“First Surrealists Were Cavemen”: The American Abstract Artists and Their Appropriation of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in 1937
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702747
ISSN2329-1249
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoPrevious articleNext article Free“First Surrealists Were Cavemen”: The American Abstract Artists and Their Appropriation of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in 1937Elke SeibertElke SeibertPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHow electrifying it must be to discover a world of new, hitherto unseen pictures! Scholars and artists have described their awe at encountering the extraordinary paintings of Altamira and Lascaux in rich prose, instilling in us the desire to hunt for other such discoveries.1But how does art affect art and how does one work of art influence another? In the following, I will argue for a causal relationship between the 1937 exhibition Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the new artistic directions evident in the work of certain New York artists immediately thereafter.2 The title for one review of this exhibition, “First Surrealists Were Cavemen,” expressed the unsettling, alien, mysterious, and provocative quality of these prehistoric paintings waiting to be discovered by American audiences (fig. 1).3 The title moreover illustrates the extent to which American art criticism continued to misunderstand surrealist artists and used the term surrealism in a pejorative manner.Fig. 1. “First Surrealists Were Cavemen.” Review of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 April to 30 May 1937, Milwaukee Sentinel, 20 May 1937, 13.This essay traces how the group known as the American Abstract Artists (AAA) appropriated prehistoric paintings in the late 1930s. The term employed in the discourse on archaic artists and artistic concepts prior to 1937 was primitivism, a term due not least to John Graham’s System and Dialectics of Art as well as his essay “Primitive Art and Picasso,” both published in 1937 and influential to the AAA members.4 Within this discourse the art of the Ice Age was conspicuous not only on account of the previously unimagined timespan it traversed but also because of the magical discovery of incipient human creativity. The spatial dimensions of the cave, the three-dimensional surface of the rock walls, the effects of light and shadow, and the movement within the pictorial composition—all these struck a nerve with artists in New York.My thesis is that prehistoric cave pictures inspired the genesis of contemporary art, and, to my knowledge, I am the first to research the art of the AAA group within this context. This article is intended as a contribution to fill this gap and to frame the argument of a book-length project I am pursuing on this topic. Members of the AAA were forerunners of nonfigurative art, and they published widely regarded statements directed against the art establishment of their time, as a few examples will highlight in the following. I will be drawing on selected texts by Irving Sandler, now held in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute, as I seek to work through the role of these pioneering abstract artists. In my conclusion, and as an outlook, I will highlight this exhibition of copies of prehistoric cave paintings received at MoMA as an object for future research. This essay, along with my book project, is intended as a contribution to the historiography of American art history and to accentuate a lesser-known aspect of this great narrative.The AAA Group and Its NetworkThroughout the 1930s, members of the AAA group sought to distinguish their work from cubism, regionalism, and social realism in search of their own style. Though interested in advancing the technique of automatism, they also sought to maintain control of their pictorial means. Most of the AAA members were abstract or constructivist artists aligned with the School of Paris. During its foundational period around 1936, this loose group had no manifesto. It included as members Josef Albers, Rosalind Bengelsdorf, Ilya Bolotowsky, Harry Bowden, Byron Browne, Giorgio Cavallon, Burgoyne Diller, Werner Drewes, John Ferren, Suzy Frelinghuysen, Albert Gallatin, Gertrude Glass Greene and Balcomb Greene, Harry Holtzman, Carl Robert Holty, Ray Kaiser (the future Ray Eames), Paul Kelpe, Ibram Lassaw, Alice Mason, George McNeil, George Lovett Kingsland Morris, John Opper, Esphyr Slobodkina, Louis Schanker, David Smith, Albert Swinden, Rupert Turnbull, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Wilfrid Zogbaum, among others.5 Arshile Gorky and Willem De Kooning were close to the group, although they were not official members.Balcomb Greene, the long-standing chairperson of the AAA, recounted the group’s founding in the following terms:There was disagreement in the A.A.A. from the start. Holtzman and Gorky wanted A.A.A. to be an educational organization with classes. Holtzman sounded as if he wanted to be the teacher. Gorky