(Onward with those art
exhibitions reviewed after they close)
“Futurism and Vorticism have
all gone under and we are in the full swing of a Classical
revolution.”
- The Sunday Telegraph, 1919
The Classical Comeback
Which is more delightfully absurd?
Going to the Sunday Telegraph to check what's the latest thing in
Modernism? Or finding them to be on the money? Because artists who
had been at the very cutting edge of Modernism one day shifted gear
and came to embrace those cold marbles of Classicism. At the very
same time that commercial art used it's solid-seeming reassurances to
flog stuff.
Modernist Classicism - how did
that ever happen? It sounds such an oxymoron.
After all the very stuff the Impressionists had railed against had
been quite literally wrapped up in Classicism. Why should figures in
paintings pose around in togas, when they don't do any of that in the
street? It's no coincidence that this antipathy was taken the
furthest by the Futurists, who were based in Italy – centre of both
Roman Classicism and the Renaissance. Who didn't want to transcend it
so much as bin it. They'd look at all those noble-looking statues and
column-fronted buildings and ask if anyone intended cleaning up
around here. So vehement could they get that their manifesto was arguably one of their most accomplished
artworks. Just taste some...
“It is from Italy that we
launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary
manifesto of ours… we want to free this land from its smelly
gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians.
For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean
to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many
graveyards… Come on! set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside
the canals to flood the museums!... Take up your pickaxes, your axes
and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”
And even if their actions did not quite
live up to their incendiary manifestos, at least not as far as taking
up pickaxes went, how did we get from there to yesterday's news
becoming the latest thing? Of course the immediate spanner in the
great bus of progress was the Great War. After it's carnage, to
misquote Othello, Modernism seemed to have loved the machine age not
wisely but too well. War Memorials didn’t just affect a respectful
tone, they often stripped their subject from all references to
Modernity. The classically proportioned figure was held at odds to
the machine guns and barbed wire which blasted and tore apart the
actual human body.
But even granted that, how did this
last till 1950? Because of course it reflected a wider impulse, of
which the immediate post-war mood was just the spark. One which
wasn't oxymoronic at all. The past is like the proverbial river, it
may seem to occupy an identical space but you soon discover you can’t
jump into the same past twice. And they had never been reacting
against Classicism so much as an earlier Neo-Classicism, from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
centuries. This was not your parent's past.
Through this lens Classicism was, or
seemed to be, the setting of the aesthetic rules we now live by.
Hence Escher’s poker-faced joy in “mocking our unwavering certainties”, appearing to adhere to Classicism’s rules while breaking them.
Hence any distinction between Classicism and the Renaissance is
considered as essentially trivial, as both are concerned with trying
to enforce an arbitrary geometry on the world. The world was held to
be measurable and classifiable. You learnt to be a surgeon or a
builder by apprenticing yourself to the masters and learning the
pre-set rules, and you learnt to be an artist the same way.
Is any of this actually true? Perhaps
to some extent. But that’s not really the question. It just needed
to be true enough to sound credible. Art movements are forever trying
to paint their predecessors as a flat stereotype, the easier to
bounce off them. Almost without fail, each successive Modernist
movement would pull this trick on their forebearers.
This show's an effective sequel to the
Pallant House's 'Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War' exhibition, with many artists straddling the two. But there throwing
the lens over on a specifically British response had seemed a smart
piece of focusing. The jury is more out over how well things work
here. There's little doubt that, like Classicism before it,
Neo-Classicism was essentially a continental import. So to isolate
it's British element might seem wrenching.
On the other hand, we were on precisely
the opposite end of things to the Futurists. We have little genuinely
Classical art and architecture of our own, even when things are
stretched to the Renaissance. Of course we had amassed huge
collections of the stuff, in the British Museum and other places, the
plunder of empire. But that was the equivalent of best china, not for
use but display. In our daily lives we did not move among the remains
of Classicism, as people did in Italy or Greece. And that exacerbates
an effect seen across Neo-Classicism...
To see this at work, look at the way
John Armstrong's lithograph 'Pheidippides 490 BC (Greek
Messenger)' (1935, above) reproduces a version of the
Classical figures from a Greek urn. But with them come the shape of
the urn. In fact the suggested curve of the urn is used to enhance
the perspective, pushing the messenger ahead of the other figures.
Classicism is not just being cited but
self-consciously referenced, a frame within a frame. The Victorians
saw the Classical world as composed of distant relations, who had
clearly intended us to inherit their fortune, even if no actual will
was to be found. While Modernism essentially brought the distance
back. It's no longer being assumed Classicism was explicable to us,
let alone assimilable into our culture. Anything we say about it
becomes by nature a commentary.
