The Death of The School of Paris
cypher
My Website - www.thepanicartist.com
Recently I have been reading Bernard Dorival's book 'Twentieth Century
Painters" it is a rare French publication from 1958 - which is what
makes it so fascinating and quirky. I found the book in a Dublin
library which seems to have owned it since it was first published.
Bernard Dorival's (b1914 - d2003) was a French art historian, art
critic and museum head who wrote many books on modern French art.
Like most art books from that period its colour plates are tipped into
the text and some of them have fallen off for want of glue. Today in
our multi-cultural world you would be forgiven for thinking that this
was a history of world painters - or at least of France, German,
Britain and America - but no this is an all France based book.
The history of art is a history of records and erasures. For every
artist we the general art public chooses to remember there are a
thousand-and-one that we consign to the graves of oblivion.
The history of art is also a history of shooting-star artists,
laughable artists statements, hubristic manifestos, zeitgeist
propaganda, critical errors and public bad taste.
For the historian though such records like; newspaper reviews, gossip
column articles, artists manifestos and outspoken opinions and
predictions (right or wrong) from critics are worth their weight in
gold. They tell the story as it happened - without the tiding up and
ordering of historical memory. Bernard Dorival's book is one such gem.
To my taste it is hilariously French - very grand, very verbose, very
poetic, very philosophical, very concerned with paint and its
application to canvas. I cannot think when I last read a
book on modern art in which over 66% of the painters were unknown to
me - but this book has them in spades!
Now bear with me while I list the artists he discusses and see how
many you remember from art books or trips to the museum; Yves Alix,
Francois Arnal, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean Aujame, Balthus, Andre
Bauchant, Jean Bazaine, Andre Beaudin, Jean Bertholle, Roger Bissiere,
Camille Bombois, Franciso Bores, Jean-Louis Boussingault, Yves Brayer,
Maurice Brianchon, Bernard Buffett, Jacques Busse, Christian Caillard,
Aristide Caillaud, Jean Marie Calmettes, Julies Cavailles, Marc
Chagall, Roger Chapelain-Midi, Roger Chastel, Giorgio i Chirico, Jean
Cortot, Lucien Goutaud, Salvador Dali, Gabriel Dauchot, Georges Dayez,
Francois Desnoyer, Jacques Despierre, Jean Dewasne, Jean-Jacques
Deyrolle, Pierre Dmitrienko, Jacques Doucet, Jean Dubuffet, Bernard
Dufour, Charles Dufresne, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Maurice
Esteve, Jean Eve, Jean Fautrier, Andre Fougeron, Robert-Edgar Gillet,
Leon Gischia, Edouard Goerg, Emmanuel Gondouin, Marcel Gromaire,
Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Auguste Herbin, Robert Humbolt, Henri
Jannot, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling, Felix Labisse, Jacques Lagrange,
Andre Lanskov, La Patelliere, Charles Lapique, Robert LaPoujade, Henri
Le Fauconnier, Jules Lefranc, Raymond Legueult, Jean Le Moal, Roger
Limouse, Bernard Lorjou, Jean Lurcat, Alfred Manessier, Andre
Marchand, Andre Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux, Andre Minaux,
Jean Miro, Luc-Albert Moreau, Louis Nallard, Roland Oudot, Amedee
Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Michel Patrix, Dominique Peyronnet, Jean
Piaubert, James Pichette, Edouard Pignon, Andre Planson, Serge
Poliakoff, Daniel Ravel, Paul Rebeyrolle, Rene Rimbert, Georges
Rohner, Henri Rousseau, Pierre Roy, Gerard Schneider, Seraphine,
Gustave Singier, Pierre Soulanges, Chaim Soutine, Nicholas de Stael,
Leopold Survage, Pierre Tal-Coat, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor
Vasarely, Claude Venard, Vieira da Silva, Louis Vivin, Charles Walch,
Henry de Waroqier, Wols, Leon Zack and finally Zao Wou Ki!
All that but only a few footnotes on bloody Picasso, Braque, Gris,
Matisse or Modigliani - for a book covering painting from 1905-1958!
God only knows how Dorival justified that to himself!
So how many names did you remember? I remembered the following:
Jean-Michel Atlan, Balthus, Roger Bissiere, Camille Bombois, Bernard
Buffett, Marc Chagall, Giorgio di Chirico, Salvador Dali, Jean
Dubuffet, Dunoyer De Segonzac, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Edouard
Goerg, Francis Gruber, Hans Hartung, Le Corbusier, Moses Kisling,
Henri Le Fauconnier, Andre Masson, Georges Mathieu, Henri Michaux,
Jean Miro, Roland Oudot, Amedee Ozenfant, Julius Pasin, Serge
Poliakoff, Henri Rousseau, Seraphine, Pierre Soulanges, Chaim Soutine,
Nicholas de Stael, Yves Tanguy, Raoul Ubac, Victor Vasarely,Vieira Da
Silva, Wols, and Zao Wou Ki! A little less than a third - and I have
been studying French art since I was ten!
