Laurence Bertrand Dorléac

The crossed destinies of France, Poland, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic are not just a few examples, among others, of the divisions of the Cold War. As heirs to prewar European cultural life, the intellectual and artistic circles that flourished there during the postwar era continued to make quite numerous exchanges possible. Now, the field of study that, along with Mathilde Arnoux, we propose to follow forces us, first and foremost, to abandon once and for all the illusion of a world of the East wherein whatever occurs would be either merely a translation of Western inventions or a (positive or negative) reaction to the artistic trends that characterized our side of the Iron Curtain.
While reality had become problematic on account of the War and the revision of values imposed by the War, the response such an awareness entailed was necessarily individual in character, even though the age was one of collective world views. One is thus reminded of Witold Gombrowicz’s question at the beginning of his Diary, when he asks himself how it would be possible for him to reject Communism when a part of him seemed to be leaning in that direction. Everyone would now be called upon to define his or her position, as if the mere fact of existing in the world no longer sufficed. Existentialism–undoubtedly, the plural form would be more appropriate–makes this insufficiency into the principle for the modern condition: it is one’s action, and therefore one’s choice, that gives content to one’s individual existence. The rhetoric of engagement revives at each instant the basic options at stake in the dialectic of Master and Slave: live and be but one’s life or else risk one’s life and rise above it, rejecting submission, to which the act of merely continuing to live can perfectly well accommodate itself. What remains to be done, of course, is to translate the idea into deeds. Now, whatever one’s personal path might be–and that, it seems, is the ambition of a study of this sort that begins with individual cases–no absolutely faithful translation can exist any more than it could in the case of literature. After 1945, the forms of such a choice were obviously different, depending on whether one was situated in the West or in the East, but it seems that thenceforth it had to cross every artist’s path, even when, for the artist, it was ultimately a matter of refusing to choose. This choice, which was characteristic of the Cold War, basically replayed what the Europe of 1933 had begun to feel.
Let us turn toward an artistic figure it would be hard to think of at first, especially if one’s intention was to start from the notion of “reality.” I am speaking of André Cadere. A Romanian born in 1934 in Warsaw, where his father was then the ambassador, Cadere settled in Paris in 1967. There, he embodied a new type of European artist who was “international” on account of his nonstop travel until his death in 1978. He embodied a certain propensity for reformulating reality. Even as he always stuck close to it, he manipulated its elements to the point that his individual consciousness and his theoretical conception of his work attained a perfect correspondence. This was a demanding, ascetic path he followed–one of those paths that, retrospectively, appear at a certain moment to set the tone.
One of the questions one is tempted to ask then is about the particular evolution of the notion of the “surreal” in the East, or rather of the “paucity of reality,” as André Breton called it in the early 1920s. It is not a question of broaching the history of the postwar Surrealist movement–for, apart from France, it was Czechoslovakia more than the countries dealt with here that would be at issue. But, if one hazards mention of these words drawn from the particular context of Paris during the interwar period, that is because they seem to us to maintain a certain relationship with what some works and attitudes would later try to formulate in another context where a politicized reality appeared as a more or less unbearable constraint, as too full. The work of the Russian artist Vladimir Yankilevsky as well as the works of the Polish playwright and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor and of the French-language Czech novelist Milan Kundera offer some possible illustrations of this situation.

The objective of the research project being presented to this seminar is to Mathilde Arnoux is an art historian, research director, and head of the French-language publication service at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art à Paris. She published La peinture allemande dans les musées français, 1871-1981 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2007) and has edited, in collaboration withe Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Friederike Kitschen, Perspectives croisées. La critique franco-allemande 1870-1945 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009).

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac

The objective of the research project being presented to this seminar is to investigate the notion of the real in the visual arts in France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, and Poland from the 1960s until the late 1980s. The ambition of this project is to reexamine the ideological stakes in effect that presided over the interpretation of art during the Cold War period and to offer a new reading of the connections, parallels, and differences between artistic practices in the West and those in the East, starting from an analysis of the use made of one and the same notion on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The Origins of the Project