wanted discipline like working in black, red and white. Gorky wanted no exhibitions and stormed out when he was voted down. The group had no general position on abstraction but would argue the point on individual paintings. There was a feeling that art had its roots in nature (Hofmann position).6Some still were students of Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League of New York and then at his private academy on Fifth Avenue, and had not yet established themselves.7 Hofmann influenced their art and introduced them to Piet Mondrian, who from October 1940 onward regularly participated in the group’s meetings. Members of the geometric and lyrical abstract movements also joined the AAA group, but the number of Mondrian adherents predominated. Contemporary artists in the mid-1930s regarded archaic art to be part of nature in general, while all American painters at the time were inspired by nature. In an oral history conversation recorded with Irving Sandler, Vytlacil noted: “Geometric abstraction—people just experimented with it—nothing doctrinaire—Idealism was in the attempt to create a new form…. we felt … The picture must be an object complete in itself … definitely interested in pictorial structure.”8 The AAA was the first such group to turn its back on earlier styles and embrace abstract art, though whether it could be called a homogeneous group or indeed felt it truly belonged is open to debate. Their statutes, set out in 1936, state: “We believe that a new art form has been established which is definite enough in character to demand this unified effort.”9During the group’s seminal and innovative years from 1936 to 1940, they could study works by European avant-garde artists at exhibitions organized by the Pierre Matisse Gallery, by Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art, and at MoMA. But what was the origin of the expressivity in the works of the AAA members? Have we overlooked a source for their inspiration? Certainly, New York artists closely observed important developments in Europe. But they also continued to seek a distinct, independent path, as their texts make clear and as this essay argues.There was a fruitful mobility and exchange of ideas between Paris and New York. Pablo Picasso, who undoubtedly drew inspiration from Magdalenian cave paintings in France, served as one model for the lyrical abstract painters. This was an open secret, not least as Picasso’s mural-sized painting Guernica, with its archaic references to bull motifs, impressed the crowds attending the Exposition Internationale in Paris in 1937.10 Moreover, the artificial cave devised by the prehistorian Henri Breuil, complete with copies of prehistoric cave paintings and artifacts, which was also accessible on the grounds of the exposition, gave attendees at the fair the remarkable opportunity of directly comparing the two works with each other. Breuil and Hugo Obermaier’s 1935 publication, The Cave of Altamira at Santillana del Mar, Spain, widely disseminated the transcriptions or reproductions of these impressive and picturesque animal depictions.11 The French journal Cahier d’Art, which juxtaposed the avant-garde paintings of André Masson, Joan Miró, or Paul Klee with these recently discovered prehistoric paintings, further laid the groundwork for this reception. Constructing the concept of the prehistoric presupposed a linear chronological development that in turned allowed for the isolation of sedimentation, or a time capsule. This in turn became a projection space for visual artists on both sides of the Atlantic and shaped the discourse of the era. However, it was not just the desire for an unblemished prehistory of humankind that was driving the debate surrounding the concept of the prehistoric. It was also the search for a primal creativity.Into this pulsating atmosphere with its sense of departure for new vistas, the AAA inserted itself as an alliance dedicated to establishing an exhibition space for nonfigurative art and sustaining the hopes of its members during the Great Depression. Most of them worked for the Federal Art Project (FAP), which frequently established the connections between the artists and accelerated the group’s consolidation. Both their daily collaboration and their work for the FAP’s Mural Division, for instance, under Burgoyne Diller, a key founding figure of the AAA, established friendships and encouraged the circulation of artistic opinions. In 1937, Gorky took inspiration from Stuart Davis’s large-scale paintings and Fernand Léger’s The City (1919) to create an abstract FAP mural for Newark Airport that questioned the radical nature of the older generation and rejected the socialist style of Diego Rivera’s murals.12 The FAP, with its fixed weekly salary, offered the young painters of the AAA freedom in their artistic development and engendered in them an increased artistic self-confidence. However, it offered little in the way of exhibition opportunities. George Morris described the genesis of avant-garde art in the spaces that resulted: “it would