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

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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 Four

Fig. 59) The Spanish edition of the anthology of Herschel B. Chipp, translated by Julio Rodríguez Puértolas and published in 1995 by the Madrid publisher Akal with the title Teorías del arte contemporáneo. Fuentes artísticas y opiniones críticas. Note that the English term 'modern' was translated into Spanish as 'contemporary'.

Go Back to Part One

The last part of the review on the anthology of Herschel B. Chipp is dedicated to the writings of the Dada, Surrealist and Metaphysical artists (seventh chapter) and of those considered by the author as his contemporaries, active between 1945 and 1968 (ninth chapter). With his work published in 1968, Chipp was the first American author to propose a codification of twentieth-century art literature. His text would remain fundamental for decades to teach students and inform other interested readers about the view of painters and sculptors of their time.

Dada, Surrealism and Metaphysical School: the irrational and the dream

A vast literary production was linked in the early twentieth century to the irruption of the absurd and the dreamlike as principles of artistic creation. To accommodate the texts in his anthology, Chipp followed two main criteria. First, he disregarded all those writings in which exponents of the art world were indeed inspired by the irrational and the dream, but did not derive from it any precise stylistic and iconographic orientation towards a break with prevailing aesthetic conventions. Second, he selected those texts that discussed issues of figurative arts, detaching them from an impressively large fictional, philosophical or more general polemical literature. In conclusion, he identified three avenues: Dada art, Surrealism and the Metaphysical School. As for the latter, given the need to translate Italian sources, Chipp relied on the help of Joshua C. Taylor.

It must be said that Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, in her review of the work (we happened to quote her often in the previous parts of this review), did not hesitate to criticize the choice of texts in this section, departing from the broadly positive tone with which she evaluated the rest of Chipp's efforts: “The exploration of the world to which Goya opened a path and which Freud and associates first mapped, the aim of Dada, Surrealists and the Scuola Metafisica, is the theme of a chapter of interesting and unique excerpts which, regrettably, lacks organizational structure. The Surrealist section needs some accent to make it more usable to those unfamiliar with the general tendencies and the vocabulary”[69].

The Dada World

The Dada movement was born in Zurich in 1916. Chipp did not include the very first Swiss texts in the anthology, although he cited them in the preface to the section. The Dadaists found an echo in Paris after the war, but Chipp also excluded the French texts. Instead, he embraced German Dadaism, with the historical-programmatic text En avant dada by the writer Richard Huelsenbeck (1892-1974) dated 1920,  an article by the artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) from the Munich-based magazine Ararat and, finally, a contribution by the Franco-Romanian poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), published in the Hanover-based Dadaist magazine Merz, whose editor  was Schwitters.

Fig. 60) On the left: The writing En avant dada by Richard Huelsenbeck, published in Hanover and Leipzig in 1921 (source: www.zvab.de). On the right: The January 1921 issue of the Munich-based magazine Ararat (source: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/Ararat/1zj/images/000cover.pdf).

The anthologizer explained the reasons for exclusions (Swiss and French texts) and inclusions (German texts) in the introduction and in the critical apparatus. The members of the Swiss Dadaist group – who had Hugo Ball (1886-1927) as their reference – met at the Club Voltaire in Zurich and worked hard at producing texts: they composed poems and songs in an intentionally absurd language, wrote nihilistic scripts and organized Dadaist actions and evenings, but “had neither a leader, nor a theory, nor an organized group. Only in 1918, after nearly three years of activity, was a manifesto written, and even then the author, Tristan Tzara, made no pretence of explaining the movement” [70]. In short, theirs was literature, but not art literature. Chipp also excluded texts from those years by Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia (i.e. artists who had introduced elements of anarchy into their production even before the foundation of the Dada movement in Zurich).

After the war, the movement spread to Germany: first in Cologne with Max Ernst (1891-1976) and then in Hannover, where Constructivists from Russia (El Lissitzky - Ла́зарь Маркович Лисицкий - 1890 -1941) and from Holland (Piet Mondrian 1872–1944, and Theo van Doesburg 1883 1931) joined the aforementioned Huelsenbeck and Schwitters. This encounter made the words of the German-speaking Dadaists the most suitable to describe Dada aesthetic preferences (without any weakening of the radicalism of their 'aesthetics'). From these pages it can also be deduced that Dadaism - once simply neutralist - was strongly permeated in Germany by communism, in years in which the infant Weimar Republic was shaken by opposing revolutionary attempts (the Dadaists supported the attempts to launch a Soviet uprising a few years after the October Revolution in St. Petersburg) and the collapse of the economy (with hyperinflation).

Fig. 61) From top to bottom and from left to right: The original of Richard Huelsenbeck's 1920 Dada Almanac, and its recent full translations in English, Russian, Japanese, French and Spanish.

