Contortion and Distortion Postwar European Art from the Menil Collection

Contortion and Distortion Postwar European Art from The Menil Collection The Menil Collection September 22, 2004-January 9, 2005 It's the point of crisis that sets in at every stage of history and which we can "a large figure seemed to me untrue and a small one intolerable .... All this observe in the past. Once the intactness has gone, a kind of metamorphosis changed ... through drawing." Along with the drawing Standing Nude begins .. a possibility for historical development. (1947), this exhibition includes the sculpture Nu debout [Standing Nude -Joseph Beuys, 1978 Woman} (1953), which appears formidable-as if burnt or eaten away-yet also resilient, even elegant. While the intimate presence of the artist's he year 1945 marked a defining moment in twentieth-century art. hand is evident in the thickly modeled surface of this figure, the paint on TWith parts of Europe in ruins after World War II, and many the plaster emphasizes the cool reality of the object. European artists having fled to the United States, the center of the Widely identified as the progenitor of Art Brut, Dubuffet sought a art world shifted from Paris to New York. In both cities, alienation had ground zero for art-a place to begin anew with what he called "anti eroded any sense of the collective idealism set forth by prewar modernists, cultural positions." He committed himself to becoming an artist in 1942, and artists now began to find their voices by exploring the self and and his work followed in a tradition of abstraction that favors nature over celebrating personal freedom. Although the practices and theories of artists culture and sensation over ideation. By 1949, he had painted several graffiti in postwar Europe seemed to echo developments in the United States, like landscapes, including Paysage aux ivrognes {Landscape with Drunkards} they were actually informed and motivated, as German-French painter (1949). Here, the forms carved into the thick paste have the stiff, schematic Hans Hartung wrote, by "an entirely new means of expression, another quality of a child's drawing. In Dubuffet's work from the 1950s, traces of human language." recollected images have been erased in a sort of painterly ritual. What Touched directly by the war, European artists were drawn to immediate remains is an endless brown-black, muddy universe, recalling perhaps the experiences and the physicality of materials, which led to an open-ended collapse of civilized values, perhaps the advent of a new age, as glimpsed in exploration of form and formlessness, abstraction and figuration, construction Texturologie III (1957). and distortion. Comprising approximately fifteen works, "Contortion and Lucio Fontana's monochromes were part of the first wave of monochrome Distortion: Postwar European Art from The Menil Collection'' provides a paintings in Europe after World War II. Instead of maintaining the modest summary of the many trends that emerged during this time, a illusory space of traditional easel painting, Fontana rejected the notion of period marked by devastation and uncertainty. Created between 1945 and the canvas as mere support for a picture and instead embraced its own 1979, many in F ranee and Italy, these works are by a range of artists, from materiality. This concept was at the heart of his theory of Spatialism, those who had already established their positions to one degree or another which focused on the material and metaphysical properties of space. By before World War II to those who reached maturity in its wake. puncturing and slashing the canvas-in disdain for Art Informel's gestural "Art," wrote Jean Dubuffet, "likes to be incognito. Its best moments histrionics-he disrupted any attempt to see the painted object as more are when it forgets what its own name is." In 1940s Paris, painting was than a physical material hung on a wall. dominated by lyrical abstraction and its variants-Art Brut, Art lnformel, Inspired by Fontana, Yves Klein began to create monochromes in early Tachisme-often characterized by scarred surfaces and stunted or 1950s Paris. He used what he called the "depersonalization" of color, deformed figures of pathos. One of the earliest manifestations of this sponges, and human figures as "spiritual metaphors" to remove all traces of trend was Jean Fautrier's Otages {Hostages} series. Some of these shapeless subjective emotion-again a reaction against the emotive gesture of Art heads recall human features, while others are distorted beyond recognition, Informel, but rejecting as well the objectivism of Spatialism. As seen in as though the faces were reduced to rope-tied bundles. Seen here, Oradour Untitled [Monogold} (c. 1960), his works were both, in Klein's words, sur-Glane (1945) is a seminal painting that seems to encompass both "objects" and "landscapes of freedom"-the dense surface and uneven edges characteristics. This work, which commemorates the destruction of a rural of the painting here call attention to its literal objecthood, yet the gold leaf community during the war, led Andre Malraux to characterize the Otages lends an immaterial quality. Jean Tinguely, on the other hand, turned series as "a hieroglyph of pain." directly to objects of everyday life and machinery, becoming famous for his Alberto Giacometti's work is very much an art born of war, but it is junk constructions that applied the principles of kineticism. also an art of emancipation. After being dismissed from the Surrealist With his desecrated picture planes and often the poorest of materials, group in the 1930s and living in his native Switzerland during the war, Fontana created a type of abstraction that bridged the generations of Art Giacometti returned to Paris in 1945 with the results of almost five years' lnformel with Arte Povera. Introduced in 1967 by the Italian art critic effort tucked into six matchboxes-namely, hundreds of gaunt figural Germano Celant, Arte Povera was, in his words, "the artists' engagement sculptures. In a 1948letter to his art dealer, Giacometti explained that with actual materials and with total reality and their attempt to interpret that reality in a way which, although hard to understand, is subtle, cerebral, elusive, private, intense." Although working with different materials, Giulio Paolini and Michelangelo Pistoletto both distorted reality by exploring the nature of art and the presentation of the materials used in art. Through photography and collage, Paolini gave the illusion of other works of art while he simultaneously revealed the material of his own work in the process. Works like Eco de Narciso (1978) form, in the artist's words, "moments in the relationship between the person who makes the picture, the person who looks at it and the material object that the picture is." By using stainless steel in his "mirror paintings," Pistoletto narrowed the divide between art and life. In Vietnam (1965), he encouraged the spectators to share the same space as the subjects, and vice versa. Similarly, by cutting a mirror in half in Division and Multiplication ofthe Mirror (1975-79), he revealed what he called the "original oneness" of the divided frames-which seem to merge in the mirror's reflection-as well as that of the art object and the gallery space. Interestingly, the works of both Paolini and Pistoletto---although liberating and somewhat playful-seem to also be imprisoning, holding the spectator captive in his or her own subjectivity. Through their expressionistic use of materials and gestural singularity, these artists prompted the celebrated reception of Joseph Beuys, the first postwar German artist to achieve international fame. Conceived as a backdrop to "Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments," this exhibition provides a timely opportunity to reexamine the explorations of postwar artists and their contributions to both American and European contemporary art. - Susan Braeuer, Project Curatorial Assistant Front: Alberto Giacometti, Homme assis {Seated M an}, 1954 Oil on canvas 31 3/4 x 25 lf2 inches The Menil Collection, H ouston The exhibition is supported in part by the City of Houston. THE MENIL COLLECTION 1515 Sul Ross Houston, Texas 77006 713-525-9400 www.menil.org .

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