seem that abstract art can fructify only when the artist remains unhampered as he closes upon the endless problems of form in design.”13 However, the 1935 survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Abstract Painting in America, turned out to be a disappointment. As Morris reflected, “most of the artists chosen had become stalled in various ill-digested ferments of impressionism, expressionism, and half-hearted cubism.”14 Meanwhile, for the exhibitions of abstract art at MoMA in 1936–37, the curator Alfred H. Barr relied on European art, that is to say, on established art. The contemporary developments within abstract art by the American avant-garde were disregarded.At roughly the same time, The Ten, another recently established, loose collective, organized a joint exhibition that included Schanker, Bolotowsky, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko. This double helix created its own dynamism that enabled the exchange with the Concretionists, a group founded by Gallatin in 1936, and which included other AAA artists such as Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, Ferren, Morris, and Charles Green Shaw. In this constellation, and despite their independence, The Ten can be seen as the group shaping the format of the AAA. The individualists Graham, Gorky, Davis, and De Kooning, who were reluctant to join any artist groups, defined the spiritual and intellectual climate of a distinctly U.S.-based approach to abstract painting. It was their influence that made it possible for artists in New York to appropriate this new tendency, as Sandler has discussed historically, though they were not part of the group.15By comparison to other groups, the AAA was neither homogeneous nor well organized. However, they were strong competitors on the established art scene and were certainly ambitious. Albers supported them, and André Masson and other important avant-garde artists held presentations for the group. Even the influential French abstract painter Jean Hélion joined the group during his time in New York. The founders also sought to model the group on their European counterparts, such as Abstraction-Création, Cercle et Carré, and Art Concret.16 From 1937 onward, Sophie Taeuber and Jean Arp joined with Morris and Gallatin to publish the journal Plastique.17 These activities intensified the artistic exchange precisely during the year the collective organized its first exhibition, at Squibb Gallery in New York from 3 to 17 April 1937.This was the best-attended exhibition outside a museum that year in New York, clocking up to 1,500 visitors. It was followed by an exhibition at Columbia University from 1 to 30 November the same year, and for the next two years, group exhibitions toured various galleries across the United States, leading Clement Greenberg to state: “The annual exhibitions of the American Abstract Artists … were the most important occasions of these years as far as advanced art in New York was concerned.”18 The self-confidence and the mission of the group’s individual representatives are manifest in the yearbooks of 1938, 1939, and 1946.19 Nevertheless, their attempts to hold their 1938 Annual Exhibition at MoMA failed. Barr had rejected their written requests, arguing that the museum had no available time slot and required approval from the board. This rejection caused frustration in the group.20 Following another historicizing MoMA exhibition, Art in Our Time (1939), and an exhibition of contemporary comic strips, AAA members distributed the provocative protest statement How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art? outside the museum itself.21 With typography by Ad Reinhardt, this leaflet was a pioneering initiative that demanded MoMA give European and American avant-garde artists greater visibility. MoMA subsequently declared this pamphlet a work of art and added it to their permanent collection.They caused another sensation in 1940 with their critical exhibition in response to the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. This exhibition included architectural models by Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Richard Neutra in an attempt to show their broad appeal and present their international reach. However, the more militant AAA activists again sought to vent their dissatisfaction. Rather than producing a yearbook, they published another leaflet titled The Art Critics—!22 In this leaflet, they extended their criticism to include art journalism alongside the art institutions as the official bodies denying them recognition, negating their standing as avant-garde artists, and denigrating the quality of their works. In response, they were defamed by critics as the “American Abstract Academy.” Nevertheless, their renown increased as a result of the controversy. However, with the onset of World War II, the immense appeal of well-known artists emigrating from Europe to escape the conflict, and the rise of new artist associations in New York, their influence quickly waned.Morris, in his introduction to the