Intensely Dutch: Image, Abstraction And The Word, Post-War And Beyond
Posted: 03 Jan 2012 | By: Patricia Anderson - Editor
A post-war generation of art lovers more or less assumed that if a painting was big, colourful, unruly and, above all, abstract, then it was American. However, the exhibition Intensely Dutch, which appeared in 2010 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales — a big, colourful, unruly and abstract show — not only put paid to this notion, but raised questions about how the American contingent could have so successfully hogged the art-world limelight through the late 1940s and into the sixties.
Another observation which might follow close on its heels is that many of the best known of the Australian abstractionists, some of them European arrivals before and after the war, clearly drew sustenance from their European cousins for the works they exhibited throughout the late 1950s and 60s in Australia. There is a rollcall, but that will keep until later.
How did American post-war painting become so closely associated with modernity — indeed its key disseminator — when America had only received it courtesy of those who spent time on the continent during the great explosion of ‘ism’s? The answer lies with the post-war realignment of Europe.
Modernism as a viable ongoing element of the visual arts in western culture was hamstrung on two fronts. Firstly, the Nazi regime had discredited the modernists, hounding them, burning their works and exhibiting them in an orchestrated propaganda exercise called Entartete Kunst —Degenerate Art — in Munich in 1937. Artists such as Emile Nolde, Ernst Barlach, Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckman and Otto Dix might have found themselves out in the cold where the official art establishment was concerned, but behind the scenes there were many who recognised their importance and a great swell of buying and selling went on behind the scenes.
Germany’s regime was attempting to identify itself with a chimeric classical past, and we have plenty of reminders of the saccharine and stylised results in architectural building programs even beyond Germany’s borders. They also identified with some phantom untainted bucolic world where simplicity and certainty reigned and ‘cosmopolitanism’ and its heady infusions was snubbed.
Secondly, when the Soviets found themselves in control of a vast portion of middle Europe and half of Germany, there was more of the same; and an equivalent paranoia about the new and the daring, which were seen, quite rightly, to be independent of prevailing authority. It seemed for a while that even countries like Greece, Italy and France would be consumed by Communist regimes, and for this reason the one western power whose resources were not exhausted made a strategic decision to promote its own culture and democratic way of life. This battle for hearts and minds took on a new urgency as all parties, the west, Germany and Russia strove to prove the others, not themselves, were the real barbarians.
These post-war developments were examined by Frances Stonor Saunders in her book called The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, published in the US in 2000 and the previous year in England, where publisher Granta got straight to the point, titling the book Who Paid the Piper? CIA and the Cultural Cold War. The more spontaneous manifestations of American culture before and after 1945 — its big-band music, its fashions, its speech patterns and mannerisms — had percolated effortlessly — to the delight of the young and the mystification of an older generation. But what the entire organisational juggernaut of the US had in mind was a wholesale but discrete export of the finest elements of American culture and a resuscitation of the remnants of European excellence.
The Russians had something similar in mind, as Saunders put it. “As early as 1945, when the stench of human bodies still hung about the ruins, the Russians staged a brilliant opening for the State Opera with a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus, in the beautifully lit, red plush Admiralspalast. Stocky, pomaded Russian colonels grinned smugly at American military personael as they listened together to performances of Eugène Onegin … the music punctuated by the tinkle of medals.” When in 1947 they opened a ‘House of Culture’ on the Unter den Linden, the Americans returned cultural fire by opening the Amerika-Häuser. These were warmly heated institutes where the reading rooms were comfortably furnished, and which hosted film screenings, musical recitals, lectures and art exhibitions — all heavily freighted with American content. As Saunders put it: “Thanks largely to Russian propaganda, America was widely regarded as culturally barren, a nation of gum-chewing, Chevy-driving, Dupont-sheathed philistines, and the America-Häuser did much to reverse this negative stereotype.”