I mention all this for a profound reason - it beautifully illustrates
the power of history to forget. This book is only forty-nine years old
yet it might as well be four hundred years old for all its antiquated
notions of male genius, the metaphysical meaning of the brushstroke,
the fetish of the hand of the painter and the lauding of the tradition
of painting that stretched back to Courbet the first great
(self-appointed) Realist painter. Yes it is true that most of these
artists were mediocities of never more than local interest but don't
go fooling yourself - many of these painters were minor household
names in their day, critically praised, poetically lauded,
philosophically consulted, politically influential, or rich beyond the
dreams of most of us. But for only a handful were the doors of
immortality opened.
>From an art theory point of view reading Dorival's book is like
reading old mathematical problems which have long since been solved,
ignored as cul-de-sacs or conclusively disproved. But to a bibliophile
like me it is a treasure trove of lost opportunities, failed
manifestos and short lived artistic schools. The period of French art
from 1940-1958 was the one I concentrated most on in Dorival's book -
since it's the history of a collapse of creative elan in French art -
and is also a period so little known to art lovers outside France.
I will always remember how my heart sunk when I visited Paris for the
first time with my mother when I was nineteen - I came in search of
the Picasso's and Modigliani's of my day, the Bohemian glamor of the
artist quarters in Montmartre and the philosophical passion of the
Existentialists. Imagine my disappointment when I arrived in the Place
de Tertre in Montmartre to find craven pavement artists, kitsch street
painters and crass portrait artists of the worst kind. I knew there
must have been new artist quarters in Paris - but I had no idea where
they were or what kind of art they were making. But I could not fathom
how a city so rich in culture could in the space of just fifty odd
years become nothing more than a living museum or worse still an
artistic Disney Land. I never liked Paris - I found it a cruel, cold,
cynical, and rude city. I found the museums and grand buildings bear
down on me with an oppressive weight while at other times I felt like
I was walking through the graveyard of a long lost Imperial city. In
the Centre Pompadour I ravished the great paintings and sculptures of
Paris from 1900-1939 and then slowly became more and more bored as I
survived 'the best' in French art from 1940-1989. No one but Jean
Dubuffett, Pierre Soulanges, Nicholas de Stael, Yves Kline and Ben
struck my heart, head or imagination. But only Dubuffett and Klein
seemed like really great and original artists. So I have always been
fascinated by this collapse.
The beginning of the end came in June 1940 when the German's marched
into Paris. Artists fled the city and then the country - boarding
boats to England or America - some joined the Resistance while others
collaborated with the German's and privileged others like Matisse and
Picasso lived in splendid isolation. Near the wars end wonderfully
emotive painters like Wols, Jean Fautrier and Dubuffet began to emerge
- their art - humble, hurt, angry and traumatized into brutalism.
After the end of the war - the Liberation, the reprisals on
collaborators, and the idealist and socialist hopes for a new France -
Paris galleries had a boom in sales. But New York emerged as the new
world capital of art - with brash energetic and serious painters like
Pollock, De Kooning and Rothko and witty intelligent painters like
Jasper Johns and protean creative spirits like Robert Rauschenberg .
Some like to point out the C.I.A. promotion of American art as the
real clue to its success - but I think the work really does stand up
better than its French counterparts.
The seismic shift from Paris to New York did not happen over night -
it happened slowly at first. The Paris art world initially thrived on
the renewed interest of American collectors who now saw Modern artists
as the good guys in the great moral fight with the Communists and
Nazis and their various brands of Socialist and National-Socialist
realism. Crate load after crate load of great Modernist masterpieces
were bought up and shipped to America and the Paris gallery's reaped
the whirlwind. Paris galleries experienced a boom in the sale of
contemporary art unheard of before. Artists like Dubuffett, Buffett
and De Stael became over night successes. By the early 1950's French
abstraction under the banner 'Art-Informel' and its sub-school of
Tachisme was achieving unprecedented critical acclaim and collector
avarice - but its reign was short lived and soon over thrown by the
emergence of Pop art in the 1960's. Art-Informal was in its way an
rejection of the rigid theories of Cubist inspired geometric
abstraction. Art-Informal paintings were large abstracts, with crude
colours and dominating blacks - thickly painted and full of the bucket
and slosh mannerism of 1950's art. The trouble with most of this
French abstraction was its monotony and repetition. This made it
attractive to collectors who wanted 'signature' work that was easily
recognizable as the work of - Hartung, Mathieu, Soulanges and so on -
but to a connoisseur today their work seems too limited, too willfully
eccentric and too technically sloppy. For all the apparent bluster and
bravura energy - these were in fact - exhausted, Conservative, timid
and unconvincing canvases - made by painters with mushroom
reputations. The theatrical mannerisms of their work cannot match the
power and darkness of Francis Bacon or for that matter the children's
and outsider art inspired raw work of Karl Appel. Georges Mathieu in
particular seems to me to be nothing more than a showman. His flashy
mannered canvases have none of the pathos and raw power of Pollock -
an artist he has some affinities with.