group’s 1939 yearbook, and probably without intending to do so, laid out the group’s legacy.23 In response to criticism that they were too beholden to the School of Paris, he detailed the continuous development of contemporary art and underscored the need for precursors to engender development: “If art-forms were being realized that would express the contemporary spirit, … which had been the basic properties of art … since the first scratchings of the cave-men … they would have to be put forward by the artists themselves.” He rejects the contemporary argument that abstract art is “un-American” by referring to the past, alluding to both the art of the Ice Age and the prehistoric rock art of North America: “The opposition which abstract art has encountered … in America gives particular cause for surprise in that from the earliest times the native American art was very abstract in feeling.” He underscores that the AAA wants to continue to give people throughout the United States the opportunity to see modern, contemporary American art. Morris recommended to Barr: “An exhibition could be planned so as to include the Stone Age, and various phases of abstract art through … the Arab Periods (when all art was required to be non-representational), … into the contemporary European and American movements.”In their 1946 entry to the AAA yearbook, Albers, Mondrian, and Léger noted the extent to which the historic situation had changed. And Gallatin once again sharply criticized the collection policies of the museum in New York. Whereas in 1939, Morris could reflect on the crisis in world politics and the diaspora of the European avant-garde artists as he contrasted the independence of the American artists’ pictorial language to the European abstract movement, now the geographic displacement within the art world and American abstract expressionism had become reality.24Rethinking American Art HistoryHowever, the AAA members never received their due recognition, either from Barr himself, their immediate peers, or from the main figures central to subsequent American art history, despite their clear artistic similarities to Barnett Newman, Davis, De Kooning, Gorky, or Gottlieb. MoMA continued to rely on established artists and dismissed the AAA with their innovative potential out of hand, despite the quality of many of the members’ work. Though there are many reasons, the end result nevertheless remains that only specialists are aware of the AAA and their historical importance.It is all the more surprising, then, that Sandler, in his pioneering publication Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American Painting (1970), dedicated so much space to the foundation and organization of the AAA group, before then ignoring their artistic influence.25 His personal notes at the Getty Research Institute offer a more nuanced conclusion on the interconnections and intertwining of the AAA. Despite this, even fellow travelers such as McNeil retrospectively denied the group had any great significance, albeit with a note of regret: “The A.A.A. was never significant. There were always schisms…. We felt ourselves second generation to School of Paris…. Around 1943, a whole bunch of boys started painting abstractly and usurped the position which should have belonged to us.”26In his subsequent survey of American abstract expressionism, Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (2009), Sandler no longer gives the AAA collective any space. Even though he counted Ferren and Opper among his artistic friends, they didn’t help correct this image. Had the individualism of the postwar years reshaped their view? Had their memories been reinterpreted, a phenomenon encountered all too frequently in interviews? Or did they want to rewrite American art history, as Robert Motherwell attempted? Had the ideals of the AAA run their course? Did the AAA indeed challenge the institutions of art and art criticism? Certainly, Sandler’s essay “The Four Musketeers of Modernism at the Height of the Great Depression” provided an in-depth analysis of the concurrent networks of artistic circles in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the fact that AAA not only was the largest art group in terms of numbers alone but also served as the largest platform for generating new art is frequently overlooked.27 The youthful ease of the AAA members, their refreshing dynamism, and the innovativeness of their early years appear to have suffered under the weight of subsequent, historic events, the impressive presence of European immigrants such as Max Ernst, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, or Léger, and the exceedingly self-indulgent behavior of the abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s. All this subsumed the artistic ideas of the AAA.Sandler’s interviews with artists in the 1960s offer informative details on the importance of the AAA between 1936 and 1940. In his publications he makes the argument that the historic situation of the Great Depression facilitated the founding of the AAA