by Philipp Blom
During the next fifteen years, Kandinsky moved away from a somewhat soupy late Impressionist style and found a much more individual and archaic visual language, in which the rattles and drums of the shamans, with the figures of birds and snakes used in their incantations, resurfaced on the canvas, creating a graphic universe that went beyond the conventions of painting, or rather, pre-dated them. These symbols held universal significance, Kandinsky felt: they had the power to stir collective memories of an existence before electricity and cars, before cities, before civilization itself. The critical reaction to works like these was overwhelmingly hostile, as some of Kandinsky’s German colleagues discovered after an exhibition in 1911. A reviewer for the Kölnische Zeitung gave them a broadside of conservative aesthetics:
The pictures are impossible to supersede in the uselessness of their design and are nothing but garishly coloured games played by these cannibals. Looked at as painting they are the end of art, a prank. But they show a more nefarious side. The modern phrase that the object of art is indifferent, is abused here in a truly malevolent way ... What is presented to us breathes the poison breath of the darkest places of vice of the big city and shows the constitution of the artists, which can only be understood in terms of pathology.
Elsewhere, things were hardly better. London critics scoffed at the post-Impressionists presented to them by Roger Fry; in 1905, a Paris reviewer coolly concluded of an exhibition by Matisse: ‘He has thrown a pot of paint into his public’s face,’ and the French Fauvist painters got their group name when the journalist Louis Vaucelles spotted an Italianate-looking and very tame bronze of a nude woman surrounded by the avant-gardist canvases and exclaimed: Donatello chez les fauves! (Donatello among the savages!) The name stuck.
Although Kandinsky had chosen to settle in Germany, his development towards what might be called shamanic abstraction had strong parallels in Russia, where a whole generation of young artists sought different ways of approaching and portraying nature. In Moscow, Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881-1964) created strong, simplistic figures inspired by Russian folk art - figures like prehistoric cave paintings, reduced to the very essentials, and speaking, not without irony, of the essentials of life: sex, food, man, woman. His lover Natalia Sergeeva Goncharova (1881-62) was equally enthralled by peasant art and created vivid tableaux as well as archaic portraits. Nobody, however, moved as fast and as far as Kasimir Severinovich Malevich (1878-1935), who assimilated all artistic currents of his time and arrived at the most austere of abstractions (see plate section). To Malevich, the world and imagery of peasant art and imagination was a touchstone of authenticity and a way out of the oversophisticated imagery practised by the previous generation of painters. His portraits of peasants and wood-cutters show figures like tree trunks, monumental and tubular, like gods from a lost mythology, grown out of the soil of Mother Russia. After completing a series of these canvases, Malevich turned to his own time and the life of modernity. If he had reduced peasants to figures of primeval force, his city people were splintered up in countless fragments, unrecognizable behind bits of writing and shreds of images, half covered by curious symbols (a fish, a sabre, a wooden spoon), powerless against the vortex of information and speed sucking them into its dark core.
Malevich’s technique and stylistic development were mirrored almost exactly by those of a painter from the other extremity of Europe, the young Catalan Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who also discovered the force of primitive forms and the disintegration of the subject as means of artistic expression. Malevich, however, drew his inspiration from Russian peasant art, while Picasso was influenced by a very different aesthetic world. For the young painter (his magnificently Catholic full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Clito Rula y Picasso), the move to Paris had been an escape from what he felt to be the provincial narrowness of Barcelona. In his new home, his exuberant talent exploded in a multitude of forms and styles. Picasso drew inspiration from everywhere: from predecessors like Cézanne and from advertising, from travelling circuses and from curiosities sold in junk shops. Among the latter were African carvings brought back by troops stationed in West Africa and sold in the harbours for a few drinks. Nobody thought of them as possessing any value, either aesthetic or financial, and while those who had served in the colonies might put them on the wall together with Berber carpets, hunting trophies and selected sabres and pistols, nobody gave them another thought.