This project originates in the conjuncture of a variety of observations made while undertaking prior research projects. Examination of foreign art exhibitions in France and, in particular, exhibitions of German art have revealed the highly political character of those events, which reflected the diplomatic relations between the countries involved. It appears in this context that classical art could be connected to a political discourse as soon as it was invested with a racial psychology aimed at ascertaining national bases. On the other hand, in the case of the art produced beginning in the late 1950s, such art was presented in a more direct way as intrinsically bound up with sociopolitical aspirations, which is something that has caught our attention. There was no longer a need to apply any sort of pseudoscientific methodology in order for works to be politicized, since “they adhere to their time, are anchored in social reality, and play an organic role within it.”[ref]Catherine Millet, L’art contemporain en France (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), p. 34. See Contemporary Art in France, trans. from the French by Charles Penwarden (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), p. 34.[/ref] Such works are presented as having a sociopolitical dimension in and of themselves, and numerous shows that present works from the second half of the twentieth century have based their discourse on this specificity attributed to contemporary works.[ref]See, for example, Après le classicisme, exhibition catalogue (Saint-Étienne: Musée d’art et d’industrie, 1980) and Art Allemagne Aujourd’hui. Différents aspects de l’art actuel en république fédérale d’Allemagne, exhibition catalogue (Paris: ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1981).[/ref] Once this sociopolitical content of the works in question has been established, that content is often presented as being articulated around practices characterized by the subversion of artistic traditions, the quest to connect art and life, or a waning of interest in artistic beauty. This articulation of supposedly engagé artistic content with a supposedly engagé artistic practice seems to constitute a guiding thread for art criticism and art history from the 1960s to the late 1980s. Nevertheless, in light of the profusion of different kinds of expression during this period and with a view to establishing some reference points, art historians and art critics have grouped these practices by their affinities: the détournement of objects is related to a drift of Pop Art and its commentary on capitalist society, the return of figurative art in the mid-1960s is said to proceed from left-wing concerns, and while those who participated in performance art fit less easily into these predefined compartments, they all would attest to an interest in some conspicuous social concerns. A series of keys for reading works has been manufactured, and the works themselves were gradually shut up in the intentions attributed to them, the result most often being that they are isolated from one other.
Moreover, it is clearly apparent that the history of art from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s in Europe concentrated mainly on so-called Western Europe, while the so-called countries of the East are almost completely absent from art-history books. And yet, visits to museum collections in the so-called countries of the East, in particular Poland, have led us to discover an entire body of largely unknown works and have thus brutally confronted us with the realities of the kind of propaganda that had prevailed in virulent fashion on the Western as well as on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain.
In studies of artistic exchanges during this period, this same one-sided attitude toward the West is quite flagrant. Of course, the USSR sometimes comes up when it is a question of certain forms of figurative representation, but most often it is the English-speaking countries that are presented as having played a major role. From this standpoint, research on the artistic relationships between France and Germany is extremely rich, because such relationships have freed analytical study from this concentration on the contributions of English-speaking peoples. Whether one is talking about the geographical, political, and moral scars left by World War II, the biased ways in which each country has tried to assume responsibility, or the desire to build up a strong bilateral relationship as part of the effort to construct European integration, such research touches on questions that pertain to European identity. It must nevertheless be noted that the Germany in question here is the FRG and that most of the time the GDR is left out.
Finally, the image one has of the arts scene from the 1960s to the late 1980s includes a great variety of expressions, which one most often tries to arrange in terms of movements and groups. The idea still prevails that these arts scenes belong to one or the other of the two major blocs, that of the West or that of the East, though in the latter case most of its manifestations are unknown. Each of these blocs appears clearly demarcated and both bombard one with a benchmark social model set up as an absolute truth in opposition to that of its great rival. What is thereby created is a bipolar world verging on Manicheanism, which can no longer be considered satisfactory today, and its bases are to be questioned.

The Questions

These observations led me to question the content of the sociopolitical investment in works from this period, and the accuracy of analyses sustained by a highly determined form of ideological criticism. For, the discourse of critics about the artistic forms of expression that developed within the context of the Cold War was highly determined, and numerous discourses from the era were marked in a conscious or unconscious way by the ideologies of the time. These discourses endeavored more or less clearly to rally diverse forms of artistic practice to the Western or Eastern sphere of influence and to discern therein some form of engagement, a stand, the possibility of exchanges between East and West almost never being envisioned.
Should not the chronological distance we enjoy today in relation to those events, the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, and the collapse of the Eastern bloc commit one to undertake a reinvestigation of those works and the discourse that has been applied to them, just as questions have been brought to bear on the nationalistic bases for the history of art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Behind the bloc logic underlying numerous discourses from critics, what were the ambitions of the artists themselves? It is time to free oneself from analyses that rest on a strict separation of East from West and on a one-to-one opposition between the Communist bloc and the capitalist bloc, an approach that ultimately ratifies the Cold War propaganda, all the more so at a time when one is increasingly inquiring into the bases for European identity. Following the lead here of other disciplines, it henceforth seems to be of capital importance to reestablish the history of artistic ties that were able to exist between East and West. The idea has therefore arisen of posing this question in relation to the Franco-German pair, where research has been quite abundant, and of adding in Poland on account of the crucial ties it shared with both countries. In reconstituting the ties among artists in France, the FRG, the GDR, and Poland, one can ask what they shared in common and look into whether, beyond the formal relations that led to the gathering of artistic trends into groups, it is not possible to establish connections on the level of the ideas that guided the creation of works and to verify whether each bloc’s models were as determinative as the readings of the time had suggested to us. It is undoubtedly in inquiring into what these countries might have been able to share around one and the same notion that the bases for a reflection on contemporary European culture can emerge.

