Herschel B. Chipp. Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics. Part Two

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Herschel B. Chipp 

Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics.
With Contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor

Berkeley, University of California Press, 1968

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part Two

Fig. 11) The first edition of Herschel B. Chipp's anthology, published by the University of California Press in 1968.

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Let us now speak about the structure of the anthology [27]: Chipp and its two co-authors divided it into nine chapters: (i) Post-impressionism, (ii) Symbolism and other subjectivist tendencies, (iii) Fauvism and Expressionism, (iv) Cubism, (v ) Futurism, (vi) Neo-plasticism and Constructivism, (vii) Dada, Surrealism and metaphysical school, (viii) art and politics and (viii) contemporary art: the autonomy of the work of art.

In this second part we will focus on the first three chapters. Here we will find references to the writings of some giants of modern art: Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, the Symbolists, the Fauvists and the Expressionists. For those who wrote in 1968, these were artists born one hundred years before. One could already reflect about their texts with a sufficiently sound historical perspective, as they had become the new 'classics'. An entire generation of post-war artists had read them, both to grasp their motivation as well as to overcome it, often in a radical way.

Fig. 12) The first of the two volumes of Lionello Venturi's anthology on impressionist art literature.

Since the 1920-1930s the publication of collections of letters of artists born around the middle of the nineteenth century had spread. It was, indeed, a trend that included the Impressionists (not present in Chipp's anthology). Consider, for example, the publication in 1939 of the anthology of Lionello Venturi entitled Les Archives de l'Impressionisme, in two volumes, which collected texts (as the long subtitle says) by Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, in addition to the memoirs by Paul Durand-Ruel and other documents. The texts of the artists who were violating the canons of romanticism were eagerly read by all the young artists who put themselves at the head of the avant-gardes.

A second wave of studies on the writings of these artists materialised in the 1950-1960s, or immediately before the publication of Chipp’s anthology. These were the years in which the United States became the new centre for the development of contemporary art and the translation of writings into English became fundamental to allow young artists to acquire analytical tools and sources of thought to interpret the art of the last century.

What was, at the time of the anthology we are reviewing here, the "American" fortune of the writings of artists between Cézanne and Kandinskij? And how did the Chipp anthology enhance their status? We will see that in some cases the texts were already widely known (although we will discover that, not infrequently, the pages cited by Chipp did not correspond to the most popular quotes). We will also consider the critical opinion of Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, one of the authorities in the field of American art literature, regarding the choice of anthologized passages.

Moreover, we will then extend the discussion to involve other geographical areas. In particular we will try to understand what was in those years the knowledge of the sources cited by Chipp in Italy, as an element of contrast and comparison. This exercise is certainly facilitated by the presence in Chipp's anthology of a very detailed reasoned bibliography, which (as we have already said) according to Ms Holt was recalling in some respects the documentary method of Julius von Schlosser, and the possibility of doing bibliographic searches on the internet, in particular thanks to the worldcat.org website.

Anthologizing the artistic literature of Post-impressionism: Cézanne and van Gogh

The Post-impressionism section was all based on the Cézanne-van Gogh binomial.

At the time of the appearance of the work, to tell the truth, the prevailing view was that one should speak of a post-impressionist trio (Cézanne-Gauguin-van Gogh) in terms of art literature. This happened in the Letters of Artists in the nineteenth century by Else Cassirer (1913) and in Confessions of Artists by Paul Westheim (1926), as proof of the fact that the writings of the three were seen in the German world as the combined caesura between the artistic literature of the two centuries. If it was really necessary to be lean, the anthologizers omitted most of the time Cézanne: in fact, only Gauguin and van Gogh were included in the American anthology Artists on art signed by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves in 1945, in the French one by Pierre du Colombier in The most beautiful writings of the great artists of 1946 and in the American article Artists who write by Alfred Werner, released shortly before Chipp’s anthology, or in 1965. Chipp instead moved Gauguin into the next chapter (the one of symbolism) thus underlining the difference between van Gogh and Gauguin, and finding instead elements of continuity between the writings of Cézanne and those of van Gogh. To unite the texts of the two latter artists was the firm reference to the aesthetic culture of the past (even referring to much before Impressionism).

Finally, it must be said that, according to Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, the section on Chipp's post-impressionism was suffering from the absence of the writings of Georges Seurat (1859–1891), the father of Neo-Impressionism [28].

Cézanne

Fig. 13) On the left: Emile Bernard, Souvenirs on Paul Cézanne and letters, 1921 (source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6572642c). On the right: Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, 1921 (source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9800064p/f3.image.texteImage).

Very few, short letters of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) referred to art, although the painter -  as Chipp wrote - was a man of ample culture and had a very broad correspondence, for example with the writer Émile Zola (1840-1902). In terms of style -  the anthologiser continued – Cézanne’s writing style was however "awkward, cryptic, and often ungrammatical, and he expresses himself only with the great effort. In that regard his writing is similar to his earliest paintings” [29]. In fact, the painter from Aix-en-Provence did not like to write or talk about art with other artists or connoisseurs, after the painful experience of the encounter-clash with the Impressionists that marked him hard in the 1860s (only Pissarro had remained his friend since then). He interrupted his literary asceticism only in “the last three years of his life, when he was in his late sixties. [His correspondence was] addressed to three young men, all of whom had exerted the considerable effort necessary to seek out the solitary painter” [30]. The sixty-year-old in fact became friend in 1896 with the twenty-year-old poet Joachim Gasquet (1873-1921), in 1901 with the future painter Charles Camoin (1879–1965), at the time a conscript soldier, and in 1904 with the 35-year-old painter Emile Bernard (1868-1941). The latter, who had published articles on Cézanne already at the age of twenty-two in 1890, spent a whole month with him in 1904, entirely spent in discussions about art.

