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

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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 Three

Fig. 40)  The Brazilian edition of Hershel B. Chipp’s anthology, entitled Teorias Da Arte Moderna and published by the publisher Martin Fontes (São Paulo). On the left, the 1988 version; on the right, that dated 1999.

Go Back to Part One

This third part of the review about the anthology Theories of Modern Art: a Source Book by Artists and Critics by Herschel B. Chipp (1913-1992) is dedicated to Cubism, Futurism and finally to Neo-plasticism and Constructivism, which are documented respectively in the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the work. Compared to the avenues and movements discussed in the second part (i.e. Post-impressionism, Symbolism and other subjectivist tendencies, Fauvism and Expressionism) the art literature here is distinguished by a less prominent role of specific individual personalities and a stronger collective articulation. In fact, it was no longer the individual testimonies (diaries and correspondence) that were dominating. Artists chose more and more to publish collective manifestos to explain to the public the reasons why groups of artists (very often aligned with writers, poets and playwrights) were coming together to propose radically new art forms. Moreover, while many of the previous artists (think of Cézanne, van Gogh, Matisse, Beckmann) had rediscovered the importance of their classical art background, the new movements instead were often testifying  to an irreducible and radical will to break with the past.

An almost impossible task: to anthologize Cubist art literature

As an art historian, Chipp is above all known for his extensive essay writings on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). He also launched the idea of the Picasso Project, i.e. a complete catalogue of his works, which was however mostly published posthumously shortly after the death of the critic, as from 1992. To the art literature of Cubism, whose essence he synthesized in the rule 'form as expression', Chipp dedicated a large section of a hundred pages. Compared to other chapters, the texts cited in this section were also wider and more continuous.

Fig. 41) Three of the volumes of the Picasso Project, conceived by Herschel B. Chipp and dedicated respectively to the phase from cubism to neoclassicism (1995), to neoclassicism I (1995) and to neoclassicism II (1996). All volumes were published by the publisher Alan Wofsy Fine Arts in San Francisco. Source: https://www.art-books.com/the-picasso-project.php

Between 1907 and 1914 Cubism - as Chipp wrote - revolutionised art more than it was ever made since the Renaissance, influencing architecture, applied arts, poetry, literature and music [47]. The influence of Cubism did not end within the ranks of this movement, but manifested itself in all the immediately subsequent artistic expressions, reflecting on the entire century. With the important exception of the two main exponents of this address - and therefore of Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963) - the literary production of the other artists was very intense, although it started only after the 1911 exhibit of Cubist art at the Salon des Indépendants (therefore, a few years after the appearance of Picasso's first Cubist works in 1907). The cubist artists sought a link with reference intellectuals, explained their reasons, and spread their ideas [48]. The most active in this sense were Jean Metzinger (1883-1956), Albert Gleizes (1881-1953), Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Juan Gris (1887-1927); the major literates and critics who accompanied them were Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), André Salmon (1881-1969) and Alfred Jarry (1873-1907).

Fig. 42) The essay by André Salmon on the young French painting, which included the chapter Anecdotal History of Cubism It was published in 1912 in Paris by the Société des Trente. Source: https://archive.org/details/lajeunepeinturef00salm/page/40

The section opened with the chapter on cubism in André Salmon's essay on The Young French Painting dated 1912 (entirely available on the internet at the address https://archive.org/details/lajeunepeinturef00salm/page/n8). Salmon was the first to narrate in a factual way the life of Picasso and the other Cubists in those years. The translation from French was by Chipp himself; it must however be said that we have also a different and more recent English translation by the art historian Beth S. Gersh-Nesic (see: https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=BngwOaFvEecC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it). 

Fig. 43) Above, from left to right: The treatise on cubism by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, in the original edition, published in 1912 by Eugène Figuière Éditeurs in Paris; The following French edition, released in 1947 by the Compagnie Française des Arts Graphiques; The English translation of 1913 published by T. Fisher Unwin (without indication of the translator); The third issue of the magazine Union of Youth, including the Russian review by the painter and composer Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin. Below, from left to right: The two most recent French versions of 1980 (Présence) and of 2012 (Hermann); The Spanish translation of 1986 (Colección de Arquitectura, translation by I. Ramos Serna and F. Torres Monreal); and the German version of 1988 (R.G. Fischer, translation by Fritz Metzinger).