The German language texts were followed by pages of artists written in the United States in the 1940s, and therefore in a historical phase in which the Dada movement was now fragmented into different aesthetic addresses. In short, those writings were more memoirs than programmatic statements; they aimed at explaining to the Americans the reasons for the continuity break with the past in the 1920s. In particular, Chip included a work by Jean Arp (1887–1966) from 1942, taken from a catalogue of a collective exhibition held at the New York gallery Art of this Century by Peggy Guggenheim, and an interview by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) with the art critic James Johnson Sweeney (1900–1986), on the occasion of another collective exhibition held at the MoMA in New York in 1946. We will meet Sweeney on numerous other occasions.

At the time of the publication of Chipp's anthology, the Dada texts were still difficult to find. It is thanks to an American academic institution - or the Iowa University - that the situation has radically changed since 2000: the entire written production of the Dadaists has been digitized and is now directly accessible on the Internet (see http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/index.html). Also on the book market the number of publications of Dada texts has grown. Just by way of example, Richard Huelsenbeck's Dada Almanac, published in Berlin in German in 1920, has now fully been translated in English (1993), Russian (2000), Japanese (2002), French (2005), Italian (2007) and Spanish (2015). The Almanac existed in Italian since 1976 in a collective repertoire of Dadaist magazines, edited by Arturo Schwarz and published by Feltrinelli.

Fig. 62) The repertoire of Dada magazine by Arturo Schawarz from 1976 and the 2007 full Italian edition of the Dada Almanac.

Surrealism

Chipp included in the surrealist section texts by Giorgio De Chirico (1888 - 1978), André Breton (1896 - 1966), Salvator Dalí (1904 - 1989), Max Ernst (1891 - 1976), Joan Miró (1893 - 1983), André Masson (1896 - 1987), March Chagall (1887 - 1985) and Roberto Matta (1911-2002). It goes without saying that Chipp wanted to offer us a wider and more representative selection of Surrealists than he did for Dada art. In fact, with Surrealism - Chipp wrote - art literature had made a qualitative leap: The writing of surrealist artists was more mature, and reflected the ability to organize an orderly discussion within the artistic movement, also thanks to the attendance of intellectuals of disparate areas. Among them, André Breton exercised a clear cultural leadership and was able to elaborate precise aesthetic guidelines, being a scholar and art critic capable of changing dada teaching. Breton was strongly influenced by the teachings of Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), which he put into practice during the First World War, when he worked with traumatised soldiers in a military asylum. Chipp made it clear that, in addition to Freud, Breton also relied upon the political theses of Trotsky and the aesthetic philosophy of Hippolyte Tayne (1828 - 1893). 

 

Fig. 63) On the left: The 1920 essay by André Breton and Philippe Soupault on magnetic fields (source: https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/stories/andre-breton-early-surrealist-publications). On the right: The 1924 Surrealist Manifesto (source: Wikimedia Commons).

With his initiatives, Breton brought together the group well before the first Surrealist exhibition of 1925, i.e. the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris. From the earliest Twenties, when the group did not yet exist as an organized entity, he studied the effect of magnetic fields on the mechanisms of creation. In 1920 he published an essay on magnetic fields; in 1922 he studied with Max Ernst the automatism in painting (the surrealists believed in a psychic automatism thanks to which the artist was nothing but a means for the automatic execution of images); finally in 1924 he wrote the Surrealist Manifesto.

Fig. 64) From top to bottom and from left to right: The original version of Surrealism and painting of 1928, the Japanese version of 1930, two French editions of 1965 and 2002, two English editions of 1972 and 2002 and two Italian editions of 1965 and 2015.

Breton compiled in 1928 the article Surrealism and painting on the Nouvelle Revue Française. An equally-named volume edited by him and with contributions from Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Mirò, George Braque, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, André Masson and Yves Tanguy was brought out the same year by Gallimard and became the main theoretical text on the painting of surrealism, uninterruptedly published in many languages. Chipp published a very extensive extract thereof, drawing it from the partial translation already available in English in 1936. He added some pages from the conference Qu’est-ce-que le Surréalisme? (What is surrealism?) held in Brussels in 1934 and also available in English since 1936.

Fig. 65) From left to right: What is surrealism?, André Breton's French original of the conference in Brussels in 1934, the English translation of 1936 and the Japanese translation of 1969.

The passion for writing was not characteristic of Breton alone, but involved all the surrealists, including artists. “The members of the group were prolific writers, and they issued an enormous body of articles, novels, essays, propaganda brochures, and several manifestos. The larger part of their theoretical writing was concerned with experiments and studies of methods, some of them drawn from psychology, whereby they could stimulate the subconscious mind to yield some of its limitless store of fantastic and dreamlike images. They had a deep respect for scientific method, especially that of psychology; they fully accepted the reality of the physical world, even though they believed that they had gone so deeply into it that they had transcended it; and they believed in a close interrelationship between their art and revolutionary elements in society” [71]. 

