Las Bellas Artes refieren a las principales formas de realización artística o representación estética cultivadas históricamente por la humanidad, y consideradas formas “puras” de arte que emplean técnicas, materiales y procedimientos diferentes entre sí. Cada una de las siete, no obstante, engloba una multitud de prácticas, estilos y tendencias reconocidas.
Estas artes forman parte tradicionalmente de los elementos duraderos y trascendentales de la humanidad: aquellos considerados dignos de un lugar central en la alta cultura, tanto como documentos o testimoniales de una época, una forma de sentir, o como símbolos que atañen a una concepción específica del mundo y de la existencia.
Tradicionalmente se reconocen seis formas de las Bellas Artes: la pintura, la música, la literatura, la danza y la escultura. Posteriormente se añadieron el cine (el séptimo arte), la arquitectura y la narrativa gráfica o arte secuencial (el noveno arte).
Hay que decir que el concepto de Bellas Artes está vinculado con la idea del museo y del arte histórico, y no tanto del arte contemporáneo, que ha puesto en jaque o en cuestionamiento dicho concepto. Hoy en día el arte se contempla desde perspectivas diversas, dado que la noción tradicional de Bellas Artes ha sido acusada a menudo de ser etnocéntrica (privilegia la concepción europea del arte) y culturalmente excluyente.
Historia de las Bellas Artes
Los antiguos griegos estudiaron la representación artística (sobre todo Aristóteles) y la comprendían en dos categorías oponibles: las superiores y las menores. Las primeras eran más elevadas, poéticamente poderosas y trascendentales, mientras que las segundas eran más vulgares y sencillas. Esta distinción se suponía a partir de los sentidos empleados para percibir la belleza (vista y oído eran los sentidos superiores).
Sin embargo, el término Bellas Artes se empleó propiamente a partir del siglo XVIII para agrupar a las prácticas artísticas valoradas en la época y tratar de unificar las numerosas teorías que había sobre la belleza, el estilo o el gusto. Inicialmente se incluía entre ellas la declamación y la oratoria, pero fueron sustituidas en el tiempo.
¿Cómo se clasifican las Bellas Artes?
La música busca alcanzar la belleza mediante ritmos, melodías y sonidos.
La división clásica de las Bellas Artes se establece a partir de los materiales que usa y del modo en que los utiliza, de la siguiente manera:
Arquitectura. Emplea los diversos materiales de construcción para confeccionar viviendas, edificaciones y espacios urbanos que sean hermosos y funcionales, estéticos y habitables al mismo tiempo.
Danza. Emplea el cuerpo humano y el ritmo musical como una forma de expresión de contenidos artísticos.
Escultura. Emplea la piedra, la arcilla o diversos materiales sólidos para lograr representaciones artísticas tridimensionales, ya sean figurativas o abstractas.
Pintura. Emplea pigmentos obtenidos de diversas fuentes naturales y artificiales, para representar estéticamente la realidad mediante el color y las formas sobre lienzos y otras superficies.
Música. Mediante diversos instrumentos construidos por el ser humano, busca alcanzar la belleza mediante ritmos, melodías y sonidos armónicamente orquestados para suscitar una experiencia estética en el escucha.
Literatura. Empleando el lenguaje como materia prima, compone relatos, representaciones teatrales o descripciones poéticas que luego pueden leerse y disfrutarse estéticamente.
Cine. Empleando instrumentos técnicos complejos, capta la luz, el sonido y el tiempo mismo en secuencias de eventos simulados o reales que componen un relato, un discurso o una representación audiovisual de la realidad.
Características de las Bellas Artes
Las Bellas Artes son diversas entre sí, pero suponen un conjunto uniforme de características:
Aspiran a la belleza. Del modo que sea y a través de las técnicas y materiales que sean, pero las Bellas Artes buscan comunicar una experiencia específica de lo bello, lo armónico, lo trascendente o lo profundo.
Son universales. En principio, las obras de arte tendrían que ser apreciables por toda la humanidad, sin importar las particularidades de su proveniencia, religión o sexo.