Chipp included afterwards the almost complete transcription of the essay Du Cubisme by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, also published in 1912 in French (it was the first theoretical work on Cubism). It must be said that this (brief) treatise, printed thanks to the Parisian poet and publisher Eugène Figuière (1882-1944) in conjunction with the collective exhibition of the Section d'or at the La Boétie gallery by Paul Rosenberg (1881-1959) in October 1912, was the subject for decades of controversy, after the gallerist and critic Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1884-1979), the great promoter of Cubism and Rosenberg's brother-in-law, attacked the treatise vehemently in 1920 in his essay “The way to Cubism” (Der Weg zum Kubismus). One of the most criticised points was the didactic tone of the text by Gleizes and Metzinger, justified by the concern of the two artists to defend the Cubists from the lashing criticism of which they were the object. In defence of the two painters, Chipp wrote instead: “In Du Cubisme the two artists attempted to explain some of the conceptions underlying the movement. They discussed in clear and rational terms the idea of ​​the new "conceptual" as opposed to the old "visual" reality, and how the transformation of natural objects into the plastic realm of the painting was effected” [49]. The 1912 edition also displayed images of cubist artists’ works, including original drawings, and this is why it has often been shown in collective art exhibitions on Cubism. Chipp pointed out that, in that work, Picasso was present with only one image and Braque was not present at all: in short, Gleizes and Metzinger seemingly wanted to emphasize their autonomy with respect to the two historical leaders of the movement [50]. Instead there were images of works by Paul Cézanne, André Derain, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Marie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris and Francis Picabia. An English translation of Du Cubisme was released by the publisher T. Fisher Unwin the following year, where curiously Metzinger's surname was mangled because of a typo right on the cover. The same error appeared the same year in the Russian review "О книге Мецанже - Глеза" Du Cubisme " (‘About the book Du Cubisme by Metzinger and Gleizes’), which was the work of one of the central figures of the country's cubo-futurist avant-garde, the painter and composer Michael Vasilyevich Matyushin (Михаил Васильевич Матюшин, 1861-1934). The review appeared in the journal "Union of youth" (Союз молодежи). A new French version was published in the first post-war period, in 1947, edited by the Paris-based Compagnie Française des Arts Graphiques, with the addition of an afterword by the authors and new illustrations. The treaty was reissued several times in French, while in 1986 and 1988 Spanish and German translation were brought out. Until today the text of Gleizes and Metzinger is not available in Italian, perhaps suffering from the controversy over its quality dating back to the first part of the last century.

Fig. 44) Four texts on Cubism by Albert Gleizes: Du Cubisme et des moyens de la comprendre (1920); La peinture et ses lois: ce qui devrait sortir du cubisme (1924); Tradition et cubisme: vers une conscience plastique (1927) e Souvenirs: Le Cubisme 1908-1914 (1957).

Chipp quoted four other writings by Albert Gleizes: Du Cubisme et des moyens de la comprendre (1920); La peinture et ses lois: ce qui devrait sortir du cubisme (1924, published in the magazine "La Vie des lettres et des arts", and released in English by Francis Boutle Publishers in 2000, with the title The Laws of painting); Tradition et cubisme: vers une conscience plastique (published in 1927 with articles and conference papers between 1912 and 1924) and the posthumous Souvenirs: Le Cubisme 1908-1914 (1957, republished in 1997) edited by the Association des Amis d'Albert Gleizes. The painter (who - as Chipp wrote - was originally very interested in neo-religious art movements) wrote a lot about Cubism, but almost all of his texts remained in the French-speaking world. For a collection of the numerous writings of Gleizes, please see also: http://www.fondationgleizes.fr/fr/gleize/page/albert-gleizes/ses-ecrits.

Fig. 45) The article Les commencements du cubisme by Guillaume Apollinaire on Les Temps of October 14, 1912 (Source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2410091/f5.item.texteImage)

The scholar and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire (the first to use the term "the Cubists") is present in the anthology with two texts which Chipp reported in full: the article Les commencements du cubisme, published in the Parisian newspaper "Le Temps" on October 14, 1912 and the essay “Les peintres cubistes: Méditations Esthétiques” of 1913.

