Formalism Post- Formalism
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FORMALISM POST- FORMALISM nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities 7 affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2014 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren SUBMISSIONS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. Applicants for the B-Side Modernism/Danowski Library Fellowship should consult the full proposal guidelines before submitting their applications directly to the nonsite.org submission manager. 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(Or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte) . 26 Whitney Davis Picasso (and Warhol) and Things . 46 Lisa Florman “The Painter’s Revenge”: Fernand Léger For and Against Cinema . 62 Gordon Hughes Pollock’s Formalist Spaces . 82 Michael Schreyach The Conditions of Interpretation: A Reception History of The Synagogue by Max Beckmann . 108 Amy K. Hamlin 4 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #7: FORMALISM POST-FORMALISM (FALL 2012) ARTICLES ARTICLES 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #7: FORMALISM POST-FORMALISM (FALL 2012) ARTICLES CONJURE AND COLLAPSE IN THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN RACHAEL DELUE To begin, let me say something about the first word in the title of this essay: “conjure.” The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. “Conjure” was used in English as early as the 14th century; it derived from the Latin “conjurare,” meaning to band together through an oath or conspire. 1 As such, “to conjure” bears a significant, resonant weight, one constituted by its tangle of meanings as well as by its long passage across continents and through history. For the 20th-century American artist Romare Bearden, the term “conjure” had a very specific meaning. The shape of that meaning is the subject of this essay. Born in 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden moved with his family to New York City in 1914, settling in Harlem by 1920. As a child and young man, Bearden attended public school in New York, but also spent long stretches of time with relatives in Pittsburgh, PA, Mecklenburg County, NC, and Lutherville, MD. As a young adult in the 1930s and, after that, 8 RACHAEL DELUE - CONJURE AND COLLAPSE IN THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN in the 1940s and 50s, Bearden juggled college; work as a cartoonist and illustrator; a job with New York’s Department of Social Services; art classes; a stint in the army; solo and group exhibitions at various New York galleries; study in Paris at the Sorbonne; travel in Italy and Spain; contact with prominent artists and philosophers, including Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Gaston Bachelard, and Hannah Arendt; commercial song-writing; and marriage. In 1959, he and his wife, Nanette, whom he had wed in 1954, moved into a loft on Canal Street, in Manhattan, where Bearden would reside for the rest of his life. 2 Fig. 1, Bearden, Factory Workers, 1942 9 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #7: FORMALISM POST-FORMALISM (FALL 2012) ARTICLES During this time, Bearden’s work for the most part alternated between social realist imagery—straightforward, unstinting depictions of everyday people, especially the working class, including his Factory Workers, from 1942, which was chosen to illustrate an article in Fortune Magazine entitled “The Negro’s War”—and experimental, quasi-abstract pictures, often with biblical or mythical subjects, as with The Payment of Judas (1945-46). 3 Through the 1950s, Bearden’s primary medium was paint—oil, acrylic, watercolor, or gouache—but in the late 1950s and early 1960s he began to experiment with collage, pasting paper onto canvas to create figurative or abstract compositions; he also turned out a small number of completely non-objective works. 4 Fig. 2, Bearden, The Payment of Judas, 1945-46 It was not until 1963, when he was in his early 50s, that Bearden turned his full attention to the medium of collage and, also, to the medium of photomontage, a technique in which a picture is created by combining cut-out parts of photographs. It was at this moment that he began producing the works for which he is now best known, including The Dove (1964), a collage made out of cut and pasted paper affixed to board and elaborated with gouache and pencil. 10 RACHAEL DELUE - CONJURE AND COLLAPSE IN THE ART OF ROMARE BEARDEN Fig. 3, Bearden, The Dove, 1964 In The Dove, Bearden presents the scene on a New York street, the sidewalk thick with people strolling, talking, leaning, looking out of windows, and sitting on stoops. The picture registers almost immediately as a snapshot of the noisy, thick hustle of urban life and it does so despite the fact that it is, as a picture, a very strange one. Scraps of paper, cut-out photographs, and touches of paint and pencil form the bodies, buildings, and objects that we see. Bits of imagery from widely disparate sources—newspapers, magazines, product labels, construction paper, black and white or color photographs, wallpaper samples, architectural drawings—combine to create not a set of coherent forms but a series of disjointed and bizarrely scaled objects and bodies that lurch and stutter down the street as would a marionette puppet across a stage if operated by someone still learning the ropes. In the right half of the picture, a man whose head is far too large for his body, his eyes blocked or lopped off by a scrap of paper representing a cap, leans against a fire hydrant as a massive hand proffers an even more massive cigarette. Behind him stands a woman who holds in one oversize hand a piece of red and yellow fabric bearing a child’s head and in another a length of twisted, rope-like metal; the tumult of her barely cohering body is exacerbated by the shifting and irregular patchwork quilt of colors and patterns on which she walks. To the left of the eyeless man a cluster of five figures—a child, a woman, and three men—unfold in space, accordian-like, such that they 11 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #7: FORMALISM POST-FORMALISM (FALL 2012) ARTICLES seem to expand and contract in size, ballooning or shrinking, but not at all consistently or according to the rules of proportion or scale, so that it feels as if one sees them simultaneously from close up and far away.