[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: January 10, 2011]
Too late to recommend or counsel against this show, which is closing as I write, but perhaps some of you saw it and might be interested in my brief reflections. And firstly, what an unpromising subject, aesthetically speaking. Without diving deep into the press materials, the pretext for this typically large and wide-ranging exhibit seems to be the view that European artists, between the wars, derived comfort from the revival and use of certain tropes from classical art and architecture. The fragments served to shore them, as it were, against the ruins of the modern world.
Something like that, anyway, although it clearly begs a budget of questions. For one thing, what is classical art? It seems plausible, at least, that many of the painters and sculptors shown here were engaging with neo-classical revivalism of the previous century, rather than directly with the art of Greece and Rome itself. Secondly, while the conservative artists in the show used classicism (or neo-classicism) to represent predictable reactionary values of purity and strength, other artists - Picasso and De Chirico, for example - turn classical influences to quite different purposes. In other words, there are a number of quite different things going on in the show.
One unitary use of classical motifs is demonstrated unequivocally in the later stages of the show, namely their recuperation in support of the German and Italian fascist revolutions. A depressing succession of noble workers and soldiers line the last few twists of the Gugg's spiral, leading spectators to a final gloomy annex of tawdry pictures depicting warriors and heroes and the odd broken column.
This is the final flourish, if you like, of a theme which courses through the entire exhibition. Not so much fascism, or even classicism, as a tedious conservatism in twentieth century art; an argument, if you like, which failed in its day to convince and which will win few hearts now. Too many bad, banal, uncritically "realist" pictures. The correct term, I believe, is "kitsch," although you might make do with "cheesy."
The occasional modernist work, breaking the monotony, blows the competition out of the water: consider, for example, a cubist harlequin by Juan Gris - a marvel of perspectives and critical use of picture space - hung alongside several drably representational depictions of similar subjects. Balthus, that gadly, paints a French street scene ("La Rue"), all storefronts and upright citizens, but his wit produces so gaily subversive an effect, one almost wonders what the picture is doing in the show at all?
Similarly, the wit of De Chirico is at work in a ballet costume which is little more than a gent's suit constructed from Ionic (or Doric?) columns? Seeing this, one might expect the curator to detect at least some irony in paintings by the same artist which feature classical themes.
Unfortunately, the curatorial obsession here lies not with the possibility of classicism being deployed in an ironic or critical manner, but with the identification of classical motifs in the most unpromising contexts. Anything resembling a column or fluting, it sometimes seems, shows the artist engaging with classical influences. One wants to point out that the reason heads in these twentieth-century pictures resemble the heads in Greek or Roman statuary is not that aesthetic influences were at work but because, essentially, that's what heads look like. In particular, one wants to protest that Léger's project of breaking down human figures into collections of spheres and columns has much less to do with classical art than with a critique of industrial modernity.
On a positive note, a delicious work by an artist unfamiliar to me. Ernesto Puppo's "Gate." Just that, a medium-sized alumnium gate featuring a series of faces in profile. Every face is so utterly modern, straight out of some Italian equivalent of Vanity Fair, that the curatorial twittering about carvings of faces on gates in the classical period seems especially out of place. This is a light, elegant work, and wholly of its era.
The Guggenheim's view of the show is here.
Comments