Death of The School of Paris

In mid July 2007, I began reading Bernard Dorival's book Twentieth Century Painters a rare French publication from 1958 - which was what made it so fascinating and quirky. I found the book in the Ilac Library in Dublin city centre. They seemed to have owned it since it was first published.  Bernard Dorival's (b1914 - d2003) was a French art historian, art critic and museum head who wrote many books on modern French art.  Like most art books from that period, its colour plates were tipped into the text and some of them had fallen off for want of glue. In my multi-cultural world, I would have been forgiven for thinking that this was a history of world painters - or at least of France, German, Britain and America. However, this was an all France based book.

             

The history of art is a story of records and erasures. For every artist we the general art public chooses to remember there are a thousand-and-one that we consign to the graves of oblivion.

             

The history of art is also a tale of shooting-star artists, laughable artist’s statements, hubristic manifestos, zeitgeist propaganda, critical errors and public bad taste.

             

For the historian though such records like; newspaper reviews, gossip column articles, artists manifestos and outspoken opinions and predictions (right or wrong) from critics are worth their weight in gold. They tell the story as it happened - without the tiding up and ordering of historical memory. Bernard Dorival's book is one such gem. To my taste, it was hilariously French - very grand, very verbose, very poetic, very philosophical, and very concerned with paint and its application to canvas. I could not think when I had last read a book on modern art in which over 66% of the painters were unknown to me - but this book had them in spades!

             

Now bear with me while I list the artists he discussed and see how many you remember from art books or trips to the museum; Yves Alix, Francois Arnal, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Aujame, Balthus, Andre Bauchant, Jean Bazaine, Andre Beaudin, Jean Bertholle, Roger Bissiere, Camille Bombois, Franciso Bores, Jean-Louis Boussingault, Yves Brayer, Maurice Brianchon, Bernard Buffet, Jacques Busse, Christian Caillard, Aristide Caillaud, Jean Marie Calmettes, Julies Cavailles, Marc Chagall, Roger Chapelain-Midi, Roger Chastel, Giorgio  i Chirico, Jean Cortot, Lucien Goutaud, Salvador Dalí, Gabriel Dauchot, Georges Dayez, Francois Desnoyer, Jacques Despierre, Jean Dewasne, Jean-Jacques Deyrolle, Pierre Dmitrienko, Jacques Doucet, Jean Dubuffet, Bernard Dufour, Charles Dufresne, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Maurice Esteve, Jean Eve, Jean Fautrier, Andre Fougeron, Robert-Edgar Gillet, Leon Gischia, Edouard Goerg, Emmanuel Gondouin, Marcel Gromaire, Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Auguste Herbin, Robert Humbolt, Henri Jannot, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling, Felix Labisse, Jacques Lagrange, Andre Lanskov, La Patelliere, Charles Lapique, Robert LaPoujade, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jules Lefranc, Raymond Legueult, Jean Le Moal, Roger Limouse, Bernard Lorjou, Jean Lurcat, Alfred Manessier, Andre Marchand, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Andre Minaux, Jean Miró, Luc-Albert Moreau, Louis Nallard, Roland Oudot, Amedee Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Michel Patrix, Dominique Peyronnet, Jean Piaubert, James Pichette, Edouard Pignon, Andre Planson, Serge Poliakoff, Daniel Ravel, Paul Rebeyrolle, Rene Rimbert, Georges Rohner, Henri Rousseau, Pierre Roy, Gerard Schneider, Seraphine, Gustave Singier, Pierre Soulages, Chaïm Soutine, Nicolas de Staël, Leopold Survage, Pierre Tal-Coat, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor Vasarely, Claude Venard, Vieira da Silva, Louis Vivin, Charles Walch, Henry de Waroqier, Wols, Leon Zack and finally Zao Wou Ki!

             

All that, but only a few footnotes on bloody Picasso, Braque, Gris, Matisse or Modigliani - for a book covering painting from 1905-1958! God only knows how Dorival justified that to himself!