And this distances us from one
particular use of Classicism in parts of the continent, which sought
to deny that element of framing. Overall, there are not a great deal
of positive things to say about Fascism. But it was very handy in
demonstrating Classicism as pastiche. If companies invoked the
reassuring, ordered world of Classicism the better to sell their
products, then so did the goose steppers.
Which they pretty much had to. Their
ideology was more a fever dream of the Twentieth century than a
coherent political position, an incoherent jumble of often
contradictory concepts held together only by the formal fetishisation
of unity. In his early days, Mussolini had flirted with the
Futurists. But he soon decided “established 1922” was not much of
a sales pitch to be using in the Twenties, so claimed to be based on
an original idea by the Roman Empire. Then, particularly once in
power, Fascism could indulge it’s taste for a kind of Ratners
Blinging Classicism. It's marbled drapery was not just decoration but
a necessity, to figleaf their unendowedness.
The Great Generation Gap
And this framing evident in Armstrong,
though rarely absent, could manifest in different ways. Before we've
even entered the first room, the show is quoting TS Eliot's 1923
essay on Joyce's 'Ulysses'. It's “parallel
between antiquity and the uncertain present” turns then and now into a set of
antonyms - the great and the small, the epic and the ordinary.
Perhaps even the eternal and the
transient. In Ithell Colquhoun's 'The Judgement of
Paris' (1930, above) Paris is not only depicted in duller
colours than the radiant Goddesses, he's pushed so far in the
foreground he's virtually in the audience with us. Despite his
ostensible 'judging' role he looks meekly down as the mighty
Goddesses gaze up. Mortal even in the myth, Paris is made one of us.
The distinction isn't between then and now so much as them and us.
Similarly 'Arcadia'
(1928/9) by Edward Burra (an old favourite of ours here at Lucid Frenzy) depicts a
garden party of bright young things. The composition places their
jumble of gesticulating figures below more composed (pun intended)
classical statues. Some of the party sport classical-themed fancy
dress, which just accentuates the difference.
At times, the juxtapositions can become
so pronounced we're essentially looking at collage. In Meredith Frampton's 'Still
Life' (1932, above) the bust head with the laurel crown is
not, as we might expect, at the top of the frame but displaced by
flowers. (With the garland-like crown comparing the two.) A painting
focusing on a vase of flowers seems more of an Impressionist thing to
do, so we might want to read the work as Modernism displacing
Classicism.
Yet the composition is split in half,
into classical and nature sides. And yet the unspooling measuring
tape is allowed to unfurl itself across that split. Measuring tape
itself is modern. But the act of measuring is often associated with
Classical rules of proportion. (In Hans Feiburch's advertising
gouache 'Architects Prefer Shell', 1933, a modern
measuring rod is placed alongside some compasses.) Those “and
yets”... ultimately, they're the point. That the relationship
between the Classical and the modern world is not a set thing, but
ever-shifting.
In others, it's hard to tell the joins
and that's the point. Madame Yevonde's 'Crisis'
(1939, above) sharply combines juxtaposition with verisimilitude. The
gas masked bust relies not on our expectation that we see busts in
art, but that we encounter them in the real world. Had this been a
painting not a photo, it would have much less impact.
But conversely, other works can look to
a synthesis. Dod Proctor's 'Early Morning' (1927,
above) has not just modern furniture. Even without the title, the
lighting would pin it to a time of day. (We know precisely where the
sunlight falls from, even if it's not shown.) Yet the show is right
to say it also has a “sculptural quality”. This is not just it's
stillness. There's the pallid colours. Classicism is associated with
whiteness, however wrongly.
And more importantly, as Charlotte Higgins commented in the Guardian, “the white sheets and
nightgown that Procter has arranged around her model strongly recall
the pale chilliness of antique sculpture.” Classical sculpture
would try to capture the momentary folds of drapery but then
inevitably freeze them in stone, a feeling evoked here. Similarly,
Hans Feurbach's 'Narcissus' (1946, below) is a
virtuous combination of the solidity of statuary and the fluidity of
oil.
While William Roberts' 'Judgement
of Paris' (1933) is less bothered with Classical forms than
by universalising the myth. With the absence of architecture and the
figures nude or near-nude, we have no handholds which might pinpoint
it to an era. If anything, the multi-racial figures would suggest to
us modern times. (Wrongly, but then it's the image of Classicism
which counts here.) And, like Joyce, he trivialises. His naïve,
flat-footed tubular anatomies, so at odds to the Classical rules of
proportion, suggest some sort of myth diorama, staged with toy
figures who have lost their clothes. (And the way Roberts' take on
the myth can be so utterly unlike Colquhoun's shows in itself how
many pasts there were to pick from.)
