE l l l V TOWARD THE ART OF ARTLESSNESS 195 VI CONCLUSIONS 233 Notes 243 List of Artists 269 Index 279 FOREWORD ~ ===~=====!.lhere are problems whose challenge can haunt us, like a leitmotif, for years. We succumb to their attraction without at first gauging the consequences that flow from them. Some insig nificant incident or a striking aphorism can in a flash reveal a thorny problem of which we are later unable to rid our minds. Frequently we forget the original occasion and do not recall it until our conscience sets out to trace prime causes. In the winter of 1948 I spent some weeks at a rest center for European students. During this stay, I came across a well-thumbed issue of the Partisan Review, and read a contribution entitled "The Crisis of the Easel Picture." The author was the art critic Clement Greenberg. In time, title and contents of the short essay slipped from my memory, but not the problem it posed. I felt instinctively that the aphorism, "Crisis of the Easel Picture," spelled out a central, if not, indeed, the decisive, process in the art of our century. Since then I have tried to analyze, in a number of publications-most recently in Grundlagen der modernen Kunst (1966) (Foundations of Modern Art)-the origins, nature, and con sequences of the problems involved. The present book picks up these same threads, but proposes a different perspective. Instead of showing the extensive links in art which subsist through the centuries, it marks the unobtrusive "small steps" taken by histor- [9] ical progress and concentrates on those shifts m emphasis which occurred between 1890 and 191 7. Symptoms of crisis in art, like every artistic manifestation of importance, make themselves felt before and after their time. Were it not so, the events concerned would lie unrelated in the lap of history, and we would have to content ourselves with the chron icle of their succession. If. the easel picture is about to lose its predominant position we must ask: what are the forces that this crisis has released, when did they first appear, and what kind of art will this crisis produce? The answers to the first two questions, so far as I am capable of giving them, can be found in the pages that follow. How very far they differ from the point of view expressed by Greenberg in 1948, I was able to establish when I reread his essay not long ago.1 In 1948 he foresaw the development _of action painting, a move ment toward a new picture determined by the concepts of "all over," "decentralized," and "polyphonic." Jackson Pollock, Mark Tobey, and others were quoted in confirmation. For my part, I feel this answer is too restrictive. It is not so much that the easel picture and its conventions are in decline, as it is that Western painting as a whole appears to have come to the end of the ascendancy conferred on it by the Renaissance. This conjecture, not a death sentence but an affirmation of a loss of ground and prestige, can be substantiated by numerous symptoms. One of them I see in the fact that sculpture" has recently emerged from under the shadow of painting. The publication in 1937 of Carola Giedion-Welcker's first comprehensive survey, Modern Plastic Art (rev. ed. Contemporary Sculpture, 1955) set off a new appreciation of plastic form that is far from finished. A parallel trend during the past twenty years and more has been the in creasingly eager urge to put the third dimension to creative and inventive use. In the course of this trend, familiar categories, which had hitherto exercised binding authority, were transgressed. [10] Hybrids of painting and sculpture, sculpture and architecture, works of art and articles of everyday use are now innumerable. Neo-Dadaism, Nouveau Realisme, Op Art, Pop Art, and most recently A-B-C Art (employing minimal spatial structures) furnish the proof. These movements have given a radical twist to the "crisis" Greenberg observed in action painting. They have left the world of the "picture" behind, and in this way have established a con tact between the present and the pioneering days of twentieth century art, which is the subject of this book. It is not by chance that the panel picture's loss of prestige was accompanied by redis covery of Jugendstil, Dada, De Stijl, and Constructivism. What emerges is that the "crisis" was in its beginnings diag nosed on the one hand as a manifestation of decadence and on the other as an incentive to democratic renewal and a convalescence of art. In 1894 the artist and critic Henry van de Velde, in his lecture "Deblaiement d'Art" (Purification of Art), concluded that "the easel picture was simply a sign of hoary age, the slow evanescence of strength in an old man, the last moments of a dying one." This analysis was probably not unconnected with Albert Aurier's essay of 1891, "Le Symbolisme en Peinture," which stated: "The easel picture is nothing other than an illogical refinement invented to satisfy the imagination or commercial in stinct of decadent cultures."2 As early as 1825 the scholar Quatre mere de Quincy had complained in his Girodet essay about the commercialization of painting whereby pictures, "designated by some people as void of any function," were produced without purpose. Delacroix's essay on Raphael, five years later, resumed this line of thought and held the panel picture's pride of place responsible for the progressive artistic decay since Raphael's age. The masterpieces of painting and sculpture gradually became the objects of boastful luxury instead of stirring the soul or grati fying an intellectual craving, as in the time of Raphael. Painting [II] confines itself more and more to easel pictures which are purely suited to being hung next to each other in galleries. We shall trace this disastrous evolution right down to the epoch of decay we have ourselves reached.3 If Delacroix regretted the Renaissance as the period when paint ers embellished temples and palaces for eternity and appealed to all, the.painter Philipp Otto Runge, disgruntled by the art com mercialism and "dam ... building" of his contemporaries, pinned all his hopes on a "new architecture ... more a continuation of Gothic than Greek," and created for the purpose of providing his pictures with a permanent home. Thus artists have been aware for considerable time that the easel picture is not the final, most momentous word in European painting, let alone art as a whole. Art theory, however, has stub bornly declined to ponder this state of affairs, to pluck positive aspects out of the easel picture's crisis, and to recognize it for what it is-a process of creative liberation likely to prove as great as that of the events set in motion by the development of the easel picture in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. For as long as we discuss the art of our own century in terms of painting, sculpture, and architecture-the autonomous creative categories established as orthodox in the Renaissance-we are not coming to grips with the basic problems. Similarly we shall miss the point if, like Hegel, we continue to regard "inwardness" and subjectivity as the most urgent representational components in "romantic art" and consequently concede the lead to painting. These attitudes are out of date, seeking, as they do, to prop the art of this century with arguments which perpetrate its falsifica tion. That can only be proved by invalidating the cliches about the evolution of twentieth-century art. The alleged superiority of painting is a mere assumption. Nothing is more misleading than the point of view focused on the internal development of easel painting from Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Cezanne to, say, Soulages [12]
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