The Notion of the Real

While reflecting on these questions, we have been struck by the recurrence of the notion of the real in discourses on the visual arts from the period. This notion constitutes a key reference point for artists who situated their artistic production in connection with their own construction of reality. As employed in this context, the notion of the real is therefore polymorphic, and yet it may be noted that it can be understood from a temporal standpoint (the real as what is current, the present), a physical or material standpoint (the real as the surrounding world, the world of concrete objects), or else the real can be considered as what is true. These varying acceptations of the term correspond to the very ambiguity of the term’s definition, and each one raises unique questions within the framework of this project.
When the real is considered as a temporal dimension, works approach it thematically by making current events into the subject of the work (Hans Haacke) or they seek to establish an equivalence between art and life, the unfolding of present time constituting one of the characteristic features of the work, as in performances that investigate what unites art with reality. Nonetheless, contexts change everything, for the goals are not the same when art joins life in a capitalist system (Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg’s Leben mit Pop, a performance-art piece at the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf on October 11, 1963) or in the Communist system (Autoperforationartisten from Dresden), in a free society or in dissidence. In the former countries of the East, an artistic approach that accentuates the physical presence of the artist as an individual agent took on a quite unique political dimension, one that was distinct from the significations those practices took on within a Western social context. To what does such a search for an abolition of boundaries correspond? How is one to comprehend this concern to connect art with reality? Is the life that art thus seeks to join still a life that is lived or is it a projection of the one of which one would be dreaming? In relation to what sort of illusion is the reality with which art seeks to create ties situated? In order to take a fresh look at such practices, one must take the variety of contexts into consideration and take into account, too, the contributions of theatrical experiments undertaken during this same era that interacted to a great extent with the visual arts, particularly in Poland with Tadeusz Kantor and then Jerzy Grotowski. Likewise, one must look into the practices of conceptual art, which were not confined to autotelic investigations. The notion of reality constitutes that in relation to which conceptual artists often situated themselves in an engaged way, seeking through performance art a way to make the broadening of the limits of art coincide with the broadening of the limits of freedom, as in the works of Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek, who form the KwieKulik duo.
When the real is associated with a physical or material dimension, it penetrates into works through the inclusion of fragments from the surrounding world, concrete objects that one introduces into the work or that constitute it. Such practices often have been associated with a desire on the part of artists in the West to make a more or less engaged statement about the consumer society of the capitalist system, an analysis that is of course inadequate and all the more so when it comes to understanding the similar practices that were developed in the East. Beyond conventional interpretations highly determined by the political context of the time, more attention must be paid to what the introduction of fragments from the surrounding world into the very matter of works implies. Far from being a simple ode to the capitalist system, those practices inquire about the abundance of things, the constitution of an “archeology of the present,” and raise the question of what the everyday and the immediate may preserve as markers of the past. In what way can reality constitute a reservoir of memory? One must therefore look into how reality intervenes via various practices that introduce objects from the surrounding world and inquire into the works of the New Realism, Fluxus (Wolf Vostell and Joseph Beuys), Wladyslaw Hasior and Wlodimierz Borowski in Poland, as well as the works of the Türenausstellung in Dresden in 1979.