Generally the
sculpture in this show, unlike the sculpture-derived painting, is a
weak point. Jumping between media acts against the merely imitative,
and pushes somewhere new. Until that is, we reach Henry Moore. He
really attacked the problem from the other end, collapsing the
difference between Classical and primitive forms and arriving at
something which does suggest at the eternal. (See 'Reclining
Figure', above.)
In my earlier piece on Moore I remarked on the centrality of
his Shelter drawings, and how rooted they seemed in Grecian Hades.
Here he's quoted: “Until my Shelter drawings I never seemed to feel
free... to mix the Mediterranean approach comfortably with my
interest in the more elementary concept of archaic and primitive
people.”
Dissembling Arcadia
But let's jump to another corner of the
board. Here we might see Classicism not through Joyce but Shelley, as
something inherently Ozymandian. Here Classicism does not imply order
or continuity but rupture and upheaval. It was a warning against
hubris, a reminder empires fall. For if even the Romans didn’t
last, why should we? (It's perhaps analogous to the way in music the
Nineties were so often said to be the Sixties upside down, presenting
not the view from Woodstock looking forward but Altamont looking
back.)
Classicism is strongly associated with
the cult of the body, like a Charles Atlas ad in reverse where it's
the 'before' figure we should aim to be like. So in Michael Ayrton's
'Orpheus', his ravaged form could not be more at
odds with the idealised anatomies of old. The myth of Orpheus
incorporates anthropomorphism, his lyre playing said to be so
beguiling it could stir the trees and rocks to dance. Here the
opposite has happened, the landscape he’s in as ravaged as he is.
In fact there’s little differentiation between them. The same
ghostly grey hues are used for both, a touch of off-red on his lips
is the only hint of colour. While the straggly bare trees are echoed
in the veins on his chest.
After being unable to rescue Eurydice
from death, a distraught figure wandered the earth. And the story’s
ending is here associated with the end of Classicism itself, as if
he’s exiled past his time and it’s the barren modern world which
batters him.
Furthermore, it's
a truism that we rarely see intact examples of Classicism. The broken
pieces of pot, the limbless statue, the incomplete frieze… what's Classical comes down to us in a battered box with pieces missing. Our
knowledge of it is a combination of assemblage and guesswork. Art can
be used to overcome that, to reassemble Arcadia, take us back to when
temples were intact. Or, conversely...
John Armstrong's
'The Three Orders of Architecture' (1927, above)
presents this fragmentary, collage view of Classicism. Two different
column caps are conjoined, while we only see pieces of the main
figure, the rest suggested in white outline. And of course we are
used to seeing Classical statuary in just this incomplete state, in
the more iconic cases to the point where to now see it intact would
be jarring. It's a visual metaphor for our incomplete understanding
of the past. But it should also be seen in combination with other
Armstrong works.
His 'Pro
Patria' (1938, above) is more a companion piece to his ruin
works from the earlier 'British Artists and the Spanish
Civil War' show. There's the same jagged shards of what
once were houses, wallpaper still attached. But this time he
incorporates Classical motifs, such as the fractured statue face, and
quite modern elements – such as the two peeling posters which shout
at each other from opposite walls.
“Pro Patria”
(“for the fatherland”) was a phrase from Horace turned into a
slogan by Mussolini. It could be read as a promise that, like the
Rome Mussolini modelled himself on, fascism would fall. But there is
also something more sweeping and simultaneously beguiling to it. Is
this post-attack or post-apocalypse? The green peeling paintwork on
the right looks almost like foliage, as though this is the new
nature, our new normal.
(After the
earlier exhibition unearthed Armstrong, he was noticed by numerous
well-informed critics. (And by me.) We're now told he was part of a
mini-movement, the Tempera Revival.)
Frank Runacres'
'Untitled (Ruin)' (1939, above) perhaps goes
further in turning bomb wreckage into collage. Ironically, amongst
the damage, one figure is shown holding up entabulature. The pure
geometrical forms – a sphere, a wheel, a pyramid – serve to
emphasise what a jumble everything has been reduced to. The classical
sculptures are missing limbs, but of course we have no way of knowing
whether that's from the blast or they have just come down to us that
way. The sky is deep storm-grey, though the scene is painted as if
brightly lit. The show refers to this as “the destruction of
culture through war”.
Notably, both
these works were not journalism but heralds of war. JG Ballard, who
experienced World War Two as a child, perhaps made one of the most
important statements about Modernism when he said “war is surreal”.
