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Painting Between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

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Painting Between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 DANIEL ROBBINS Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s very brave of you to come out in this weather. I thought seriously of staying in bed myself, and I only hope that, when I am finished, [00:01:00] we won’t all have wished that I had. This is the second and last in a series of two -- I don’t know if that makes a series or not -- called “Painting Between the Wars.” Those of you who were here in the first lecture may recall that we covered very interesting subjects. We’re discussing a period roughly between 1920 and 1940, specifically between 1918 and 1939, showing occasionally a canvas that was painted before or a painting that was made after those dates. Last time, we talked about the betrayal of cubism and the return to reality that took place shortly after the end of the First World War, and the awful consequences [00:02:00] of this betrayal of cubism in a gradual decline of painting, particularly in France, as it became more and more sentimental. We also rapidly discussed the development of surrealism, probably the most potent force and movement to develop in the period under consideration, out of Dada, and even touched on its extremely important involvement with political tendencies. We also touched briefly on those few French cubist painters who did not return to reality and struggled to lead their art from cubism to a purely abstract art. Today we must very rapidly try and summarize the rest of what was going on [00:03:00] in this extremely complicated period, a period which, I will stress again, has more historical unity, and, indeed, more historical interest, than it does specific artistic interest, because everything in this period, as I said last time, can be considered either as a weakening and continuation of what had come before or else as a preparation for what has come afterwards. And it’s only by making the assumption that you are well acquainted with what came before, and that you are all cognizant of the developments in contemporary, particularly American, art since the end of the Second World War that we can proceed smoothly and calmly. I show you these two paintings from the middle ’30s, [00:04:00] both from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, by a French painter named Charles Dufresne, whose name is probably not very familiar to you, and with some justification. But I show it to you to remind you of this return to reality that characterized painting in the ’30s. Whole sections of books that were written in the ’30s describe this effort, this return to reality, and in the movement the painter Charles Dufresne held a very important place. In his still life on the left you see a rather conventional painting that has obviously benefitted from those innovations that came before -- a kind of Dufy-like color and treatment, a kind of ambiguous space which is neither realistic nor cubist, and a kind of soft and gentle atmosphere, and, above all, a sweet, and easy, and easily comprehended subject matter. More characteristic of Dufresne’s work, [00:05:00] and more characteristic of the French effort for a coherent return to reality having a kind of eternal meaning behind it, would be this painting called The Judgement of Paris. In it, you can see how the subject matter, the classical subject matter, a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters, a favorite for a thousand years, has been transcribed to life on a French farm. To [comprehend?] the idyllic nature of abundance, the farmer, even in his hat, is transposed into Paris, who holds out his arm, in which a circular shape Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 10 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 -- conceivably the traditional apple -- is being presented to two nudes and one semi-nude woman, presumably Juno, Athena, and Venus. There is no hint of the cataclysmic Trojan War that, in classical mythology, [00:06:00] dates from this event. There’s simply the use of an old and, one might even say, worn out theme, a theme, in many ways, not proper to contemporary art, or certainly not thought proper to contemporary art in the two decades prior to the painting of this picture into a lush and realistic French provincial setting. This, then, is a reminder of our departure point. Now let us consider what happened in this period in terms of a very strong and important movement, important particularly because its effect on American painting was paramount. It, too -- this movement -- is characterized by a strong affinity with cubism in the sense that the derivation of the forms entirely comes out of the artist’s acquaintance with cubism. On the right is a painting [00:07:00] [by?] the French artist Marcel Gromaire, who also enjoyed a very considerable reputation in the ’30s, was considered one of the major painters of the time, and I suppose there are people today who still think of him in that sense. On the left, a painting by Diego Rivera from 1935 called Flower Vendor. Now the important thing to remember is that both Gromaire and Rivera -- Rivera, of course, a Mexican; Gromaire French -- were involved in a peripheral sense in the Paris just before the First World War. Both of them had direct, if peripheral, cubist experience, and that cubist experience was fundamental to the determining of their style. You can see in the handling of the realistic shapes in both of them [00:08:00] the same kind of overall simplification that you might expect from people who would have this broad familiarity with cubism. But although both of them stylize the figures according to easily comprehensible principles of simplification -- reducing hip to a movement and limbs to simple cylindrical shapes -- so that you can easily make an association with Léger if you want, the nature of the stylization, because of the way in which the subject itself is treated, becomes very different. And we look, in the Gromaire from the mid-’30s, at a kind of anecdotal nude, a subject devoid, really, either of plastic interest [00:09:00] or, finally, of anecdotal interest. It isn’t a nude satisfying as a nude in the same sense that a nineteenth century painting might be -- that is, lush and sensual -- and it isn’t a study for its spatial tension or the beauty of the interacting forms. On the other hand, the subject matter in the Rivera claims our attention in a much more ready fashion. Clearly, we are encountering simplification here for purposes of bringing out force, pathos, sensitivity, and a certain kind of obvious and perhaps touching message. That is, the poor peddler is bent down on his hands and his knees, with an enormous basket, all treated in a [00:10:00] very flat way, in a very shallow space. His arms, too, reduced to cylinders, making the connection obvious with Léger. The basket shape, for all its intricate pattern, not treated for the texture of straw. Here he is bent under this weight and he is selling flowers. How pathetic, in a sense, that he should suffer in carrying such a beautiful load. And this, in a rather banal way, is the difference between two kinds of stylization. The one on the right leading, as I pointed out last time, to a picture of such utter triviality as Gromaire’s Tramp from 1939, a forerunner in its lack of emotion and lack of plastic interest and in its emphasis on [00:11:00] apparently bold black lines -- a forerunner of the easy style and popular style of a Bernard Buffet. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 10 Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 Now with our introduction of Rivera, we must confront what was one of the most important historical phenomenon to take place in our period, and that is the development of Mexican painting and the meaning of Mexican painting, its engagement of the mural, and, finally, its influence on our own American painting in the 1920s and 1930s. On the left, you see another painting by Rivera, just a detail of a huge mural in Cuernavaca, called Cane Workers. Now, once again, the cubist influence in the overall organization is evident, although perhaps less evident than even in the last painting. [00:12:00] And we note other influences that seem pertinent to the development of the large mural art, that is the kind of stylized patternization of the white figures of the cane works, and the white horse, the trapping of the saddle, that may remind us, and should remind us, of fifteenth and even fourteenth century Italian painters. Fifteenth-century painters such as Paolo Uccello, who was clearly studied by the very cultivated and very competent technician, Rivera. But more than that, we notice the broad emphasis on the social nature of the subject matter. We note, even in the detail where the top of the horse and the rider is cut off, that the rider carries arms, a rifle is slung. He holds a whip in his hand, and the cane workers, just like, presumably, Cuban sugar workers under Batista, are suffering, working very hard, that their clothes are clearly tattered, [00:13:00] the elbows are out.
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