Fig. 14) Above: On the left, the French critical edition of Cézanne's correspondence edited by John Rewald in 1937 and on the right the most recent reprint of the work in 2006 (in both cases published by Grasset). Below: On the left, the English translation of the correspondence in the Rewald edition, translated by Marguerite Kay 1941 (publisher Bruno Cassirer) and, on the right, the new, philologically correct, critical edition in English, edited and translated by Alex Danchev of 2013.

For Cézanne, interacting with young people who were curious and sensitive to his art, in long interviews (which would then be published after his death and become basic texts to understand his aesthetics), undoubtedly constituted a new experience. As early as 1912 Bernard released a very successful volume of memories about the month spent with Cézanne. In 1921 he integrated it with the letters (at the same time he also published a summary of A conversation with Cézanne in the magazine Mercure de France). Also in 1921, Gasquet inserted a long chapter in his book on Cézanne with a complete conversation with the painter. These were the years in which the global avant-garde was still buzzing in Paris, and reading first-hand the intentions of Cézanne must have been an inspiring occurrence for the young artists visiting the bookstores in Montmartre and Montparnasse.

Having to choose between the most famous memoirs published by Bernard and Cézanne's autograph letters, Chipp chose against the passages from the conversations (and therefore texts of a more literary nature) and in favour of some short passages taken from the correspondence. He selected some very famous letters (like the letter to Bernard himself of 1904 with the well-known reference to nature as a combination of cylinders, spheres and cones [31]). I found interesting also the letters, always addressed to the same interlocutor, in which Cézanne celebrated Tintoretto (1904) [32] and discussed the abstraction in art (1905) [33]. Chipp's interest in the theoretical aspects was so accentuated that he cut the texts so as to avoid all references to contingent questions: it must be said that Elizabeth Gilmore Holt negatively judged this conduct. The scholar wrote in her review of the anthology: “De-humanizing the letters by omitting all greetings and personal news is regrettable. (…) It is true that the result is an increase in space for theories. (…) When I then read the entire letter Cézanne wrote in the last week of his life, I was sorry for the deletion that left only the last four lines. Had the quote begun even midway in the letter it would still have conveyed Cézanne’s determination and unflinching spirit” [34].

 

Fig. 15) The Italian version of Paul Cézanne's letters curated by Elena Pontiggia in the editions of 1985 (SE) and 2011 (Abscondita).

The dissemination to the general public of the complete correspondence of the letters sent by Cézanne (the artist unfortunately did not keep the letters addressed to him) took place thanks to the publication in Paris of the Correspondence edited by John Rewald (1912-1994) in a critical edition dated 1937. Rewald was born Gustav, but changed his name when Hitler took power in Germany. After having settled first in France and then in the United States, he became one of the greatest art historians of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and one of the staunchest editors of artists’ texts in the United States. His edition of Cézanne’s letters has been reprinted since then regularly in French, and translated into English by Marguerite Kay in 1941 (the latter was also the version used by Chipp). It must be said that his collection was not philologically correct, even if Chipp could not have known it: only in 2011 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn would publish a critical collection of 54 letters of Cézanne highlighting not only some errors by Rewald, but that in fact the scholar had not resorted to the originals, merely transcribing many of the letters already published in volumes of memories, thereby confirming the transcription errors already contained there. A new translation in English, completely revised, was edited in 2013 by Alex Danchev, who had written a biography of Cézanne in 2012. As for our language, an Italian edition of the letters was slow to arrive and was unfortunately based on the philologically flawed one by Rewald: it was released only in 1985 (edited by Elena Pontiggia, published by SE, with reprints until 2011 by Abscondita). Before then only the Italian translation of the Memories and letters by Emile Bernard had been brought out (in 1953, in the translation by Anita and Luigi Compagnone edited by Longanesi).

Fig. 16) The two German editions of Paul Cezanne's letters in Switzerland. On the left: The edition by Hans Graber (1932); on the right: the edition by Gotthard Jedlicka, originally brought out in 1930, but here in a reprint of 1962.

Finally, it must be said that as early as the 1930s there were two German versions of Cézanne's letters, both published in Switzerland by art historians specialized in the study of modern art and texts in art literature: a collection of letters was edited by Gotthard Jedlicka (1899-1965) in 1930 and one by Hans Graber (1886-1956) in 1932. Chipp did not mention them: maybe he didn't know (or maybe he couldn't use) them, even for linguistic reasons. The Jedlicka edition was reprinted until the 1960s.

