University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art 1986 Geometric Abstraction in America Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska- Lincoln Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs Part of the Art and Design Commons Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Geometric Abstraction in America" (1986). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 37. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/37 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. RESOURCE SERIES GEOMETRIC s ABSTRACTION Resource/Reservoir is part of Sheldon's ongoing Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Reservoir explores various aspects of the Gallery's permanent collection. The Resources Series is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment 'lor the Arts and a grant from Cliff's Notes . • A portion of the • • Gallery's general •• 1 • • operating funds for the , fiscal year has been • • I -, 1 provided through a - grant from the Institute , -1 • I • I of Museum Services, - •• a federal gency that I. • .1 .-1 • offers general - • •• operating support to I I I. the nation's museums . • 1- - • • I- • • • -. • • • • L on Polk Smith Black-Blue·Grey·Whit Square, 1947 Geometric'Abstraction in America Precisionism and Regionalism were the were "exponents of Bohemian infantilism" dominant styles of the late Twenties and early who wrote "volumes of pseudo-philosophic Thirties; the isolationist and chauvinistic at­ drivel on the advantages of cubes and titudes which encouraged conservative im­ cones. "> agery of the American Scene generated In the same month- November- that scorn for Modernist art. Sounding very like Craven was composing these views, the the critics who derided the Armory Show of avant garde in New York was organizing it­ 1913, Thomas Craven (for example), writing self, meeting to discuss the formation of a in the New York American in 1936 about A. school and forum which would allow them E. Gallatin's purchase of Picasso's Three to develop and discuss their artistic aims. 2 Musicians for his Museum of Living Art , set The artists were divided among themselves. a standard for vituperation: One group, led by such artists as Arshile Rallying around a fallen idol, the vested inter­ Gorky and Willem deKooning, were deeply ests, collectors, nuts and professional es­ influenced by Surrealism-however in­ thetes have joined hands in a last desperate debted they were to the Cubist tradition. The campaign to restore the tarnished majesty of Picasso, a king without a kingdom, a ruler with other was strongly influenced by the ideas few loyal syncophants and courtiers but with and the art of the De Stijl group, principally Volume 1 few subjects in the ranks of genuine artists . Mondrian, as well as the Constructivists and Number 4 Such "courtiers," Craven went on to claim , Suprematists. The profound separation be- 1986 tween the emerging traditions of Surrealism and geometric abstraction precluded the formation of a single curriculum. There were no serious obstacles to a joint exhibition, however, and several additional meetings generated, in April of 1937, the first Amer­ ican Abstract Artists exhibition. Not every artist joined the AAA.-Davis and Gorky refused to participate, for example-but the size of the exhibition grew steadily. By 1946, in a Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue, Lloyd Goodrich could accurately observe that "about the middle 1930's began a new trend toward abstraction, particularly among the younger artists, until today it is one of the dominant tendencies in our art. " 3 Fundamental to this development was the gathering of the avant garde in Paris after World War I. The Dada crowd which had held forth riotiously at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich had dispersed, but many had come to Paris. There, in 1924, they followed their spokesman and party whip, Andre Breton, into the new camp of Surrealism. Picasso I1ya Bolotowsky and Georges Braque resumed their careers Red Tondo, 1967·68 in Paris. So too did the second generation of Cubists, among them perhaps the most influential being Ferdinand Leger. From So­ viet Russia, where the license for Supre­ matists and Constructivist experimentation had been abruptly withdrawn, came Naum Tower .. playing the most powerful projec­ Gabo and Anton Pevsner. From Holland tors in the world upon the streets ... my came the rigorously theoretical De Stijl art­ project was thrown OUt."5 ists. Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. The Utopian dreams which could billow Generally (although the specific tenets of to preposterous scale were rooted in an urge faith were different), the Constructivists and to overwhelm what had certainly been­ the De Stijl artists entertained a visionary, promised to be-disaster. The memory of even religious concept of art as an effica­ the astounding carnage of World War I was cious force in society, imagining art and ar­ fresh. A world-wide depression threatened chitecture which fused Utopian ideals with the stability of the western world. And finally, technology. In this, these artists were kin to of course, there was by the middle Thirties the great French architect, Le Corbusier, and the daunting spectre of a maniacal Third to the masters from the Bauhaus, Walter Reich. It is neither coincidental nor absurd Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. that the visual arts explored the hidden realm Le Corbusier, like his Bauhaus col­ of dreams, or offered the dream of a world leagues, was possessed by a dream of a rationally balanced in art which was struc­ transformed Paris. Had he had his way, the tured by clean geometric shapes and pre­ center of Paris would have been bladed from cise planes of primary colors. the earth. "My dream," Corbusier declared, The theories of De Stijl and Constructivists "is to see the Place de Concorde empty artists-and to a lesser extent, the Supre­ once more, silent and lonely ... these green matlsts-were available to an international parks with their relics are in some sort ce­ audience through a number of publications meteries, carefully tended. .. In this way established in the period. In 1926, Cahiers the past becomes no longer dangerous to d'Art was founded and became a journal life, but finds instead its true place within read widely in advanced art circles in Eu­ it. " 4 rope and the United States. In 1930, a group The Bauhaus architects were perhaps less of artists committed to the clarity and social violent in their antipathy to the past, but were efficacy of abstraction based upon geom­ equally committed to a streamlined archi­ etry formed Cercle et Carre (Circle and tecture of glass supported by a three-di­ Square). Although this organization lasted mensional grid of structural steel. Such, they only a year, it generated in the following year believed, would help create a techno-urban the highly influential group Abstraction-Cre­ man, uplifted by his light-filled, rationally ation Non-Figuratif, which published a jour­ proportioned living spaces devoid of em­ nal of the same name. In its pages, as Susan bellishment. Larsen has noted, The prospect of a Utopian environment Mondrian's Neo-Plasticism emerged as a po­ touched, in all, a wide range of artists. Leger tent, uncompromising vision, highly admired and emulated in varying degrees by artists complained that, for the 1937 Paris Expo­ working abroad including . America's sition, "I suggested Paris Completely White; Charles Biederman, Burgoyne Diller, and Harry I asked for 300,000 unemployed to clean Holtzman. Abstraction-Creation became a and scrub the facades. Create a white and forum in which the complex evolution of ab­ luminous citY,-in the evening the Eiffel stract art in Europe cou ld be clearly seen. 6 In New York during the Twenties and Thir­ In the same April in which "Cubism and Ab­ ties, drawing upon all of this, the presence stract Art " was installed at MoMA, Gallatin of modern art expanded enormously. Dur­ opened an exhibition of fi ve American art­ ing the Twenties, three public collections of ists: Charles Biederman, Alexander Calder, contemporary art were established; in the John Ferren , George L. K. Morris, and next decade were founded two more. Charles Shaw. The first was the Societe Anonyme , es­ Although they were not the only collectors tablished by the American collector, Kath­ in New York , Barr, Dreier, and Gallatin were erine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp (with the most important importers of European Joseph Stella and Man Ray) . The Societe art and ideas during the late Twenties and Anonyme was dedicated to presenting a se­ early Thirties. They not onl y generated influ­ ries of exhibitions which explored devel­ ential collections, but also produced inform­ opments in contemporary art. Group shows ative, sometimes exemplary exhibitions. of Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism were Dreier sustained a lengthy correspondance among those designed, in Dreier's phrase, with a number of European painters, among to "stimulate the imaginative and inventive them Pannaggi, Moholy-Nagy, and Gabo. attitude in the United States."? In 1926, No­ She supported Louis Lozowick's publication vember 10, until the new year, the Societe of Modern Russian Art, and became thor­ Anonyme presented a major exhibition of oughly conversant with the ideas of the sem­ contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, inal artists, Gabo and Mondrian. surveying art not only from Paris , but from It is their ideas, perhaps, that Dreier found Germany and Russia as well. most compatible with her own . She believed Dreier's collection came to include an ex­ Mondrian to be one of the most important traordinary range of geometric abstraction.