Introduction to Section 2

Introduction to Section 2 Benedikt Hjartarson The title of this section points towards important shifts in the activities of the avant-garde at the beginning of the period under discussion in this volume. As in other regions within Europe, in the mid-1920s the Nordic countries saw a movement away from the first wave of avant-garde movements, such as futurism, cubism, dada, constructivism and expressionism towards new currents that came to be linked with labels such as functionalism, purism, post- cubism, new objectivity, cultural radicalism and surrealism. While this shift is often seen as marking the end of the “heroic” or more openly “revolutionary” phase of the avant-garde, it can also be seen in terms of a continuity by other means, often through an approach to industry and advertising. The “legacy” of the avant-garde in the period 1925–1950 thus has a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to a rupture with earlier practices and strategies; on the other, it denotes the enduring impact of the avant-garde. In a sense, the period 1925–1950 can be seen as governed by the question of whether it was plausible or even possible to continue the avant-garde project, of whether and how it could be relevant for the search for new strategies and techniques responding to changed social, political and cultural conditions. In the first quarter of the twentieth century the involvement of Nordic artists in avant-garde activities can be traced along two different paths. First, artists and writers worked abroad and participated in activities in the centres of the European avant-garde in cities such as Berlin or Paris (see the section “Nor- dic Artists in the European Metropolises” in A Cultural History of the Avant- Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925). Second, artists and authors – either working in their home countries or abroad – picked up and appropriated new styles, idioms, aesthetic techniques or ideas rooted in avant-garde activities abroad and attempted to introduce them into their home countries. The most important change in the second quarter of the century consisted in the rise of organised collective activities in the Nordic countries and direct links to activities of groups and movements abroad. Of special importance in that context is the involvement of Nordic artists in international surrealism from the mid- 1930s onwards. Three contributions in this section deal with the legacy of the earlier “-isms”, and two of them focus on the links to Paris. Whereas Paris had indisputably been the most important cosmopolitan centre of avant-garde activities in the earlier period, the city in many ways lost its hegemonic status in the mid-1920s, © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004388�9�_009 <UN> 192 Hjartarson following the rise of transnational constructivism. The focus in the French cap- ital was mainly on the traditional medium of painting and earlier local tradi- tions such as cubism and fauvism. Yet, as the contributions by Dorthe Aagesen and Andrea Kollnitz show, the Parisian milieu continued to attract artists from the Nordic countries. The dominant current in Paris in the mid-1920s was purism, which gained a reputation as the most important international current of the new art emerging in France. As Aagesen discusses, a significant num- ber of Nordic students enrolled in the programme at the Académie Moderne under the tutelage of Fernand Léger after 1924. Particularly noteworthy is the involvement of several women artists who came to play a central role in these activities, among them Franciska Clausen, Elsa Lystad, Siri Mayer, Ragnhild Keyser and Ragnhild Kaarbø. Prior to her period in Paris, Clausen had come into contact with constructivist aesthetics as a student of László Moholy-Nagy and Alexander Archipenko in Berlin, and her works thus linked the post-cubist aesthetics of purism with ideas rooted in abstract constructivism. The works of the Nordic women artists at Léger’s school can thus be seen not only as symp- tomatic of the continued impact of the Parisian avant-garde on the works of Nordic artists, but also as a case highlighting the important role of artists from the Nordic periphery in mediating new ideas and practices between the different centres of avant-garde activities on the continent. Kollnitz discusses the links between the cosmopolitan avant-garde milieu in Paris and the Nordic countries from a different perspective, focusing on an exhibition of international post-cubist art organised by the Swedish artist Otto G. Carlsund in Stockholm in 1930. Carlsund had also studied at the Académie Moderne, and his background was in many ways similar to that of Clausen. The show in 1930 was furthermore related to Carlsund’s instrumental role in the project of art concret, which presented a short-lived attempt to establish a new forum for the international community of artists working on the basis of abstract constructivism. As Kollnitz shows, the exhibition has gone down in art history as a “fiasco”; instead of marking the beginning of strong ties between Nordic artists and the international avant-garde milieu, it instead marked a belated and unsuccessful attempt to introduce concrete art and other currents of post-cubism as a paradigm of the new international art in Sweden. As Koll- nitz points out, the organisation of Carslund’s display as a sub-section of the large-scale Stockholm Exhibition in 1930 was unfavourable for its reception. The broad international scope of Carlsund’s display – including works by artists such as Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Piet Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, László Moholy-Nagy, Le Corbusier and Theo van Doesburg – was criticised from a nationalist perspective as a product of the lat- est Parisian fashion and stood in blatant opposition to the works of exclusively <UN>.

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