Van Gogh

About Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) Chipp wrote that his “statements specifically concerned with his ideas and theories on art are not numerous, and are most often very simple and direct. They occur almost exclusively during a very brief period, the first few fruitful and idyllic months when, having just left Paris at the age of thirty five, he settled in Arles for a stay that lasted from February 1888 until May 1889” [35]. With the exception of a short page from 1885, dedicated to the Potato Eaters (picture of that year), all the letters in the anthology referred to the latter period. It was the phase in which van Gogh, having abandoned that Paris where he had met the aforementioned Bernard and the community of neo-impressionism theorists, felt the need to communicate with his counterparts on artistic matters. Here Chipp actually identified the painter as a person who was anything but naive on art: Vincent had worked for six years in the world of the art market, before the mystical crisis that would lead him to abandon art trade and try to take the road of the preacher in the remote Flemish region of the Borinage. As a market expert in the Netherlands, Belgium, England and France, the artist was well acquainted with the masters of the previous generation [36]. In sum, after the mystical phase, van Gogh returned to art and proved to be able to reason on aesthetic questions.

The pages chosen by Chipp - consequently - were not only the well-known considerations of a mystical-religious nature on the meaning of life, but dealt with the use of colour, and with his relationship with Giotto, Cimabue, Holbein, Van Dyck, Leonardo, Correggio, Delacroix, Van Meer and Watteau. The world of the artists in the mind of van Gogh was not, in short, restricted to the famous partnership with Paul Gauguin in a sunny and puzzling Provence, to which the filmography has dedicated an almost obsessive attention (from Vincent Minnelli’s Lust for Life 1956 until the recent At Eternity's Gate by the director and painter Julian Schnabel). It must be said that Elizabeth Gilmore Holt wrote that Chipp, having to choose from an enormous letter corpus, made a good selection [37].

Fig. 17) On the left: One of the undated editions, published by Bruno Cassirer, of van Gogh's letters edited by Margarete Mauthner. On the right: Vincent van Gogh, The letters to his brother Theo, 1914. This was the first complete edition in three parts, published in Amsterdam by Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Theo van Gogh’s wife.
Source: https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/gogh006brie01_01/.

Van Gogh's letters experienced an overwhelming success (and in some instances, as in early twentieth-century Germany, van Gogh was perhaps even more famous as a writer than as a painter). The letters began to appear in French thanks to Emile Bernard in the Parisian art magazine Mercure de France in 1893 and in the German art magazine Kunst und Künstler in 1904. A first partial collection was produced in German in 1906 by the publisher Bruno Cassirer (eight reprints succeeded until 1930). The letters were chosen and translated by Ms Margarete Mauthner (1863-1947), a scholar and art collector, who was one of the leading specialists on the subject. An entire generation of German expressionist painters would be trained on that edition (translated into English starting in 1912). In 1911 the letters of van Gogh to Emile Bernard were published (in French) by Ambroise Vollard.

Fig. 18) On the left: Van Gogh’s letters to Emile Bernard in the edition published by Ambroise Vollard in 1911. On the right: The complete correspondence edition in English in 1958 in New York.

The first complete critical edition of the letters was published in three volumes in Amsterdam by Theo van Gogh's wife, Johanna Gesina Bonger van Gogh, in 1914. The letters’ section to the brother Theo was immediately translated into German by Leo Klein-Diepold for the publisher Bruno Cassirer (and appeared 1927 in English thanks to the translation of Theo’s wife and in 1937 in French thanks to Georges Philippart and Charles Terrasse). A second complete edition of the correspondence in Dutch appeared in 1952-1954 thanks to Johanna’s son Vincent Willem van Gogh. An English version of it was made in 1958, with translation by Theo van Gogh's wife and C. de Dood. The collection of letters came out simultaneously in London and New York, and has since then been reprinted numerous times. It was, among other things, the edition used by Chipp. From this English edition it were also derived the complete French (1960) and Russian (1966) versions. A third and new critical edition of the six-volume letters appeared in English and French in 2009. It was edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker.

Fig. 19) On the left: The first Italian edition of the Letters to Theo by Vincent van Gogh, published in 1944. On the right: The second edition, appeared in 1946, edited by Marco Valsecchi.

As for Italy, the Letters to Theo were published (in two different editions) for the first time in 1944 (translation from Dutch by Liana Ferri, preface by Virgilio Guzzi, Rome, Edizioni della Bussola) and in 1946 (edited by the art historian Marco Valsecchi in Milan for the publisher Bompiani). The complete three-volume edition of all the letters was first published in 1959 (based on the 1952-1954 edition) with the title Tutte le lettere di Vincent van Gogh – i.e. All the letters by Vincent van Gogh (Silvana Editoriale d'Arte), in the translation from Dutch and French by Marisa Donvito and Beatrice Casavecchia. The number of editions (in all forms and combinations) has since then multiplied, making van Gogh's letters a mass consumer product also in our country (the last Italian edition was edited by the publisher Donzelli of 2013).

Fig. 20) Some recent editions of Vincent van Gogh's letters in Italian. Top, from left to right: the edition of the Letters in Einaudi’s "I Millenni" series by Cynthia Saltzman, with translations by Margherita Botto, Laura Pignatti and Chiara Stangalino (2013); the edition of the Letters to Theo, edited by Massimo Cescon, with an introductory essay by Karl Jaspers and translations by Marisa Donvito and Beatrice Casavecchia, published by Guanda (2007); the edition of the Letters to Theo, with a testimony by Paul Gauguin, in the translation by Lorena Paladini and Alessandro Mola, in the Garzanti edition (2018). Below, from left to right: the edition of the Letters to Theo on painting, curated by Massimo Cescon, with translations by Tiziano Gianotti, Marisa Donvito and Barbara Casavecchia, in the Tea arte edition (1994); the edition of the Letters to a painter friend (Émile Bernard), curated by Maria Mimita Lamberti, in the translation by Sergio Caredda, in the Rizzoli edition (2013); and the volume Scrivere la vita. 266 lettere e 11 schizzi originali (Writing a Life. 266 letters and 11 original sketches), edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, published by Donzelli publisher (2013).