and denies them any artistic impetus. However, in his papers he describes them as interconnected activists who shaped the New York debates and paved the way for an American avant-garde. Although this young collective was not ideological in the political sense, its members appear to have been somewhat strict and pigheaded when discussing their artistic principles. Reflecting on his connection to the group, De Kooning noted: “I wasn’t a member of the A.A.A. but with them. I disagreed with their narrowness—their telling me not to do something.”28 Some artists were even rejected for not following the self-imposed rules, while Léger was expelled for not paying his membership dues. They even turned down Meyer Schapiro! Writing about the AAA, Gorky described them as “spring chickens.” However, they were young rebels: they embraced subversive actions, such as distributing the leaflet How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art? outside the museum entrance, conspicuously dressed in raincoats, to visitors, passersby, journalists, and officials during the opening of the MoMA exhibition they were boycotting. Concluding the summary of his time with the AAA, Vytlacil noted: “Esthetics never came up nor did the demand ever come up…. Let’s knock the academy on its heels.”29The AAA persists even now as an artistic association and the object of art-historical research.30 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, solo and group exhibitions paid tribute to this second wave of American modernity.31 More recently, there have been signs of a renaissance.32 The catalog Constructive Spirit (2010) considers the pan-American dialogue on geometric abstraction, while several recent studies in America are focusing on the excellent contacts to Mexican artists and the strong impact of their leftist thought, which they considered exemplary.33 The Mexican socialist comrades and their painterly style provided the brimming pictures for the revolution and for the regionalism of the mural painters. Rivera and José Clemente Orozco were painting in 1930s New York, while David Alfaro Siqueiros maintained an experimental workshop there from 1936 to 1937.34 Mesoamerican art was as attractive as the archaic artifacts of the indigenous people and easily accessible. Today it is beyond doubt that Albers derived the formula and scale for his iconic Homage to the Square series from Mesoamerican pyramids.35 However, none of these texts mention the influence of prehistoric rock art or the effects of the 1937 MoMA exhibition on the AAA. Recovering the history of this forgotten exhibition will show that prehistoric rock paintings inspired the AAA in their turn to nonfigurative art, which is the focus of my research and book project.The Forgotten Exhibition: Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and AfricaAt this juncture in the history of American art, the exhibition Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa (1937) at MoMA served as a catalyst for the appropriation of prehistoric rock painting (fig. 2).36 However, with the outbreak of World War II and the death of the ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), the German patron who lent the reproductions of the prehistoric works that formed the heart of the exhibition, the show was conveniently forgotten.37 Even MoMA’s archive offers comparatively little information on the subject that is publicly accessible.38 The fact that these pictures and their reception have become the object of recent art-historical research at all borders on a miracle.39 If Barr had included prehistoric art on the flow chart with which he traced the most important influences for the development of contemporary abstract art and which he published in the 1936 catalog for Cubism and Abstract Art, prehistoric rock paintings would now be an integral part of the canon of so-called primitivism. It was purely by coincidence that this exhibition, the third in a series after Cubism and Abstract Art (1936) and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936), supported Barr’s theses on primitivism, as Frobenius had previously been away on expeditions.Fig. 2. Installation view, Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 April to 30 May 1937. Photo by Soichi Sunami. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Two painted facsimiles of prehistoric rock paintings from Zimbabwe, to scale. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.By 1937, Frobenius had built a collection of about 3,500 copies of prehistoric rock paintings. These were the result of twelve on-site expeditions, made between 1904 and 1935, to the Sahara, southern Africa, and Europe, and were produced by academically trained painters. From this cache, MoMA selected copies of the well-known Altamira cave paintings as well as paintings from Norway, France, Italy, and Africa. Hunting scenes made up of handprints and motifs depicting horses, bison, mammoths, and stags from Europe, ritualistic presentations and depictions of bowmen, prehistoric men praying and dancing, and scenes depicting antelopes, elephants, giraffes, and lions from Africa filled the rooms. The big surprises for visitors to the exhibition were the abstract motifs consisting of points, lines, hatchings, signs, and symbols. Paintings showing the dematerialized bodies of humans and animals as well as amorphous rock and landscape formations appeared surreal and modern to the observer.These pictures lead us back to fundamental questions of art history. What is abstraction? What was the intention and in what state of consciousness did the Ice Age artists approach their work? What specific qualities of prehistoric artifacts offered solutions to artistic problems within the European avant-garde? And at what point does the writing of art history begin?Although Barr had already planned to include copies of the rock painting for the 1936 season, he did not mention them in his flow chart, not least because he at first underestimated their influence on the genesis of new art. Writing to Barr, the film curator Iris Barry reported that the exhibition would include most of the works shown on the previous European tour of the Frobenius collection.40 This also meant that the selected works remained basically the same as in the previous exhibitions at Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich. Barr only selected a few works personally during a visit to Frankfurt in July and August of 1936. Preparations for the two-year tour (1937–39) of twenty-nine U.S. cities (including stops at the San Francisco Museum of Art; Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art; Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia; City Art Museum in St. Louis; Honolulu Academy of Art, and others) included making “copies of the copies” at the studio in Frankfurt (1935–37). It was the large-scale highlights of the collection on view in all the European exhibitions that also caught Barr’s attention. However, he was the first curator to place them in dialogue with European avant-garde artworks. Despite the thousands of photographs available in Frankfurt, only a few black-and-white photographs complemented the painted copies, some of which followed the original scale and size. These provided a comparison between the different media and provided an impression of the rocks’ surface. Barr’s main focus was on the painterly aspect: the quickly executed watercolors and the copies with strongly overpainted surfaces. Nevertheless, the painterly qualities of the Frankfurt copies varied strongly; some were even reminiscent of scientific documents at the time. Despite this, the general public largely accepted the process of transformation from original to copy, and the authenticity of the works was not questioned.Unlike in Europe, artist-made copies were increasingly regarded in the United States as independent works of contemporary art. For at the time, thousands of American artists sought gainful employment working for the FAP and made ends meet by copying cultural goods for the Index of American Design.41 Despite the discussions arising from the varying quality of mural paintings, and despite Gorky referring to the socialist style as “poor art for poor people,”42 Barr saw a connection to contemporary art: “Today walls are painted so that the artist may eat, but in prehistoric times walls were painted so that the community might eat.”43Barr ultimately steered the concept in a visionary direction and reacted to the dynamism of the exhibition project.44 He drew connections between the prehistoric rock art copies and work by the European avant-garde as well as to surrealist painters, including Klee, Masson, Miró, Arp, Kandinsky, Vladimir Lebedev, and Mikhail Larionov. He exhibited the avant-garde works in a separate section on the fourth floor of the museum building along with a collection of old red monochromatic and polychromatic Native American petroglyphs from the Chumash cave paintings in California. The FAP artist Lala Eve Rivol had copied them for the Index in 1935. Her drawings rendered these artifacts with greater authenticity than had been the case in previous publications.45 This led Barr to regard these as works of contemporary art and to include them in the exhibition. It is likely that this addition was the idea of Dorothy Miller, MoMA’s assistant curator of painting and sculpture. Miller was the wife of the FAP’s national director, Holger Cahill, and took over the management of Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa while preparing and hanging the exhibition alongside Frobenius’s American employee, Douglas Fox. It was due to Fox’s commitment that Walter Chrysler financed the project and promoted Frobenius, introducing him to the high society of New York. Barr, Frobenius, and Fox agreed to work on additional projects, though these never saw the light of day.While the titles of the paintings by Kandinsky (fig. 3), Arp (figs. 4, 5), and Klee (see fig. 7) may have seemed incoherent when first mentioned in the press, Barr’s intentions become clearer when considered al
Referência(s)