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.