Symbolisms and subjectivisms

Within this very wide and perhaps voluntarily imprecise category - where all the symbolisms and subjectivisms were associated - Chipp placed above all the writings of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), but also the theoretical thoughts of George-Albert Aurier (1865-1892), Maurice Denis (1870-1943) and Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), as well as the testimonies of James Ensor (1860-1949), Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Odilon Redon (1840-1916) and Henry van de Velde (1863-1957). What united them - the anthologist warned - was above all the common adversity to realism (especially that of Zola, who was a great friend of Cézanne up to a resounding rupture), the centrality of the theme of the transcendent world (reproduced thanks to the subjective qualities of colours) and the expansion of the theme of freedom of expression. There was a great intellectual proximity between these artists and poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) and Gustave Kahn (1859-1936). These were the years of total art and the contamination between written and visual was entirely intentional. “Seldom since that time and perhaps never before had painter and poet come so close together both in their personal associations and in their struggle with common artistic problems.” [38].

Gauguin

Fig. 21) The issue of the journal Verse and Prose in which Paul Gauguin published his Synthetic Notes in 1910.
Source: https://pictures.abebooks.com/PRISCA/12604598234.jpg.

Gauguin was born into a family of writers and journalists; his correspondence and his writings testify to his passion for the theory of artistic experiments before their realization. Chipp documented how that art, which is often described as an expression of a wild soul, was therefore - on the contrary – the result of a fully-developed theoretical framework [39].

Fig. 22) Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa, 1929, published by Éditions Crès in Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Compared to previous examples of art literature, that of a symbolist orientation was not only a form of rationalization of the past, but had the nature of a programmatic manifesto [40]. Gauguin's Synthetism was born on paper before being made on canvas. Even the learning of Polynesian way of life - witnessed in the famous travel diary Noa-Noa (which was not anthologized here) - was actually the result of studies and readings, and not of life experiences [41]. His subsequent attempts to deny the influence of poets and writers on his art represented, in short, the attempt to be accredited as a man dominated by an immediate impulse; ultimately, these 'primitivist' features were part of a successful communication strategy led by financial goals. Chipp gathered the writings of Gauguin under three profiles: the synthetist theories, the comments on his own works and those on primitivism. He included above all letters, short theoretical writings published in journals and quotes from the Tahitian manuscripts Diverses Choses, 1896-1897 and Cahier pour Aline, published posthumously by Gauguin’s biographer Jean De Rotonchamp in 1906.

Fig. 23) The three-volume edition of Paul Gauguin's notebooks in 1962, with a comment by Raymond Cogniat and an introduction by John Rewald.

To date, a complete critical edition of Gauguin's letters has not yet been published. Herschel Chipp announced in the anthology that the critic John Rewald [42] (whom we have already met concerning Cézanne's writings) was working on a future critical collection of the entire correspondence, but evidently the enterprise has never been realized. Rewald, on the other hand, produced a brief collection of Gauguin's letters to Ambroise Volard and André Fontainas, which appeared in 1943, as well as the introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the notebooks (A Sketchbook), in three volumes, by Raymond Cogniat of 1962, to which Chipp referred, by quoting from there many of the pages contained in his anthology. Cogniat was one of the greatest critics and popularizers of Impressionism.

Fig. 24) Gauguin's letters edited by Maurice Malingue. Above, the three French editions published by Grasset in 1946, 1992 and 2003. Below, the English edition translated by Henry J. Stenning (editions of 1948 and 2003, published by The World Publishing Company and MFA Publication) and the Italian one, in the Longanesi edition of 1949, translated by Piero Gadda. There was also a more recent version, published by Guanda in 1994.

The richest and most fortunate publication of the correspondence (also used by Chipp) was instead that of the Letters of Gauguin to his wife and friends by the art historian Maurice Malingue, appeared in French (1946), English (1948), Italian (1948) and German (1960). Malingue, an art historian and friend of the artist's family, continued to shape the public image of Gauguin, with his monograph Gauguin: le peintre et son oeuvre (Gauguin: the painter and his work), introduced by his wife Pola (1948), with the exhibition “Gauguin and his friends” at the Galerie Kleber in 1949 and finally with the creation of the association “The friends of Paul Gauguin”(1960).

Other symbolists and subjectivists

Fig. 25) On the left: The 1920 collection of writings Theories 1890-1910. From Symbolism and Gauguin to a New Classical Order by Maurice Denis. Source: https://archive.org/details/thories189019100deniuoft/page/n10. At the centre: The collection of writings by James Ensor dated 1921. Source: https://archive.org/details/lescritsdejame00enso/page/n5. On the right: The diary To himself by Odilon Redon, published in 1922.