             

So how many names did you remember? I remembered the following: Jean-Michel Atlan, Balthus, Roger Bissiere, Camille Bombois, Bernard Buffet, Marc Chagall, Giorgio di Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Jean Dubuffet, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Edouard Goerg, Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling, Henri Le Fauconnier, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Jean Miró, Roland Oudot, Amedee Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Serge Poliakoff, Henri Rousseau, Seraphine, Pierre Soulages, Chaïm Soutine, Nicolas de Staël, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor Vasarely,Vieira Da Silva, Wols, and Zao Wou Ki! A little less than a third - and I had been studying French art since I was ten!

             

I mention all this for a profound reason - it beautifully illustrates for me - the power of history to forget. This book was only forty-nine years old yet it might as well have been four  hundred years old for all its antiquated notions of; male genius, the metaphysical meaning of the brushstroke, the fetish of the hand of the painter and the lauding of the tradition of painting that stretched back to Courbet the first great (self-appointed) Realist painter. Yes it is true that most of these artists were mediocrities of never more than local interest but don't go fooling yourself – some of these painters were minor household names in their day – attacked in the press or critically praised, poetically lauded, philosophically consulted, politically influential, or rich beyond the dreams of most of us. However for only a handful were the doors of immortality opened.

             

From an art theory point of view reading Dorival's book reminded me of reading old mathematical problems - which had long since been solved, ignored as cul-de-sacs or conclusively disproved.                                                                                                                                

The period of French art from 1940-1958 was the one I concentrated most on in Dorival's book - since it was the history of a collapse of creative élan in French art - and was also a period so little known to art lovers outside France.

             

I will always remember how my heart sunk when I visited Paris for the first time with my mother when I was nineteen - I came in search of the Picasso's and Modigliani's of my day, the Bohemian glamour of the artist quarters in Montmartre and the philosophical passion of the Existentialists. Imagine my disappointment when I arrived in the Place de Tertre in Montmartre to find craven pavement artists and crass portrait artists of the worst kind. I knew there must have been new artist quarters in Paris - yet I had no idea where they were or what kind of art they were making. I could not fathom how a city so rich in culture could in the space of just fifty odd years become nothing more than a living museum or worse still an artistic Disney Land. I never liked Paris - I found it a cruel, cold, cynical, and rude city. I found the museums and grand buildings bear down on me with an oppressive weight while at other times I felt like I was walking through the graveyard of a long lost Imperial city.

             

In the Centre Pompidou I ravished the great paintings and sculptures of Paris from 1900-1939 and then slowly became more and more bored as I surveyed 'the best' in French art from 1940-1989. No one but Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Yves Kline and Ben struck my heart, head or imagination. Only Dubuffet and Klein seemed like really great and original artists. Thus, I have been fascinated by this collapse for some time.

            

 The beginning of the end - came in June 1940 - when the German's marched into Paris. Artists fled the city and then the country - boarding boats to England or America - some joined the Resistance while others collaborated with the German's or where courted like Derain and Vlaminck - privileged artists’ like Matisse and Picasso lived in splendid isolation. Near the war’s end wonderfully emotive painters like Wols, Jean Fautrier and Dubuffet began to emerge - their art - humble, hurt and traumatized into brutalism. The period 1945-47 was difficult for many artists in Paris. Oil paints, canvas and all the other materials artists need to create were in short supply – and even when they were available most artists could not afford to buy much. They often had no studios and stored their paintings under the bed.                                                                                                                       

Unlike Berlin and Dresden, which were ploughed into the ground by Allied bombers, unlike London, which had been savagely bombed by German bombers and later V-1 ‘Doodlebugs’ and V2 rockets – Paris had been spared this carnage. Hitler had ordered the German troops to hold Paris to the last round of bullets and last man, but the German General Dietrich von Choltiz honourably refused to carry out the order and surrendered his troops. The cultural world owns this Prussian General more than any collector, museum director, artist or critic you might care to mention. However, he was also a war criminal who oversaw the deportation of Jews. So, Paris was able to resume its cultural life a year before other cities in Europe and the myth of French genius was still widely believed in America and the rest of Europe. Paris galleries by 1948 - were undergoing an unprecedented boom in the sale of art. One hundred years before in the age of Delacroix and Courbet there had been no more than 2,200 professional artists in Paris. By 1950, this number had swollen to over 40, 000 and the various art galleries showed over 150,000 art-works every year. Such inflation of numbers had not produced a wave of geniuses - but rather a tsunami of mediocrities. This mob of unskilled, unintelligent and deluded charlatans debased all aesthetic and professional standards. Painting was reduced - to the smallest visual gimmicks and painterly scribbles. Many presumed Paris would continue to reign as the World’s greatest city for art – however they were dead wrong.                                                                                                               