Son duraderas. Las obras de arte deberían durar en el tiempo y poder comunicar su contenido a las generaciones venideras, ya sea en museos, reproducciones o soportes especializados para ello.
Última edición: 24 de junio de 2020. Cómo citar: “Bellas Artes”. Autor: María Estela Raffino. De: Argentina. Para: Concepto.de. Disponible en: https://concepto.de/bellas-artes/. Consultado: 13 de julio de 2020.
The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete and Special Friends
BY QUINN LATIMER
Richard Paul Lohse Fünfzehn systematische Farbreihen innerhalb eines symetrischen Systems (Fifteen Systematic Colour Sequences Within a Symmetrical System), 1950–65 Oil on canvas
The traces, shadows and aftershocks of Concrete art – and, in particular, the Zurich Concrete school – have been seen and felt everywhere in contemporary Swiss art production, with its emphasis on hard-edged, geometric abstraction. The term ‘Concrete Art’, coined in 1930 by Theo Van Doesburg in a manifesto written for the first issue of Art Concret, defined and delineated a departure from realism, nature and symbolism. Its reductionist principles of line, colour and plane organized into austere, systemic wholes – themselves copped and refined from the Bauhaus and De Stijl – were meant to ‘represent abstract thoughts in a sensuous and tangible form’, as Max Bill, the movement’s ringleader, once wrote. Concrete art was intended to create new ‘object[s] for intellectual and spiritual use’.
If such sincere proclamations sound a tinny Utopian alarm today, the kind of reduced, geometrically-prone art they proposed remains insistently de rigueur, from the Neo-Geo antics of French Switzerland (led by godfather John Armleder) to the Northern Swiss gangs of younger Basel and Zurich-based artists, who increasingly process Concrete art’s methods through the filters of digitization or consumerism. Consequently, the exhibition ‘The Fantastic Four: Zurich Concrete and Special Friends’ did not come as a particular surprise. At Haus Konstruktiv, the ‘Fantastic Four’ of the Marvel comic from whence this somewhat cloying title came, are reconfigured as the superheroes of Zurich Concrete: Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg and Richard Paul Lohse. The ‘special friends’ comprised a motley, intergenerational group of contemporary artists – among them, Saâdane Afif, Bruno Jakob and Shirana Shahbazi – whose radically disparate production can still be located, at times, in Concrete art’s shadow.
Haus Konstruktiv’s permanent collection is notably broad, and the exhibition mostly rode its able shoulders. Graeser’s lucid oil paintings on canvas, with their grounding in graphic design – like many of the Zurich Concretes, he worked in all areas of design: furniture, architecture, advertising – bookend his career. Gestoppte Rotation (Stopped Rotation, 1943) proved prescient of the geometric, abstract photography movement of today, while the funny, poignant Drei Farben: drei gleiche Volumen, 1/12 grün bewegt (Three Colours: Three Equal Volumes, 1/12 Shifted Green, 1975/76), featured one of his horizontal bands of colour attempting to make a break for it.
Loewensberg’s wonderful paintings from the late 1960s and ’70s, meanwhile, look like radio frequencies or lighting bolts swathed in colour, conjuring computer approximations of Clyfford Still’s (more famous) drippy abstractions from the same period. Bill’s revelatory painting of powdery pastel hues blossoming from a spiral, Betonung einer spirale (Accentuation of a Spiral, 1947), however, took the award for sheer timelessness.