 

Fig. 66) From top to bottom and from left to right: The original French version of Hebdomeros (Editions de Carrefour, France, 1929), the first translation in Italian (1942, Bompiani), the Parisian edition by Flammarion of 1964 and the first translations into German (1964, Henssell), American (1966, Four Seasons Book Society), English (1969, Peter Owen), Dutch (1973, Meulenhoff) and Spanish (1977, Cotal edition).

Among the surrealist artists, Chipp gave much space to Giorgio de Chirico, presenting in his collection even earlier pages, in chronological terms, than Breton's initiatives. The anthology included two excerpts from the Italian artist. The first was Meditations of a Painter, a 1912 manuscript of philosophical content, which was  published for the first time in English by the collector and art critic James Thrall Soby (1906-1979) in 1955 (and in Italian only in 1970). The second was Mystery and Creation, written in 1913 and contained in the aforementioned Surrealism and Painting by Breton in 1928. They were, therefore, "proto-surrealist" texts. In the annotated bibliography Chipp also cited the autobiographical fantasy Hebdomeros. Le peintre et son génie chez l'écrivain, published by de Chirico in French in 1929 and then translated into numerous languages (starting with Italian in 1942) and republished several times over many decades.

Fig. 67) On the left: The journal Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, published in six issues in 1931. Source: https://www.edition-originale.com/it/riviste/periodici-letterari-ed-arte/collectif-le-surrealisme-au-service-de-la-1930-18138. On the right: The Partisan Review in which James Johnson Sweeney interviewed March Chagall. Source: http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/books/PR1944V11N1/HTML/files/assets/basic-html/index.html#I .

The anthology also offered some pages by Salvador Dalí from Objets surréalistes of 1931. It was a text published in a militant French-language surrealist magazine, entitled Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, a periodical of which only six issues came out. The title of the magazine contained a clear political indication in favour of communism, but Dalí's article was instead all centred on aesthetic issues (the Spanish artist was certainly not a communist, and entertained a critical dialogue on art with Franchism). The previous year, the artist had just published an essay on his 'paranoid-critical artistic method', calling it La Femme Visible. In 1935 he published his second theoretical volume: La Conquête de l´irrationnel, published the same year also in English.

 

Fig. 68) From left to right: The issue of the 1936 magazine Cahiers d’art in which the article by Max Ernst Beyond art was published; The American edition of Max Ernst's text by the American painter Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) published in 1948; The essay by Salvator Dalí from 1930 entitled La femme visible (The visible woman), and finally the essay by Dalí in 1935, entitled La Conquête de l´irrationnel (The conquest of the irrational).

Methodological issues were at the center of two contributions by Max Ernst from 1936 (on collage and frottage) taken from the article Au delà de la Peinture (Beyond painting), published in the magazine Cahiers d'Art of 1936. The English translation was available since 1948, thanks to the MoMA of New York. Mirò was present instead with two interviews: one dated 1936 with the French art historian Georges Duthuit (1891–1973) and the other with James Johnson Sweeney in 1947 (the critic we already know, as he had interviewed Duchamp the year before). Among the closest artists to the surrealists, Sweeney himself had interviewed March Chagall in 1944 in Partisan Review (a text also included in the anthology).

Fig. 69) From left to right: Three texts by André Masson published in the fifties: Le plaisir de peindre (1950), Métamorphose de l'Artiste (1956) and Entretiens with Georges Charbonnier (1958) and the Italian translation The pleasure of painting (1988). The texts have not been translated into other languages.

Also important is the role of André Masson, to whom we owe a series of publications in French in the 1950s, fully translated into other languages only in part. Chipp included two texts in his anthology: Peindre est une Gageure of 1941 (translated in English in 1943 as ‘Painting Is a Wager’) and A crisis of the imaginary of 1944 (available in English in 1945).

Metaphysical art

As already explained, the pages on Metaphysical Art were edited by Joshua C. Taylor, the scholar who assisted Chipp on all Italian texts. Taylor wrote about the meeting between de Chirico and Carlo Carrà (1881 - 1966) in Ferrara, during the years of the first world war. The two painters (together with de Chirico's brother, who used the pseudonym Alberto Savinio (1891-1952) had a vocation for writing and aesthetic theorizing, using the art magazine Valori Plastici (Plastic Values) (1918-1921) by Mario Broglio (1891-1948) as a means of spreading their convictions about metaphysical art, a theory based on the irruption of the irrational in artistic creation, which was due to have a permanent effect on the French surrealists.

Fig. 70) On the left: The collection of Plastic Values of 1919. On the right: The volume Metaphysical Painting by Carlo Carrà, dated 1919.