The real can also merge with the notion of truth. It then proceeds along the lines of a discourse aimed at distinguishing itself from mere propaganda, from an erroneous reading. Through the works created, such a discourse seeks to achieve an authenticity distinct from interpretations that are deemed unjust. The notion of the real is central, since it represents what is elusive. Art then comes to take a stand in the world, and it does so in particular through a recourse to figurative representation. One must question what the return to the visible world as an iconographic reservoir says about the artist’s positioning in society, as in the case of works by Jörg Immendorff and Anselm Kiefer. What questions are being raised in the rejection of raw everyday reality by the artists of the Narrative Figuration movement? As has been shown in recent research on the figurative art of GDR artists Wilhelm Tübke, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Arno Rink, and Volker Stelzmann, such figurative art does not fit any single analytical framework and the study of such works reveals ambiguities and incoherencies that are worth lingering over.
Finally, photography, with its original connection to the issue of the rendering of reality, raises fundamental questions for this project. What does the idea of an equivalence between reality and the photographic image conceal? What effect does the artistic act have on the way in which reality is grasped? What is being investigated in the search for objectivity on the part of Düsseldorf artists and in the seemingly neutral shots of an Evelyn Richter in the GDR? Is reality as it is transmitted through photographic works truly lacking in any message, as Roland Barthes thought? These questions investigate the implications of subjectivity in artistic attempts to capture an original object.
The real thus can intervene in works from many of these angles. Usage of this notion in the visual arts employs this ambiguity in a way that allows us to connect it to a number of works, as is shown by the recurrence of the term in the art-historical writings of the time that deal with some nevertheless highly varied topics.
This notion is summoned up in the titles of the works by Peter Sager (Neue Formen des Realismus–Kunst zwischen Illusion und Wirklichkeit [Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1973]), Christopher Carrell et al., eds (Polish Realities: New Art from Poland [Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1988]), Hal Foster (The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996]), and L’art du réel aux USA 1948-1968 (exhibition catalogue [Paris: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1968]). It also stands out in the chapter headings of books by Michael Archer (“The Real and Its Object,” in Art since 1960 [London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997]), Catherine Millet (the sections entitled “Art Sticks to the Real” and “Back to the Reality of Things,” in Contemporary Art in France, trans. from the French by Charles Penwarden [Paris: Flammarion, 2006)]), and Klaus Honnef (“Die Inszenierung des Wirklichen oder die Macht der Fotografie,” in Kunst der Gegenwart [Cologne: Taschen, 1988]).
The notion of the real is therefore highly pertinent for an investigation of this period, which was highly determined from a political standpoint, torn as it was between two societal models, each of which laid claim to the truth and, beyond the artists’ statements on which analyses often relied, reveal in fact major incoherencies and ambiguities. This notion allows us to reintroduce the human factor where doctrine had tried to gain the upper hand.
In identifying this pregnancy of politics and ideology in works and in the interpretations thereof, it is not a matter of questioning or denying the friction between the two blocs during the Cold War, as that is an established fact. We propose, rather, to undertake research that, in benefitting from the chronological distance now separating us from the Cold War, attempts to return to the works themselves and endeavors, while taking this context into account, to touch on their particularity in order to free them from an understanding that has been overly determined by how they were read at the time they were created and that has been marked by the false opposition between capitalism and communism.
By investigating how works were articulated around one and the same notion (the real), it is a matter of opening up new interpretational outlooks that would benefit from cross-cultural perspectives and from the intersection of ideas in works that at first sight one would not be led to believe share points in common. This undertaking also benefits from the contribution of aesthetic reflections on artists’ approach to reality, for this notion plays a key role in the field of aesthetics, and it seems obvious that we are dealing here with a terrain that is particularly propitious for an encounter between art historians and philosophers. The cooperative work is to be structured around a study of borrowings from aesthetics in critics’ discourses and an analysis of the ambitions articulated by artists themselves while being careful at the same time to discern what they actually grasped thereof.
The objective of this approach is to do a history of art that takes both East and West into account while underscoring the nuances and the absence of any strict cohesion with respect to a political ideology that was being attributed to works one wanted to turn into testimony for an overly caricatural view of the Cold War.