American's like Robert Rauchenberg still went to Paris in the late
1940's looking for the fellow artists and inspiration that they
thought still existed from the days of Matisse, Picasso and Dali- but
they were soon
disappointed. French art had lost its nerve and ambition. Increasingly
insular and hostile to foreigner influences, French critics waffled on
about the classic virtues of Haute pate (a French love for the sensual
properties of oil paint) French painterly painting - failing to see
that the timid work of the likes of Soulanges was no match for the
vulgar lust and ambition in a Pollock or De Kooning.
True America was the new super-power, true American collectors ruled
the market, true the American painters had progressed a lot in modern
terms (thanks to the influx of many European masters like Mondrian,
Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, Matta and Dali), true America had the money -
but France could still produce geniuses which could compete and win on
the world stage of art - or could they? In fact they couldn't.
War had not only impoverished and traumatized France - it had robbed
it of ambition and courage. Moreover the weight of tradition began to
wear down on artists. Great cultures at their peak have a sense that
anything is possible. But dying cultures like Paris in the 1940's-50's
are riven with dissent, division and rule upon rule, debate upon
counter debate, philosophical speculation upon philosophical
speculation until the whole ethos and mood becomes suffocating to true
creative spirits.
The art of Paris after the war was like that made by a man enduring a
long hangover. How could any man or woman come to terms with the
tragedy, betrayals, shame, guilt, hurt, and pain of the occupation. So
can any philosophical movement have ever been more in tune with its
time the French Existentialism expounded by Jean Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet? Their writings spoke with
terrifying lucidity of the solitude of man, the prison of
subjectivity, the cruelty and absurdness of fate, the burden of
femininity, the absence of God and the need for collective political
action. Their work ran parallel to the paintings and sculptures of
artist like Wols, Giacometti, Artaud, Gruber, Fautrier, Dubuffett, de
Stael, and yes even the awful rubbish of Bernard Buffett. All of
their work was characterized by emaciated figures, tragic solitude,
brutalized artifice, and a wounded consciousness in search of meaning
and recovery from a tragic bereavement.
The last genius of French art was Jean Dubuffett - only his work comes
close to the protean energy of Picasso (though with none of his
ancestral skills, or true inventive power). His crude portraits of
friends in the mid 1940's - the drawing like the work of some demented
child scrawled over a canvas bed of soot, sand, and plaster embedded
paint - where the last French paintings to send shivers down my spine.
What was the bloody point of cultural refinement, correct drawing, and
fine feelings - the German's had those and look what they did to
Europe. Dubuffets was the most intelligent, powerfully articulated
rebuke to high culture in the twentieth century - and all this from an
ex wine merchant! His work was a celebration of innate creativity
unfettered by western academic training - the work of children,
psychotics, the disabled, visionaries, criminals and the dirty and
obscene scrawls on lavatory walls. But for all his bluster Dubuffett
could no more make himself into a naif than Picasso - there was too
much to unlearn. That is why his paintings have a elegance and
painterly sophistication unseen in the art of the truly raw outsider.
Still he he remained in my thoughts periodically since I first
thoroughly discovered his work in 1987.
The last great painter France fostered (he was Russian by birth) was
Nicolas de Stael - his life tragically cut short by himself. Only his
paintings succeed for me in balancing the demands of the French
figurative tradition, the Cubist legacy and the need for abstract
poetry. De Stael was one of the great masters of the pallet knife and
even the trowel. His canvases have a wonderfully nuanced quality - the
paint thick but never coarse, crass or vulgar (a common problem one
faces with paintings made with the pallet knife). He was also one of
the finest colorists of the twentieth century - both daring and
inventive. Moreover any doubts about his conventional abilities were
corrected by his wonderfully fluent and sophisticated drawings. In
fact de Stael battled all his creative life with the twin polls of
abstraction and figuration (a cause of constant heated debate amongst
French artists of his day who formed opposing bands). Some say his
suicide (he jumped out the window of his studio in Antibes was because
of the hostile reactions of critics like Douglas Cooper (a famous
collector and scholar on Cubism) to his more figurative last works.
Others blame overwork - he was a hot commodity in the Paris art world
and his work was always in demand especially from American collectors
(most of his best work is in the U.SA.). Others blame his alcoholism
and naturally morbid personality. Whatever - his death marked the end
of the French school of painting that stretched back to Braque.
