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Oversights in overseeing modernism: A symptomatic reading of Alfred H. Barr Jr's ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ chart

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502361003595006

1470-1308

Bernard Vere,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Théophile Gautier, Souvenirs de Théâtre, d'art et de critique (Paris: Charpentier, 1883), p. 203 (my italics). First published in L'Evénement, August 8, 1848, and quoted in Matei Calinescu, Fives Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 46. Wyndham Lewis, ‘Manifesto’, Blast 1 [1914], rpt. (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2002), p. 39. F. T. Marinetti, ‘Futurist Speech to the English: Given at the Lyceum Club of London, 1910’ in R. W. Flint (ed.), trans. R. W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli, Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), pp. 67–73. This quote p. 68. Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 325. The first quote is Kantor's. In the second, she is quoting Robert Rosenblum. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 13. Hereafter cited as RC in the text, followed by the page reference. As well as this gouache by Lewis, the exhibition contained Moore's Two Forms (1934); a Nicholson Relief (1935 – a similar work, also titled Relief, from the previous year is illustrated in the catalogue); a 1927 McKnight-Kauffer poster for London Underground; and Lubetkin's Penguin Pool, here described as ‘Penguin Pond’. Moore, McKnight-Kauffer, Nicholson and Lubetkin were illustrated in the catalogue (Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, exh. cat. MoMA, New York, 1936. Reprinted by Secker and Warburg, 1975). Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Grids’ in her The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1986), p. 10. Krauss, ‘Grids’, p. 21. As well as being the cover of the catalogue, during the exhibition Barr's chart hung alongside the works of the movements it describes. Sigfried Giedeon, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete [1928], trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center, 1995), pp. 130–31, 132-33 (two buildings from the 1870s linked by arrows to 1927 apartment housing by Mies van der Rohe and the 1926 Bauhaus Dessau by Walter Gropius). Marcel Breuer, ‘A Bauhaus Film’ (a series of Breuer's chairs from the 1920s showing their evolution towards a point where man will sit on a column of air), Bauhaus no. 1 (July 1926). El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, The Isms of Art [1925], facs. rpt. (Baden: Lars Müller, 1990). Ian Christie compares these charts to Barr's in ‘Mass-Market Modernism’, Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939, Christopher Wilk (ed.), exh. cat. Victoria and Albert Museum (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006), p. 390. Giedion links his examples to ‘suggest the evolutionary path’ (Building in France…, p. 130, n. 57); Breuer writes next to his chair designs that they get ‘better and better with each year’; Lissitzky and Arp open their text with a quote from Malevich which begins ‘The actual time is the epoch of all analyses, the result of all systems that ever were established’ and concludes with a call to ‘construct the system of unity’ by rectifying the ‘imperfections’ that these analyses reveal (The Isms of Art, p. viii). Margaret Scolari Barr, interviewed by Paul Cummings, 1974. Quoted in Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., p. 26. See: Meyer Shapiro, ‘Nature of Abstract Art’, Marxist Quarterly, 1 (January–March 1937): 77–98; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 50–51; and Susan Noyes Platt, ‘Modernism, Formalism, and Politics: The “Cubism and Abstract Art” Exhibition of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art’, Art Journal, 47(4)(1988), pp. 291–92. Barr quoted in (ed.) Timothy Materer, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1915-24 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 3. ‘For more than a decade there has been a steady deflation of that intellectual exuberance which had sent out over the earth the waves of cubism, futurism, vorticism’. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Fall of Paris’, excerpted in (eds) Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), p. 550. Barr, Cubism and Abstract Art, p. 120. Anthony Parton, Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 215. Rayism is, I suspect, omitted because, like Vorticism, it can only be connected to a machine aesthetic is a highly qualified manner. Parton also discusses a letter that Larionov wrote to Barr, parts of which ‘imply a mystical content in rayism’ (p. 215). The major buyer of Vorticist works at the auction was Richard Wyndham. He told the Daily Sketch that he had purchased ‘practically the whole of the Vorticist section for less than the cost of a crate of American champagne’ (quoted in Paul O'Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis [London: Pimlico, 2001], p. 269). Lewis then satirised Wyndham in his novel The Apes of God. Wyndham retaliated by offering two major Lewis oils, Kermesse and Plan of War, for sale in the classified section of The Times, since when neither has been seen. Other losses include Slow Attack, Eisteddfod, Red Duet and Christopher Columbus. The majority of Edward Wadsworth's oils from the same period are also lost. Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory claims that: ‘artworks are like picture puzzles in that what they hide – like Poe's letter – is visible and is, by being visible, hidden’. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (eds), ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), p. 121. Poe's purloined letter is hidden, of course, precisely in full view, both by the Queen and by the minister who steals it from her. Searching the minister's house, the police are unable to find it, despite the fact that it is held in a letter rack above his fireplace. All the minister has done is refolded the letter, re-addressed it, and changed the seal from red to black. Poe's story is also discussed at length in the second book of Jacques Lacan's Seminar and it is worth noting that Althusser acknowledges his debt to Lacan early in Reading Capital (RC, 16, n. 1). In many ways, my reading runs parallel to that of W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 230–39. Mitchell does, however, treat all the red boxes as equivalent. Giedion, Building in France…, p. 143. See Christina Lodder's discussion of the Monument in her Russian Constructivism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP, 1983), pp. 55–67. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. ‘Russian Diary’, entry for January 3, 1928, in Irving Sandler and Amy Newman (eds), Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), p. 113. LEF Manifesto from LEF 2 (April–May, 1923). Reprinted in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 305–306. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh's ‘From Faktura to Factography’, October 30 (Fall 1984), pp. 82–119, describes the change away from painting and in favour of projects such as Lissitzky's Pressa exhibition installation, as well as giving an account of Barr's visit and the way in which, despite being fascinated, it had little impact on his project: ‘[I]t was this perseverance, as much as anything else, that prevented, until the late ‘60s, the program of productivism and the methods of factographic production from entering the general consciousness of American and European audiences’ (84). For an assertion that this situation had still not been resolved by the mid-1980s – and that it had affected the museum's attitude to subsequent political work – see Douglas Crimp's essay ‘The Art of Exhibition’ in his On The Museum's Ruins (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993), especially pp. 260–69. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), p. 156. Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., p. 146. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Architectural Press, 1962), p. 153. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859) (often known simply as the ‘1859 Preface’) in Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings (London: Fontana, 1969), p. 85. Here I agree with Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 234, when he writes of the chart's ‘rhetoric in which aesthetic elitism, Marxist radicalism and scientific rationalism can find a common language’. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 84. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism. Vol. 1: The Founders, trans. P. S. Falla (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 338. Friedrich Engels, Letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21–22, 1890, Marx and Engels: Basic Writings, p. 438. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings, p. 436. Marx and Engels: Basic Writings, p. 435. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1995), p. 93. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 23. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane ‘Preface to the 1991 Reprint’ in their edited collection, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930. Rpt. with a New Preface (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 11. Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’ in Tony Pinkey (ed.), his collection The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), p. 45. Quotes such as these three are hardly exceptional, and I could have extended their number almost indefinitely. It is now generally accepted that Black Square was painted not long before it was exhibited at the ‘0,10’ exhibition at the end of 1915. See T. J. Clark's chapter ‘God is Not Cast Down’ in his Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 225–97. Again the date is questionable, most modern histories beginning at around 1920, but this probably reflects a knowledge of Tatlin's Corner Reliefs. Elaine S. Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (New York: Fromm, 1997), p. 182, citing an interview with Fritz Hesse (Dessau's mayor) by Reginald Isaacs in the Archives of American Art. That is, if we consider the original wartime signatories to de Stijl's First Manifesto rather than van Doesburg's all-inclusive, retrospective list of 1927 (Lissitzky, Ball, Arp, Severini, Richter and Brancusi are among the names added). Of the seven signatories, only Huszar (Hungary) and Vantongerloo (Belgium) were born outside The Netherlands. Bart van der Leck had already left the group by the time of the manifesto; Gerrit Rietveld was yet to join. Other prominent Dutch members were the architects J. J. P. Oud and Cornelis van Eesteren. The situation is further complicated by the remarkable fact that the grouping was so diffuse that Rietveld never met Mondrian. Louis Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1990), p. 104. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, p. 97. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, p. 100. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, p. 106. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, p. 113. Michael Sprinker, ‘Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (eds), The Althusserian Legacy (London: Verso, 1993), p. 205. For a much fuller discussion of these issues see David Cottington, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris, 1905–1914 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998), Chapter 2. As Paul Edwards notes: ‘There was, for the English painters, no equivalent of the dealer system in Paris, where Kahnweiler, for example, supported painters and carefully handled the showing and marketing of their works on the basis of shared commercial advantage’. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 96. London's developed infrastructure as a centre for literary production meant that it could sustain radical modernism in this field, and the argument I am making for the visual arts throughout this essay holds far less true for the literary. Ezra Pound, ‘The Renaissance III’, Poetry, vol. 6, no. 2 (May 1915), p. 85. Earlier parts of the article had been published in the February and March issues of Poetry. In this context, see in particular Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989). The situation in England is described by Brandon Taylor in his essay ‘Foreigners and Fascists: Patterns of Hostility to Modern Art in Britain before and after the First World War’ in David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (eds), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 169–98. Exact figures for population size and growth vary. Le Corbusier gives the following figures for Paris, London, Berlin and New York between 1880–1910 in The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1987): Paris: 2,200,000 (1880), 3,000,000 (1910), an increase of just over 36 per cent; London: 3,800,000 (1880), 7,200,000 (1910), an increase of almost 90 per cent; Berlin: 1,840,000 (1880), 3,400,000 (1910), an increase of almost 85 per cent; and New York: 2,800,000 (1880), 4,500,000 (1910), an increase of just over 70 per cent (p. 94). So not only was London the largest city (and Paris the smallest by 1910), it also has the fastest rate of growth in those 30 years (and Paris the slowest). Louis Althusser, ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in his Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 187. Althusser's retrospective insistence on the importance of underdetermination (‘I am deliberately stressing underdetermination, because while certain people easily accepted a simple supplement to determination, they could not accept the idea of underdetermination’) is problematic. In choosing to oppose ‘under’ and ‘over’ he appears to suggest that, rather like the three bears' possessions, there would be one that was ‘just right’ – that is to say he seems to establish a quantitative scale that is alien to his original conception, where he lists a number of revolutionary situations which were overdetermined towards failure (‘I should like to suggest that an “overdetermined contradiction” may be either overdetermined in the direction of a historical inhibition, a real “block” for the contradiction … or in the direction of revolutionary rupture’ ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, p. 106). It is also has the effect of disguising ‘overdetermination's’ psychoanalytic provenance, more on which below. Nevertheless I have retained the term for its suggestive, rather than theoretical, power. In her biography of Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy writes: ‘Yet England offered no chance. Its educational system was untouched by the free-thinking tolerance of the London circle. By the spring of 1937 Moholy had become tired and melancholic’. Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1969), pp. 137–38. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, For Marx, p. 101. This also holds true for the subsequent treatment of overdetermination by post-Marxists and post-Althusserians. The point I am making is that concepts cannot be exchanged between theoretical arguments intact like marbles can be between schoolchildren. For psychoanalytic borrowings, see Jean Laplanche's essay ‘The Derivation of Psychoanalytic Entities’ included as an Appendix to his Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), especially his observation that: ‘Paradoxically, in fact, psychoanalytic terminology is characterized simultaneously by its specificity and by its borrowed or “derived” character’ (p. 129). For a defence of the slogan see the section ‘Remark on the Category: “Process without a Subject or Goal(s)”’, the final part of the essay ‘Reply to John Lewis’, in Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, pp. 94–99. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 28–29. El Lissitzky, from Russia, The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union (1930), included in Stephen Bann (ed.), The Tradition of Constructivism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 140. Joan Copjec, ‘The Sartorial Superego’ in her Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), p. 91. ‘Just as the intense industrialization of the past decades of peace had attacked, affected, and caused disorders of the nervous system of those engaged in industry more than ever before, so the enormously increased mechanization of present-day warfare presents the gravest dangers and disorders to the nerves of fighting men’. Kafka, Letter of October 30, 1916 to Felice Bauer, in Letters to Felice. Quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 223. Such anxieties were not confined to the mechanical, however: ‘Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish’. Ibid. Quoted Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, pp. 225–26. To move is to crash. To remain still is to be leached away by media ghosts. Either way the limits of man are incarnated. Practically the whole of Civilization and Its Discontents concerns, of course, this subject. But especially in passages such as: ‘Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times … we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character’. Sigmund Freud, in James Strachey (trans. and ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), 24 vols, vol. XXI, pp. 91–92. ‘[T]he destruction of man's inner quiet and security has remained the most conspicuous effect of the industrial revolution. The individual goes under before the march of production; he is devoured by it’. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 99. El Lissitzky, Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union, in The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 140. El Lissitzky, Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union, in The Tradition of Constructivism, p. 140. K. S. Malevich, ‘On the Museum’ in Troels Andersen (ed.), Essays on Art, 1915–1933, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Pras and Arnold McMillin (London and Chester Springs, PA: Rapp and Whiting/Dufour Editions, 1969), 2 vols, 1, pp. 68–72, 72. In the same essay he comments: ‘If we take tractors or motor cars to the backward villages, and set up corresponding schools, then teaching about carts will hardly be necessary’ 1: 70. The New Man is a lithograph of a mechanical puppet that Lissitzky created as part of a portfolio, detailing his project to produce an ‘electro-mechanical peepshow’ of Victory Over the Sun. Malevich had completed the designs for the original production in 1913. It was revived by UNOVIS at Vitebsk in 1920. Lissitzky's own designs were completed in Moscow in 1920–1921 and produced as a portfolio in Hanover. See his account in ‘The plastic form of the electromechanical peepshow “Victory over the sun”’ in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (ed.), El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Text, trans. Helen Aldwinkle and Mary Whittall (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), pp. 351–52. Clark, Farewell to An Idea, pp. 240–41. F. T. Marinetti, ‘We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters, the Last Lovers of the Moon’, Let's Murder the Moonshine, p. 74. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–1926), Revised ed. (London and New York: John Calder/Riverrun, 1982), p. 34. Technology in the city is obviously easier to romanticize when one doesn't have it. Rodchenko's 1925 visit to Paris failed to match his expectations: ‘Why did I have to see it, this West? I loved it better without having seen it. Take its technology from it, and it remains a rotten pile of manure, helpless and decrepit.’ Quoted in Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2005), p. 220. Marinetti, ‘We Abjure Our Symbolist Masters, the Last Lovers of the Moon’, p. 75. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Cubist Room’, in Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (eds), Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), p. 57. This was the catalogue introduction for the exhibition ‘Post-Impressionists, Cubists and Others’ at which Lewis showed alongside the future Vorticists Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton and Edward Wadsworth, as well as C. R. W. Nevinson (who remained a Futurist) and Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg. The exhibition opened in December 1913 and Lewis's piece was reprinted in the Egoist of January 1, 1914. The term ‘Vorticism’ would not be coined until shortly before the launch of Blast six months later. Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, Let's Murder the Moonshine, p. 92. Lewis, ‘The Cubist Room’, p. 57. Lewis, ‘The Cubist Room’, p. 57. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, p. 114. Lewis, ‘The Cubist Room’, p. 57 (my italics). David Peters Corbett, ‘The Geography of Blast: Landscape, Modernity and English Painting, 1914-1930’ in The Geographies of Englishness, p. 119. Marinetti, ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, p. 96. Michael Durman and Alan Munton, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Nature of Vorticism’ in Giovanni Cianci (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura/Pittura (Palermo: Sellerio, 1982), p. 111. David Wragg, ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Visions of Modernity’ in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Great London Vortex: Modernist Literature and Art (Bath: Sulis Press, 2003), p. 159, n. 90. Giovanni Cianci, ‘The Centrality of the City’ in The Great London Vortex, p. 18. Lisa Tickner, ‘English Modernism in the Cultural Field’ in David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry (eds), English Art 1860–1914: Modern Artists and Identity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 30. Sheldon Cheney, A Primer of Modern Art. Barr's Bibliography cites the 1927 edition, which I have been unable to consult. However, a comparison of the 1924 first edition (New York: Boni and Liveright) with the 1939 edition (New York: Tudor) reveals the material on Vorticism to be identical, with the exception of the substitution of Lewis's Design for a Programme Cover – Kermesse for Wadsworth's Rotterdam. Quotes here are from pp. 133, 135, 136 (the pagination is also identical in both editions). Frank Rutter, Some Contemporary Artists (London: Leonard Parsons, 1922), p. 184. Rutter, Some Contemporary Artists, p. 20. Frank Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art: A Study of Modern Painting, new ed. (London: George Harrap, 1932), pp. 114–15. Rutter, Evolution in Modern Art, p. 115.