The Avante Garde of Fin de Siecle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon and their contemporaries: at the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, Venice, Italy

The Avante Garde of Fin de Siecle Paris: Signac, Bonnard, Redon and their contemporaries: at the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, Venice, Italy

 This exhibition at the Peggy Guggenheim modern art gallery, Venice, charts the evolution of French painting at the end of the 19th century. The Impressionist movement was beginning to become the kind of tired art monopoly that it had once rebelled against. France had been defeated in the war of 1870 by the Prussians and Germany had thus been unified. In the fin de siecle France was to be rocked by the Dreyfus scandal but also by a political ferment including Bohemians and conservatives, radicals and anti-republicans, anarchists and supporters of the status quo. Artists began to either retreat from the political turmoil around them into a purely aesthetic movement or fervently embrace predominantly left wing alternatives. 

The period was summarized by five separate, disparate groups: the Nabis, the Fauvists, the Pontillists, the Post-Impressionists and the Symbolists. The retreat from reality was manifested by a renewed interest in the esoteric, exotic, remote and oriental: medieval manuscripts, fascination with art from Japan and the adoption of Symbolism which was really a consequence of a critical failure of religion to provide adequate means of expression for the crisis of modernity that artists began to face. Europe was now the dominant power in the world and its superiority rested upon the Gatling gun, the Lee Enfield rifle, barbed wire, mines, steam-powered battleships. This was entirely different from the world of Napoleon, for instance, for his army in Egypt had been similarly equipped to its Mameluke counterparts in the Battle of the Pyramids sixty or so years earlier. The world after 1870 was entirely different from the world of the past and represented the domination of Europe over the rest of the globe. The era of European colonialism was a time when French artists, for instance, began to depict the life of far flung places in some kind of idealised, idyllic transposition contrasted with encroaching industrialization, commercialization and urbanization in Europe. The best example of this is in the work of Paul Gaugin (1848-1903) who traveled to Tahiti to depict the life of the south sea islanders. This seems a spontaneous rebellion against the choaking conformity of French life, in fact it was a well orchestrated and planned attempt to exploit the paradise that Tahiti seemed in terms of art depictions that might sell well back in the auction houses of Paris. But Gaugin, for all his insincerity and greedy, exploitative investment in colonialism influenced the artists who succeeded the Impressionists especially when they began to challenge orthodoxies such as perspective and the Impressionists goal of creating art of a more personal, immediate and relevant kind that had become in turn an art monopoly that began to resist and resent change. The leader of the Pontillists, George Seurat (1959-1891), was probably reacting against various new technical developments which included photography.  He had evolved an innovative colour theory based on the ideas of Newton and Helmholtz. This was to become the pontillist technique whereby optical effects are created by the eye itself as it views separated dots of colour rather than by brushwork alone. 

Seurat's work is absent (somewhat disappointingly but nor are works by Paul Gaugin or Vincent Van Gogh) from this exhibition but the work of his successor as leader of the movement, Paul Signac (1863-1935), is. In fact many wonderful, atmospheric paintings by Signac who was a committed Anarchist-Communist are presented including depictions of his home at St Tropez and also locations along the Mediterranean coast such as Venice and Antibes. Signac had been a friend of Van Gogh, having painted with him at Asnieres sur Seine and visiting the artist at his house in Arles. The painting of Signac forms the centerpiece of this exhibition alongside works by Odilon Redon (1840-1916), a Symbolist artist who seems to have depicted internalized objects which elicit a fascination with the extremity and conflicting tendencies of science and religion that summarized the late Victorian era. His source material is from the Revelation of St John hinting at apocalyptic doom to come? 

The exhibition was conventionally curated, for instance, the title seemed to be quite academic and a bit stuffy, but might have been helped by some general text in each room rather than individual card texts for each painting and the usual audio guide (not given away). A summary like this with titles such as 'Impressionist influences' or 'The Rise of the Symbolists might have helped the visitor. The card text was sometimes either too simplistic or insufficiently explained and a bit complex. I had to ask one of the extremely helpful interns about the term 'cropping' because it was linked to 'flattened perspective' but left unexplained and eerily hanging like a ruined arch on the card text. In short cropping is the editing of an image to depict it as part of a point of view rather than the object itself. So instead of merely painting a boat in plan view the cropped image presents the artist in the boot and looking out. The image is therefore no longer about the thing but about the viewer. This is a direct reaction to the rise of photography. Painters had to keep one step ahead of photographers by going places where cameras could not go for at this time cameras were big and cumbersome. Also artists were tending to move the horizon line to the very top of the image heralding the beginning of abstract art. Perspective was no longer seen to be the touchstone it had once been, indeed its necessity was being questioned. Generally a more dynamic and engaging style would have helped the exhibition to engage the viewer rather than leaving him or her a bit over-awed. For instance, some of the experiments of the groups depicted produced works of art which are, to say the least, rather bad or at the very best, a matter of taste. 

The rest of the museum is devoted largely to Peggy Guggenheim's massive collection of modern art. In many ways it rivals collections like the Tate Modern the difference being that the Guggenheim collection is a personal response to 20th century art whereas the Tate's collection was bought with public funds and reflects a less eclectic approach and one based on more art historical principles and views of what is and what isn't part of the canon. Its clear that Peggy Guggenheim, the art collector, was friends with Picasso and Jackson Pollocks that she built the collection with loving care and was also photographed by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s when both were poor and struggling in Montmartre. The collection is a personal view of modern art and modernism generally in an unforgettable location right beside the Grand Canal in Venice, possibly the most unique place in the world to situate such a museum. Its a fitting tribute to the geniuses and movements that Peggy Guggenheim supported. 

Paul Murphy, Venice, October 2013