Art
THE SOCIETE ANONYME: MODERNISM FOR AMERICA
Frist Center for the Visual Arts
Through Jan. 27, 2008
The timing of the opening weekend for the Frist’s Société Anonyme show—concurrent with the last weekend of an exhibit of paintings from the Ashcan School—underscored just how groundbreaking Modernism really was. The upstairs galleries were filled with pictures of famous actresses, sporting events and people strolling in parks, painted by artists such as George Bellows and Robert Henri in a figurative style not far removed from the Impressionists. The paintings dated as late as the 1910s and showed what art looked like in America at the opening of the 1920s. But downstairs you were confronted by Constantin Brancusi’s wood sculpture “Little French Girl,” which looks like a bedpost that sprouted stubby legs and a helmet-shaped head. This sculpture, along with machine-inspired compositions and fragmented images using the language of Cubism, was featured in the Société Anonyme’s 1921 inaugural exhibit. Compared to the Ashcan paintings, “modern” art at that time meant something truly new.
Founders, Keepers Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp in the library at The Haven, her estate in West Redding, Conn., in the late summer of 1936
The Société Anonyme was an artists’ group whose mission, in the words of co-founder Katherine Dreier, was to acquaint Americans with “the latest movements in modern painting and sculpture,” which would keep the local art world “from continuing too limited in our aesthetic sympathies.” The group had its heyday in the 1920s, introducing New York audiences to the European artists who were challenging the look and very definition of art after the visual rupture of Cubism. The group lasted into the 1940s and then donated its archives and a large collection of art to Yale University. This show examines that collection, which gives a unique view into what avant-garde 1920s art looked like to that period’s cultural pioneers.
Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray formed the Société Anonyme in 1920. Over the next 20 years or so, they staged 80 exhibitions, issued roughly 30 publications and sponsored about 85 lectures and performances. The group exhibited first or early showings of key figures from the artistic movements of the day, such as Constructivism, Futurism and De Stijl, and presented a major show in 1926 that brought together 106 artists from 19 countries, all of whom were experimenting with new forms and styles. In addition to displaying works by leading Europeans, the Société Anonyme showed work by Americans they saw as aligned with them in spirit and style, including Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley.
Well Rounded Wassily Kandinsky, Multicolored Circle (Mit Buntem Kreis), 1921
The exhibit does not include masterworks from the era so much as significant pieces by a variety of figures ranging from major (Paul Klee and Kasimir Malevich) to important but lost in the shuffle (say, Jean Metzinger) to obscure (remember Victor Servranckx?) or even odd. The group’s one-person shows presented renowned artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, one of the parents of pure abstraction, but they also featured a forgotten figure, Louis Michel Eilshemius. An eccentric poet and painter of mystical, post-Impressionist scenes, Eilshemius was probably more interesting as a personality than a painter.
Lost and Found Kurt Schwitters, Oval Construction, 1925.
The collection does not have a single predominant look, by the founders’ design. Dreier said their goal was to “open a modest gallery without pretense or emphasis upon personal taste.” The collection and show have an inclusive sensibility, picking up artists who in different ways seemed out of the ordinary compared to work like the Ashcan paintings. The Société Anonyme left it to later eras to sort these artists into stylistic buckets.
The inclusive nature of the collection shows how people were experimenting with similar concepts, creating a lively sense of community. One room features two paintings by Piet Mondrian, the chief figure of the Dutch De Stijl movement. The works represent his classic style, built on a grid of asymmetrical black lines on a white ground, one with some of the spaces filled with primary colors (“Fox Trot B”) and one black on white (“Fox Trot A”). Hanging next to the Mondrians are several works by Theo van Doesburg, Burgoyne Diller and Harry Holtzman that feature the same elements—grids and intermittent primary color. It takes a minute to distinguish Mondrian from the others, but his paintings have more void in the center, pushing lines and colors toward the borders. The other artists fill the space more uniformly, reducing the tension that might enliven the compositions. This set shows an idea that was in the air, and how people picked it up and used it.
Fluid Dynamics David Nestorovitch Kakabadzé, Z (The Speared Fish), ca. 1925
The cases of programs and publications are particularly interesting, conveying the breadth of the Anonyme artists’ activities. Their explorations went in every direction, encompassing treatises, concerts of avant-garde music, educational programs and experimental film screenings. It was like the fringe art scene today—go to a house concert by a noise band, and you can paw through boxes filled with self-published books, drawings and hand-printed T-shirts. Every avant-garde provides freedom that allows energy to go in all directions simultaneously. Any one piece of such a movement might not be impressive, but the density of expression and output shows the participants’ palpable sense of possibility in their artistic and cultural surroundings.
Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific innovation arises out of communities of knowledge. For instance, at the same time Charles Darwin was formulating his theory of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on similar ideas. This exhibit shows an artistic community of contemporaries working with different levels of success to make something out of the era’s new aesthetic languages. The Société Anonyme championed artists dedicated to the possibilities in Cubist techniques of fragmentation and collage, abstract geometries and Dada’s challenges to what constitutes art. The exhibit suggests a way to approach contemporary art in any era—enjoy the mob of people attacking many aesthetic fronts, don’t focus on a few heroic figures. Leave that to later generations.
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