Synthesism was taken account of by Chipp  above all with Maurice Denis’s writings. Chipp recognized his value not only as a painter of the Nabis group, but as a theorist (a first collection of his writings of 1890-1910 had already appeared in 1920) and as an organizer, in the following decades, of modern movements of sacred art. His long article Définition du Néo-traditionisme (Definition of Neo-traditionism), published in August 1890 at nineteen in the weekly magazine Art et Critique, played a fundamental role (after all, also Goldwater and Treves had already included it in their anthology Artists on Art). Also Elizabeth Gilmore Holt congratulated Chipp for recognizing its theoretical significance [43].

Equally important was the contribution of some of the cursed artists of those years, such as Edvard Munch with short aphorisms included in an essay dedicated to him dated 1963, James Ensor whose writings appeared in an edition of 1921, and Odilon Redon, whose diary À soi-même (To himself) was released in 1922. With the writings of Denis, Ensor and Redon (all in French) and Munch (in Norwegian) we are meeting for the first time texts that were not yet available in English in 1968 (as already mentioned, with the sole exception of passages from the article by Maurice Denis). Chipp was presenting them for the first time to the English-speaking public. However, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt did not consider Ensor's presence in the chapter appropriate: she considered him an artist and theorist of the previous century. According to the scholar, Chipp should have instead included texts of theory of sculpture like for instance by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) and Adolf Hildebrand (1847–1921) [44].

The writings of Fauvists and Expressionists

It was Peter Selz who took charge of this chapter of the anthology, probably because of his knowledge of German art and, in particular, of expressionism (Elizabeth Gilmore Holt wholeheartedly praised his choices). If until then contemporary art had developed in Paris, now the French capital was flanked - as Selz explained - by the new art centres of Dresden and Munich. Actually, for English versions from German where an English text was not previously available, Selz did not attempt himself to translate, but preferred to make use of the help of other specialists. Among them I would like to mention another illustrious exponent of contemporary art criticism of German origin, namely Ernest Mundt (1905-1993), a member of the Bauhaus in the thirties in Berlin and then emigrated to the United States (through Turkey), where he became director of the California School of Fine Arts in the 1950s in San Francisco. Moreover, one of the translations from Kandinskij was  of the American art historian Kenneth Clement Lindsay (1919-2009), who  would eventually publish all his art writings in English in 1982.

Matisse

Fig. 26) The Notes of a Painter by Henri Matisse in the edition of the Center Pompidou (2012) with a preface by Cécile Debray

With the exception of short texts and letters by Henri Rousseau Le Douanier (1844-1910) and Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958), Fauvism was represented by Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Selz noted that - in contrast to the 'wild' intention of Matisse's art - his programmatic texts were “calm and moderate: he believes in capturing the essential of nature, he commends the idealism of Greek sculpture, asserts his principal interest in the human figure, and strives for serenity” [45]. For Selz the determining factor of Matisse's aesthetic theory was the centrality of artistic intuition, which he traced back to the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and above all of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). The main text reproduced was that of the Notes of a Painter, originally released in December 1908 in the artistic-literary periodical La Grande Revue, published in Paris and St. Petersburg. This was the first theoretical text by Matisse, then in his forties, who was asked to defend his painting from the fierce criticism after an exhibition in 1905: the artist did so by referring to classical categories as, for instance, the ideal beauty. The text was immediately translated into Russian (in the magazine Золотое руно - The Golden Fleece) and German (in the magazine Kunst und Künstler) the following year, and would be read by many young painters of the early twentieth century. It was translated into English in 1931 and 1951 (the latter version edited by the famous Alfred H. Barr (1902-1981) is the one used in the anthology) and in Italian in 1943 (in the magazine Emporium). In Selz's chapter, three texts from the 1940s and 1950s followed, written by the artist on the occasion of and in memory of the famous American exhibition in Philadelphia in 1948.

Nolde

Fig. 27) The Years of the Battles, the volume of memoirs on the years 1902-1914 published by Emil Nolde in 1934 by the publishing house Rembrandt and in the 1958 by Flensburg edition

The section on expressionism was much broader and aimed to document the diversity of inspiration of the artists. It was opened by some pages of the autobiography of Emil Nolde (1867-1956), a very large autobiographical corpus on whose vicissitudes we have written extensively in this blog. From the volume The Years of Battles 1902-1914 Selz chose some pages on religious art, written in 1934, in which the painter drew a parallelism between his art, the medieval one and the works of the archaic civilizations of the primitives, referring to his creations of 1909. In contrast to Matisse's pages, the author's goal here was expressly to deny any value to the world of Greek-Latin classicism and the Renaissance tradition. His writing style was characterized by an extreme search for emotional effects. It must be said that Nolde's autobiography never appeared in English and therefore Ernest Mundt's translation remained one of the few pages in English of the German expressionist.

Kandinskij

The writings of Vasilij Kandinskij (1866-1944) were present here with two texts from 1912, taken respectively from the Spiritual in art and in particular in painting (Über das Geistige in der Kunst: insbesordere in der Malerei) and from the Almanac of the Blue Knight (Der Blaue Reiter). The first citation concerned the effect of colour (of which the painter wrote that it has both a smell and a sound). While Nolde was instinctive, provincial and in many respects uneducated, Kandinsky (a Russian of great culture and the language ability to cross the borders of cultures) was a man of strong roots in "philosophy and religion, poetry and music" and, indeed, an "universal genius” [46]. One of the most difficult aspects in the interpretation of Kandinsky's written work (in addition to his extraordinary breadth, even without including a remarkable body of purely literary and theatrical texts) was the fact that he produced different versions of his writings according to the languages, adapting them to the public opinion of the linguistic area to which he was addressed. For example, of the Spiritual in art there is also a Russian version of 1911, different from the German one. The version quoted by Chipp derived (via a previous English translation) from the German text.

