|
|
|
By William Paton
How one woman's collection came to reflect the cutting edge of 20th-century art.
|
|
No century bore witness to such cataclysmic changes in art as the 20th century. The collection of Pierina de Gavardie acts as a microcosm for the changes in art throughout the century, charting much of the development of art, especially painting. Pierina de Gavardie was born in Italy but moved to Paris in the 1930s to work with an uncle who was a tailor. Among her uncle's clients were many of the movers and shakers in the Parisian art world, both dealers and the artists themselves, and slowly she found herself dealing in her own right before coming to work with Heinz Berggruen in the 1950s.
Gavardie's exposure to the art world is reflected in the list of names of the artists featured in her representative collection, which reads like a Who's Who of the leading luminaries and daring iconoclasts of the last century: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, Jean-Paul Riopelle and many more. Each of the artists, each of the works, challenges the notions and limitations of representation. At the same time, each of these works is an unambiguous representation of its own time and aesthetic, regardless of the decade or situation that produced it. Gleizes's vibrant Brooklyn Bridge, painted in 1915, both exemplifies the advances of the European avant-garde and captures the era and style of the 1910s—instead of a mere representation of the shafts and cables of the iconic New York landmark, the viewer is presented with a bustling image of dynamism and movement, the structure itself captured in spirit and form, the lights of the passing cars shining at the viewer. Gleizes had moved to New York at the end of his military service during the First World War. While he was serving in the army, the technology and harshness of war had fuelled his Cubist works, but in New York, which had remained relatively unaffected by and distant from the turmoil of battle, Gleizes found inspiration in the civil technology and cosmopolitanism of the city. He celebrated the Big Apple from Broadway to Brooklyn Bridge with the same artistic enthusiasm.
|
While Gleizes's Cubism sought to capture the three-dimensional structures of the world in two-dimensional form, other 20th-century artists sought instead to represent the arcana of life and thought themselves. In Miró's art, the world of the artist's own hidden thoughts and memories was codified into a strange, hieroglyphic system of representation creating a kind of landscape of the mind. Peinture, a tense and dark work from 1936, is a personalized representation of the artist's tension. Miró largely spent that year, which marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, near Barcelona, until he moved himself and his family to the safety of Paris at the end. During this period he created what are known as his 'Wild Paintings', featuring diverse and experimental media that somehow add to the taut and evocative nature of the works. Peinture is painted with tar as well as paint, lending its center an absorbing darkness. The floating figure on the right, exemplifying Miró's customarily light and playful images, contrasts with another to the left, but this phallic shape is clumsy and cumbersome, filled with a strange brutality. Both are dominated by the menacing black of the center, which spreads slowly like a malaise. The general darkness of Peinture perfectly captures the aggressive sexual tensions that marked Miró's angst-ridden work during this period.
As many artists steered away from the strictly figurative world, involving themselves in ever-increasingly abstracted and intellectual methods of representation, a backlash appeared, especially in the form of Fernand Léger. As one of the second-generation Cubists, Léger had sought to present reason, order and structure in his paintings. However, the prevalent opacity in the work of many of his contemporaries pushed him to find a more transparent and recognizable art that fitted with his Communist views. He began to celebrate the figure, and more specifically the worker, creating monumental murals designed to bring color and joy to the workplace and to the lives of the proletariat. In some sense, Esquisse pour les quatre personnages, n.2, painted in 1944, shares this. The dynamism of the machine has been replaced with the simplicity and man-powered speed of the bicycles. The cyclists and the women seem a leisurely, friendly group, without any sense of competition or rivalry between them. The bright and bold colors of the clothes and background fill the painting with zest, translating Léger's unadulterated joy in the theme of people enjoying Nature.
Léger's wartime celebration of the simple things in life found itself peculiarly echoed in the works of many post-War artists who re-espoused the figure in simple, deliberately unschooled styles. However, a backlash against this new figurative trend came in with abstraction. Jean-Paul Riopelle's Composition, painted in 1951, takes abstraction to a new level. In his works, color and texture mix to form a glistening field reminiscent filled with lushness. This is a dark and hectic painting, and yet in comparison to so many of the works of the period, burdened with the gloom and depression of war-torn Europe and particularly an invaded Paris, this gleams with its panoply of colors. Each spot, each smear, each streak of color is filled with movement and vibrancy. This is an existential work, a celebration of existence and a representation not of the visible reality, but of metaphysics themselves. At the same time, it is a vivacious yet poignant release in the darkness of those years.
William Paton is a Researcher in the 20th Century Art Department, Christie's London.
Back to top
|
|
|
