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Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936
"Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936" explores the classicizing aesthetic that followed the immense destruction of World War I. Accompanying the Guggenheim's exhibition of the same name, it examines the interwar period in its key artistic manifestations and their interpretations of classical values and aesthetics: the poetic dream of antiquity in the Parisian avant garde of Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso; the politicized revival of the Roman Empire under Benito Mussolini by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi; and the austere functionalist utopianism of the Bauhaus, as well as, more chillingly, the pseudo-biological classicism, or Aryanism, of nascent Nazi society. This presentation of the seismic transformations in interbellum French, Italian and German culture encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, fashion and the decorative arts. Among the other artists surveyed here are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Andre Derain, Gino Severini, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Amedee Ozenfant, Madeleine Vionnet, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Carra, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Ubaldo Oppi, Felice Casorati, Giuseppe Terragni, Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini, Georg Kolbe, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Georg Schrimpf, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and August Sander.
- GenresArtArt History
192 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2010
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March 23, 2016
Terms like modernism and avant-garde are terribly, maybe irretrievably muddled: the meaning of both varies whether you look at literature, visual arts, architecture, politics, religion or law. Within those various categories, the boundaries of those movements vary greatly depending on the country or area under discussion: spanish modernismo has little to do with anglo-american modernism, and Italy seemed for long to have no such things. And a third layer then need to be added to the cake, that of the orientation of each separate author: New Criticism, Marxism, Frankfurt School, Post-moderns, all have varying interpretation of those movements and their relationship to modernity, and each author within must at least feel the temptation to provide his own, epochal interpretation of the issue. In no small part, the new-found reflexivity of the movement, and the fast-paced variety this brought about, can be credited with the variegated puzzle that has so far eluded any consensus.
In that regard, the "return to order" with which the present book is concerned provide us with a much welcome solace: the totalizing but fissiparous, and elusive character of the first twenty years of the century, and the infinite recesses of theory it produced, seemed to have come to a halt when in 1926 Jean Cocteau published his collection of essays titled "Rappel à l'Ordre": while remaining divided, along political lines in particular, but also stylistic ones, the major actors of the next two decades of European art would be able to show a remarkable cohesion in their technique, principles and concerns, one which stands out against the agitated and ever-divided backdrop of XXth century art-history.
This book is the catalogue of a 2010 Guggenheim exhibition, curated by Kenneth E. Silver, foremost expert on the ideological intricacies of inter-war French culture, and including essays of such field leaders as Emily Braun, James Herbert and Jeanne Nugent.
The first and the by far the longest of the essays is that of Silver, which aims and succeed at providing the lay reader with an overview of art and design between the wars presented through the peculiar lens of the phenomenon variously named Rappel à l'Ordre or Neue Sachlichkeit. Those national forms have their own very distinct identities to which we will return, but first, let us examine that peculiarly common stock of rhetoric that lies below or above the specifics of art practice:
The Great War had been constructed, a priori, into an event of apocalyptic proportions, both the in the state-sponsored imaginary of mass media, and in that, often oddly convergent, of the artistic avant-garde: as the war unfolded and often an increasing awareness of its brutality, absurdity and horror came to supersede the tired old rhetoric, and the discourse of vitalism, celebrating change qua change in a mystical key came to be superseded: “The pulsating life has become an impossible metaphor, and … appear strange to us” writes Franz Roh, one of the reaction's main theoreticians (16). Instead arises the “combination of ghostliness with the cool and immediate Sachlichkeit [precision, matter-of-factness] of the modelling … a return to stolidity and almost classicistic correctness of the sculptural perception of form” (Paul F. Schmidt, 15) ;
This new emphasis on materiality wilfully departed from the deconstructive and absolute abstractions of the war and pre-war years: the return to figuration was ushered by a return to the past, ranging from the classical to the Italian primitives, anything, in short, which escaped the perspectival and humanist forms of the Renaissance convention. This new primitivism was often markedly European in its idiom, with a taste for quotations which at times opened up into full blown irony, as in many forms of surrealism. And yet for the most part, irony was nowhere to be found: thus the purist manifesto (by Ozenfant and Jeanneret, soon to be called Le Corbusier) describe the realm that opens up After Cubism: “The war ends; Everything is organized, … Here, only order and purity illuminate and orient life;” (20) ;
It is easy to imagine how those declaration might have paved the way for the totalitarian regimes: yet one should be wary -as ever- of lumping together disparate strands of thought, which if they certainly overlap, were also proven to oppose in the later years: Hitler was to include many Neue Sachlichkeit artists in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, and Lukacs would show no more sympathy for the movement. There is, for me, a sense in which the conservative values, often hypocritically humanistic, which were proded in the inter-war period are only adopted by many of those artists in order to be pushed, ad-absurdum, into revealing their paradoxes and their fundamental denial of both the body and the alleged essence of man.
