THEO VAN DOESBURG AT THE TATE MODERN, LONDON, MARCH 2010
THEO VAN DOESBURG AT THE TATE MODERN, LONDON, MARCH 2010
Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London
One question this exhibition begs is: who is this exhibition really about? Not just Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) but the works of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, the Surrealists intrude upon van Doesburg's work. Perhaps van Doesburg might modestly be described as a cypher meaning an entire outlook on life, an avante garde moment beyond which is an entire sunrise replete with sea monsters.
This is a retrospective of the Dutch de Stijl art group best known for the works of abstract artist Piet Mondrian, van Doesburg's older mentor. Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) was an artist entrepreneur, today practically forgotten. Every art movement is summarised by it's leading artist, but de Stijl possibly more than others. Van Doesburg's own art is often painfully derivative of Mondrian's but his range of influences, activities is vastly more eclectic. Theo van Doesburg comes over as an eccentric figure, inventing pseudonyms such as Aldo Camini, avante garde poet publishing iconoclastic pamphlets (this reflects Van Doesburg's Nietzsche phase, which seems to have gone on longer and been more painful and excruciating than usual) and IK Bonsett, an anti-philosopher celebrating the new pragmatic power of physics (in other words Albert Einstein, creator of the new doctrine of Relativity Theory that was then sweeping through artistic and intellectual movements in Europe including those - de Stijl, DaDa - that Van Doesburg was chiefly involved with.)
De Stijl was founded at the very end of WW1 in Holland in October 1917 by the painters Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck and Vilmos Huszar along with the architect JJP Oud and the poet Antony Kok. De Stijl reflects an exploding worldview as the vast rupture that the war caused unfolded and a total upturning of values occured: authority seemed criminal, figures of the establishment such as judges, policemen, professors, teachers, lawyers were representative of corruption and all the forces of jingoism, militarism, aggressive nationalism, chauvanism, all of them despairing, that led to the war and which were anticipated in the great works of late expressionists such as Edvard Munch and Frank Wedekind.
Van Doesburg unusually mixed an essentially individualistic, eccentric, anarchistic approach to art with an internationalist, cosmopolitan, intensely group oriented one. Van Doesburg had many international contacts, such as Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), whose work Woman combing her hair (1915) is presented in this exhibition. He began to cultivate international connections right at the beginning of his career. At this point Van Doesburg had contact with Brancusi and the Italian futurist painter Gino Severini (1883-1966). His areas of interest were large and unfocussed in contrast to Mondrian, who specialised in a tightly organised body of work that evolved organically, almost mathematically. Van Doesburg harshly criticised Mondrian's inability to move on, either unable or unwilling to make new, revolutionary leaps forward.
Van Doesburg only gradually began to move away from realist depiction to abstraction. This movement can be viewed in the paintings in the first hall of the exhibition. He based his notions of abstractions on things that he could readily observe and the same pattern is even more apparent in the work of Piet Mondrian.
Piet Mondrian was born in Utrecht, Holland in 1872. In 1911 he moved to Paris, then the art capital of the world, but returned to Holland in 1914 upon the outbreak of WW1. In 1919 he returned to Paris to begin again. By this time he was a member of de Stijl, but he left the movement in 1925 after being exposed to criticism and hostility from Van Doesburg. His work Composition with Blue, Yellow, Black and Red (1922) is represented here, illustrating the stark contrasts, relative simplicity, even paradoxically the sensuousness of his work, in contrast to Van Doesburg's which became increasingly cluttered. The painting expresses the relationships between the individual and the collective, a new vision of society. The incompleteness of the lines expresses both the disappearance of the individual into the collective and the individual's concomitant inability to make such a transition. There is more subtlety in Mondrian's paintings than appears at first sight, since there are often several varieties of white or yellow or black in each painting. The sensuousness of the work is the hardest element to analyse. In contrast Van Doesburg's works look like harsh, abstract experiments with little or no emotional effect whatever.
The exhibition also details Van Doesburg's involvement with art movements such as DaDa and his forays into other art forms, such as architecture, which really underline Van Doesburg's eclectism and seem to have made him just as many enemies as friends. For Van Doesburg DaDa was a necessary adjunct to de Stijl. His DaDa writings and artworks were published and presented under the pseudonym IK Bonsett in his own DaDaist review Mecano. Van Doesburg also forged links with Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Sandor Bortnyik and Lajos Kasak. His interests were in magazine publication, the new media of film and in attempts at multi-media presentations. He even attempted to join the German Bauhaus movement in Weimar as a member of staff. In 1919 he attended classes at the school but was unable to secure a teaching post there. Instead he set up his own classes, which were officially frowned upon by the teaching staff, but which were attended by Werner Graeff, Karl Peter Rohl, Max Burchartz and Egon Engelien. He opposed the Bauhaus ultimately, whom he viewed as romantics, favouring instead objectivity, impersonality, machine production and technology. Van Doesburg appears to have been viewed as an individualist and an eccentric by most of the established European avante-garde art movements of the day.
The exhibition also gives us works by Sandor Bortnyik, a Hungarian artist, who created The New Adam (1924) and Geometric Forms in Space (1924) that underline the avante garde fascination with the new ideas in physics of relativity and the fourth dimension. The multi-media installations of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mach (1893-1965) and his Colour Light -Play: Sonatine II (Red) c1923-4 demonstrates de Stijl artist's fascination with sound-image syncopation, metaphors and images for music and architecture, their willingness to create metaphors for the unities of all the arts and to move freely from art form to art form.
Ultimately Van Doesburg's works become more intriguing, breaking the hold of the ideas of Mondrian. His last works are more mathematical, works such as Arithmetic Composition 1929-30. Indeed Van Doesburg eventually seems an under-represented person in our historical understanding of the 20th century avante garde, albeit eccentric, undoubtedly a person who deserves our sympathy and attention.
This exhibition is one of the most remarkable I´ve ever seen mounted in London. The documentation, depth of scholarship, curatorship, presentation, even the very helpful work of the staff at the exhibition mark this off as something very special indeed. It is simply the must see exhibition of the year, anyone going along should take an entire day to look around.
Be open-minded at least about what you see there. Sometimes inhuman surfaces amid much that is absorbing, hilarious, tragi-comic and, it must be said, great.
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