As the cultural cold war warmed up — so to speak — America shipped some of its proudest achievements to Europe. Talented opera graduates from the Juilliard School, the Curtis, the Eastman and the Peabody made their appearance. American academics, playwrights and directors were consulted about a theatre program and the result was an ambitious blueprint which exposed European audiences to plays by Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck — to name a few. Many American composers such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin owed the first appearance of their works in Europe to American government sponsorship.
No doubt with Benjamin Disraeli’s observation that “a book may be a great a thing as a battle”, a book program was established which significantly enhanced the reputations of American writers like William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Sandburg, James Thurber and Edith Wharton. And as Saunders points out, a number of “European authors were … promoted as part of an explicitly ‘anti-Communist programme’”. Their works had to fill a specific criterion: namely to be “objective, convincingly written and timely”. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon fitted the bill perfectly; so did Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago.
America’s staggeringly well-funded mission was coordinated by the OPC (the Office of Policy Coordination) with money funnelled through the Congress of Cultural Freedom. The OPC was independent from the State Department but was later subsumed into the CIA in 1952.
On the visual arts front, their success was palpable, lovers of the visual arts were encouraged to identify the new, the colourful, the abstract — large in scale and audacious — with American values of freedom, spontaneity and originality. Although, years later the writer Günther Grass remarked drily in his memoir Peeling the Onion that: “The CIA had promoted the non-representational school … because of its harmless, decorative quality and because the concept of the modern was, and promised to remain, the property of the West.”
The wife of the artist László Moholy-Nagy spoke in front of German audiences about the work of her late husband, who had, in the 1920s, been an immensely influential lecturer at the Bauhaus in Weimar and ultimately found himself, at the invitation of an American corporation, in Chicago. In 1939, he founded the School of Design there — a ‘new Bauhaus’.
The first appearance in Europe of what would become the New York School of painters was an exhibition of Non-Objective Paintings from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, accompanied by lectures on the possibilities of abstraction on canvas. This offering, too, had been government sponsored. Did any of this reach Australia’s post-war shores? It did, but by a kind of osmosis. Some European artists had arrived here between the two World Wars, and others arrived in the wake of the latter. They brought with them their traditional European training, but many were alert to new developments through imported journals, magazines and books, even if these made no concentrated appearance here until the mid-1950s.
And here we return to Holland, whose lively developments were clearly overshadowed by the American gift for promoting its own, but who we now recognise, courtesy of this remarkable exhibition, to have generated something not only uniquely theirs, but something that a post-war generation of artists — and some critics — were quietly well aware of. We can see this when we compare their work with a number of prominent Australian painters of the 1950s and 1960s.
Nor is it difficult to discern the lineaments of American abstract expressionism. Artists who travelled there from Europe, such as Arshille Gorky and Max Ernst, provided a sturdy bridge between European surrealism and automatism and the new American expansiveness. Australians had an opportunity to see how this unfolded when in 1964 novelist James A. Michener’s Collection of forty contemporary American paintingsi did the rounds of Sydney, Newcastle and the Adelaide Arts Festival. Abstract Expressionists and post-painterly abstractionists, such as Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Kenneth Noland, Hans Hofmann, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Larry Rivers, and Morris Louis were all present, but, according to art critic and painter Elwyn Lynn, the exhibition was presided over by a single loan from the Guggenheim: Pollock’s Ocean Greyness, which had been insured for $80,000. Lynn suggested that the show provided a lot of evidence to support Clement Greenberg’s avowal that the new American painting developed through cubism rather than through central European expressionismii, but here he was wrong.