From de Chirico (already included in the previous section on surrealism with two texts) two further extracts appear here: Zeusi l'esploratore (Zeuxis the Explorer) e Sull’arte metafisica (On Metaphysical Art). Never translated into English until then, they had appeared in the magazine Valori plastici respectively in the January and April-May 1918 issues. As to Carrà – about whom Taylor underlined the differences both with respect to de Chirico and to the surrealists – the anthology hosted Il quadrante dello spirito (The quadrant of the spirit), an article published always in the April-May issue of Valori plastici. The reasoned bibliography at the end of the anthology also indicated the 1919 essay Metaphysical Painting, published by Carrà with the Vallecchi publishing house. There has been no translation hereof in another language so far (and even in Italian, after the publication of the second revised edition in 1945, there have been no subsequent version).

Art literature from 1945 to 1969

In this chapter Chipp attempted perhaps the most difficult operation: that of codifying the texts of painters and sculptors of his own time, when New York, immediately after the Second World War, outclassed Paris, London, Rome or Tokyo as the centre of development of the contemporary art. Up to this point it was normal to wonder in what language the writings reported in the anthology had originally been published and if they had already been translated in English before Chipp’s endeavour. From now onwards, the fortune of a writing had to be discussed in a reversed order: For the global diffusion of artistic literature it would make a difference whether the American original writings had been translated into the major languages of the globe. For many of them this has not yet happened so far: some fundamental writings of American art literature are incomprehensible to those who do not speak English.

The texts included in the chapter on contemporary art were organised by Chipp in two sections, the first dedicated to the Americans and the second to the Europeans (all Western Europeans, actually). According to Chipp, the interpretation of post-war art literature may be linked on both sides of the Atlantic by an overarching principle: contemporary art must be read as the phase of full realization of the autonomy of the work of art. Thus, implicitly, with the art of the present, a long journey would come to an end, which had started in the Renaissance: that leading to the independence of the artist from the simple production of goods.

What happened in the United States and Europe, however, was not actually quite the same: in her 1972 review, Elizabeth Gilmore Holt emphasized Chipp's contribution to fully understanding the differences between American and European artists in their third-party approaches [72]. The young American painters revealed themselves, even in painting, more individualistic and with a higher inclination to the expression of feelings, while European artists were guided instead by common conceptual schemes inspired by philosophical theories.

Two further aspects must be immediately reported from the methodological point of view. First, in this section the role of loose statements of the artists, published in the catalogues on the occasion of their exhibitions became predominant. “Finally, the growing practice of museums and galleries of publishing statements by the artists in their increasingly elaborate exhibition catalogues, encouraged artists to make statements of their intentions which were directed toward the public. But all of these opportunities and encouragements, if sometimes resulting in ideas that were forced, produced in general a large body of clear and relevant theory” [73]. Articles and interviews published in magazines were also important. Today there is actually also a vast production of artistic literature in monographs covering the decades between 1945 and 1969. Evidently, at the time of the appearance of the anthology, the collection of contemporary writings in the form of volumes had not yet started.

 

Fig. 71) From left to right: Clement Greenberg, Art and culture (1961); Harold Rosenberg, The tradition of the new (1959); Hilton Cramer, Perspectives on art (1961) and Michel Tapié, A different art - or are they new emptyings of reality? (1952)

Secondly, when Chipp documented the art writing of the post-war period, the role of critics became important. Their texts were presented alongside those of the artists (a reference to the critics exists in the title of the anthology, but in reality their contribution was sizeable only in this chapter). For the anthologist it became obviously crucial to refer to the interpretation of his colleagues, in order to help the reader in the critical understanding of texts that referred to often surprising and perhaps cryptic developments. The four critics taken into account in the anthology were the Americans Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978), and Hilton Kramer (1928-2012) as well as the European Michel Tapié (1909 - 1987). It is certainly no coincidence that exactly these four scholars were instrumental in discovering some of the most famous categories relating to the art of the time (such as the invention of the term 'action painting' by Rosenberg in 1952 and 'art informel' by Michel Tapié, also in 1952). Although I am aware of their fundamental contribution, I decided not to present references to their writings in this review for reasons of space.

American artists

Fig. 72) From top to bottom and from left to right: The versions of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri of 1923 and 1939, that of 1960, three editions of the eighties, and finally those of 2007 and 2019.

Robert Henri (1865-1929), the first of the Americans whose writings were included in the section, actually anticipated all the others by at least one generation. He was in fact the leader of the Ash Can School, a realist strain unfolding in New York between 1907 and 1912. In fact, Henri was the noble father of all American modernists, and his writings, reordered in 1923 by the painter Margery Ryerson (1886-1936) in a volume titled The Art Spirit, became a source of inspiration for many of his followers. Henri supported the vocation of American artists to find in the representation of reality an ethical reason going beyond any idea of ​​pure aestheticism, against the principle of "art for art". The Art Spirit was republished in the United States eleven times, the last of which this year (2019), and is therefore one of the landmarks of American art literature. A German edition exists only from 2015 (Der Weg zur Kunst), while there are no other translations in other languages.

