Newsletter No. 7, October 2008
- Preface by Paul van Rosmalen
- Amsterdam-Paris and back, by Serge Lemoine
- The painter’s relief, by Marianne Lepommeré
“De Stijl” is zonder twijfel de belangrijkste Nederlandse bijdrage aan de internationale kunstgeschiedenis van de 20e eeuw. Opgericht in 1917 in Nederland door o.a. Mondriaan en Van Doesburg, zal de beweging na het einde van WO I al snel een internationaal karakter krijgen. Als één van de leidende figuren publiceerde Mondriaan in een reeks artikelen in “De Stijl” zijn ideeën over “de Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst” .
Eenmaal weer terug in Parijs zullen Mondriaan en Van Doesburg die denkbeelden verder uitdragen en worden ze overgenomen door anderen.
Eén van Mondriaan’s trouwste volgelingen wordt de Fransman Jean Gorin (1899-1981). In 1926 ontmoet hij Mondriaan in Parijs. Deze ontmoeting, welke zal uitmonden in een vriendschap, is voor Gorin van grote betekenis, en wel zodanig dat hij tot aan zijn dood het idioom van Mondriaan’s “Neo-plasticisme” zal trouw blijven. Hij voegt daar bovendien nog een element aan toe: de derde dimensie. Mede doordat Mondriaan zelf hem daartoe aanspoort, begint hij met het maken van reliëfs en constructies, waarbij een strenge geometrie gehandhaafd blijft.
In Nederland na WO II tekenen zich twee richtingen af in de abstracte kunst, in de kunstkritieken wel eens aangeduid als behorende tot het Apollinische of het Dionysische kamp. Apollo, God van orde, regelmaat en harmonie, versus Dionysos, God van geestdrift en chaos.
Joost Baljeu, een jonge kunstenaar, schreef in 1956 in het tijdschrift Parnas een artikel met de titel: Mondrian of Miro. Beide grootheden als representanten van die richtingenstrijd in de abstracte kunst: de geometrische abstractie van Mondriaan versus de lyrische abstractie van Miro. Baljeu manifesteert zich in woord en beeld als aanhanger van de erfenis van Mondriaan en De Stijl. Hij ontmoet in Parijs Jean Gorin, met wie hij zeer bevriend raakt en welke vriendschap Gorin enkele malen naar Nederland zal brengen (o.a. in 1967 voor een retrospectieve tentoonstelling van Gorin in het Stedelijk Museum).
Via weer andere invalshoeken komen in Nederland ook kunstenaars als Jan Schoonhoven, Carel Visser en Ad Dekkers tot een verstilde kunst in de vorm van reliëfs en constructies, waarin ritme en repetitie, lijn en vlak, tijd en ruimte de leidraad vormen. Het klassieke schilderij heeft voor hen afgedaan: de ultieme consequentie van Mondriaan’s Nieuwe Beelding.
In RELIEF & CONSTRUCTION exposeren we een met zorg samengestelde collectie reliëfs en sculpturen, waarvan de ultieme oorsprong ligt in die belangwekkende periode van De Stijl, en die via Parijs weer naar Nederland leidt.
Amsterdam, september 2008
Paul van Rosmalen
Amsterdam-Paris: the relationship between the Netherlands and France in the 20th century constitutes one of the most significant subjects in the history of art.
However the fact has never really been acknowledged, by either of the countries. For example, when in France the Centre Georges-Pompidou was renovated, Pontus Hulten organised the exhibitions Paris-New York, Paris-Berlin and Paris-Moscow, which quite rightly remain in everyone’s memory, but “Paris-Amsterdam”, which had just as much, if not more, right to be held was omitted.
Piet Mondrian occupies first place in the history of this relationship, followed by Theo van Doesburg. The thoughts and actions of these two Dutch artists cannot be appreciated without the involvement of France, where they play a decisive role for many artists, including both Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier. Although younger, Jean Gorin, is not the least important member of this family. He is the first French artist to be converted to Neoplasticism and as a consequence of these ideas he is certainly the first to take the obvious next step of transforming the painting into a relief, leaving the flat surface in favour of space and therefore in some sense to transform painting into architecture. From then on his oeuvre becomes very special and his most beautiful reliefs count as some of the masterpieces of 20th century art.
Jean Gorin himself then had a great influence on a number of young artists, such as the American Charles Biederman, the Canadian Eli Bornstein, the Briton Anthony Hill – who was, of course, also influenced by Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore – the Argentine Carlos Cairoli and the Dutchman Joost Baljeu.
Several exhibitions of the time show evidence of these experiments and these relationships: Experiment in Constructie, in 1962, by Willem Sandberg in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, an exhibition that was then also shown in the Kunsthaus in Zurich.
Relief/Construction/Relief, in 1968 by Jan van der Marck in Chicago and other American cities.
Structure in Art, in 1973 by Eli Bornstein in Saskatoon, Canada.
Next Margit Rowell put on the exhibition The Planar Dimension in
Europe, 1912-1932, for the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1979, which managed to ignore both Jean Gorin and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart.
I, myself, brought together from 1985 what is undoubtedly the most important public collection of reliefs produced by painters for the Museum of Grenoble.