Bibliography

Boheme und Diktatur in der DDR. Gruppen, Konflikte, Quartiere, 1970-1989. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum 1997.

Jeneseits der Staatskultur: Traditionen autonomer Kunst in der DDR. Ed. Gabriele Muschter and Rüdiger Thomas. Munich: Hanser, 1992.

Kunst und Kalter Krieg. Deutsche Positionen 1945-1989. Exhibition catalogue. Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 2009.

Nader, Luiza. Konceptualizm v PRL (Conceptual Art in Poland. Language-Attitude-Strategy). Warsaw: University of Warsaw and Foksal Gallery Foundation, 2009.

Piotrowski, Piotr. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. Londres: Reaktion, 2009.

Vissault, Maïté. Der Beuys Komplex–L’identité allemande à travers la réception de l’œuvre de Joseph Beuys (1945-1986). Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2010

Mathilde Arnoux is an art historian, research director, and head of the French-language publication service at the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art à Paris. She published La peinture allemande dans les musées français, 1871-1981 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2007) and has edited, in collaboration withe Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Friederike Kitschen, Perspectives croisées. La critique franco-allemande 1870-1945 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2009).

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Seminar of June 5 2008

“France was liberated from the Krauts; it must now be liberated from the   jerks.” (Archives du Peintre Wols)

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Circus Girl Resting, no date.

From what we are told by the abstract painter Wols, the postwar period was not going to be either easy or completely restful! After the war, everything in France, of course, had to be rebuilt, but especially its cultural and symbolic image had to be remade. Paris, the capital of the arts, which had suffered not only from the Occupation but also and especially from collaboration, had to find itself again and to reinvent itself. What Wols saw and felt so deeply in the recesses of his spare hotel room, which also served as his studio, was the established cultural powers’ inability to recognize and to defend certain new forms of modern art that expressed the malaise then seeping into the consciousnesses of a great number of people. This anxiety, rooted in modernity, that lay at the heart of the issues haunting the West, and which New York embraced, nonetheless too often seemed to be ignored by French cultural institutions. Indeed, through the voices of and positions taken by its critics and museum directors, Paris had a hard time seeing or accepting art located at the antipodes of what had always been the image of France: an optimism mixed with luxuriousness and sometimes with voluptuousness.

The Grasshopper and the (American) Ant

Bikini atoll atomic bomb test, 1946.

The exhibition Be-Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz was an attempt to bring out this symbolic friction. By presenting on its walls the mutual lack of understanding between Paris and New York, this show let us see the intense cultural production going on in the West as it grappled, up to 1956, with a frightening cold war that had recruited culture almost by force into its political arsenal. The exhibition tried to highlight the different artistic and political currents that were dividing each culture and that participated in the elaboration of quite specific and varied identities. It also was intended to show the complexity of these two artistic and political scenes by laying emphasis on the different currents that shared them while setting out to present, of course, the currents of artists who had received international recognition but also those ones that had not succeeded in getting their message across to others, despite the quality and inherent interest of what they had to say.

Jackson Pollock, Big Dipper, 1947.

Moreover, thanks to the presentation, along the way, of popular and avant-garde films as well as of jazz music, the exhibition set out to delimit and to analyze the vast cultural field of battle onto which modern artists had been hurled. It is rather striking to see how much France, like the United States, interiorized stereotypes of their respective cultures. On this account, America was brutal and violent but free, and France, the land of culture, was suave to the point of decadence as well as bursting with internal contradictions. One was rough and unfinished, the other smooth and refined. The positive characteristics of the one became for the other negative qualities.

In their reconstruction efforts, Parisians, for example, tried to capitalize on the image of luxury traditionally afforded by haute couture and Parisian fashion without truly realizing all the negative aspects this image conveyed as the Cold War was starting up and as all signs of culture were becoming highly symbolic.

Admiral Blandy and Mrs Blandy celebrate operation Crossroads with an atomic cake, 1946.

While Paris continued to be, for Americans, the center of the culture of luxury as well as of fashion, at the same time the latter confined the City of Light to a somewhat ethereal space that had no genuine hold over what was then going on. While The Theater of Fashion—a haute couture exhibition presented on doll-sized models because of rationing–enjoyed considerable success in the United States in 1945-1946, the exhibition of paintings entitled Painting in France 1939-1945 was gleefully reviled by American critics on account of its old-fashioned character. Paris was becoming artificial and somewhat effeminate, whereas New York was appropriating for itself the most up-to-date intellectual and virile forms of artistic production.

Thus, in Paris, while Christian Dior had won acclaim for his New Look, which transformed the militarized woman of the Resistance into a desirable and carefree being, American critics used her to define the French soul in general.

Christian Dior’s “New Look”, Bar Suit (photo Willy Maywald), 1947.

The buxom mother-woman who was the heroine of Vichy had of course been purged by then, but by becoming a desirable woman, this erotic mistress-woman symbolized the loss of intellectual power. It was easy for New York to take this place since Paris, in replaying its old cards of a tradition of luxury, calm, and voluptuousness, seemed unthinkingly carefree to American critics worried about looming confrontations with the USSR. For others, however–artists like Jean Fautrier, Bram Van Velde, Wols, Pierre Soulages, and Hans Hartung–this flashy luxury and carefree attitude were replaced by a critical countenance which was also depicted on stage by Boris Vian, Marcel Mouloudji, and Juliette Gréco.