Eat Drink Man
Woman: Mikhail
Larionov reduced
life to its most
primitive
elements.
Picasso did. He was startled by them and bought as many as his meagre earnings would allow him. Their rough-cut shapes, irregular symmetry and powerful simplification seemed to him the only possible answer to the over-refined aesthetics of bourgeois taste with its floating nymphs, art nouveau girls and dainty plants, its endless allegories and innocent nudity, its beauty and its mind-numbing technical perfection. Totally indifferent to what these African items might have meant in their own culture, what their significance and symbolism were, Picasso used the formal repertoire of tribal art for his own ends. In the masks he recognized the unchanging structure of the human condition, underneath what appeared to be personal; an individual reduced to a sign, a cypher stripped of anything unique.
This new and profoundly sceptical vision of civilization was first and most fully realized in his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (see plate section), a large canvas of brutal and disturbing bluntness which, much like Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps, did everything to hide its underlying technical and compositional virtuosity. Created in 1907, the scene is the interior of a brothel, with naked prostitutes posing for a client. The women, though, are unlike anything that had been seen before in art. Their exposed bodies are reduced to geometrical components, barely hinting at arm and leg, breast and crotch. The faces consist of nothing more than black lines on the colour of the flesh. The woman to the right seems to have an African mask growing out of her skull, while the figure in front, squatting, is completely disfigured, her eyes at different heights, her nose grown into a line at once monstrous and abstract - a reminder, perhaps, of the terrible ravages of syphilis.
Both Picasso and his friend and colleague Georges Braque (1882-1963) found this technique of dissolving fluent shapes into seemingly archaic elements a powerful means of appropriating reality and articulating their response to life in metropolitan Paris. While it could be used to reduce individuals to archetypes, and quotidian reality to myth, breaking down complex forms into simple constituents could also do the opposite: it could show what modern life was like by looking at it with ancient eyes. Until well into the Middle Ages, a painting has been understood to represent more than just a single moment; it was seen to represent a spiritual essence. Thus an altar could depict the entire process of Christ’s passion, all twelve Stations of the Cross with the figure of Jesus in them, on a single panel - a progression in time seen as a progression through space. Following on where Cézanne had left off, Picasso and Braque’s ‘Cubist’ paintings now applied the same principle to modern, secular subjects. By showing a face or a figure from several different angles at once they destroyed the formal coherence of their subject as well as any sense of a particular moment or place. But in so doing, they hoped to capture an essence, to see all its facets from all sides, to perceive something more profoundly true than what is possible for one chained to one perspective and one spot in time and space.
At the same time the language of Cubism was a powerful way of conveying another message: in the modern city people were no longer in one piece, as Malevich’s monumental peasants were. They were composite, splintered and pasted figures, made up of scraps of this and parts of that, not a fully grown entity but an almost random conflation of elements and disparate points of view. The very opposite of his explosive friend Picasso, Georges Braque was a methodical, inte
llectual man who worked slowly and deliberately. He was sensitive to the theoretical implications of painting, to the fascinating paradoxes implicit in recreating a three-dimensional world in two dimensions, in the tension between illusion and symbolic representation, in depicting a mere moment out of the work of months, and of artistic creation in a world increasingly dominated by industrial design, utilitarian shapes, advertising and mass reproduction. The son of a decorative painter and furniture restorer, Braque used wood imitations in his paintings, more by way of an open question to the viewer than with any intention of deceiving the eye. He was particularly fascinated by violins, no doubt not simply because of their rounded shape and the contrast of the straight lines of the strings and the curves of sides and scroll, but also because the violin was an instrument designed to be heard and not seen, the challenge to the painter being essentially one of translating the language of sound into that of vision. In his Man with Violin (1912), Braque reflects on several of these ideas. Hovering above the multi-faceted shape of the violin, the figure of the player is a mere ghost, the idea of a player hinted at with the outlines of robotic eyes, mouth and nose. The man seems stunned, submerged by the sounds swirling around him in the shape of fragmentary musical notations. It is not so much a portrait of a person as of an experience, and a disquieting one, as the human form is the least certain element of the composition, dissolved as it is in the shapes and sounds of its surroundings.