In the wake of such works, the contemporary inclusions were somewhat disappointing and the choices difficult to interpret – surely there are other Swiss-related artists whose work follows Concrete art more explicitly – but some of the pairings were nevertheless inspired. Best known for her photorealist, figurative murals rendered by Iranian sign painters, Shahbazi showed large geometric works that were both lovely and surprising. If Killian Rüthemann’s site-specific installations – playfully dark retorts to geometric abstraction’s legacy – fit perfectly, Afif’s punk-ish performance documentation was less expected. Still, Concrete art’s intentions to unite art and life in all its ably designed forms bore this contribution out. And should the spectator have persisted in the misguided thinking that this Swiss movement remained regional, there was one scene-stealing side project: a series of sketches, drawings and paintings by Fritz Glarner for the famous 1960s-era Rockefeller Dining Room in New York. The artist, who emigrated to the US in 1936, designed the room for Nelson Rockefeller himself, bringing Zurich Concrete – and Glarner’s own brand of Mondrian-inflected wit, with its jam of flat, hard-edged geometric forms tricked out in blue, red and yellow – to the most American and yet international of settings.
Quinn Latimer is a writer and contributing editor of frieze. Her most recent book is Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017).
Richard Paul Lohse was a Swiss painter and graphic artist and one of the main representatives of the concrete and constructive art movements. Lohse was born in Zürich in 1902. His wish to study in Paris was thwarted due to his difficult economic circumstances.
There are several major works of Concrete Art in the Ricola Collection. The Zurich Concretists Max Bill (1908–1994), Camille Graeser (1892–1980), Verena Loewensberg (1912–1986), and Richard Paul Lohse (1902–1988) were all important benchmarks for Alfred Richterich, the man who first conceived the collection in the late 1970s. His decision to focus the collection of art from Switzerland on artists who were working on a contemporary concept of the “work”—and that against the backdrop of a modernist understanding of art history—has influenced the collection’s development to this day.
But what exactly is Concrete Art? As the glance at art history in what follows will show, the term is not just a description of certain stylistic characteristics, but in fact defines the epoch that came after abstraction in the early twentieth century. Concrete Art expresses the shift in the perception of what an artist’s task actually is, and of what art can and should achieve, that began to manifest itself from 1930 onwards. The Concretists did not define a style that might be learned with the aim of applying it themselves as artists. After all, the language of art is developing all the time.
The first mention of “concrete” art dates from 1930 and the manifesto The Basis of Concrete Art by Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931). In a commentary on his manifesto, which like the latter was published in French in van Doesburg’s magazine Art Concret, he characterized abstraction as a historical epoch that was now finished. Nothing, he wrote there, was “more concrete, more real than a line, a color, an area.”
The six-point manifesto reads as follows: “We say: 1. Art is universal. 2. The work of art must be conceived and shaped in its entirety in the mind before it is executed. It must not receive any of nature’s formal properties, nor those of sensuality, nor those of sentimentality. We want to exclude all lyricism, drama, symbolism etc. 3. The painting must be composed exclusively of purely pictorial elements, that is to say of shapes and colors. A pictorial element has no meaning beyond itself, so that the painting as a whole has no meaning beyond itself. 4. The construction of the painting and its elements must be simple and visually controllable. 5. The technique must be mechanical, that is to say exact, anti-impressionistic. 6. It should strive for absolute clarity.”
Each of these points is quoted and explained in detail in the commentary. And this is what van Doesburg had to say about method: “The work of art exists in its entirety in the mind before being realized materially. To match the perfection of the concept, it has to be technically perfect. It must not bear any traces of human weakness: no trembling, no imprecision, no indecision, no incomplete areas etc. etc.
Humanism is cited to justify all manner of stupidities in art. If you cannot draw a straight line by hand, use a ruler. Typescript is clearer, finer, and more legible than handwriting. We do not want an artistic hand. If you cannot draw a circle by hand, use a compass. All the tools invented by the intellect for the purpose of perfection are recommended.”
The Swiss architect, artist, and product designer Max Bill published the first of three different versions of his own definition of terms based on van Doesburg’s in a piece headed “concrete design” published in the catalogue of the exhibition Problems of Contemporary Swiss Painting and Sculpture at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1936. In this essay, he wrote that “concrete design is that design that arises of its own accord, following its own laws without deriving these from external natural phenomena or modeling them on the same.” This was followed in 1938 by Wassily Kandinsky’s essay entitled “L’Art Concret” published in the magazine XXe Siècle.
