Michael Peppiatt
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Michael Peppiatt THE MAKING OF MODERN ART Selected Writings Yale University Press, New Haven and London Contents Introduction: The Making of Modern Art 04 Post- War In Giacometti’s Studio 126 Renewal Balthus, Klossowski, Bellmer: Eros Unbound 139 Jean Dubuffet: Letters to an Editor 151 Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s Labyrinth 163 Towards Victor Hugo, Draughtsman 14 Zoran Mušič: In the Silence of Time 166 Modernism Manet and Degas at Work 19 The Mid-Century Dilemma of Nicolas de Staël 170 The Paradox of Cézanne 25 Avigdor Arikha: A Hunger in the Eye 175 Auguste Rodin’s Women 34 Maillol: The Silent Revolution 38 American O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance 182 Van Gogh’s Last Word 44 Visions Jackson Pollock Reconsidered 186 Gustav Klimt on the Swing of Fashion 48 The Bay Area Artists 191 Alexander Calder Sets All Forms Free 195 European Matisse: Seen from the Studio 56 The Achievement of Joe Downing 197 Masters Picasso’s Progress 61 Bill Jacklin: A Poet in Venice and New York 203 Juan Gris: All the Colour Was on the Canvas 68 The Trouble with ‘Primitivism’ 72 School of Is There a School of London? 208 Klee and Kandinsky Side by Side 78 London Francis Bacon: The Self Portrayed 226 Otto Dix: ‘That’s How It Was’ 81 A Closer Look at Lucian Freud 231 Soutine as Artist and Victim 83 Frank Auerbach in Chiaroscuro 237 Painters and Poets 86 Memories of David Hockney 240 Art- World Joseph Duveen, Manipulator Extraordinaire 92 Acknowledgements 249 Profiles Tériade, Publisher Genius 97 Essay Sources 250 Chick Austin: Magician of the Modern 100 Inside the Mind of André Malraux 104 Gilbert de Botton: Portrait of an Art Collector 107 André Emmerich: Portrait of an Art Dealer 113 Fire under the Ashes: An Interview with Jan Krugier 118 was a balanced review, making my reservations known in a deliberately The Trouble with ‘Primitivism’ unaggressive way (particularly when compared to the many other, bitterly hostile reviews that came later). No sooner had the piece been published To Thomas McEvilley when it seemed all hell had broken loose. MoMA were holding an (1939–2013) emergency midnight meeting, the editor of Connaissance des arts called to tell me, in order to decide what action to take, while hiring two teams of lawyers, one in New York, one in Paris, to build a case against me. They would be taking a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune, he further informed me, to denounce me as in bad faith and in the pay of African art dealers. This is a subject that I have alluded to at some length in the Introduction I could hardly believe what had happened, but I won’t pretend that I to this book: if I don’t seem able to leave it alone, it’s because it marked a wasn’t deeply shaken and worried. I was already plagued by guilt and definitive caesura in my professional and my private life. anxiety. My father had just died, thus leaving the issues that had divided us I hadn’t the faintest idea when I wrote the following review of the unresolved, and my personal life was in a shambles because I was trying Primitivism exhibition at MoMA in New York some thirty years ago that I was to leave a much older lover, not really for anyone else but because I knew about to stir up a hornets’ nest in the art world and precipitate a deep crisis instinctively it was time for my life to take a different direction. On top of in my own life. When Connaissance des arts, the Paris-based art magazine this, what became known as the ‘Rubin affair’ sent me reeling into such I had been writing for regularly for several years, suggested I go to New a loss of self-confidence and self-respect that I had a complete nervous York in advance of the show’s opening to discuss it with its eminent curator, breakdown, unable to eat or sleep. It took a year, with the help of a few William Rubin, I was delighted. Not only was the theme of the show, as well doctors and several staunch friends, to overcome the crisis. as a trip to New York, very alluring, but I was also flattered to be the first to In the event, although Connaissance des arts washed their hands of comment on a ground-breaking international event. It was one of those me and suggested I get a lawyer of my own to take up my defence, Rubin heady moments when you felt everything was going your way. published an angry rebuttal and would have pursued the matter further Far from a professional triumph, it proved to be my nemesis. Rubin had he not by this time been inundated by other, far fiercer criticism from received me cordially enough, described the aims of