These “cellar rats” of the Latin Quarter defined the desires of a new generation that was now in breach of norms in a society where the existential was replacing the artificial. The black of jumpers was replacing the pastels of organdy dresses while the authenticity of the cellar, of the inner world, was replacing the superficiality of the surface.

Cold War rhetoric tended to present two opposing camps, each one employing against the other an entire panoply placed at their disposal by the media. Now, political reality was, even during the Fifties, more complex, more contradictory, and sometimes more confused. Under such conditions, one will not be surprised to learn that the ideological positions and attitudes adopted by intellectuals were always complicated and often imbued with irony. In fact, in order to understand the Paris world of art between 1947 and 1951, one must mull over what the poet Christian Dotremont, of the “revolutionary Surrealist” group then connected with the Communist Party, had said.

Jean Fautrier, Nude, 1943.

To a journalist from Carrefour who asked him in 1948 what he would do if Soviet troops invaded France, Dotremont, in full possession of his dialectical powers, answered without beating an eyelash that he would take the first plane leaving for the United States.

Peace, Freedom, and Fantasy

As for America, it knew that it had become the leader of the West and the main line of defense against Communist ideology. It had very quickly become obvious that, if the United States wanted to guarantee itself a position of strength in the postwar arena, it had to gain cultural supremacy, or at least broad cultural recognition–which would help in persuading the rest of the Western world that their military and economic hegemony did not represent, despite what some people were saying, a threat. On the contrary, not only could one rely on it but one also had to rally around it.

Hans Hartung, T1948-38, 1948.

Indeed, it had to be shown that America was defending and cherishing the same values and the same complex civilization as the Europeans. For the American avant-garde (and by that term I am alluding not only to artists but also to art critics and to individuals who make financial contributions to museums), it was a matter, first of all, of persuading a portion of the public, even in the United States, that the works they were in the process of creating or those they were defending (the Abstract Expressionists) were just as sophisticated as those produced by the modern European masters. It was obviously going to be necessary, after that, to convince the Europeans of the intrinsic quality of specifically American artistic characteristics and of their universal supremacy–though that was going to prove distinctly more difficult to accomplish.

Lee Miller, Civilians and US soldiers with dead prisoners Buchenwald, Germany, 1945.

Thanks to the writings of Clement Greenberg and to the activist stance of the major American museums, modern art in the United States between 1948 and 1951 was going to be not only protected but also dressed up in new clothes and presented as the sole movement capable of refashioning the image not only of postwar America but also that of the West as a whole. This was a completely new phenomenon for the United States. To judge by the events surrounding the episode of the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston–which came into conflict in 1948 with the Museum of Modern Art of New York over the issue of the word Modern, considered dangerously elitist by Boston–it is clear that people like Clement Greenberg, Robert Motherwell, Alfred Barr, and Nelson Rockefeller, to mention but a few names of the people upholding a certain ideology (which we could describe as liberal new modernism, in order to distinguish it from the watered-down academic modernism then in vogue), felt it quite necessary to promote a kind of art that was based on individualism and freedom of expression, as opposed to productions pertaining to a socialist or populist ideology.

Irene Rice Pereira, Green Mass, 1950.

It was possible for New York’s Museum of Modern Art to defend in this way the so-called extremist Abstract Expressionists because it was easily demonstrable that modern art did not pose a danger to America and that, contrary to what many on the Right had tried to insinuate, this form of art was in no way harming American values (the Soviets, following the example of the Nazis, were ferociously hostile to it). Modern art–as it happened, its most advanced bastion–insolently held its own between the two blocs traditionally opposed to it: the Right and the Old Left. It is this central, and therefore crucial, position that served for Albert Barr as an argument in 1949 when he wanted to convince Henry Luce, the head of Life, to alter his magazine’s policy toward the novelty of Abstract Expressionism. And Barr added that one must not be afraid of modern art–which he showed was not destined to destroy American values.

Pablo Picasso, Faune, musicien et danseuse, (Faun, musician, dancer), 1945.

