Gabo and Pevsner then issued a manifesto. It is dated 5 August 1920, and its most important pronouncement, as Gabo has said, was that art has its absolute, independent value and a function to perform in society, whether capitalistic, socialistic, or communistic. ‘Art will always be alive as one of the indispensable expressions of human experience and as an important means of communication. The other important pronouncement in the manifesto was the assertion that space and time constitute the backbone of the constructive arts.’ 19
It is necessary to dwell a little on these discussions because though they took place in Moscow between 1917 and 1922, they are still live issues, and the future development of art still depends on their resolution. By 1922 the differences between the two
210 Development of Constructivism
groups in Moscow were obviously irreconcilable, but the victory was not to be with either party. Suprematists, Constructivists, Productivists—all alike had been merely tolerated by the Russian government because for the moment more urgent problems occupied its attention. When finally it became aware of the issues, neither the Government itself nor the soldiers and peasants and industrial workers they represented cared for any of these fine points of aesthetics. They wanted an art they could understand, an anecdotic art, indeed an academic art; and since all forces had to be organized in defence of the Soviet, they wanted a propagandist art, an art in the service of the Revolution. That the artists themselves conceived their art to be essentially revolutionary and therefore appropriate for the new society that was coming into being was irrelevant. Who were these artists? Not workers, in any proletarian sense; but rather survivals of Western bourgeois decadence, probably anarchists, in any case a noisy and subversive minority. The game was up and the artists knew it. In 1922 Gabo left for Berlin to supervise an exhibition of Russian art sent there by the Government. He never returned to Moscow, and a year later Pevsner joined him in Berlin. Kandinsky left the same year, to join Gropius in Weimar. Of those who remained in Moscow, either like Tatlin they became industrial designers or like Malevich they retired into obscurity and poverty. The fate of most of them is unknown.
Gabo stayed in Berlin for ten years, then spent three years in Paris. In 1935 he settled in London and remained in England ten years. In 1946 he left England for the United States and eventually became an American citizen. Pevsner, who had had a decisive meeting with Marcel Duchamp in Berlin in 1922 or 1923, then turned from painting to constructivist sculpture, and in October 1923 returned to Paris, where he has remained ever since, becoming a French citizen in 1930.
In so far as Constructivism is conceived as a development of traditional sculpture, it might seem to lie outside the scope of this volume; but though both Gabo and Pevsner often speak of themselves as sculptors and are so regarded by critics and the
antoine pevsner Design in Enamel. rg2j
public, in fact what they have aimed at and achieved is a form of art that supersedes all previous categories of art. Pevsner has written:
‘The gigantic constructions of the modern world, the prodigious discoveries of science have changed the face of the world, while artists were announcing new conceptions and forms. A revolution is imposed on the arts and on the emotions—it will discover a new world as yet scarcely explored. Thus we have arrived, Gabo
212 The Bauhaus
and I, on the road to new research of which the guiding idea is the attempt at a synthesis of the plastic arts: painting, sculpture and architecture. ... It is not fanciful to think that the epoch which will succeed ours will be once more, in the history of humanity, a period of great collective works; that it will witness the execution of imposing constructions in vast urban spaces.’ 20
Such a ‘synthesis of all the plastic arts’, in which the traditional Renaissance categories disappear in a new architectonic complex of constructive activities, has also been the ideal of the great architects of our period, Walter Gropius (b. 1883), Mies van der Rohe (b. 1886), and Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret, b. 1887). The Bauhaus was founded by Gropius with just such an ideal of a synthesis of the plastic arts; and this too was the ideal of van Doesburg and other members of De Stijl. The Bauhaus united for ten productive years artists of every category in this common endeavour. In the first proclamation issued at Weimar in 1919 it was argued that all the arts must be unified round the building. ‘Architects, painters and sculptors must recognize anew the composite character of a building as an entity. Only then will their work be imbued with the architectonic spirit which it has lost as “salon art”. Architects, sculptors, painters: we must all turn to the crafts. . . . Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.’ 21
This brave ambition was defeated by the machinations of philistine politicians, but the Bauhaus itself became the symbol of all that is creative and constructive in an age of economic and political confusion, and remains such a symbol. During the fourteen years of its existence it not only gave a professional status and means of livelihood to such ‘creative’ artists as Klee, Feiningcr and Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), but also through the teaching ofjohannes Itten (b. 1888) and Josef Albers (b. 1888) established
for the first time a course in basic design that could serve as a training for the machine art of an industrial civilization. A fundamental parallelism was for the first time drawn between the principles of abstract art and design for mass production.
While Gropius was creating the Hauhaus in Weimar, Lasar (El) Lissitzky (1890 1941) was establishing similar principles in Russia, first at Vitebsk and then in Moscow. In 1921 lie was sent to Berlin to make contact with Western artists and for a time was actively associated with Mies van der Rohe, Thco van Doesburg, Hans Richter and others. In 1923 Richter, in association with Werner GraefT, Doesburg and Mies, founded still another group known as ‘G’, to which Gabo, Lissitzky and several other artists and architects adhered. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895 194b), a Hungarian who came to Berlin in 1920 already imbued with Constructivist ideals, joined this group. In 1923 Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the stall of the Bauhaus, and was eventually to carry the Bauhaus ideal to America in 1938 he became
victor pasmore Inland Sea. iggo
director of a new Bauhaus in Chicago. Virtually all the leaders of the movement and many of its disciples (Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Richter, Lyonel Feininger, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Gyorgy Kepes) were eventually displaced from Europe and established themselves in America.