In contrast to this 'ethical-realist' interpretation of the function of art, the vision of those who were making art for the sole pleasure of experimenting was also affirmed in the American world. It was actually an idea borrowed from France. Already before the Great War, artists and art lovers in the United States had tried to spend some time in Paris, as the French capital offered them opportunities for learning, developing and experimenting with a new modern way of looking at art. Being active as artist a few years of one's life between Montmartre and Montparnasse became even more common after the American youth made the acquaintance of Europe on the battlefields. In the French capital, Americans got excited about Cézanne and the Cubists. Some of them, like Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) and Joseph Stella (1877-1946), did not only attend the Paris art circles, but also brought the teachings of German Expressionism and Italian Futurism to the United States. Upon returning to the USA, the Modernists mostly gathered around the gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864 - 1946) in New York. 

 

Fig. 73) On the left: The poster for the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York in 1913. On the right: A poster illustrating the Federal Art Project in 1936. For both the source is Wikipedia Commons

Chipp interpreted the development of American art as a series of cyclical moments of encounter and clash between these two key orientations: on the one hand a most intimately American one, inspired by realism and often with a strong ethical content; on the other hand, the most international one, with a strong aesthetic background. A moment of rare unity was the common organization of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show) of 1913, a traveling exhibition held in New York, Chicago and Boston that made European art schools and young US artists known to the  American public [74]. However, when the Great Depression hit the country in 1929, the rift between the two fronts widened again: put in front of the drama of the impoverishment of society, the world of art was divided again between regionalists and internationalists. The former considered it a duty to return to the faithful representation of the simple life of the American tradition of the Midwest (in the name of an isolationism that was not only cultural, but also political). The latter (now devoid of sufficient financing sources, because families could no longer keep the young artists abroad abroad) were forced to return to the country from the Parisian years, but they wanted to make New Work the new centre for the creation of contemporary art. Once again, there was a rapprochement between the two addresses, when the Federal Art Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) within the framework of the Roosevelt New Deal, intervened to the rescue of the dramatically impoverished artists, by promoting an intense program of decoration of the buildings public and knowingly supporting artists of all orientations.

The WPA federal project, Chipp concluded, succeeded where the art academies had failed, creating an innovative contemporary art, but with a highly ethical imprint. “And although the ‘WPA style,” particularly in art for public buildings, was often a kind of uninspired stylized realism, there were also some important monuments, such as Arshile Gorky’s murals for the Newark Airport (since lost or destroyed), which combined a socially useful theme with a vigorous modern style based upon Cubism” [75]. When the WPA at the end of economic stagnation was dissolved for having achieved its purpose, it “had strengthened their identity as artists. (…) So in suffering through the depression together, yet able to earn a livelihood in their profession, these men came out of it with an increased awareness of themselves as artists – American artists. (…) There was naturally a strong element of what was then called ‘social significance’ in the artists’ thinking, even if not in their work. This strain of thought, which had already been vigorously propagated by Robert Henri before the First World War, reinforced the American’s feeling that art was a serious occupation connected with the realities of life as it was seen and lived and with all its problems. This was a point of view in direct opposition to the one that prevailed in America prior to the Armory Show namely (…) that art was a rare cultural commodity, usually created in Europe, that existed only in museums or as ornaments in the homes of the rich” [76].

Geopolitical events would be soon due to reinforce the American art identity. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact devastated the cultural legitimacy of communism, the fall of France in the hands of Hitler eliminated the monopolistic role of Paris as the cradle of art, and the attack in Peal Harbour put the United States at the centre of the World War. “The new world-consciousness and the consequent cosmopolitanism was the final blow to the political isolationism of the depression years and to the regionalist art that reflected it” [77]. In this context, a group of artists from the WPA program produced - within the so-called New York school - a new style that would eventually win the interest of the whole world: they were Stuart Davis (1892 - 1964), Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976), Bradley Walker Tomlin (1899 - 1953), Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970), Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997), Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956), William Baziotes (1912 - 1963) and Robert Motherwell (1915 - 1991). On the art market many of them would be launched by Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) with her Art of This Century Gallery in New York. It is above all to their writings that Chipp dedicated his corpus of contemporary American art literature.

Let us now consider the writings included in this section of the anthology. I would like to mention first Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley, two artists active between the two World Wars.

Fig. 74) On the left: The autobiography of Stuart Davis, published at the American Artists Group in 1945. On the right: the catalogue of the exhibition on Stuart Davis at the MoMA in New York, curated by James Johnson Sweeney, held the same year.