If Ruancres' image is a mite too arranged to look like an actual
scene, it's perfectly possible a museum or private collection could
have been bombed. And being based in a credible event grants it
credibility.
It is slightly
strange the show focuses on Eliot's essay on Joyce and not his own
'The Waste Land' (1922), despite it being widely
seen as a foundation stone of Modernist poetry. In it Eliot quotes
from Classical sources such as Homer and Ovid, and the second-hand
Classicism of for example Shakespeare's plays. And notably this was
another war work, though this time a reaction to the First World War.
Making Myth Into
Psychology
Whether people from Classical eras
believed in their myths with earnest literalism is one thing. (With
what evidence we have pointing against a neat answer.) But, even when
they focused on the exploits of individual heroes, they were always
social stories with a collective message. Yet we've since seen the
parallel rise of psychology and art more concerned with mental
landscapes. Joyce's 'Ulysses' bases itself on
'The Odyssey' to emphasise the contrast, as art
went from a macro to a micro focus - from the mytho-historic or even
cosmogenic to a peep inside a single mind. In fact the show's
post-Freudian title would seem to stem from this.
Glyn Philpott summed up the paradox:
“For me the more personal has been my desire to create some
expression of my own emotional or spiritual experience, the more
readily have I accepted the aid of a theme drawn from myth and
legend.”
It's only been three times already,
let's turn to John Armstrong again. He didn't consider himself a
Surrealist, but take a look at 'The Labyrinth'
(1927, above). Objects as symbols and figures as cyphers, situated
inside a bizarre architectural space strewn with apertures. The way
the three figures are in the same pallid off-white, giving the walls
and ruddy ground the most vivid colours, suggests the maze is a frame
holding the figure together rather than dividing them. Hollywood's
quasi-classical epics were always boasting of a cast of thousands.
But perhaps this has a cast of one. The three figures are merely
elements of a single psyche.
If we’re going for psychological
explanations for a Surrealist work, Freud would seem an obvious fit. Wikipedia summarises his tripartite mental model: “the id is the
set of uncoordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the
critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic
part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.”
And here we have three figures - the bullish brute id placed dead
centre (the Minotaur), the advancing ego seeking dominance (Theseus),
and the directing super-ego (Ariadne). (The plan, let’s remember,
had been Ariadne’s.)
Yet before we close the case let’s
note a few more things. Ariadne’s thread, a detail from the myth
most remember, is absent. And without it’s linking device the
figures look isolated. Both Ariadne and Theseus seem to look out of
the frame. Pushed to the edge of the composition, it’s unclear
whether Theseus is striding boldly forwards or simply sloping off.
Besides which, Freud associated the super-ego with… surprise,
surprise… the authority of the Father.
Psychological explanations of myth
often assume it’s role is inherently instructive and even curative,
about the symbolic restoration of balance. In this way they occupy
the insidiously slippery slope where Jungism degenerates into New Age
mush. Yet myth is more often an explanation for why things
don’t work than why they do, and the Theseus
story – with it’s litany of betrayals and failures, and long line
of avoidable deaths – is a classic example.
The Minotaur was the progeny of Minos’
wife and a bull, shamefully consigned to the labyrinth. Traditionally
he was depicted as a symbiote, half man half bull. Armstrong makes
him more of a fusion, animal body yet humanised (if horned) face. And
the unsocialised child is often likened to an animal. Perhaps the
male figure is just that, not Theseus but simply standing for ‘the
male’. In which case he could as equally stand for Minos, the
father keen to finally rid himself of his troublesome offspring. It’s
the Oedipus myth the other way up.
While, even in the original myth,
Theseus breaks his promise to Ariadne and abandons her. In times past
the labyrinth was not just a puzzle to be solved but a sort of
spiritual journey akin to pilgrimage; you could pass through it,
while trapping those plaguing evil spirits within it. But the
opposite happens here. ’The Labyrinth’ is a
portrait of a fractured mental model, three pieces which must be made
to fit together but which cannot.
Looking backwards
to go forward... This was the way Modernism had pretty much always
seen primitive or folk art. The way to not become blocked by an
immediate obstacle was to take a step back in the hope of
leapfrogging over it. Ultimately, it’s Armstrong’s incomplete
Classical statue which is the signature image. Classicism may first
have been sought out for it’s reassuring orderedness. But it
remained as a repository of imagery, as pictures already scalpeled
and hence collage-ready. It presented images which looked like they
should have been unifying but simply weren’t.
Coming soon! More
art exhibitions reviewed after they've closed...
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