Paris remained obstinately attached to ‘salon art’, in spite of the efforts of Le Corbusier. The Section d'or school of Cubism, represented by Gleizes and Metzinger, had already before the war moved towards a ‘pure’ form of abstraction. Immediately after the war Le Corbusier and Amedee Ozenfant published a ‘purist manifesto’, Apres le Cubisme, 22 This was an attack on the decorative tendencies of Cubism, on the cult of sensibility, and a call for an art as pure and ‘rigorous’ as the machine. Purism was chosen as a word to express the characteristics of the modern spirit. The work
ben nicholson Still-life [offgreen). 1945-54
of art of the future was not to be accidental, exceptional, impressionist, inorganic, picturesque, etc., but on the contrary general, static, expressing the constant factor in nature. Clarity, precision, fidelity to the ‘concept’—these were to be the ideals of the new art. In 1920 a periodical entitled U esprit nouveau was established to propagate these ideals, and there can be no doubt that between the years 1920 and 1925 the Purists had a decisive influence on the development of abstract art throughout Europe and America. But Purism did not desert the object: it was an ideal of style or technique, a purification of the motif as such. Nevertheless, a non-figurative school of painting did emerge in Paris, and in 1932 a group with many adherents was founded by Antoine Pevsner and Gabo with the title Abstraction-Creation. It has continued to represent a strictly non-figurative ideal in abstract
art, but it is still essentially a group of painters and sculptors and has not tried to realize that synthesis of the plastic arts which was the ideal of the Bauhaus and De Stijl. At the most there has been some merging of the techniques of painting and sculpture—a merging that was first suggested by some of the ‘constructions’ in wood, paper, and other materials made by Picasso as early as 1912—an invention subsequently exploited with good effect by many artists. Most constructions of this kind are experimental, or decorative, or surrealistic accretions meant to shock us; but one has only to examine the evolution of a painter like Ben Nicholson (b. 1894) to see how such a constructive element has modified the concept of the painted picture. Nicholson began as a decorative painter of great charm, and then came under various ‘purist’ influences of which the most direct and powerful was that of Mondrian, though Arp also must be taken into account. He then evolved the ‘relief’ which is still representative of his work. This can be literally a relief—a geometrical division of the picturearea distinguished not by colour but by differences in level, usually cut down from the original surface of a board. A very subtle difference of level between the various divisions of the composition suffices to create the abstract pattern, though this may sometimes be elaborated by a circle or other detail drawn in pencil.
Arc such reliefs painting or sculpture? The question is more difficult to answer when we pass to works by this artist which are not carved in relief, but wholly painted, for we then see that the disposition of the colours, their balance and interrelationship, has been influenced by an architectonic conception of painting—that is to say, the colours are disposed as if in relief. The spatial conception of the painting has been influenced by a sculptural conception of space.
This is not exactly the synthesis of the arts as conceived by van Doesburg, Le Corbusier or Gropius, but it is a secure step in this direction. Victor Pasmore is another English artist whose progress has been in this same limited but intensive direction; Pasmore, moreover, has recently worked on architectural projects which bring his work into line with the Bauhaus intentions of 1919-28.
Abstract Art 217
The ideal of a synthesis of the plastic arts is not dead; but the experience gained at much cost of effort and disillusionment of spirit at Weimar, Dessau, Harvard, Chicago, and elsewhere shows that the vital conceptions of the artist cannot immediately transform societies still clinging to obsolete political and economic concepts. The artist creates his image, original and universal; it is dropped like a crystal into the amorphous ferment of life; and only slowly and perhaps imperceptibly can it communicate its order and clarity to the chaos around it.
After the Second World War the manifestations of abstract art in Paris continued to increase. An annual salon which was given the name of Realites JVouvelles was established, and this organization revealed for the first time the growing strength of the movement in that city, where from 1933 onwards the presence of Kandinsky and of Alberto Magnelli (b. 1888, in Florence) had exercised a decisive influence. The artists who were associated with Realites Nouvelles are too numerous to be mentioned, but they include Jean Piaubert (b. 1900), Serge Poliakoff (b. 1906, in Moscow), Victor de Vasarely (b. 1908, in Hungary), Jean Deyrolle (b. 1911), Natalia Dumitresco (b. 1915, in Rumania), Alexander Istrati (b. 1915, in Rumania) and Jean Dewasne (b. 1921). From 1949 onwards the Salon de Mai turned towards abstraction; among its regular exhibitors were Charles Lapicque (b. 1898), Geer van Velde (b. 1898), Andre Lanskoy (b. 1902, in Moscow), Leon Gischia (b. 1904), Maurice Esteve (b. 1904), Jean Bazaine (b. 1904), Maria Elena Vieira da Silva (b. 1908, in Lisbon), Gustave Singier (b. 1909), Raoul Ubac (b. 1911), Alfred Manessier (b. 1911) and Jean Paul Riopelle (b. 1924, at Montreal). In general the artists of the Salon de Mai represented a variety of abstract styles, some of which tended to get far away from the formal severity of Kandinsky’s and Magnelli’s compositions; they began to merge with an expressionistic type of abstraction which had separate origins and different aims, and must be the subject of a further chapter.