Greenberg himself, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation, would visit Australia in 1968. He had been, for some time, the most powerful contemporary art-world arbiter in America. He championed the abstract expressionists and then the colour-field painters whom he saw as their natural successors. Greenberg divided opinions sharply wherever he went with his rigorous and exclusive views on the aesthetic experience and the primacy of the ‘eye’ — especially his own. He mesmerised a generation of artists, students and collectors and acquired camp followers and detractors in equal measure. During the war years, Greenberg had, according to writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, upended the Nazi view that Jewish art and art criticism had spearheaded decadent abstraction, claiming that the new art blossoming in New York City “was fully representative of the principles that had to win the war: positive in spirit, heroic in scale, free, imaginative and unquestionably American”.iii Some believed that he fomented a campaign which was responsible for the eclipse of Paris as the natural centre of the art; in other words, a New York hatched conspiracy. Was it drawing a long bow to assume that Greenberg’s views meshed with America’s foreign policy? Perhaps. But clearly what emerged from America eclipsed contemporaneous activities in Europe. And here we return again to the Dutch exhibition.
Many of the artists in Splendidly Dutch have biographical material which returns us viscerally to the upheavals of the Second World War. Indeed, there is a shrill rawness about some of these paintings which speaks directly of intense feelings, anxiety and great suffering suppressed — something their American cousins experienced mostly from the couches of their therapists. The catalogue points out that Corneille weighed just forty kilograms at the war’s end. Yet the vivid, even riotous colour, bold forms and restless organic accretions also suggest a swell of optimism and defiance — a kind of joy.
Key artists in the exhibition, Constant, Karel Appel, Corneille and Lucebert were members of a wild and unconventional group of practitioners, centred in Holland but with followers and practitioners in Denmark, Belgium and Germany, calling themselves CoBrA. This movement flared like a Roman candle in 1949 and was still showering sparks beyond 1951.
Although Australia might have seemed a long way away, Greenberg observed: “I thought some paintings by John Olsen very interesting, though he seems rather indebted to Corneille.” Perceptive Robert Hughes was the first local critic to notice the influence of both Europe and America on a budding group of local abstractionists and how fellow critics responded to local work: “A vocabulary, a frame of reference, has evolved to suit these circumstances … we are given a natty game of spot-the-influence. A wriggly line means Corneille, an agitated paste, Dubuffet, a monumental one, Tàpies, a dissolving figure, Bacon. Upward’s big black signs are unthinkingly linked with Kline …”
When visitors to Splendidly Dutch saw the canvases of Jaap Nanninga, they were quite right to be reminded of early works by local artists Frank Hodgkinson, Leonard Hessing, John Coburn and John Olsen. The monochromatic abstracts of Bram van Velde will put some in mind of the palette of Joy Hester, and the exuberant canvases of Japp Wagemaker will bring to mind the crusted surfaces of Elwyn Lynn and Alan Peascod — and the dark circles and rods of Stanislaus Rapotec.
The inclusion of Jan Riske, Dutch by birth and living in Australia, was one of the most satisfying experiences of the exhibition. His sensibility remains entirely European and his works of the 1980s — microscopic accretions of pure pigment in rhythmic layer upon layer — demand careful scrutiny. Hendrik Kolenberg, the curator of prints and drawings at the AGNSW, who assembled this fine exhibition, gave the art-going public a fine gift indeed.
i From the Allentown Art Museum, Pennsylvania, USA.
ii ibid.
iii Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘The Collector — The conquests and canvases of Peggy Guggenheim’, The New Yorker, 13 May 2002, p.91.
Images from top:
Corneille, Zon (Sun), 1953, watercolour and gouache, 30.5 x 43cm.
Wim Oepts, Het blauwe huis (The blue house), 1958, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 59.5cm.
Lucebert, I can’t dance, I’ve got ants in my pants, 1984, oil on canvas, 115.5 x 145.5cm.
Jaap Wagemaker, Compositie (Composition), 1959, brush and black ink, 44.9 x 34.8cm.
Jaap Nanninga, Compositie in kleuren (Composition in colours), 1961, pastel and gouache, 46.5 x 63.5cm.
Jan Riske, Expressions in time 20, 1988, oil on canvas, 35 x 35cm.
Bram Bogart, Daybreak, 1997, pigment, oil, whiting on jute, 238 x 190cm.
Bram van Velde, Untitled, 1975, colour lithograph, 32.6 x 56cm.