Fig. 28) Above: Kandinky, The Spiritual in art: The original German edition of 1912 (Piper and Co), the English translation of 1946 (Salomon Guggenheim Foundation) and the Italian translation of 1968 (De Donato). Below, two English editions based on the Sadleir translation (Dover, 1977 and Martino Fine Books, 2014) and the most recent Italian version (SE, 2005).

Not surprisingly, the work had an extraordinary success in the English world since the 1940s, that is in the full phase of affirmation in the United States of abstract expressionists. A first version was published in 1946 by the Guggenheim Foundation in New York. Selz instead used the English translation of the Spiritual in art dated 1947. It was prepared by the English scholar Michael Sadleir (1888-1957) and revised by Francis Golffing, Michael Harrison and Ferdinand Ostertag. From the 1940s onwards the version of Kandiskij's essay in the translation by Sadleir and others established itself as one of the most published works of artistic literature in the English world. But success was not limited to this area. The first translation into Japanese was dated 1924, that in French occurred in 1949, and the one in Spanish in 1956. The success in the Italian world was also not negligible. The first translation (from German) appeared in 1940 (Della spiritualità dell’arte particolarmente nella pittura) thanks to Giovanni Antonio Colonna di Cesarò (1878-1940); his text was re-presented in 1968, with an introductory essay by Luigi Spezzaferro, by the publisher De Donato. Feltrinelli publishers added to it in 1971 an Italian version which (passing through the French critical edition of Philippe Sers) was instead taken from the Russian edition; the latest Italian translation of 1993 by Elena Pontiggia, subject of numerous reprints, was again from German.

Fig. 29) The Blue Knight's Almanac, republished in 1965 in a critical edition by Klaus Lakheit (left, R. Piper and Co editions), translated into Italian by Giuseppina Gozzini Calzecchi Onesti in 1967 (in the middle, De Donato editions) and in English by Henning Falkenstein in cooperation with Manug Terzian and Gertrude Hinderlie in 1974 (right, The Viking Press editions).

The essay on form, which according to Selz was key to the theoretical elaboration of the concept of abstract art, was first published - as already mentioned - in the Almanac of the Blue Knight by Franz Marc and Vasilij Kandinskij. In the anthology it was proposed in the translation of Kenneth Clement Lindsay. The editorial success of the Almanac took more time than the previous publication, and was largely due to the German art historian Klaus Lankheit (1913-1992), who reprinted it in German in 1965; this edition was also the source of the first version in English, which appeared in the United States in 1974, and therefore only after the publication of Chipp’s anthology. Also in this case the Italian fortune cannot be underestimated: the first version was published by the publisher De Donato in 1967, with a translation from the German by Giuseppina Gozzini Calzecchi Onesti which has been reprinted since then by different publishing houses (SE, Abscondita).

Kokoschka and Kirchner

Fig. 30) Left: The essay on Kokoschka by Edith Hoffmann which first contained the text (in English) of the January 1912 conference About the nature of visions (Faber and Faber editions). At the center: two German editions of all the writings of Kokoschka between 1907 and 1955, curated by Hans Maria Wingler (Langen-Müller Verlag, 1956 and Fischer Verlag, 1964) and the Italian edition by Donatella Mazza (Campanotto editions, 2008)

The most radical generation of German expressionism was represented by Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938). The former frequently exercised writing; in addition to aesthetic works, he also made many  texts of theatre and literature. Selz chose the discourse About the nature of visions (Von der Natur der Gesichte) held in Vienna on 26 January 1912, where Kandinsky's spiritual theories were not translated into an aspiration to abstraction, but into an exasperation of the image. The story of the spread of this youthful text in print was, in some ways, convoluted: an English translation On the Nature of Visions (it is the text quoted by Chipp in the anthology) appeared for the first time in 1947 in Kokoschka, Life and Work, by Edith Hoffmann. The original German text was then included in the critical edition of the writings published by the art historian Hans Maria Wingler (1920- 1984) in 1956 (with reprint in 1964), on the occasion of the artist's seventy years. The text also exists in an Italian edition edited by Donatella Mazza in 2008.

Fig. 31) On the left: Letters to his wife Nele by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1961, editions R. Piper and C). At the centre: the Davos diaries curated by Lothar Griesebach in the 1968 (Dumont) and 1997 (Catje) editions. On the right: the collection of documents and writings edited by Karlheinz Gabler and published by the Aschaffenburg museum in 1980

As to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the anthology included the Chronicle of the Bridge of 1916, a very short text that paradoxically marked the dissolving moment of The Bridge (Die Brücke) group, founded by the artist together with Fritz Bleyl (1880 –1966), Erich Heckel (1883 –1970) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976) in 1905. The story is known: Kirchner wrote the text in 1913 to narrate the story of the group, but the other members rejected it, believing it had given too much space for his one's role: after eight years during which the four had produced in full understanding art according to the basis of the 1906 manifesto, the friendship broke. Kirchner would publish the Chronicle only in 1916, after the years of war and the treatment in a sanatorium. The work was translated by Peter Selz himself and published in English for the first time in 1950. At the time when Chipp published the anthology, there was no complete collection of the painter's writings. The letters to his wife and to the architect Henry van de Velde had already been printed (1961). Then it was the turn of the diaries of exile in Davos, where the artist committed suicide in 1938. A collection of writings was compiled in 1968 by his painter friend Lothar Grisebach (1910-1989). The letters to the wife were never subject to separate republication. The Davos memoirs exist in a more recent 1997 reprint. The Museum of Aschaffenburg, Kirchner’s hometown, produced a collection of writings in 1980, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. But all in all, the testimony of the writings has indeed remained very limited compared to the fame of the artist.