Invaded and fragmented: Braque’s Man with Violin
cannot defend his contours against outside forces.
This fragmentation of identities was further reinforced by contemporary influences such as cinema. As effective cutting and trick photography became standard features of the movies, the way people were thinking about stories changed. Writers and painters began to imitate the rapid shifts of perspective and the disjunction found in films. Ortega y Gasset’s epistemological claim that the only possible way of seeing the world was that of a multitude of individual vantage points began to sound like a theory of cinema, and the floating enchantment of the stream of consciousness in authors like Luigi Pirandello, Arthur Schnitzler and Andrei Bely saw the world through the eye of a camera, recording random details and impressions and letting them merge into vivid ideas. The self, Ernst Mach had claimed, was nothing but an accumulation of sensations and experiences.
Leapfrog, sliced: Sequential photographs such as this one by Thomas
Eakins were a source of inspiration for avant-garde painting.
Influenced by the sequential photography developed by Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins, which split up a single movement into its constituent parts, the French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) anatomized human sensation with his path-breaking Nude Descending a Staircase Number 2 (1912), which showed a classic subject of painting, a female nude, fanned out into the many facets of a moment, half analytical, half romantic, and wholly ironic. The work was regarded with suspicion by colleagues like Picasso and Braque, who sensed that it represented an independent departure from the Cubist creed. One year later, in 1913, the nude was presented at the Armory Show in New York and it succeeded in stirring up considerable scandal. Like the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla, Duchamp had incorporated the passage of time into a single canvas, pointing again to an age-old paradox of painting, the relation between a depicted instant and the time it takes to create a work, between being true to life and true to art. Duchamp’s canvas showed that being true to empirical experience changed not only what was seen, but also how it could be translated into feelings and experiences. The work challenged viewers to ask how one can fall in love with a series of moving shapes and how moments of sensation become experience or personality.
Conquering time:
Duchamp’s Nude
Descending a Staircase
captured a sequence of
movement on a single
canvas.
In the real world, the fragmentary, episodic nature of existence went hand in hand with the rush and inconstancy of fashion and the imperious demands of industrial developments, sweeping away with an iron broom everything that was not up-to-the-minute. Despite rising life expectancy and increased choice, life had never felt more transient, more fragile. To many of those who felt this fragility, those struggling for respectability, the past suddenly seemed like a promised land of stability and belonging.
Let us return to the fascination of the primitive. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) did not have the existential drive of a Picasso or Braque’s analytical bent. His work shows that he was simply too glad to be alive to waste much of his energy on intellectual analyses of things that seemed so clear to him under the vivid Mediterranean sun of his southern French retreat. But while Matisse’s mind was not set on analysing modernity or taking an axe to the human form and cutting it out of the colours as one might carve a canoe from a tree, his own paradise was definitely set in an archaic world - one long and languid après-midi d’un faune, with a kinder look at humanity and its potential. The nude figures in his large canvas Bonheur de vivre (see plate section) breathe the aestival ease of an imagined meeting between the sensuality of Greek gods and the simple joys of life during prehistoric times. The goats to the right are like remnants of cave paintings from Altamira (a Spanish cave whose ancient carvings had been recently dated as 15,000-year-old masterpieces), while the gesture and manner of the young goatherd is inspired by Greek vase painting.