Extremely divided, the Parisian world of art was not at all inclined to consensus. And the violence of the impressive campaign organized by the popular and powerful Communist press kept it from achieving unity when, after 1947, the Party rejected the idea that abstract art might have any value at all. As the review Esprit indicates, the French Communist Party (PCF) also conducted an active campaign of anti-American propaganda. The “peace offensive” launched starting in 1947 was quite impressive, as much on account of its relentless attacks against American culture and the American way of life as on account of the portrait it painted of America as warmongering. For the entire time this offensive was to last, the PCF, knowing the importance of France’s cultural image, guaranteed itself the support of a large number of famous intellectuals, including Tristan Tzara, Roger Vailland, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Jean Lurçat, Edouard Pignon, and André Fougeron. In this battle for the soul of France, art was going to become one of the most prized stakes–without, for all that, offering a rallying point. Neither the political scene nor the world of art could foster a viable middle ground. The Parisian art world resembled a shattered mirror–each of its factions dreaming of gathering together the broken pieces so that that mirror might again reflect the grandeur of France, though in its own image.
As if by magic, as soon as the Communist ministers ceased to be part of the French government, there would no longer be for the PCF anything but one artistic style that could fittingly represent the working class. A revised and updated version of Socialist Realism was to become the Communist criterion in matters of aesthetics. Straightforward and easily accessible to the masses, this art form had its roots in the French tradition (David, Courbet). The writer Louis Aragon would become the theoretician of this current, and the Realist painter André Fougeron was to be its leader. Through Realism, one could hold back the tide of abstraction and, at the same time, violently attack capitalist decadence.
Nevertheless, what really is to be noted here is that the contemporary art being produced in Paris at the end of the 1940s and through the 1950s shared most of the characteristics of what was then being produced in the West in response to the horrors of war: a strong interest in abstraction as well as an unconcealed fascination for the force of the individual. But as this art was often played in a different key and did not harmonize with the formalist art criticism being developed in New York, American eyes were incapable of seeing what Wols, Fautrier, and Antoni Tapies were expressing in the early 1950s. Their detached silence and their introspectiveness did not fit into the well-coached Greenbergian outlook of American criticism. Everything that did not fit into this perspective quite literally was neither seen nor known. For the first time in the United States–and this, as early as 1948–avant-garde art had become lodged at the center of American identity. Few people in France realized this, and very few had heard of the book Thomas Hess had published in 1951, Abstract Painting: Background and American Phase, where the New York School was placed at the end of a long line of artists who represented the tradition and the renewal of modern art. The book’s layout was clear. All the reproductions of American works were in color, those of European artists were tiny and in black and white. Responding to a questionnaire entitled “Is the French Avant-Garde Overrated?” proposed by the review Art Digest in September 1953, Greenberg answered unambiguously: “Do I mean that the new American Abstract painting is superior on the whole to the French? I do.” This now-famous reaction laid stress on the fact that French abstract painting was no longer a match for America’s since the former had become soppy and feminine. The French knew how to be inventive, of course, but unfortunately they “finished,” they “polished” their canvases. As for the Americans, they were, according to Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, rougher, more audacious, and more robust. According to Greenberg, what was being produced in Paris was “tame,” which conjures up an image of castration and slavery. Paris was like a lion whose teeth had been removed. Paris was now purring like a cat, and that was not the image the West needed in order to oppose the dangerous Communist hordes.

Drip and Stains

Jackson Pollock, Search, 1956.

What was at stake at the time, and what the critic Charles Estienne understood very well, was in fact the creation of a new and modern identity for France–an identity rooted, he thought, in a long and glorious national past but also armed with a contemporary force. What was needed, but that had not truly been assimilated, was the construction of a present that would be open to a universal future, yet clearly built upon French foundations. Of course, the Americans were dripping, as Estienne knew since he had taken a vague interest in Jackson Pollock, but what to him seemed much more interesting was that the French themselves were staining! The French were making “stains [taches].” “Tachism”–which, according to him, had been invented around 1952 by painters whom he was defending, such as Marcelle Loubchansky, Simon Hantai, Roger-Edgar Gillet, Jean Degottex, René Duvillier, Jean Messagier, Fahr-el-Nissa, and even the American Alfonso Ossorio–was also, like the New York version, an art of free expression. But in Paris, he explained, expression always started again from scratch [B partir de zéro], from the inarticulate, from filth, from the stain–like the placenta, as he liked to say. This was a birth with deep roots. This kind of art, Estienne said, employing the fashionable phrase drawn from Roland Barthes who had just published his famous book Writing Degree Zero, is a total re-creation. “The Stain is the degree zero of artistic writing,” he wrote. This was a kind of art that, as Estienne pointed out, emerged from the individual rather than from any style. Tachism was–we often forget–a parallel French version of American Abstract Expressionism, a type of painting created after the war and mustered into service by Estienne in order to neutralize the publicity people like Michel Tapié were giving the Americans by inviting Pollock to “be with us” in 1952 at the Facchetti Studio. The drip and the stain were two sides of the same coin, the heads or tails of contemporary art. This contemporary-art scene was clearly divided between those who were looking toward the US and those who preferred to show an interest for neutralism. Michel Tapié and Georges Mathieu, for example, were so immersed in the ideology of freedom being advocated at the time by the United States in opposition to the notion of peace being defended by the Communists that they were quite often suspected of “collaboration” with America. What made things even worse was that they also published, as the propaganda war was stepping up, a review entitled The United States Lines Paris Review, for a transatlantic luxury-liner company, in which they were not afraid to speak of “the vitality and the grandeur of our Western civilization on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.”