Of Stuart Davis (1892-1964) Chipp presented numerous texts. In painting Davis combined inspiration with the representation of life in the streets of the big cities, typical of Robert Henri (of whom he is a student) and of Ash Can painting, with a strong attachment to avant-garde art. During the years in Paris he fell in love with Cubism and the art of Fernand Léger, whom he interpreted as influenced by American efficiency. The result was a very personal style that combined the American landscape, the influences of jazz music of which he was a great expert and the cubist plasticity. Davis discussed the topic Is there an American art? as early as 1930 and described Abstract art in the American scene in 1941. In 1945, thanks to the American Artists Group, Davis published a short autobiography from which Chipp published long extracts: these were pages dealing with Robert Henri, the Armory Show and naturalism vs abstraction.

Fig. 75) The autobiography of Marsden Hartley, in the original 1921 edition and in the most recent edition in 2011

Marsden Hartley, a member of modernist circles which were gathered in New York around Stieglitz, was a successful artist already in the first decades of the century both in Paris and in Munich. His autobiography - never translated into any other language - celebrated his return to American art and its values. In addition to excerpts from that text, Chipp took numerous abstracts from magazines and catalogues.

The anthologizer made a time jump to the first years of the Second World War, when the group of European surrealists moved to New York to escape the conflict, after having conquered the American public already in 1936 with the exhibition at the MoMA dedicated to Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, curated by Alfred H. Barr (1902 - 1981).

Fig. 76) From left to right: The poster of the first Arshile Gorky exhibition in New York in 1945; The catalogue of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to him, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1951, and curated by Ethel Schwabacher and Lloyd Goodrich; The text of a monograph by Ethel Schwabacher in 1957; Harold Rosenberg's monograph on Gorky of 1962.

The American artist who was most influenced by the arrival of the surrealists in New York was Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), whose catalogue in occasion of the first exhibition in New York in 1945 benefited from an introduction by André Breton. Chipp published quotations from Gorky drawn from numerous essays dedicated to him by the female painter Ethel Schwabacher (1903-1984) in the 1950s.

Fig. 77) The text In Search of Reality in the original 1948 edition and in the one published twenty years later by the MIT.

For Chipp the role of cultural intermediation played by Hans Hoffman (1880 - 1966), an abstract painter who was educated between France and Germany in the first decades of the century, was fundamental. Hoffman was close to all the great artists of European abstraction and had even founded the first school of abstract art in Munich. Already in the 1930s Hoffmann's writings for the Munich school (Form und Farbe in the Gestaltung: Ein Lehrbuch für den Kunstunterricht - Form and color in creation: a manual for the art lesson) circulated in English for use by US students (Creation in Form and Color: A Textbook for Instruction in Art). With the seizure of Nazi power, Hofmann moved his school to New York. Now more than sixty years old, he also discovered himself as a painter and master of the American abstract expressionists. A translation of his pedagogical texts into German appeared in 1948 on the occasion of an exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art, in a collection with the title In Search dor the Real.

Hoffmann’s “theory – Chipp wrote – is based upon the belief that abstract art has its origin in nature. It reflects his belief in the duality of the world of art and the world of appearances, similar to the theory of the Symbolists; it deals with color as an element in itself which is capable of expressing the most profound moods, similar to, if not derived directly from, ideas stated by Kandinsky and the Expressionists; but it is concerned also with form in the tradition of Cézanne and Cubism. Hofmann’s theory remained essentially the same throughout nearly fifty years of teaching and painting and formed a substantial foundation for much of contemporary theory on abstract art” [78].

In the 1950s, the group of Abstract Expressionists and Action Painters, later to become known as the New York School, settled in the East Side of New York. Citing the art critic and historian Meyer Shapiro (1904 - 1996), Chipp noted that the irruption of Abstract Expressionism in the United States had the tone of a real generational rebellion [79]. It was actually the simultaneous action of a grouping of personalities characterized by different styles and needs. Beyond the fact of operating from the East Side and cultivating a fraternal friendship between each other -  Chipp wrote - the artists had almost nothing in common.

Fig. 78) Collections of writings by Robert Motherwell in the 1994, 1997 and 2007 versions

Today it is frequent to think that Robert Motherwell may have been the most prominent personality for theoretical and writing skills in the New York School. Collections of his writings have appeared since the 1990s. To Motherwell, incidentally, we also owe an anthology of Dada writings and painters published in 1951 by the MoMa. Yet in Chipp's anthology, Motherwell appeared only with a very short quote (two lines!) dated 1944. Also the extracts of the other major artists of the time (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning) were very short. Their voice was collectively quoted in the text of a conference held at the MoMA in New York (What modern art means to me) and in the transcript of a common session of work (A session of the artists) both in 1951. More important was the presence in the anthology of the writings of Barnett Newman (1905-1970), which Chipp praised because of their highly individualistic tones [80].