Marc

Fig. 32) Above: On the left, the first of the two volumes of the original edition of Franz Marc's 1920 Letters, drawings and aphorisms, edited by the publisher Paul Cassirer in Berlin. On the right, an edition edited by Franz Meißner and published in Leipzig (then German Democratic Republic) by Kiepeheuer in 1980. Below: the Italian editions of the aphorisms (Feltrinelli 1982 and Abscondita 2007) edited by Renato Troncon and Elena Pontiggia

The myth of Franz Marc (1880–1916) was linked - in addition to his painting where, as Selz explained, animals drawn in a classical sense were immersed in a fairy world thanks to the use of shapes and colours - both to his personal events (first of all the tragic death, which occurred on the battlefields of Verdun) as well as the writings. The pages cited by Selz were all oriented to a very pure reflection of an aesthetic nature. In a first note of 1911-1912 in the margins of his drawings, the author wondered how a horse sees the world: it was an opportunity to raise universal themes in the history of art, bringing together Picasso, Kandinsky and Delaunay with Pisanello. It followed a selection of aphorisms on the nature of language and art. It concluded a letter sent to an unknown recipient, in which Marc explained the reasons why he almost exclusively painted animals and made a comparison between his art and that of Kandinsky. Marc's three texts were taken from the collection (in two volumes) of Letters, Drawings and Aphorisms published by Paul Cassirer in 1920, revived in 1980 and 1989 in eastern Germany and recently republished in 2014. A collection of writings between 1910 and 1915 was published in Italian in 1987 in Florence. The aphorisms were brought out in Italy in two editions: I cento aforismi: la seconda vista (The hundred aphorisms: the second sight) by Renato Troncon with an essay by Giorgio Franck, Feltrinelli, 1982 and La seconda vista: aforismi e altri scritti (The second sight: aphorisms and other writings) by Elena Pontiggia (Abscondita, 2007).

Fig. 33) From the left: Franz Marc’s Letters from the front, in the 1940 edition (Rembrandt Verlag), in 2000 (Piper Verlag) and in 2014 (Allitera Verlag). On the right, the English edition translated by Liselotte Dieckmann (1992).

But in reality the correspondence owed its popularity above all to the editions dedicated to specific themes (extracted from the complete 1920 edition), and, in particular, to a small volume of Letters from the front published for the first time in 1940 (and therefore in a period of war) and reprinted in 1956. The war correspondence was re-proposed in a new edition by Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen in 1982 and, since then, has been regularly reprinted; the Lankheit-Steffen edition was finally translated into English for the types of publisher Peter Lang in 1992. There were also editions of letters between painters: the correspondence between the two painter friends August Macke (1887-1914) and Franz Marc covered the period 1910-1914 and was published for the first time in 1964; the one between Franz Marc and Wassily  Kandinsky dates back to 1983. These are texts that are much cited today, confirming the existence of a fabric of personal contacts between artists (often documented also with parallel exhibitions of their paintings).

Fig. 34) On the left: The edition of the correspondence between Kandinsky and Marc, edited by Klaus Lankheit and published in 1983. On the right: the letters between Franz Marc and August Macke in a 2014 edition curated by Karl-Maria Guth.

Klee

In line with the general design of the anthology (where theory was preferred to biography), the writings of Paul Klee (1879-1940) were not taken from the Diaries, or his splendid autobiographical texts on the period 1898-1918, widely reviewed in this blog, but from one of his most famous programmatic writings, the Creative Confession (here entitled Creative Credo), which marked for him the complete transition from an expressionist symbolism to the suggestions of abstract art. The Diaries (published in German in 1957) were published in English in 1964 (strangely, Chipp wrote that they were still being published, perhaps because his annotated bibliography had not been fully updated at the time of publication of the anthology). It is however in the Creative Credo that Klee wrote that art does not reproduce what is visible, but makes a hidden world visible. The writing had appeared with the title Schöpferische Konfession in the journal Tribüne der Kunst und der Zeit (Tribune of Art and Time) in 1920, published by the writer Kasimir Edschmid (1890-1966). The insertion of the English translation (taken from a catalogue of an exhibition of 1959 by Norbert Gutermann) paid tribute to a short text, which is however still today considered crucial: think of the collection Confessione creatrice ed altri scritti (Creative confession and other writings) edited by Francesco Saba Sardi in 2004 and to that (in English) entitled Creative confession and other writings, published by the Tate Gallery in 2013.