>From the sublime to the ridiculous but equally tragic - Bernard
Buffett was something of a teenage prodigy - his canvases executed
when he was seventeen are impressive for one so young and somewhat
reminiscent of early James Esnor in Brussells, and L.S. Lowery in
England. But his art was still born and never developed. In 1948 he
was awarded the Prix de la Critique along with Lorjou. From then on he
became a star of the newly revived Paris art world. Heaped with praise
for his elongated, emaciated, and bitter looking nudes, portraits,
still life's and city-scape's - he had no need to push his art beyond
its adolescent mannerisms and autistic stoicism. His art was an
Etch-A-Sketch version of Expressionism. There was hardly a curved line
in Buffetts paintings - everything was at sharp right angles. He had
absolutely no concept of paint as a sensual medium that can enhance a
drawing - to him was all tiling grout for his spiked black autistic
line. That such a comically bad painter (I was literally laughing out
loud the last time I looked at his paintings) could have been lauded
by the best critics and collectors in Franch is utterly bizarre - one
can only assume that for a few years Buffett really did seem to be the
poet Laurette for his day. Then the backlash came of course but
Buffett by then had established his name and the money still came
rolling in - giving him a Chateau in the countryside and a museum
dedicated to him in Japan (well you know what they say about being big
in Japan)! His career proves again that often collectors simply buy
names - without even actually seeing the art they are buying.
Tragically (in the sense that I never like to see anyone driven to it)
Buffet killed himself in 1999 after his Parkinson disease prevented
him from working. I remember reading an interview with him in the
1990's in Modern Painters magazine - he seemed quite jovial and cocky
- unphased by a lifetime of critical assaults and bolstered by a life
time of awards and honors and public fondness for his art. But who
knows maybe the criticism really did get to him in the end - famous
and rich painters often crave critical respect just like poor
critically revered artists often crave financial success.
Another sincere but mediocre artist - revered in France by the common
man, was Dunoyer De Segozac. I had bought a second hand book on him
last year and liked his work on a superficial level. But my main
reason for buying the book was to try to understand how such a
supposedly famous and beloved French artist could be unknown to me.
What I learned was that his brand of realist art inspired by Courbet
and Cezanne had been taken to the bosom of Conservative critics and
the general public after World War One (who had become disillusioned
with the academy but were also suspicious of the avant-guard) De
Segozac's work trod a lucrative middle ground. His watercolours are
quite charming but his oil paintings are turgid and cack-handed.
The last hurrah for Paris came through theater and comedy - in the
form of Yves Klein - perhaps the most chic artist of the twentieth
century. I loath conceptual artists but I have a soft spot for Klein.
I know that most of the ideas behind his work were spiritual
mumbo-jumbo and self-deceiving nonsense - but he did everything with
such wit, lightness of touch and sincerity - I cannot hold it against
him. I find his blue abstracts truly moving and spiritual in a way I
can't quite pin down. Long before Martin Creed exhibited an empty
gallery in Tate modern with the lights going on and off - Klein had
exhibited an empty (save for a glass case) white room in 1961. I love
his cheeky (pardon the pun) imprinting of paint covered naked French
arty girls on canvas - while an orchestra played his Montone Symphony
- hilarious and erotic in the best sense of the word. If only all
conceptual art could be that much fun.
Oh and I almost forgot Balthus - its an easy mistake to make - his art
seemed so far removed from the crass faddish concerns of French
painters of his day and he lived most of his life as a deliberately
enigmatic recluse. His art spoke of the ancient compositional rhythms
and subtle modulated colour of Piero della Francesca but his themes
were unsettling modern day nymphs and innocent childhood sexuality
just on the cusp of puberty and adult awareness. Despite the
awkwardness of his self-taught technique - his paintings were the last
truly great evocative naturalistic canvases in the West.
But as for the rest since then - Arman, Martial Raysse, Daniel Buren,
Niele Toroni, Bertrand Lavier, Annette Messager or even Christian
Boltanski I have nothing but feelings of nostalgia (as fragments of a
once great tradition), indifference and boredom.
The story of the Death of The School of Paris is a salutary one today
- as the stock market continues to rise, and the art market enters the
stratosphere. I remember reading Robert Hughes in the late 1980's and
thinking he was mad to think the art market of the 1980's would
collapse - but it did. They say it can't happen again - the market is
more diverse, there are more collectors, more institutions, blah,
blah, blah. I wouldn't bet on it. But that's when the shake out will
begin. Reputations will go to the wall, some will survive even
stronger, new schools will be founded on a total opposition to the
ethos of commercial conceptualism of today - and the cycle of fashion
and fad will continue.
I post a scathing monthly blog on art in Dublin which you can also
read at my myspace page - http://myspace.com/cypherthepanicartist
or
http://thepanicartist.livejournal.com/
My Website - www.thepanicartist.com