 

Fig. 79) From left to right: The 1951 conference 'What modern art means to me' at the New York MoMA and the collections of writings by Willem de Kooning (1988), Barnett Newmann (1990), Mark Rothko (2004) and Jackson Pollock (2006)

Today there are writings and testimonies from each of the great personalities of the New York School. The collection of de Kooning’s writings (Collected Writings) was edited by George Scrivani in 1988; that of Barnett Newmann (Selected Writings and Interviews) was released in 1990 thanks to John Philip O'Neill; a posthumous collection of Pollock's Works, Writings, Interviews exists since 2011 thanks to Nancy Jachec; two volumes of posthumous writings by Rothko have also been published: The artist's reality: philosophies of art by his son Christopher in 2004 and Writings on art in 2006 by Miguel López Remiro.

The series of texts written by American painters ended with sections on Claes Oldenburg (1929,-) and George Rickey (1907 - 2002). The first was the only Pop artists included in the anthology: his text was a transcription from radio discussions between Oldenburg himself, Roy Lichtenstein (1923 - 1997) and Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), published in Artforum in 1966. Rickey was the promoter of kinetic sculpture; he was present with an interview in 1965, the most recent text in Chipp's work.

The European artists

The post-war Europeans were present with writings from eleven personalities. The sculptors prevailed over painters in numerical terms: they were Henry Moore (1898 - 1986), Alberto Giacometti (1901 - 1966), Étienne Hajdú (1907-1996), Hans Uhlmann (1900-1975), Eduardo Paolozzi (1924 - 2005), Davide Boriani (1936-) and Philipp King (1934-). Painting was present with Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920 - 2005), Jean Dubuffet (1901 - 1985) and Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992). Michel Tapié, as already mentioned, was included in the anthology as an art critic and the theorist of the Informal art.

After the Second World War, as Chipp recalled, Europe was not only devastated and impoverished by the conflict, but it had suffered the emigration and the flight of most of the artist groups of previous decades. Often the destination was New York. The surrealists had moved en masse to the American metropolis; they eventually returned with some exceptions in Paris, but they would no longer be the reference interpreters of European artistic sentiment. Other theorists and artists such as Mondrian had gone to the USA. Destiny was cruel to many of the greatest painters and sculptors of the thirties. When it was possible the German expressionists fled from Nazism, but their works were largely destroyed. The Cubists, with the exception of Léger, remained in France because of their old age, but ended up in complete isolation. The younger painters, such as the French Alfred Manessier (1911 - 1993) and Pierre Soulages (1919-) and the German Fritz Winter (1905-1976), were enrolled and ended up in captivity.

Anyone who was making art in Europe in the 1950s for the first time could only begin with an existential reflection on the failures and tragedies, even personal ones, of the painters and sculptors of previous generations. At the same time, Chipp added, young European artists were able to benefit from an exposure to international art as it had never been before possible. The European artists’ “ideological sources were, therefore, two differing ones: a knowledge of and ingrained respect for traditionally accepted values, even though they had been seriously challenged by the spirit of disillusion and change of the postwar era, and an exposure to foreign ideas which were readily accessible as a result of the new ‘one-world’ point of view ” [81]. 

 

Fig. 80) Collections of Moore's writings in English, published (from left to right) in 1966, 1971, 2002 and 2010.

In short, Europeans had a different instinct than their American counterparts. Especially in France they produced an intellectual art, based on their acquaintance with literature and philosophy (above all with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905 - 1980) and “on an intellectualization of sensations” [82]. The revolution of traditional iconographic schemes was less rebellious and individualistic than the American one, but was based on common beliefs among artists.

Fig. 81) Editions of the writings of Henry Moore in German (1959), French (1994) and Italian (2010)

Henry Moore was presented as “one of the most perceptive and intelligent commentators on modern sculpture” [83] also thanks to his work as a teacher and superintendent at the Chelsea College of Arts in London. “Although he has written little on art, his few comments are remarkable in their clarity and significance. (…) His theoretical writing is concerned with fundamental sculptural problems such as the interaction of volume and space, which are both universal problems and particular concerns of his own” [84]. Chipp included in the anthology an article by Henry Moore entitled The sculptor speaks, which was printed in 1937 in the magazine The Listener, published by the BBC. The bibliographic section also took note of the collection of writings "Henry Moore on Sculture: a collection of the sculptor's writings and spoken words", by the critic Philip James (1901-1974), first published in England in 1966 and then in the United States in 1971. New collections of Moore's writings appeared in 2002 (edited by Alan Wilkinson) and in 2010 (Tate Publishing).

Fig. 82) Collections of writings in French by Giacometti from 1992, 2001, 2006 and 2007. The first two images and the last on the right refer to the collection curated by Leiris and Dupin, while the third one refers to the collection by Ángel González.