The article published in Le Temps (and translated into English by Chipp himself) has two merits: firstly it was aimed at the general public and explained to readers the origin of the movement, starting from the friendship between Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) and André Derain (1880-1954) and from their joint interest in African art; secondly, it was the basis of the conference that Apollinaire held in Berlin in January 1913, accompanied by Robert Delaunay, at the Der Sturm gallery (a very famous conference that marked the birth of German interest in the Cubist movement). Revealing philological concerns, Chipp published a version interpolating the text published in the newspaper and the manuscript that Apollinaire used for the Berlin conference, preserved in the collection of Sonia Delaunay.

Fig. 46) Top, from right to left: The original edition of Les Peintres Cubistes by Guillaume Apollinaire of 1913, published in Paris by the publisher Eugène Figuière et Cie; The second edition published by Athena in 1922; The edition published in Geneva in 1950 by the publisher Pierre Cailler; That of 1965, curated by LeRoy C Breunig and Jean-Claude Chevalier and brought out by the publisher Hermann; Finally the Berg International edition (1991). Below, the editions published by Hermann (1980), Berg International (2012), Bortillat (2013), Les editions de Paris (2018) and Omina Poche (2018).

As for the second text, namely Les peintres cubistes: Méditations Esthétiques, it originated in the spring of 1912 but "did not appear until the spring of 1913, having undergone several revisions in which Cubism figured more and more prominently. The original title  ‘Méditations esthétiques’ was superseded by a new one, ‘Les peintres cubistes’, and the former title became the subtitle. It is, in part, a collection of fragments of articles from newspapers and Soirées de Paris, and, in part, a newly written section on the individual artists" [51]. It is interesting that Chipp devoted much space to the history of this paper. In 1965 (or a few years before the publication of the anthology) the essay had been the subject of a critical edition thanks to two well-known linguists - Jean-Claude Chevalier (1925-2018) and LeRoy C Breunig (1915-1996) – who analysed its history and had discovered, precisely, that (contrary to what was believed for decades) the text was not born as a cubist treatise, but simply as a miscellaneous collection of articles. Consequently, Chipp wrote that the volume "has often been over-rated as a document of Cubism, but under-rated for its insights into contemporary painting” [52].

Fig. 47) On the left: the English translation of Les Peintres Cubistes by Lionel Abel, published by G. Wittenborn and Co. (first edition in 1944 and numerous reprints). On the right: the English translation by Peter Read, published by the University of California Press in 2004.

Chipp also observed that the expression "Cubist Painting" was not included in the first six chapters of the first part (not even when speaking of Picasso and Braque, which were simply referred to as exponents of a ‘new painting’). The analysis of the original manuscript revealed that initially, in the spring of 1912, merely Metzinger, Gleizes and Gris were considered Cubists. Only in September 1912 “did Apollinaire insert two brief sections in which he discussed Cubism itself and in which he attempted to explain his famous four categories of the movement” [53]. That categorization (scientific, orphic, physical and instinctive Cubisms) made history, but Chipp concluded "that Apollinaire’s interests were attracted chiefly by innovations in painting, for which he had considerable insights, but that he was not an apologist for the Cubism movement" [54]. Not only: Chipp explained that originally the identification of the four types of Cubism did not respond to the intention to systematize the movement, but rather had polemical purposes: Apollinaire in fact supported the anti-Picasso and anti-Braquian theses of the Cubist group of the Section d'Or (1912), in favor of a purer and more intellectual conception of the interaction between form and color. He even thought that the "Section of Or" would lead to the death and rebirth of Cubism.

Fig. 48) The three Italian editions of The Cubist painters of Guillaume Apollinaire of 1945, in the translation of Libero di Libero (Edizioni del Secolo), Giorgio Peri (Le Tre Venezie) and Franca Minoia (Il Balcone).