Bill’s active work as both publicist and curator, which he was able to continue even during the war, did much to establish the concept of “Concrete Art,” even if only in Switzerland at first. His essay “From Abstraction to Concrete Painting in the 20th Century,” in which he traced the recent history of art from Cubism to abstraction and from Constructivism to Concrete Art, positioning his own work at the end of this development, was published in 1943. The Kunsthalle Basel hosted the exhibition Concrete Art organized by Bill in 1944, and a revised version of the aforementioned text was published in the catalogue of the exhibition concrete art from zurich in 1949, which was later shown in Stuttgart and Munich as The Zurich Concretists. “Concrete art is what we call those works of art that arise of their own accord, subject to their own laws, without recourse to external natural phenomena or the transformation, including through abstraction, of the same.” This is the version of the text that Bill used in later publications.
Camille Graeser, who like Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, and Verena Loewensberg, belonged to the first generation of Zurich Concretists, who incidentally would never officially declare themselves a group, undertook his own first attempt to draw a clear distinction between concrete art and abstract art—as his fellow artists had done before him—in 1944. In a brief article published in the abstrakt + konkret bulletin of the Galerie des Eaux-Vives in Zurich he defined both terms, but without saying anything fundamentally different than what Bill had said before him.
While the language used is more lyrical than that of the considerably younger and better known Bill, in terms of substance, these two artists, who differed radically in terms of personality and temperament, were obviously of one mind.
Roman Kurzmeyer (translation: Bronwen Saunders, 2014)
Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York City, through July 23,2017
• • •
The Met Breuer’s ambitious retrospective of Lygia Pape (1927–2004)—her first US museum survey—offers a unique opportunity to take a deep dive into the pioneering Brazilian modernist’s oeuvre. It also sets some intriguing art historical stakes, challenging established narratives that marry Pape’s work to that of her better-known countrymen, Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica—fellow members of the neo-concrete movement. Formed in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, the group aimed to refashion geometric abstraction by liberating the work of art from the frame or the pedestal and bringing it into the space of the everyday. Like Clark and Oiticica, Pape began by producing sculptural reliefs and two-dimensional works during an initial period of fertile experimentation, and by the end of her career was creating pieces that directly involved the body of the artist and/or those of her viewers. But as this exhibition illustrates, her path along the way diverged from that of her close colleagues.
The show is organized chronologically, and deftly balances the many aspects of Pape’s practice. The first gallery presents a wall of early gouaches on fiberboard that attest to her fluency in the geometric vocabulary privileged by the neo-concretists. These compositions from 1954 to 1956 are colorful and dynamic, revealing an intuitive approach to shape and line that signals the influence of Swiss concrete art, which was exhibited at the first São Paulo Biennial in 1951. This gallery also features beautifully installed square wall reliefs with geometric shapes painted in a Mondrianesque palette of white, black, and primary colors protruding from predominantly white backgrounds. Relief proved instrumental for these artists—especially Clark and Oiticica—as it facilitated a transition from the static realm of the wall to the performative realm of the body.
For Pape, though, that transition was less direct, as from 1955 to 1960 she pursued a dedicated exploration of line and texture in drawings and woodcuts. These thoroughly two-dimensional works, primarily executed on Japanese paper, play with linear repetition, symmetry, and the role of negative space in the production of form. The woodcuts, which the artist retrospectively called Tecelares (Weavings) sometime between 1979 and 1983, have been discussed as investigations of ambiguous space (by rejecting traditional figure/ground relations), and in terms of a mode of spectatorship that unfolds over time—both paramount concerns of the neo-concrete manifesto. Indeed, these prints have been hailed as the climax of Pape’s neo-concrete contribution. But the centrally organized composition Pape favored subtly activates the viewer’s sense of the image’s frame, that is to say, the thing that separates the space of art from the space of the world. It is precisely this distinction that Clark and Oiticica sought to overcome.