Searching Far and Near
Like many artists, Matisse saw beauty and happiness in a pre-civilized state of man, a return to his roots. Civilization and modernity stood for speed and neurasthenia, for questioned identities, feeble minds and unsound bodies. Matisse dreamt himself into a colour-saturated Eden in which such a happy life before the fall could become true. Others were not content to dream; a small but steady stream of artists set out to find this earthly paradise, whether in artists’ colonies and communities or on voyages abroad, where they could study cultures unsullied by European modernity, and perhaps could throw off the shackles of bourgeois morality. French artists had the great advantage of French Algiers and French-dominated Morocco on their doorstep (sub-Saharan Africa was too remote, too foreign), and many made use of this enticing opportunity.
The German painter August Macke (1887-1914) and the Swiss Paul Klee (1879-1940) travelled to Tunisia in 1914 and came back with sketchbooks full of vivid colour and semi-abstract shapes; Matisse had been in Tangiers in 1912 and richly profited from seeing the colours, the traditional crafts and decorations, and the apparently simpler life of the North Africans. For those who could not make the journey themselves, an exhibition of Islamic art held in Munich in 1910 brought a new aesthetic universe into one of the nerve centres of the European avant-garde.
Many artists followed the call of a more ‘natural’ life abroad, partly in the footsteps of the pioneers of the previous generation. Paul Gauguin, one of the stars of the 1910 London post-Impressionist exhibition, had shown the joys of the South Seas to European art lovers. Embarking on an almost mystical quest to redeem himself through passion and lucidity, the sensualist French novelist André Gide had found the courage to follow his amorous instincts during repeated stays in Algiers. Gide loved boys, and many men of independent means chose north Africa or southern Italy to indulge their forbidden passions: the German photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden in his villa in Taormina in Sicily; Friedrich Alfred Krupp in Capri. In all cases, the travellers’ interest was aroused not only by a different attitude to sex - homosexual or otherwise - in different cultures, but by a different attitude to sensuality and to emotions, as Gide himself had written in his autobiographical account Si le grain ne meurt (If It Die, 1926, transl., 1927):
In the name of which god, which ideal do you forbid me to live according to my nature? - And that nature, where would it take me, if I simply followed it? Until then I had accepted Christ’s morality ... In order to force myself into submitting to it I had wound up with a profound disarray of my entire being.
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The search for a primordial, ‘natural’ morality did not necessarily have to lead its adepts abroad either physically or in their imagination.
The largely rural and often underdeveloped, almost medieval ways of living preserved in Eastern Europe offered a foreign country within national borders to many in search of authenticity. In 1905 the composers and musicologists Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) travelled through the hinterland of their native Hungary in an attempt to document Magyar and gypsy folk melodies. The music resulting from this expedition into a rural world outside of classical tonal systems and formal constraints resulted in a new musical aesthetic expressed in their own composition; a music with jagged edges, as unfamiliar to the ear as were Stravinsky’s sounds. Theirs was not the gentle folk concert paraphrases and orchestral music made popular by Liszt and Brahms, Dvořák and Tchaikovsky during the late nineteenth century. This music, as well as that of the Czech Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), did not seek to adorn elaborate high art music with subtle and exotic touches. Rather, the composers wanted to change art music, to reform ways of hearing by reverting to the often stark, unfamiliar and dissonant sounds of folk music which, they surmised, was as yet untouched by the sickly gloss of Western life.
The search for a national culture with ancient roots had political aspects, of course. Throughout the nineteenth century, folk motifs in music and painting, folk stories, fairy tales and little-used languages had been used as means of proclaiming a national identity, and artists vied in their championship of the national idea, famously in the case of the Czech composers Smetana and Dvořák, whose national styles divided the Czechs into two musical camps but united them in their defiance of Vienna. Now the political edge of national revival grew sharper, particularly when it went in search of a prehistoric past. German-speaking artists of the avant-garde were singularly uninterested in the Germanic past. Painters such as Emil Nolde (1867-1956) and Max Pechstein (1881-1955) created canvases depicting ecstatic dances by groups of girls and women which had all the energy of a spring sacrifice or even a witches’ Sabbath, but it was impossible to say whether they hailed from German forests or a Tahitian beach.