The second part of Apollinaire's text was entitled The New Painters and contained ten sections, dedicated respectively to Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes, Marie Laurencin (and Henri Rousseau), Gris, Léger, Picabia, Duchamp and Raymond-Duchamp-Villon. It should be emphasized that the text was published in Italian simultaneously in three versions in 1945, a sign that probably its appearance in Italy had been previously subjected to censorship during fascism several times and that all the curators hastened to give birth to their already-made translations after the liberation.

Fig. 49) The Way to Cubism by Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, in the original German edition of 1913, in the first English translation of 1949 and in the first Italian translation of 2001.

Continuing with the analysis of the texts proposed by Chipp in his anthology, it was then the turn of the preface to the already mentioned “The way to Cubism” (Der Weg zum Kubismus) by the critic and gallery owner Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. The work - which spelt  the story of Cubism from the beginning of 1907 - was published in 1915 in Switzerland, after the German gallerist had been expelled from France due to the First World War (and his estate of paintings confiscated). Until that dramatic event, Kahnweiler had been the patron of Picasso, Braque, Derain and Gris in Paris; in particular the gallery owner had the exclusivity on the sale of Picasso's works, which were also addressed to German, American and Russian collectors. As already mentioned, Kahnweiler's text contained critical tones with regard to the cubist treatise by Gleizes and Metzinger. Chipp took advantage of an English tradition by Henry Aronson (The Rise of Cubism) already published in English by the New York publisher Wittenborn and Co. The Italian version La via al cubismo was edited by Licia Fabiani and published by Mimesis only in 2001.

At this point, the Chipp anthology had to deal with a new phenomenon. If until then all the major innovators of contemporary art had put in writing, albeit in different forms, their new ideas on art, Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most prominent modern artist who had never used writing on his own art. "Although Picasso has been closely associated with poets and artists all his life and had written several poems and a play, he has written only very few, very brief statements about himself. None of them deals with his ideas on art. For these we must rely upon informal conversations with close friends or upon their reminiscences” [55]. Chipp reproduced Picasso’s  very famous interview to the Mexican gallerist Marius de Zayas (1880-1961). Already with his publication in 1923, the interview became the most authoritative source of self-interpretation of art by the master (it was released with the title "Picasso speaks" in New York in the magazine "The Arts"; we have already found it in French in the anthological collection of Fels of 1925 and in German in that, again from 1925, by Paul Westheim). The other indirectly Picassian text (which the artist had checked and approved) was a conversation with the Greek French critic Christian Zervos (1889-1970), published in the following decade by Cahiers d'Art (1935) of which Zervos was director. The dialogue was disseminated in the United States by an early English translation by Alfred H. Barr (1902 - 1981), first director of the MoMA in New York. Chipp, for reasons we do not know, evidently disliked that version, as he commissioned the English art critic Myfany Evans (1911.1997) to prepare a new one for publication in his anthology. We have already met a reference to the interview with Zervos in Alfred Werner's 1965 article, in which he complained however about the scarce use of it by American art critics. To these two interviews, Chipp added a few brief Picasso’s quotations from other conversations of 1933, 1945 and 1948.

Fig. 50) Three editions of Picasso on Art by Dore Ashton (respectively of 1972, 1977 and 1988).

It is however evident that Chipp was embarrassed by the scarcity and the unsatisfactory quality of Picasso's art literature, and by the artist’s limited capacity to place his own art in the right historical context: "When confronted with direct or searching questions, he [Picasso] has been evasive or has replied in a metaphorical vein. His statement, however, when viewed as reflecting a personal involvement with art and life, should be considered as part (but only part) of the evidence for studying a style or a particular work. Like the paintings themselves, his statements should be taken as responses to particular ideological situations the exact conditions of which we can only partially know. They emerge as imaginative and sometimes poetic comments, rich in associations and allusions on many levels. While they consistently avoid direct explanation, they are yet bits of evidence reflecting aspects of the artist's personal struggle” [56]. It must be said that the anthological research of statements and texts that can refer to Picasso was becoming a priority of the American criticism of those years, as evidenced by the text Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views by Dore Ashton in 1972. Of Ms Ashton we will review a later anthology (Twentieth Century Artists on Art) of 1985, which was based on much less philological criteria than those of Chipp and perhaps represented an alternative model to collect and codify contemporary art literature, making ample use of numerous fragments of texts not wider of a page or a page and a half.