The book cover those movements in France, Italy and Germany, through 34 full page and 51 smaller illustrations – they seem in good part to have been selected to illustrate the narrative K. E. Silver provide of them, which gives the book a great coherence. I bought a hardback copy on-line, quite affordable, and the layout as well as the print quality delight me. If one sought for reasons to complain, one could say that the very clarity which the book both illustrates and comment is laudable but also silence important fore-runners of the phenomenon, from the liteary connexions of French neo-classicism harking back, through various incarnations, to the Parnasse, down to the British avant-gardes peculiar call for an art that would be “austere, mechanical, clear-cut and bare” (T. E. Hulme) via the early Tuscan formulations of an earthy, rooted, and “primitive” in the most italian sense, take on cubism, in the person of Ardengo Soffici. Yet space, as always, is a constraint, and the result is very convincing.
In that regard, the "return to order" with which the present book is concerned provide us with a much welcome solace: the totalizing but fissiparous, and elusive character of the first twenty years of the century, and the infinite recesses of theory it produced, seemed to have come to a halt when in 1926 Jean Cocteau published his collection of essays titled "Rappel à l'Ordre": while remaining divided, along political lines in particular, but also stylistic ones, the major actors of the next two decades of European art would be able to show a remarkable cohesion in their technique, principles and concerns, one which stands out against the agitated and ever-divided backdrop of XXth century art-history.
This book is the catalogue of a 2010 Guggenheim exhibition, curated by Kenneth E. Silver, foremost expert on the ideological intricacies of inter-war French culture, and including essays of such field leaders as Emily Braun, James Herbert and Jeanne Nugent.
The first and the by far the longest of the essays is that of Silver, which aims and succeed at providing the lay reader with an overview of art and design between the wars presented through the peculiar lens of the phenomenon variously named Rappel à l'Ordre or Neue Sachlichkeit. Those national forms have their own very distinct identities to which we will return, but first, let us examine that peculiarly common stock of rhetoric that lies below or above the specifics of art practice:
The Great War had been constructed, a priori, into an event of apocalyptic proportions, both the in the state-sponsored imaginary of mass media, and in that, often oddly convergent, of the artistic avant-garde: as the war unfolded and often an increasing awareness of its brutality, absurdity and horror came to supersede the tired old rhetoric, and the discourse of vitalism, celebrating change qua change in a mystical key came to be superseded: “The pulsating life has become an impossible metaphor, and … appear strange to us” writes Franz Roh, one of the reaction's main theoreticians (16). Instead arises the “combination of ghostliness with the cool and immediate Sachlichkeit [precision, matter-of-factness] of the modelling … a return to stolidity and almost classicistic correctness of the sculptural perception of form” (Paul F. Schmidt, 15) ;
This new emphasis on materiality wilfully departed from the deconstructive and absolute abstractions of the war and pre-war years: the return to figuration was ushered by a return to the past, ranging from the classical to the Italian primitives, anything, in short, which escaped the perspectival and humanist forms of the Renaissance convention. This new primitivism was often markedly European in its idiom, with a taste for quotations which at times opened up into full blown irony, as in many forms of surrealism. And yet for the most part, irony was nowhere to be found: thus the purist manifesto (by Ozenfant and Jeanneret, soon to be called Le Corbusier) describe the realm that opens up After Cubism: “The war ends; Everything is organized, … Here, only order and purity illuminate and orient life;” (20) ;
It is easy to imagine how those declaration might have paved the way for the totalitarian regimes: yet one should be wary -as ever- of lumping together disparate strands of thought, which if they certainly overlap, were also proven to oppose in the later years: Hitler was to include many Neue Sachlichkeit artists in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, and Lukacs would show no more sympathy for the movement. There is, for me, a sense in which the conservative values, often hypocritically humanistic, which were proded in the inter-war period are only adopted by many of those artists in order to be pushed, ad-absurdum, into revealing their paradoxes and their fundamental denial of both the body and the alleged essence of man.
The book cover those movements in France, Italy and Germany, through 34 full page and 51 smaller illustrations – they seem in good part to have been selected to illustrate the narrative K. E. Silver provide of them, which gives the book a great coherence. I bought a hardback copy on-line, quite affordable, and the layout as well as the print quality delight me. If one sought for reasons to complain, one could say that the very clarity which the book both illustrates and comment is laudable but also silence important fore-runners of the phenomenon, from the liteary connexions of French neo-classicism harking back, through various incarnations, to the Parnasse, down to the British avant-gardes peculiar call for an art that would be “austere, mechanical, clear-cut and bare” (T. E. Hulme) via the early Tuscan formulations of an earthy, rooted, and “primitive” in the most italian sense, take on cubism, in the person of Ardengo Soffici. Yet space, as always, is a constraint, and the result is very convincing.
Displaying 1 of 1 review