Alberto Giacometti was seen as the expression of the duality of the European artist, who on the one hand expressed his admiration for Renaissance art and on the other adhered to existentialist reflections, to the point that Sartre was his privileged correspondent. Chipp chose for the anthology a letter to the gallery owner and collector Pierre Matisse (1900 - 1989), published by Matisse himself in the catalogue of a Giacometti exhibition in New York in 1948 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. A first collection of Giacometti's writings was published by the Maeght Foundation on the occasion of an exhibition in 1978. A second one, edited by the writer Michel Leiris (1901 - 1990) and by the art critic Jacques Dupin (1927-2012), was produced by the Hermann publishing house in 1990 and has been the subject of numerous reprints since. A third was edited by Ángel González in 2006 and was released simultaneously in French and Spanish. The Leiris-Dupin edition was also published in Japanese (1994) and Italian (1995, 2001 and 2011), that of González in English (2017).

Fig. 83) Collections of writings by Alberto Giacometti in German (1965), Japanese (1994), Spanish (2006), Italian (1995 and 2001) and English (2017)

The Cobra group was perhaps the most similar in Europe to the New York School. Chipp cited the manifesto Our Own Desires Build the Revolution written by the Dutchman Constant Nieuwenhuys and published by the Cobra magazine in French in 1949.

Fig. 84) On the left: The article Our Own Desires Build the Revolution published in Cobra in French in 1949. Source: https://www.postwarcultureatbeinecke.org/cobra?lightbox=image23si. On the right: the 1949 Reflex magazine, the Dutch organ of the Cobra Group. Source: https://www.kunstveiling.nl

The article Empreintes (Footprints) of 1957 was published by Jacques Dubuffet, the inventor of the concept of Art Brut. Brutal art was the term with which the French artist called his production in the Fifties. Dubuffet combined the concept that art can be the effect of pure randomness with the adherence to the world of physical objects. “One of the essential aspects of his work is the constant contradiction, the contrast between the undefined, almost abstract landscapes and clearly articulated symmetrical figures, between precise drawing and the absence of line, between gaudy colour and dull monochromes, between the heaviest application of materials and the thinnest paint…. Other significant aspects of Dubuffets’s work are emphasized in this essay, such as his opposition to consciousness, which can only interfere with the fullness of experience, and his stress on the mutability of matter within a great organic whole, as well as his concerns with the simplest, the most ordinary and crude, which has generally been overlooked in man’s search for a special ‘aesthetic’ category” [85].

Fig. 85) From left to right: The French (1968), Italian (1969), Argentine (1970), Portuguese (1971), American (1988) and Turkish (2005) versions of Asphyxiating Culture by Jean Dubuffet

Chipp's insistence on Dubuffet shouldn't come as a surprise. In the same year in which his anthology was published, or in 1968, Dubuffet brought out Asphyxiating Culture, a very polemical essay that enjoyed enormous popularity. His thesis was that culture had now replaced religion as the opium of the people. The book became a reference point for all artists of libertarian inspiration in the 1970s. In the American world, as we have already seen in the diaries of Keith Haring (1958 - 1990), the French artist was considered a fundamental master still in the 1980s.

 

Fig. 86) Several English versions of David Sylvester's interviews with Francis Bacon (from left to right: 1971, 1975, 1980, 1987, 1988 and 2016)

With Francis Bacon (the last author we want to mention in this review) Chipp quoted a singular figure. On the one hand, he emphasized how - despite being self-taught - he was a man of culture, who studied Nietzsche, drew iconographic motifs from Bosch, Velázquez and Van Gogh, and studied mannerists and romantics [86]. The artist translated these stimuli into a “disillusioned, brutal, and often terrifying sense of man’s experience [… which] expresses the spiritual crisis of contemporary urban life” [87]. On the other hand, the only texts referable to him were exclusively taken from interviews, dialogues and conversations with different intellectuals, including the nine interviews between 1962 and 1986 realized with the critic David Sylvester (1924-2001). The result was the publication of numerous collections of interviews, interviews and conversations, published in many languages and very frequently, while there is still nothing printed today that can be directly described as autograph.

Fig. 87) Italian editions of Francis Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester (1991, 2003 and 2008) and Franck Maubert (2010)

NOTES

[69] 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. 231.

[70] 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 367.

[71] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.369.

[72] Holt, Elizabeth Gilmore - Theories of Modern Art by Herschel B. Chipp (citato), p. 231.

[73] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.513.

[74] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.503.

[75] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.505.

[76] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), pp.506-507.

[77] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.507.

[78] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), pp.511-512.

[79] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.501.

[80] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.515.

[81] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.590.

[82] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.590.

[83] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.590.

[84] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.591.

[85] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.592.

[86] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.593.

[87] Chipp, Herschel Brown - Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (quoted), p.593.