After the impossibility to quote autograph writings by Picasso, Chipp had to deal with similar problems when he came to considering Georges Braque and Juan Gris. He presented excerpts from articles or essays by art critics, which referred to the two. In the first case the writings were from 1910, 1917 and 1945; in the second they dated 1921 and 1925. In the bibliographic appendix at the end of the volume, Chipp could not but list a long list of statements, testimonies and stories about the two Cubists from third parties as well as monographs of art critics.

Finally, as to Fernand Léger, some very short quotations of his were taken from exhibition catalogues of 1924 and 1926; in this case, however, it was a choice of the anthologiser, since Léger had been the author of programmatic texts since 1912.

Summing up on the section about Cubism, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt commented in her 1972 review: "The process by which poets, artists and critics combined in their respective role to create the style 'Cubism' and explained it through their writings is excellently demonstrated. However the lay reader and undergraduate may be perplexed by some of the passaged which would seem to require an exegesis. Unfortunately, such an exegesis would exceed the scope of the present volume” [57].

A brief chapter on Futurist texts

The brief section on Futurism was the work of Joshua C. Taylor (1917-1981), who was always entrusted with the task of documenting the pre-eminently Italian art literature, providing, if necessary, for their translation. It has already been said in Part One that Taylor curated the Futurist exhibition at the MoMA in New York in 1961. It should be added that the scholar had been in direct contact with the art of our country as an officer in the section "Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives" of the US Army, charged with preserving works of art during the Italian conflict and recovering those that had been stolen during the war years [58].

Fig. 51) On the left: the exhibition of Italian Futurist painters held at the Sackville Gallery in London in 1912 (Source: British Library - https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manifesto-of-futurism). On the right: the exhibition on futurism at the MoMA in New York, curated by Joshua C. Taylor in 1961.

Taylor obviously anthologized Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto published in Le Figaro in 1909. The text had been translated into English directly that year by initiative of Marinetti, but appeared in this anthology in a new, more complete version edited, precisely, by Taylor. The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting of 11 April 1910, signed by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla and Severini, was reproduced in the English version edited by Marinetti for an exhibition at the Sackville Gallery in London in 1912, slightly different from the published text in the magazine Lacerba in 1914. The text of the presentation to the London exhibition (entitled The Exhibitors to the Public and signed by the same five artists), was actually the English translation of a text already published that same year by the Futurists in Paris (the traveling exhibition had moved from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery on the Seine to the Sackville Gallery on the Thames; it then reached Der Sturm gallery in Berlin and from there Munich, Hamburg, Vienna, Brussels, The Hague and Amsterdam).

Fig. 52) On the left: The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting of 1910 (source: http://www.libreriamalavasi.com/libri-antichi/la-pittura-futurista-manifesto-tecnico/25514). On the right: the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture of 1912 (source: http://www.artericerca.com/articoli%20online/Umberto%20Boccioni%20-%20La%20scultura%20-%20Manifesto%20Tecnico%20della%20Scultura%20Futurista.htm)

Chipp’s anthology also contained the 1912 Futurist Technical Manifesto by Boccioni (which Taylor had already included in the 1961 New York exhibition catalogue). Carrà’s text From Cézanne to us futurists was published in Lacerba in 1913 and never appeared in English until then. In the preface to the chapter Taylor examined in particular the relationship between futurism, cubism and expressionism. In this regard, Carrà's article allows us to document the Parisian controversy: "In painting, the Futurist movement has often been erroneously considered an offshoot of Cubism. Actually, both its roots and its goal were very different, being more closely allied with those of the new movement in German painting, which eventually was called Expressionism. A part of the confusion arose from the insistence of the Paris painters in reading the Technical Manifesto with the analytical procedures of Cubism in mind. The Italians, as insistent on maintaining their independence as the school of Paris was in affirming its artistic dominance, repeatedly pointed out the differences in angry articles appearing in the journal Lacerba, published in Florence” [59]. Taylor explained that part of the confusion was also due to the fact that futurist painters (some of whom, like Severini, were at home in Paris) used "aspects of the formal language of Cubism” [60] and had contacts with them, while definitely pursuing different aesthetic aims.

