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The Paston Prospective july 2018 july NEW RESEARCH ON ART AND ITS HISTORY JULY 2018 Arcadia rediscovered: ‘The Paston prospective’ A bronze ‘Bathing woman’ after Giambologna | Modern French art in Victorian Glasgow Richard Thomson on Rodin and ancient Greece | Delacroix in Paris | Monet in London | Joan Jonas at Tate the burlington magazine no. 1384 vol. 160 vol. 1384 no. COVER_JULY18.indd All Pages 19/06/2018 15:47 no.111), invite comparisons with Robert 1 The exhibition will be shown at the National Gallery, Prague, 7th September–20th January and Sonia Delaunay, while The fair 2019, and at the Ateneum Art Museum, (contradance) (1921–22; National Gallery, Helsinki, 22nd February–19th May 2019. Catalogue: Kupka: Pionnier de l’abstraction. Prague; no.147) recalls the Futurist By Brigitte Léal, Marketa Theinhardt and emphasis on overlapping planes and Pierre Brullé. 304 pp. incl. 321 col. and b. & w. ills. (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, the successive positions of a figure. 2018), €49. ISBN 978–2–7118–6391–4. One aspect of Kupka’s work that 2 Reviewed by Elizabeth Clegg in this Magazine, is placed in its contemporary setting 139 (1997), pp.897–99. 3 P. Leighten: The Liberation of Painting: is the graphic art he produced for Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre satirical journals at the turn of the Paris, Chicago 2013, pp.148–55 and 168–74. twentieth century. He described this work as ‘his bread and butter’, but writers such as Patricia Leighten have America’s Cool Modernism: shown how Kupka’s anarchist critique O’Keeffe to Hopper of a degenerate society, especially Ashmolean Museum, Oxford its commodification of sex, is the 23rd March–22nd July corollary of the regenerative forces that are expressed in his paintings.3 by david anfam He was also heavily influenced by the anarchist geographer Élisée To measure art with a thermometer Reclus, whose writings he illustrated texture, they also exemplify the perfect 21. Around is hard. This exhibition finely gauges with some distinction. There are, marriage of colour and form for which a point, by the temperature of a key phase in the František Kupka. 1 however, other contexts. Kupka’s Kupka strived throughout his career. 1920–30. Canvas, United States’s creative trajectory. depictions of capitalists reflect the Yet this is a show that delivers 194.5 by 200 The two star names in its subtitle were visual conventions of anti-Semitism, cm. (Centre near-contemporaries, so they stand its punches early on. If one were to Pompidou, even though his personal life, above identify the heart of the display, it Musée national slightly askew as a chronological span all his friendship with the industrialist would perhaps be the seminal Around d’art moderne, and are probably there for the box Paris; exh. Grand Jindřich Waldes, tells a different story. a point (no.175; Fig.21), hung to great Palais, Paris). office. However, the selection boasts This exhibition offers glimpses of effect in the stark white setting. With trophies that amply justify the selling Kupka’s worldly life: his involvement its networks of vibrant concentric 22. Water point. They include Charles Demuth’s (the bather), with the Czechoslovakian legions forms, this famous canvas evokes by František resplendent I saw the figure 5 in gold (1928; during the First World War, for the grandeur of the cosmos in a Kupka. 1906–09. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Canvas, 63 by example, is documented by a variety composition that is based on a single 80 cm. (Centre York; cat. no.26), Hopper’s Manhattan of patriotic designs and even his kepi. black dot. By uniting works from Pompidou, Paris; bridge loop (1928; Addison Gallery of Although Kupka’s art can seem esoteric the National Gallery, Prague, the exh. Grand American Art, Andover; no.36) and in the extreme, his high abstraction Centre Pompidou, and elsewhere, this Palais, Paris). Stuart Davis’s Odol (1924; Museum of sometimes makes references to the exhibition provides a rare opportunity Modern Art, New York; no.21). Loans modern world. ‘Reminiscences and to enjoy the breadth of Kupka’s of this stature would be noteworthy syntheses’, the section opening the achievement, but ultimately his anywhere. Hence it reflects upon the second half of the show, begins with brilliant synthesis of macrocosm and capital’s art scene that apart from last jewel-like images inspired by medieval microcosm, the unreachable and the year’s America after the Fall: Painting in stained glass, but these are followed ungraspable, can be condensed to a the 1930s at the Royal Academy, London by striking mechanistic compositions few select images. (which anyway addressed a somewhat from the late 1920s and early 1930s. different timeframe), the last proper These abrasive works, which survey of this subject was held at the reveal Kupka’s response to jazz as Hayward Gallery over four decades well as technology, are interpreted in ago.2 Equally shocking is the Tate terms of a ‘crise de “machinisme”’, as collection’s total vacuum in this area. though they were incompatible with Oxford therefore deserves merit for