By 1955, New York emerged as the new world capital for art - with brash energetic and serious painters like Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko, witty intelligent painters like Jasper Johns and protean creative spirits like Robert Rauschenberg. All of it backed up by the money and patronage of aggressive American collectors. Some liked to point to the C.I.A. promotion of American art as the real clue to its success. I think America’s good standing in Europe, its rebuilding of Germany with The Marshal Plan, and the countless food care packets played a bigger role. Besides I thought the work really did stand up better than its French counterparts did – it is braver, more reckless and more ambitious.

             

The seismic shift from Paris to New York did not happen overnight - it happened slowly at first. The Paris art world initially thrived on the renewed interest of American collectors who now saw Modern artists as the good guys in the great moral fight with the Communists and Nazis and their various brands of Socialist and National-Socialist realism. Crate load after crate load of great modernist masterpieces were bought up and shipped to America and the Paris galleries reaped the whirlwind.  Paris galleries experienced a boom in the sale of contemporary art unheard of before. Artists like Dubuffet, Buffet and De Staël became over night successes. By the early 1950s French L’art informel and its sub-school of Tachism was achieving unprecedented critical acclaim and collector avarice - but it’s reign was short lived and soon over thrown by the emergence of Pop art in the 1960s. Art-Informal was in its way a rejection of the rigid theories of Cubist inspired geometric abstraction. Art-Informal paintings were large abstracts, with crude colours and dominating blacks - thickly painted, full of the bucket, and slosh mannerism of 1950 art. The trouble with most of this French abstraction was its monotony and repetition. This made it attractive to collectors who wanted 'signature' work that was easily recognizable as the work of - Hartung, Mathieu, Soulages and so on - but to a connoisseur today their work seems too limited, too wilfully eccentric and too technically sloppy.

           

L’art informel and Tachism lacked the power and vigour of Abstract-Expressionism and of its many European exponents, only the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies had true soul and gravitas. For all the apparent bluster and bravura energy - these were in fact - exhausted, Conservative, timid and unconvincing canvases - made by painters with mushroom reputations. The theatrical mannerisms of their work cannot match the power and darkness of Francis Bacon or for that matter the children's and outsider art inspired raw work of Karl Appel. Georges Mathieu in particular seems to me to be nothing more than a showman. His flashy mannered canvases have none of the pathos and raw power of Pollock - an artist he has some affinities with. The increasing academicism, self-justification and fear of taking real risks of the French painters - finished off the once so vibrant Paris school.

             

American's like Robert Rauschenberg still went to Paris in the late 1940s looking for the fellow artists and inspiration that they thought still existed from the days of Matisse, Picasso and Dalí- but they were soon disappointed. French art had lost its nerve and ambition. Increasingly insular and hostile to foreigner influences, French critics waffled on about the classic virtues of haute pate (a French love for the sensual properties of oil paint) and French painterly painting - failing to see that the timid work of the likes of Soulages was no match for the vulgar lust and ambition in a Pollock or de Kooning.

             

True America was the new super-power, true American collectors ruled the market, true the American painters had progressed a lot in modern terms (thanks to the influx of many European masters like Mondrian, Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, Matta and Dalí), true America had the money - but France could still produce geniuses which could compete and win on the world stage of art - or could they? In fact, they could not.                                                                       

             

War had not only impoverished and traumatized France - it had robbed it of ambition and courage. Moreover, the weight of tradition began to wear down on artists. Great cultures at their peak have a sense that anything is possible. But dying cultures like Paris in the 1940s-50s are beset with dissent, division, rule upon rule, debate upon counter debate, philosophical speculation upon philosophical speculation - until the whole ethos and mood became suffocating to true creative spirits.