On the subject Elizabeth Gilmore Holt had very precise ideas: “The role of Paris as the center ring of Europe’s art circus at the end of the nineteenth century and the understandable urge of every artist to be seen in the ring - as Rome had served earlier as the arena of art, is illustrated by the Futurists’ writings. The Italian formulators of pictorial "dynamism," which had profound effects on other movements, exhibited their discoveries first as a group in Paris. As a consequence, Futurism has never escaped from the French insistence of its dependence on Cubism” [61]. In other words, the Italian anti-French controversy would have ended up confirming the French primacy.

Neoplasticism and constructivism as a 'hidden kingdom' of art literature of the first part of the 20th century

With the breaking into the art of the twentieth century of a fully abstract iconography, the creators felt the absolute need to communicate to the public and to themselves the reasons for the transition from the imitation of nature (for centuries the logical reason for the execution of the work) to the construction of forms that did not represent objects, but pursued the visualization of universal and perfect rules, and were therefore conceived as the expression of absolute beauty. This passage had already occurred in part with Cubism, and in particular in the aforementioned Du Cubisme by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (it is not by chance that the latter were the Cubists who most felt the need to theorize their production - linking it to the universal rule of the Section d'or - while the Cubists who rejected abstraction, like Picasso and Braque, shied away from writing).

The representatives of this absolutely abstract orientation "wrote joint manifestos, published magazines, wrote books and gave lectures. No other twentieth-century artists were drawn so closely together or were so idealistically motivated to theoretical explanation” [62]. In the chapter on the abstract art of the early twentieth century Chipp displayed writings by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Stanton Macdonald Wright (1890-1973), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), Naum Gabo ( Наум Гббо, 1890-1977), Kasimir Malevich (Казими́р Севери́нович Мале́вич, 1879-1935), Wassily Kandinsky (Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, 1866-1944) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957). In this way he inserted the programmatic texts of the Parisian Orphism, of US Synchromism, of Dutch Neoplasticism and of Russian Suprematism. In short, this was no longer a purely "Parisian" artistic movement.

The diversity of languages ​​and the multiplicity of sources meant that only a part of the relevant texts was available in English (or in French) at the time of the publication of the anthology. Chipp then felt the need to put a longer introduction than the one inserted in the other chapters before the anthologized passages; he wanted to testify that entire constructivist schools, such as the Bauhaus, had an impressive handbook production (and a publishing activity), which was impossible to include in the anthology. The result, however, was that this chapter was one of those suffering the most from the difficulty of proposing all the most relevant sources to the public, precisely because of "objective" difficulties. Among the artists mentioned with some relevance in the introduction, but not present in the choice of texts, I would like to mention Walter Gropius (1883 - 1969), Johannes Itten (1888 - 1967), Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957), El Lissintsky (Эль Лиси́цкий, 1890-1947), Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) and Vladimir Tatlin (Владимир вграфович Татлин, 1885-1956).

 

Fig. 53) On the left: The essay Du cubisme à l'art abstrait, by Robert Delaunay, published posthumously in 1957. On the right: The article About the Light by Robert Delaunay, published in January 1913 in Berlin in the journal Der Sturm and translated by Paul Klee.

Constructivist movements arose locally, but the abstraction of art and the universality of the rules that govern it were due to be supplemented by global intentions in the sense of implementing models of societies applicable to the whole world. This was the case for the Dutch movement De Stijl, which was born during the First World War in neutral Holland, also due to certain radical aspects of the Dutch Protestant culture, and spread to France and Germany at the end of the war as an artistic form aimed at creating a bond among the great belligerents. It was even more the case of the Russian constructivism of Gabo and Malevic, also linked to a radical vein of Russian thought, but anchored to Trotskyism and therefore to the utopia of proletarian internationalism. With the rise of Leninism, constructivists left the Soviet Union and found asylum first in Weimar Germany and then in the United States.

Fig. 54) Some American (1978) and German (1983) collections of writings by Robert Delaunay.