It is this theme that Paul van Rosmalen of the Borzo gallery reiterates today: how Jean Gorin understood and interpreted the teaching of Piet Mondrian, then in turn influenced Dutch artists and how other artists such as Jan Schoonhoven made relief their means of expression of preference.
An important theme that enables us to understand, at least partially, the development of art in the 20th century.
September 2008
Serge Lemoine
The relief appeared in art at the same time as sculpture came into being. As can be seen in the work of someone such as David d’Angers, it allows the play between light and shadow to be sublimated when the projection of a form creates a difference in height so tenuous that it is only seen as a line. Nevertheless the relief has become a new form of expression due to the work of painters.
From the start of the 20th century, in the heart of the two most important birthplaces of abstraction, Russia and the Netherlands, artists wanted to give art a new mission, in particular to try to make this a part of daily life. These painters, who followed the ideas of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevitch, wanted to discard traditional paintings and sculptures and to integrate these into architecture, which itself had changed. It is the ideal of the “synthesis of the arts”, as expressed in De Stijl movement and in Constructivism.
This ideal, that will be a driving force for the Bauhaus and that one can see being born in Mondrian’s experiments for his studio in the Rue du Départ in Paris, will produce a masterpiece: the decor of the “Brasserie de l’Aubette” in Strasbourg, created in 1926 by three artists, Jean Arp, Sophie Tauber-Arp and Theo van Doesburg.
It is, in fact, the work of the Dutch artist, who had most fully developed the ideas at the heart of De Stijl, as El Lissitzky had done for Constructivism in Russia. Both through the use of axonometry (one-point perspective) in his architectural drawings and through his scale models Theo van Doesburg revealed himself to be a painter-architect. From this point of view “inspiration” no longer applies and the artist becomes a builder. The relief then serves as the perfect medium by which to leave painting behind and conquer space.
His theoretical texts and his works will become decisive for Jean Gorin, the only French artist who embraced the ideals of Constructivism, which he discovered in 1926 and which takes him on to further develop his experiments with relief after 1930. His reliefs, initially only lightly profiled and still largely governed by the principles of Neoplasticism, allow lines and surfaces of varying depths to play in space, later become constructions, which, when viewed horizontally, look as if they are architectural models. The title of one work reveals his ambition: “The conquest of space”.
However, his strict principles do not exclude poetry when colour, applied to the faces of elements that are mounted on a panel, spreads into space and changes according to how the light hits it. These are the spatiotemporal compositions in which the rhythm of the elements has the dynamics of Suprematist works. His desire to work for public spaces also led him to make constructions which he would have liked to have made on a monumental scale for the city. One of his favourite works is the Construction spatio-temporelle no.10 émanant de la pyramide from 1955-57. He enjoyed photographing it on the rocks on the Mediterranean coast close to Nice, where he was staying, taking it from a low angle in order for it to appear more monumental and as it would finally be realised in 1980 as a public commission in Genlis (Bourgogne) for the courtyard of a grammar school.
This is not the place to talk about the other centres, in Russia, Germany (Berlin and Hanover), Hungary and England, nor about how Jean Gorin’s influence spread as far as North and South America and Canada. Jean Gorin, who had discovered Neoplasticism via the magazine “De Stijl”, which he bought in 1926, serves in turn as an example for the Dutch artists who emerge after 1950. The one closest to him – they met several times – and who owes him the most is Joost Baljeu. Baljeu, 26 years younger than Gorin, made the relief his favourite means of expression by constructing complex structures from simple, rectangular shapes and by also creating independent sculptures for public spaces.
Because the times were different and because architecture was viewed differently in Holland, less for the “statement” made than for the harmony created, Joost Baljeu actually worked on architectural and urban development commissions while Jean Gorin, like many of his French colleagues of the ‘Salon des Réalités Nouvelles’ could only dream of this.
From the sixties Ad Dekkers starts to produce reliefs that essentially reiterate the ideals of Neoplasticism and that are inspired by both Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian. Painted white, these reliefs with deeply incised lines are composed according to a system. There is yet another school in the art of relief, which is unrelated to Constructivist Art but rather refers to the spirit of Dadaism. This will chiefly be produced in Holland, and then by Jan Schoonhoven in particular, one of the founders of the NUL group. Jan Schoonhoven stated that his aim was to express his personal feelings as little as possible. His goal was anonymity and objectivity and he used relief to achieve this. His preferred raw materials are cardboard and papier-mâché, which he leaves uncoloured or paints uniformly white with a latex paint, in order to use the most rudimentary shapes to produce elementary structures, which are then repeated in staggered and crossing patterns.
It is on the basis of this concept that herman de vries in his early days creates white reliefs, onto which identical elements are haphazardly thrown, like the ‘papiers déchirés’ of Jean Arp.
With regard to the ideal of progress expressed in the work of artists of the Constructivist Art movement, the response of this other school of artists is to refuse to accept criticism, to reject any hierarchies, colour, craftsmanship or message.
Both groups nevertheless won recognition due to their strong visual presence and how they speak of a noble moral commitment and the rigour of their creators.
Augustus 2008
Marianne Le Pommeré