             

The art of Paris after the war - was like that made by a man enduring a long hangover. How could any man or woman come to terms with the tragedy, betrayals, shame, guilt, hurt, and pain of the occupation. So can any philosophical movement have ever been more in tune with its time the French Existentialism expounded by Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet? Their writings spoke with terrifying lucidity of the solitude of man, the prison of subjectivity, the cruelty and absurdness of fate, the burden of femininity, the absence of God and the need for collective political action. Their work ran parallel to the paintings and sculptures of artists like Wols, Giacometti, Artaud, Gruber, Fautrier, Dubuffet, de Staël, and yes even the awful rubbish of Bernard Buffet. All of their work was characterized by emaciated figures, tragic solitude, brutalized artifice, and a wounded consciousness in search of meaning and recovery from a tragic bereavement.

             

In my view, the last genius of French art was Jean Dubuffet - only his work came close to the protean energy of Picasso (though with none of his ancestral skills, or true inventive power.) His crude portraits of friends in the mid 1940s - the drawing like the work of some demented child scrawled over a canvas bed of soot, sand, and plaster embedded paint - where the last French paintings to send shivers down my spine. What was the bloody point of cultural refinement, correct drawing, and fine feelings - the Germans’ had those attributes - and look what they did to Europe. Dubuffet was the most intelligent, powerfully articulated rebuke to high culture in the twentieth century - and all this from an ex wine merchant! His work was a celebration of innate creativity unfettered by western academic training - the work of children, psychotics, the disabled, visionaries, criminals and the dirty and obscene scrawls on lavatory walls. However, for all his bluster Dubuffet could no more make himself into a naïf - than Picasso could - there was too much to unlearn. That is why his paintings had an elegance and painterly sophistication unseen in the art of the truly raw outsider. Still, he had remained in my thoughts periodically since I first thoroughly discovered his work in 1987.

             

The last great painter France fostered (he was Russian by birth) was Nicolas de Staël - his life tragically cut short by himself. Only his paintings succeed for me in balancing the demands of the French figurative tradition, the Cubist legacy and the need for abstract poetry. De Staël was one of the great masters of the pallet knife and even the trowel. His canvases have a wonderfully nuanced quality - the paint thick but never coarse, crass or vulgar (a common problem one faces with paintings made with the pallet knife.) He was also one of the finest colourists of the twentieth century - both daring and inventive. Moreover, any doubts about his conventional abilities were corrected by his wonderfully fluent and sophisticated drawings. In fact, de Staël battled all his creative life with the twin polls of abstraction and figuration (a cause of constant heated debate amongst French artists of his day who formed opposing bands.) Some say his suicide (he jumped out the window of his studio in Antibes) was because of the hostile reactions of previously supportive critics like Douglas Cooper (a famous collector and scholar on Cubism) to his more figurative last works. Others blamed overwork - he was a hot commodity in the Paris art world and his work was always in demand especially from American collectors (most of his best work is in the U.SA..) Others blame his alcoholism and naturally morbid personality. Whatever - his death marked the end of the French school of painting that stretched back to Braque and Courbet.

           

From the sublime to the ridiculous but equally tragic – Bernard Buffet (1928-1999) was something of a teenage prodigy - his canvases executed when he was seventeen are impressive for one so young and somewhat reminiscent of early James Ensor in Brussells, and L.S. Lowry in England. However, his art was still born and never developed. In 1948, he was awarded the Prix de la Critique along with Lorjou. From then on, he became a star of the newly revived Paris art world. Heaped with praise for his elongated, emaciated, and bitter looking nudes, portraits, still-life's and cityscape's - he had no need to push his art beyond its adolescent mannerisms and autistic stoicism.                

Bernard Buffett, was said to have painted more canvases than Renoir had in his whole career (several thousand paintings), by the age of twenty-six. By the end of his career, Buffett had produced over 8,000 paintings. He was a talented but thin draughtsman and painter. He relied too much on a limited linear style - which he found in his late teens and did not significantly alter for the rest of his life. His attempts at grandeur and religious profundity usually ended up in laughable cartoon images of a weird kind of ugliness.