Kupka’s artistic goals. If so, the crisis leading where others have failed. was resolved during the 1930s, when Neither exhaustive nor meagre, the industrial forms were absorbed the display feels right for its subject, into a style of geometric purity. The especially insofar as idiosyncratic final section, ‘Ultimate renewals’, stylistic tendencies emerge that would which presents these developments, tire if overexposed. Across three closes with the paintings that Kupka capacious galleries, freestanding walls displayed in the 1950s at the Salon parse the spaces at sensible intervals. des réalités nouvelles, Paris. With Given that sculpture was a negligible their subtle nuances of hue, tone and factor in the 1920s its absence is just, the burlington magazine | 160 | july 2018 593 EXHIBITIONS_JUL18.indd 593 19/06/2018 13:07 Exhibitions 23. New York plants. These attest to an ideology and Arthur Dove’s distilled meditations night, no.2, by that supplanted humanity per se with on landscape sidestep the ‘cool’ tenor. George Ault. 1921. Canvas, 51.4 by reification and mechanolatry. It proved In fact, I saw the figure 5 in gold waxes hot 35.6 cm. (The Jan a duplicitous altar at which to worship. as hell, blaring at the beholder with its T. and Marica Along the way essential, well- synaesthetic horn. Unless, of course, Vilcek Collection; exh. Ashmolean known players – Sheeler himself, the thesis applies that the process of Museum, Oxford). Charles Demuth, the photographer abstraction itself somehow belongs 24. Dawn in Berenice Abbott – mingle with others to that designation. Moreover, Louis Pennsylvania, by less familiar or still peregrine in this Lozowick’s coded Red circle (no.48; Edward Hopper. 1942. Canvas, country. Among the latter, George Ault Fig.25), painted after a European 61.9 by 112.4 cm. shines with two beautifully mysterious trip that took him to Moscow, offers (Terra Collection, urban nocturnes (no.4; Fig.23). Who a timely reminder that these years Chicago; exh. Ashmolean would have guessed that London’s saw powerful political passions as Museum, Oxford). Slade School of Fine Art and another sanguine as the colour that denotes in St John’s Wood nurtured this most their synecdoche. In a telling little seemingly East Coast of talents? aquatint (its encrypted message Different surprises feature with a goes unremarked), Which way? (1932; little-seen abstraction by the poet Terra Foundation for American Art, E.E. Cummings (1919; Metropolitan Chicago; no.47), Martin Lewis depicted although a few sleek pieces by the likes Museum; no.17); Morton Schamberg’s a car stalled at a snowbound crossroads. of Robert Laurent, Paul Manship or Elie Untitled (Mechanical abstraction) (1916; To the right its direction is benighted; Nadelman could have added further Whitney Museum of American Art, to the left, light illumines. Likewise, piquancy and referential breadth. New York; no.58), which must have Hopper’s frigid Dawn in Pennsylvania At the start, Marsden Hartley’s and been a crucial inspiration for Walter (no.37; Fig.24) hides what must have Edward Steichen’s brightly emblematic Tandy Murch, a later, now-neglected originally been spawned in heat. pictures both intimate the curatorial painter who was coeval with the Namely, a coupling at once literal and concept and undermine its ‘cool’ Abstract Expressionists; and Jacob metaphoric – witness the phallic lever premise. This premise references a Lawrence’s tributes, the more poignant to the rightward trolley now undone context that predates its customary for understatement, to his fellow from the railway carriage’s gaping rear assignation to the post-1945 era, when long-suffering African-Americans in void. After all, Precisionism’s zenith the term was equated with cultural the Migration series (1940–41; Phillips and its aftermath was otherwise the interconnections that encompassed Collection, Washington; nos.45–46). ribald Roaring Twenties. jazz, cinema, literature, ‘hip’ attitudes These instructive pictorial insights well America’s Cool Modernism rightly and, indeed, the overarching Cold fulfil the requirements of the Terra stresses that the nation’s economic War itself.3 The present endeavour Foundation’s enabling sponsorship and boom had a downside. Capitalism’s posits instead an older coolness in the its educational mission. Still, ‘cool’ does very success threatened the people who American aesthetic climate, and may not underwrite everything, tempting had engineered it by replacing them even revise scholarship in this area. though a flexible rubric may be. with Fordism and mechanisation; In fact, the current perspective Hartley’s exuberance, Oscar their inevitable overreach collapsed takes its cue from a critic in 1925: ‘A Bluemner’s ruddy New Jersey houses in the Great Depression. The results picture by Sheeler has the clear, sharp, cold beauty of one of our modern machines, the severe impersonality of a mechanical drawing’.4 Distinct from our contemporary vogue for ‘chilling out’, this definition actually fits its antithesis – the taut, analytical detachment dominating the period style, which surfaces as the presentation unfolds.
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