his show and gave right across the critical spectrum (and most pertinently and durably from me the catalogue, then still in proof form. I responded enthusiastically. It American art critic Thomas McEvilley, to whose memory I dedicate this was only when I was back in Paris and began to look closely at the various essay). Under this covering fire, I slunk away to probe rather than lick my pairings of ‘primitive’ carvings and modernist masterpieces that the seeds wounds. After the most distressing and painful months of my life, stumbling of doubt were sown. Reading Rubin’s catalogue essay only served to turn through a darkness that I believed would lead to madness and death, the fledgling doubt into a nagging scepticism. How could one pair a tall, I eventually recovered. I was a changed man. The insouciance of my thin African walking staff with a tall, thin Giacometti figure simply on the earlier life had vanished (not so surprisingly since I was in my mid-forties). basis that the sculptor might have seen the piece at some early point Having survived gave me a drive I hadn’t known before, and in fairly short in his development? The more I pondered the premises of Primitivism, order I acquired and relaunched the magazine Art International from my the less convinced I became, and the more I questioned the effect the bachelor quarters, then married, had children and, after an absence of pairings would have on the many unprepared, unquestioning visitors twenty-eight years, returned to live in London. Thus the run-in with Rubin, who would be tempted to believe that seeing an African staff (if indeed which had caused me such harm, in the long run changed my life for the he had seen it) had led Giacometti to create stick-like figures. Affinities, better. But that is another story. The once inflammatory text below now such as they were, had been presented as influences, which was quite a seems pretty tame to me. different matter. Moreover, the tribal art itself risked being seen as a kind of side-show to modernism. Not being the kind of critic who relishes doing a hatchet job, and also The story of modern art has been told so often that these days we listen to it as because I had a residual admiration for the extraordinary visual impact distractedly as children listening to a familiar fairy-tale. Since we know whole of so many African and European masterpieces, I wrote what I thought passages by heart, there is a ritualistic pleasure in hearing the same litany of 72 EUROPEAN MASTERS THE TROUBLE WITH ‘PRimiTiviSM’ 73 great names, the same saga of great aesthetic deeds done. But with it comes the du Trocadéro in Paris was rebaptised the Musée de l’Homme in 1937, such frustration of watching the mould of accepted opinion set ever more firmly around important holdings of African and Oceanic as La Rochelle’s are still displayed in a events that are still alive – decreeing by date and quotation that they happened natural history museum; and no satisfactory substitute for the term ‘primitive’ has thus and thus, and not otherwise. Rapid ossification ends, of course, by excluding been found. On the other hand, some of the foremost museums in the world, such much of a period’s real vitality: its quirks and contradictions, its doubts and as the Metropolitan in New York, have given over an entire wing to their collections subterfuges. In the process, certain pronouncements or interpretations become so of primitive art. From these clearly conflicting pieces of evidence, one can see that hallowed, so much part of official dogma, that they are no longer even questioned. Western attitudes are likely to continue to fluctuate for quite some time. Consequently, occasions to re-examine these received articles of faith are to be But the exhibition at MoMA is above all concerned with establishing, or at seized on. least suggesting, which pieces of primitive art have influenced which Western An unusually good opportunity of this kind seems to be offered by the large ones, in what way and to what extent. The museum’s press office claims that it is exhibition, entitled ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art, about to open at the Museum ‘the first exhibition to juxtapose tribal and modern objects in the light of informed of Modern Art in New York. By juxtaposing ‘primitive’ and modern Western art, art history’; the huge book that serves as the exhibition catalogue3 continues in the exhibition aims to explore in depth the influence that tribal works have had on the same vein: ‘No pivotal topic in twentieth-century art has received less serious the development of our own art from Gauguin to the present day.