             

His art was an Etch-A-Sketch version of Expressionism. There was hardly a single curved line in Buffet’s paintings - everything was at sharp right angles. He had absolutely no concept of paint - as a sensual medium that can enhance a drawing - to him it was all just gray tiling grout for his spiked black autistic line. That such a comically bad painter (I was literally laughing out loud the last time I looked at his paintings) could have been lauded by the best critics and collectors in France is utterly bizarre - one can only assume that for a few years Buffet really did seem to be the poet Laureate of his day. Then the backlash came of course but Buffet by then had established his name and the money still came rolling in - giving him a Chateau in the countryside and a museum dedicated to him in Japan (well you know what they say about being big in Japan)! His career proves again that often collectors simply buy names - without even actually seeing - the art they are buying. Tragically, (in the sense that I never like to see anyone driven to it) Buffet killed himself in 1999 after his Parkinson disease prevented him from working. I remember reading an interview with him in the early 1990s in Modern Painters magazine - he seemed quite jovial and cocky – unphased by a lifetime of critical assaults and bolstered by a lifetime of awards and honours and public fondness for his art. Who knows maybe the criticism really did get to him in the end - famous and rich painters often crave critical respect just like poor critically revered artists often crave financial success.

             

Another sincere but mediocre artist - revered in France by the common man, was Dunoyer De Segozac. I had bought a second hand book on him the year before and liked his work on a superficial level. But my main reason for buying the book was to try to understand how such a supposedly famous and beloved French artist could be unknown to me. What I learned was that his brand of realist art inspired by Courbet and Cézanne had been taken to the bosom of Conservative critics and the general public after World War One (who had become disillusioned with the academy but were also suspicious of the avant-garde) De Segozac's work trod a lucrative middle ground. His watercolours were quite charming but his oil paintings were turgid and cack-handed.

             

The last hurrah for Paris came at the end of the 1950s through theatre and comedy - in the form of Yves Klein - perhaps the most chic artist of the twentieth century. I loathed conceptual artists but I had a soft spot for Klein. I knew that most of the ideas behind his work were spiritual mumbo-jumbo and self-deceiving nonsense - but he did everything with such wit, panache, style, lightness of touch and sincerity - I could not hold it against him. I found his blue abstracts truly moving and spiritual in a way I could not quite pin down. Long before Martin Creed exhibited an empty gallery in Tate modern (2001 Turner prize) with the lights going on and off - Klein had exhibited an empty (save for a glass case) white room in 1961. I loved his cheeky (pardon the pun) imprinting of paint covered naked French arty girls on canvas - while an orchestra played his Montone Symphony - hilarious and erotic in the best sense of the word. If only all conceptual art could have been that much fun.

             

Oh and I almost forgot Balthus – it was an easy mistake to make - his art seemed so far removed from the crass faddish concerns of French painters of his day and he lived most of his life as a deliberately enigmatic recluse. His art spoke of the ancient compositional rhythms and subtle modulated colours of Piero della Francesca but his themes were unsettling modern day nymphs and innocent childhood sexuality just on the cusp of puberty and adult awareness. Despite the awkwardness of his self-taught technique - his paintings were the last truly great evocative naturalistic canvases in the West.

            

But as for the rest since then - Arman, Martial Raysse, Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, Bertrand Lavier, Annette Messager or even Christian Boltanski I had nothing but feelings of nostalgia (as fragments of a once great tradition), indifference and boredom.

             

The story of the death of The School of Paris I felt was a salutary one in July 2007 - as the stock market continued to rise, and the art market entered the stratosphere. I remembered reading Robert Hughes in the late 1980s and thinking he was mad to think the art market of the 1980s would collapse - but it did. They said it could not happen again - the market was more diverse, there were more collectors, more institutions, blah, blah, blah. I would not have bet on it! But that's when I knew the shake-out would begin. Reputations would go to the wall, some would survive even stronger, new schools would be founded on a total opposition to the ethos of the commercial conceptualism of my today - and the cycle of fashion and fad, boom and bust, would continue. In fact, within a month of my cynical observations on the stock market – the market collapsed due to sub-prime mortgage failures.