Fig. 35) Paul Klee's Pedagogical Notebook in a German edition in the editions of 1925 and 2018

In his reasoned bibliography Chipp inserted (in addition to the Creative Credo and the Diaries) two other fundamental texts, linked to the subsequent period spent by Klee as a teacher at the Bauhaus: first the pedagogical notebook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 1925 - English translation in 1953), and, secondly, the set of lessons at the Bauhaus, or Das Bildnerische Denken, published posthumously in German in 1956, in Italian in 1959, and in English in 1961 (with the title “Paul Klee: the thinking eye; the notebooks of Paul Klee”).

Fig. 36) On the left: The collection of writings Creative confession and other creative writings edited in 2004 by Francesco Saba Sardi (Abscondita editions). On the right: The collection of Creative Confession and other writings written by Matthew Gale and published by Tate Publishing in 2014.

Beckmann

Placing Max Beckmann (1884-1950) among the expressionists, Selz could have made us think that - fifty years ago - the 'return to order' was perhaps not adequately evaluated as an autonomous artistic phenomenon. In fact, he referred to the New Objectivity  (the Neue Sachlichkeit) movement as an expression of a vein of "great realism" that can be identified as belonging to modern art. Selz believed that this modernist trend was expressed also in the iconography of De Chirico (1888 - 1978) and Bacon (1909 - 1992), had parallels in the narrative of James Joyce (1882 - 1941) and Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924) and was even echoed in cinematography, with Michelangelo Antonioni (1912 - 2007) and Ingmar Bergmann (1918-2007). Today, perhaps, a whole separate chapter would be devoted to this tendency that regretted the experimentation of the avant-garde of the beginning of the century and recovered figurative and classicism. One would include references not only the other Germans (mainly Grosz and Dix) but also the Paris school and to the rediscovery of medieval and Renaissance painting techniques (such as tempera, mosaic and fresco) almost everywhere in Europe, as well as to socialist realism in the Soviet Union. In Italy, many of these aspects would also prove to be typical of the totalitarian art of those years, for example of its modernist currents (magical Realism). In this way, the return to figurative art became a common element to artists who were placing themselves, from an ideological point of view, on decidedly adverse positions.

Fig. 37) Two works by Peter Selz on Max Beckmann: on the left a volume on self-portraits (Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1992) and the catalogue of the exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1964.

This view would perhaps displease Selz, who was one of the great promoters of the art of Beckmann in the United States (curating his retrospective at the MoMA in New York in 1964). Selz cited Beckmann with a programmatic text On my painting, originally pronounced in German at the Burlington Gallery in London in 1938, in years when the artist was in exile in Amsterdam and sought comfort in the eternal and immutable philosophical truth of individualism, against all forms of collectivism (it was also the orientation that could be found in the writings of Grosz). The text was published a few years later in English in New York, after Beckmann's transfer from the Netherlands (occupied by the Nazis) to the United States; the Karl Buchholz Gallery (which was promoting 'degenerate' art in New York) took care of it. Emphasizing how Beckmann saw his art without interruption with the great avenues of the past (Grünewald, Blake, Henri Rousseau Le Douanier), Selz considered it as the last moment of transition between the classical figurative tradition and an iconographic world completely freed from references to the past.

Fig. 38) Above: Max Beckmann's Letters from the war, in the original edition of 1916 (Bruno Cassirer edition) and in the last edition of 1984 (by Minna Tube). Below: The diaries of 1940-1955, edited by Erhard Göpel, in the Langen-Müller (1955), Fischer (1965) and Piper (1987) editions.

In the reasoned bibliography hosted in Chipp's anthology, Beckmann was considered both for the correspondence during the war period - with the Letters from the War (Briefe im Kriege), published by Bruno Cassirer in 1916 – as well as for the Diaries between 1940 and 1950, published by the art historian Erhard Göpel (1906-1966) in 1955 (Langen-Müller editions). There were recent editions of both the first and the second writings. To them it was added the complete correspondence in three volumes, published by Piper in three volumes in 1993 by Klaus Gallwitz, Uwe M. Schneede and Stephan von Wiese. Outside German, the writings exist only in French (thanks to a publication by the Center Pompidou in Paris (edited by Philippe Dagen and Barbara Stehle).

Fig. 39) The three volumes of Beckmann's Letters edited by Klaus Gallwitz, Uwe M. Schneede and Stephan von Wiese (Piper 1993 editions)

End of Part Two

Go to Part Three

NOTES

[27] Chipp's, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book By Artists and Critics, with contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor, Oakland, University of California Press, 1968, 688 pages. The text is entirely available at: 
https://archive.org/details/theoriesofmodern00chip.

[28] Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore - Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp, in The Art Bulletin, Vol. 54, No. 2, June, 1972 (pp. 229-231). The text is available at the address:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3048987?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents. Quotation at p. 230.

[29] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.14.

[30] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.11.

[31] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), pp.18-19.

[32] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.21.

[33] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.22.

[34] https://www.jstor.org/stable/3048987?read-now=1&refreqid=excelsior%3Ada50d6675fb051bcebc55c5bc3287259&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents p. 230.

[35] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.24.

[36] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.26.

[37] Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore - Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp (quoted), p. 230.

[38] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.51.

[39] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.51.

[40] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.50.

[41] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.51.

[42] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.632.

[43] Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore - Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp (quoted), p. 230.

[44] Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore - Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp (quoted), p. 230.

[45] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.125.

[46] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.126.