Delaunay - the inventor of Orphism - was the theorist of the absolute centrality of colour as form and object [63]. He was cited with three excerpts from Du cubisme à l'art abstrait, which appeared posthumously in 1958. It was a collection of documents of the painter, mostly still unpublished and edited by the critic Pierre Francastel (1900-1970). That collection has not been so far the subject of a new publication. The three texts – besides the letters from 1912 to August Macke (1887-1914) and Vasilij Kandinskij, i.e. to painters from the Munich-based Blue Knight group – included a famous article entitled La Lumière, or About the light. Chipp noted that five versions were produced of the same article (translated into German by Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) in 1913 and published in Berlin the same year on the occasion of an exhibition at the Der Sturm gallery, where - as already mentioned - Delaunay was accompanied by Apollinaire). With the philological spirit that is proper to him, he identified the differences between the five versions in a note. Chipp’s translation was the first to make the text available in English. Collections of Delaunay's writings were published in English only in 1978, in German in 1983 and in Italian in 1986. Delaunay’s Italian collection of art writings (Scritti dell'arte) edited by Elena Pontiggia in 1986 (publisher Amadeus) is out of print and unavailable on the online antiquarian market.

Fig. 55) Stanton MacDonald Wright's text on 1916 modern art, included in the catalogue of the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. Source: https://archive.org/details/forumexhibitiono00ande_0/page/n6

Chipp included in his anthology the programmatic declaration of 1916 on Synchromism by the American Stanton MacDonald Wright, included in the catalogue of the Forum Exhibition  of Modern American Painters in New York. With that exhibition, the art magazine Forum, of which Wright was editor, aimed at promoting a national abstract art, independent of the European one. In the catalogue published for that occasion, Wright published an essay on What is modern painting that explains the art of American contemporaries, giving, in fact, an independent reading of nineteenth-century European art. The texts are available in Italian in Artisti americani tra le due guerre: una raccolta di documenti (American artists between the two wars: a collection of documents) edited by Francesca Pola, Francesco Tedeschi, Giuliana Scimé (published by Vita e Pensiero in 2004). Chipp also mentioned the Treatise on colour of 1924 (originally privately printed by Wright, but republished the same year in an exhibition catalogue in Los Angeles), while there was no reference to the 1945 Blueprint for a textbook on art.

Fig. 56) On the left: Kasimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism - the new pictorial realism published in Moscow in 1916. At the centre: Kasimir Malevic, Suprematism 34 drawings, published in Vitebsk in 1920. On the right: Kasimir Malevich, About the new systems on art: static and speed, published in Vitebsk in 1919.

In the last years of the Tsarist power the most advanced circles in Moscow were better acquainted with the art of Picasso and Monet better than they were spread in Paris itself [64]. In addition to the innate radicalism of part of Russian culture, this explains, according to Chipp, why the experience of Russian constructivism can be considered "the most radical affirmation of the ideal of the absolute in art" [65]. However, if numerous writings appeared in Russian as early as 1916, Malevich offered the most systematic theoretical presentation of his thought in 1927, on the occasion of his trip to Germany, when the Bauhaus published the treatise Die gegenstandlose Welt in its series of theoretical texts. It was translated into English as The Non-objective world in 1959 thanks to the architectural historian Howard Dearstyne (1903-1979). These were the years in which the United States were conquered by Abstract Expressionism.

Fig. 57) The World of Non-Objectivity by Kasimir Malevic, in the German edition of 1920, the English translation of 1959 and the Italian version of 1972.

The Realist Manifesto by sculptor Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner (Антуа́н Певзне́р, 1884-1962) was distributed as a flyer in 1920, on the occasion of the Constructivist Exhibition in Moscow. The two brothers had a very close relationship with the culture of Western Europe. The text - reproduced in its entirety by Chipp - was published in English for the first time in 1957 by the art historian Herbert Read (1893 - 1968) and by the architect Leslie Martin (1908-1999), both representatives of British modernism. A second text in the anthology (in many aspects, an interpretative reading of the former) belonged to the years passed by Gabo in Great Britain, after leaving the Soviet Union and before moving to the United States. It is called Sculpture: Carving and construction in space and was originally published by Gabo together with other artists in 1937 (and then reprinted in 1966).

