TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081390/0813400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 181 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 74

Modernism's Neglected Side


A first-rate London show assesses the classical revival,
sympathetically but coolly

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Some art seeks the edge, tries to break the boundary. And
other art struggles to refine, integrate, bring the past
forward into the present. Who, in the end, can say with
assurance which is the more valuable? This is the main question
posed by "On Classic Ground," this summer's main show at the
Tate Gallery in London.

    The show's subtitle, "Picasso, Leger, De Chirico and the New
Classicism 1910-1930," only hints at the size of the field it
covers. Its broad subject is the classical revival that spread
through South European art -- mainly French, Italian and
Spanish -- in the wake of World War I and formed a kind of
counterweight to the fragmentation of cubism and feverish
alienation of dada, expressionism and surrealism.

    Up to now this diffuse movement has been dismissed with the
name given it by Jean Cocteau: le rappel a l'ordre, the call
to order. The custom has been to see it as a hiatus in the
forward drive of modernism -- at best a faltering of energy,
and at worst an Arcadian sham, a rehearsal for the coarse,
repressive state art of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. This show
is the first to take an inquisitive and fair-minded look at it.
The curators, Elizabeth Cowling of Edinburgh University and
Jennifer Mundy of the Tate, have done an admirably lucid job
of presenting the material, sympathetic but without inflated
claims.

    One of the exhibition's key paintings is a little-known
Picasso, Studies, from 1920. It looks like a detail from the
wall of his studio on which a number of postcards of his own
works have been arranged, in all their diversity of style:
cubist still lifes reproduced in miniature, but also a woman's
head and two hands done in the rotund "classical" manner he
adopted after 1919. The emblems of fragmentation (both cubist
and antique) share the same pictorial space, essentially that
of a collage, with those of an equally intense longing for
stability and wholeness. It is a singularly moving image
because it speaks so frankly of multiple desires, declaring how
the restless archmodernist was also immersed in Mediterranean
antiquity and the fiction of timeless art. And yet its
nostalgia is part of its modernity.

    If there is a single event in history to which the call to
order can be linked, it is World War I. The appalling chaos,
the industrialization of death, the grinding of a whole
generation into the mud of France by advanced technology --
these spelled an end to positivist fantasies of human progress.
And after the carnage of the trenches, who but a cretin or a
fascist could echo the futurists' rhetoric about war as the
hygiene of civilization? To many artists it must have seemed
that picking up the pieces had priority over more fragmentation.

    One sees this impulse at its clearest in Giorgio De Chirico,
the Italian painter. De Chirico seems to have taken the
futurists' calls to trash the museums very much to heart: after
1918 he appointed himself the defender of tradition, making
copies of old masters and vehemently rebuking other modernists
for their technical ignorance and historical provincialism.
Although very little of what De Chirico painted after 1920 can
claim the poetic intensity of his early "metaphysical" work,
we are a long way from the surrealist prejudice that dismissed
everything De Chirico did after his 30th birthday as rubbish.
But De Chirico's classicism is never secure. As Cowling and
Mundy point out, it is relativistic, deeply Nietzschean in its
anxiety and riven by contradictions. The striking thing about
a painting like Roman Women, 1926, is its lack of classical
poise: the artist invokes the massive bodies of Roman statuary,
but only to subvert their solidity with curious, glaring
patches of inappropriate color.

    Nostalgia for the classical destroyed a good part of De
Chirico's reputation, and it did no good to Andre Derain's
either. A prejudice against Derain still lingers; one is
assured that his real importance to modern art finished with
his fauve years. Yet who could look at a Derain like The
Bagpiper, 1911, poetic, noble and formally coherent in the
highest degree, without sensing that his best work came after
fauvism, and that he has been valued for exactly the wrong
reasons?

    With his contemporaries Matisse, Leger and Braque, of
course, this was not a problem. All three were great
integrative artists who breathed the air of French classicism
throughout their lives. Matisse's prewar paintings, with their
naked figures in glades of pure color, their utterly deceptive,
agrestic simplicity, are the link between Poussin's world and
the modern one. Leger's Three Women, 1921, is as
self-consciously a masterpiece as any salon painting up to and
including Seurat's Grande Jatte, and its nudes have the perfect
dispassionateness of ancient kouroi.

    Italy had no modern equivalent to these artists, which may
be why its classical reaction against futurism went for a more
theatrical imitation of older models. Baroque and rococo were
out; painters went back to the roots of the quattrocento, to
Bellini's clarity and Mantegna's chiseled line, to the columnar
forms and ideal spaces of Piero della Francesca, the primitive
tactile grandeur of Masaccio. If one had to pick a single
painting that epitomized the movement, it would be Felice
Casorati's portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922, with its silvery
tones, excruciating care of drawing, unreal silence and above
all its deliberate evocation of Piero's Madonna della
Misericordia. Some of the artists admired and worked for
Mussolini (though not all: Giorgio Morandi was quite
apolitical). But it is absurd to infer from the politics of
some of its creators that Italian "new classicism" can be
dismissed as art, just as it is naive to think that Ezra Pound's
or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism invalidates the Pisan Cantos or
The Waste Land as literature.

    The "antiquity" of the 1920s was not simply a rehash of the
antiquity venerated by neoclassicists a century before.
Provincial antiquity seemed less mined out and more alive than
mainstream classicism. Thus in Italy -- Massimo Campigli's
painting, for instance, or Marino Marini's sculpture -- the
emphasis shifted from Roman marbles and Greek urns to the
rougher, more vital-looking frescoes and terra-cottas of the
Etruscans. The idea was to recapture a sense of antiquity that
connoted a spirit of place, an Arcadian flavor, more Hesiodic
than Augustan.

    This comes through very strongly in the work of the Catalan
artist Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956), chief painter in the
Noucentista group, a circle of artists and writers who reacted
against art nouveau in Barcelona after 1906. Sunyer's Pastoral,
1910-11, was owned by Joan Maragall, Catalonia's finest
modernist poet, who wrote about it as a virtual icon of
national identity: "Consider the woman in Sunyer's Pastoral --
she is the embodiment of the landscape; she . . . is not there
by chance: she is destiny." It was out of that conservatism --
the cult of the parental farmhouse as the model of Catalan
society -- that Joan Miro (before he reacted into surrealism)
created his detailed and almost fanatically ordered images of
life on his father's property at Montroig, whose climax is The
Farm, 1921-22. This is the first exhibition to give Catalan
Noucentisme its due place in the general pattern of modern art,
and for that alone it is a valuable and original show.

    But there are larger reasons for seeing it. It reminds us
of how ideologically determined the "revolutionary" view of
20th century art has been. One of the pernicious illusions
about modernism lies in treating it as a continuous struggle
against the past, as though every real artist were his own
Oedipus. In fact, the house of inspiration is much larger than
avant-gardist rhetoric has ever allowed. The great transformers
of art history, like Picasso or Matisse, were also its great
conservators. The idea that one tradition was killed stone-dead
in 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and
that another was born from the act, is nonsense. Perhaps there
is no such thing as a deep or genuinely important art based
solely on innovation.

    Certainly no artist before World War I would have thought
so. The real issue has always been discovery and use, not
dismissal, of the mighty energies of the past -- compared with
which the fetish of innovation and the claims of revolution are
mostly chatter.