In very clear opposition to this definition, Estienne, with the help of André Breton, dug deeply into the French past until he found–as surprising as this might seem–a relationship between the art of the Celts and that of the “Tachists.” The Celts, perceived as the direct ancestors of the French, allowed one to bring out the way in which they had deconstructed realism and Greek anthropomorphism with the help of a certain form of abstraction that is found on their coins. This deconstruction through abstraction allowed Estienne, in a dazzlingly simplistic shortcut, to connect the contemporary with the antique. The Celt was the source for the new critical abstraction that had resurfaced after centuries of slumber. The sudden irruption in Paris of this long European tradition was perceived as a major critical force, similar to the one put into place by the Celts against Greek imperialism. All one needed to do was change the names in order not only to give back to contemporary art a counterattack force but also to furnish it with an impeccable pedigree that gave Parisian abstract impressionist art a primacy over the American. This was a rather exceptional adventure for a “stain,” but one that was essential for it to be propelled to the front of the modernist stage and to the forefront of its history. This was, Estienne and Breton thought, a particularly powerful and amusing argument, even though it seemed at times a bit far-fetched. This battle seems somewhat idiotic–until, that is, one glimpses the fact that all this was being played out on a highly unstable international political stage.

Pierre Soulages, Peinture, (Painting, 196 x 270 cm, July-August 1956), 1956.

What was in fact at stake during this entire polemic was France’s position relative to political issues that, on a daily basis, involved two allies who were clashing over the most varied set of problems. It was a matter of positioning oneself at the very moment the Cold War seemed to be accelerating upon Stalin’s death and as neutralists violently opposed Atlanticists. There was also the tremendous conflict over the European Defense Council, as well as the complex negotiations with the United States following the defeat at Dien Bien Phu that were taking place just as the first bombs were exploding in Algeria. None of this encouraged one to take lightly discussions about culture. It really does seem, therefore, that Estienne and Breton were trying to carve out an independent space, one removed from American culture. The image that comes to mind is somewhat comical: Estienne standing in his little Breton sailboat facing the giant Liner on which his enemies–the aristocrat Michel Tapié de Celeyrand and the reactionary Georges Mathieu, those two characters who very much seemed to have sold their souls to the most powerful interests of the time (those of the United States)–sat enthroned. The battle was obviously lost, and Estienne knew it, as he soon afterward abandoned what he deemed to be a corrupt world of art in order to isolate himself on his boat, preferring to write popular songs for the anarchist Léo Ferré.
Oh! I almost forgot. To set all this in perspective, we must mention a postcard, found in the archives of the Getty, that was sent by the famous art critic Clement Greenberg to his mother while he was on a trip to Europe in 1939. The man who later on did so much for New York art to be welcomed into the universal pantheon, succinctly characterized the Paris scene as follows: “I’m leaving for Avignon tomorrow. I’ve already stayed in Paris too long, and Paris is not France. Among the people I’ve met have been Éluard, Sartre, Hugnet, Man Ray, Hans Arp and several others. They’re all crackpots…every one of them.” Clem.”

The die, if not already loaded, had already been cast.

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Serge Guilbaut is an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has written on modern and contemporary art and, in particular, on cultural and political relations between the United States and France. He has published, in particular, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War (University of Chicago Press,1983; translated into 4 languages and published in French in 1990 by Éditions Jacqueline Chambon) and Voir, Ne pas Voir, Faut Voir: Essais sur la perception et la non-perception des oeuvres (Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 1993). He has also edited several other works: Modernism and Modernity (Halifax, N.S.: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983, 2006), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), and Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State (on Barnett Newman; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Guilbaut has organized several exhibitions, as well: Théodore Géricault: The Alien Body, Tradition in Chaos in 1997, Up Against the Wall Mother Poster (on posters from 1968) in 1999, and Be-Bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946-1956 at MACBA in Barcelona in 2007 (critics’ prize of the Association of Catalan Art Critics for the best exhibition of the year). He is completing a book on postwar debates in Paris entitled: Le Crachat, le Carré et l’ouvrier.