Fig. 58) On the left: The first issue of the magazine De Stijl in 1917. Source: Wiki Commons. In the centre: The manifesto on Neoplasticism, published by L'Effort Moderne in Paris in 1920 and edited by Pietr Mondrian. On the right: a collection of Mondrian writings in English from 1945, entitled Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art.

The De Stijl movement was created in Amsterdam in 1917 by Mondrian, van Doesburg and Jacobus J. Oud (1872-1944). According to Chipp, it was by far the most influential movement on the art of his era. "The artistic conceptions of De Stijl's were based upon a solid ideological foundation: the Dutch philosophy of idealism, an intellectual tradition of sobriety, clarity and logic and, as Oud expressed it, ‘Protestant iconoclasm’. The artists believed in the existence of a universal harmony of which man could partake by subordinating himself to it. It lay in the realm of pure spirit which was freed from all conflict, from all object of the physical world and freed even from all individuality. In terms of painting, the plastic means were reduced to the constituent elements of line, space, and color, arranged in its most elemental compositions” [66]. According to van Doesburg, "The quadrangle is for us what was the cross to the early Christians" [67].

Mondrian was one of the most prolific twentieth-century art writers, from the second decade of the century in Paris to the sixties in New York. For Mondrian, Neoplasticism was both an aesthetic theory and a philosophical-religious principle. And so - Chipp noted - for him Neoplatonism and theosophy were much more important sources of inspiration than the friendship with Picasso and the presence of the Cubists in Paris. Chipp reported two texts by Mondrian and van Doesburg from the 1919 magazine De Stijl, available in English since the early 1950s by partial translations of the magazine's contents. Two longer texts followed, again by Mondrian: Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art (published in English as an article in 1937 and then as a volume in 1945) and a declaration of intents appearing in a catalogue of the MoMA in New York in 1946.

With the experience of the Bauhaus the culture of abstraction “became institutionalized (…) and was forcefully propagated” [68]. The Weimar school, originally founded by Henry van de Velde (1863-1957) to spread the teaching of the Jugendstil, attracted with Gropius an extraordinary group of artists and teachers all active in theoretical elaboration. Between 1925 and 1929 fourteen books were published:

1. Walter Gropius, International Architecture, 1925 (second revised edition 1927).
2. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook, 1925 (second edition 1927).
3. Adolf Meyer: An experimental house from the Weimar Bauhaus, 1925.
4. Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Farkas Molnár: The Bauhaus stage, 1925.
5. Piet Mondrian, New creation. Neoplasticism, 1925.
6. Theo van Doesburg, Fundamental concepts of the new art of creation, 1925.
7. Walter Gropius, New works of the Bauhaus workshops, 1925.
8. László Moholy-Nagy: Painting Photography Film, 1925 (second revised edition 1927).
9. Wassily Kandinsky: Point, line, surface. Contribution to the analysis of pictorial elements, 1926 (second edition 1928).
10. Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud: Dutch Architecture, 1926 (second revised edition 1929).
11. Kasimir Malevich: The Non-objective world, 1927.
12. Walter Gropius: Buildings of the Bauhaus in Dessau, 1930.
13. Albert Gleizes: Cubism, 1928.
14. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: From material to architecture, 1929.

Of these texts Chipp anthologized steps from the already mentioned Malevich’s The Non-objective world. He also noted that almost all the exponents of the series moved to the United States in the 1930s, effectively contributing to the development of the abstract and modernist movement overseas.

The last artist cited among the abstracts was the Romanian sculptor Constantin Bracusi (1876-1957), with a series of aphorisms dating back to the period between 1925 and 1957.


End of Part Three
Go to Part Four (Forthcoming) 

NOTES

[47] 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. Quotation at page 193.

[48] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.194.

[49] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.197.

[50] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.207.

[51] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), pp.195-196.

[52] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.220.

[53] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.220.

[54] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.220.

[55] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.198.

[56] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), pp.198-199.

[57] 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. 232.

[58] See: https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/intl/it/the-heroes/the-monuments-men/taylor-capt.

[59] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.281.

[60] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.282.

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

[62] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.309.

[63] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.310.

[64] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.311.

[65] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.311.

[66] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.315.

[67] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.316.

[68] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.313.