Rather than engaging neo-concretism’s injunction to vanquish the pictorial plane, these prints stress the materiality of the surface. This of course corresponds to the process of physically imprinting the woodblock onto the paper—the traces we see thus favor the tactile as opposed to the optical. This oneness of material, technique, and form seems to have provided rich ground for Pape to reject individual expression while accentuating texture to repress the virtual space of the white plane. The figure of weaving the Tecelares invoke suggests that the traces of the woodblock are interwoven with the paper like the weft and warp of a textile.
In an adjacent gallery, the Book of Creation and the Book of Architecture (both 1959–60) also deal directly with their own materiality. Here, on cardboard pages measuring approximately twelve by twelve inches each, various techniques (collage, cutouts, origami-like folds) produce abstract images symbolizing themes of space and figures of origin. Facsimiles of the unbound folios are available to viewers in the exhibition; as if paging through an interactive pop-up book, visitors can manipulate the boards in the order of their choosing, thus disrupting the traditional linear temporality of reading and bridging the divide between viewer and art object.
After a hiatus in the sixties, when Pape designed title credits for experimental filmmakers and worked as a graphic designer for a Brazilian food company, she came back to the visual arts with a practice that rejected object-making and the confines of the museum. With a new focus on the body, Pape organized performative actions at the margins of the city (beach, favela, parks). At the Met, pristine reconstructions or recently filmed versions of these actions eclipse the charged political moment in which Pape was working. Her commitment to occupy public space during this period is thus decontextualized, and remains largely untheorized in the exhibition. Though the curators do make an effort to provide some of the far-grittier documentation of original performances, other works (like Wheel of Pleasures [1967], a circle of bowls containing flavored liquids tinted by food dye that the artist would taste alongside her viewers) look like decorative objects rather than performative devices. The museum’s invitation to interact with Wheel of Pleasures on specific days does not alleviate this problem, which points to the larger issue of how to present works of a participatory, public nature in a museum context.
Pape’s turn to performance in public space was followed by a series of videos and photographs documenting the native populations of Brazil, their traditions and environments. Next to these pieces, a large-scale installation of golden threads and dramatic lighting titled Ttéia 1, C (Web 1, C), conceived in 1976 but only realized in 2002, produces a dematerializing effect accentuated by the all-black space that houses the installation. It is a dramatic counterpoint to the obdurate materiality of Pape’s prints, but it sits oddly next to her anthropological and sociological work of the time. Her last sculptures, Amazoninos (1989–92), exhibited at the very end of the show, clearly attempt to synthesize Pape’s lifelong interest in abstraction with her commitment to foregrounding the culture of the Amazons. However, these iron works, consisting of abstract elements extending from a flat surface and painted in solid colors, are rather ornamental and fail to convey the complexities of these two distinct veins of inquiry. In the end, for unfamiliar viewers, the varied concerns that weave throughout Pape’s practice may feel unresolved here, raising more questions than the curators can answer in this format. The exhibition is a rich overview of the artist’s rigorous and compelling oeuvre—but also a reminder of the scholarship that still remains to be done on this acutely important artist.
Monica Amor is a professor of modern and contemporary art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She writes and lectures regularly on postwar and contemporary art with special attention to interdisciplinary practices and the dynamics of global modernity. She is the author of Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969 (University of California Press, 2016) and is currently writing on Philippe Parreno’s work. Her next book project is entitled Gego: Weaving the Space In-Between.
Lygia Pape was a prominent Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s.
Born: April 7, 1927, Nova Friburgo, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Died: May 3, 2004, Rio de Janeiro, State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Period: Neo-Concrete Movement
Books: Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space
Children: Paula Pape
Education: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (1980), School of Fine Arts – UFRJ
Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, Latin America & Caribbean.
Raúl García es entrenador personal, asesor nutricional, fisicoculturista y campeón de artes marciales. Es un especialista en mantener el cuerpo saludable y en enseñar a los demás a hacer lo propio. Nació en Madrid y llegó a Miami en 2014; su centro de trabajo está en el gimnasio Rypt Gym, de Midtown. “Me encanta ayudar a que la gente se sienta bien, haga progresos en su estado físico y gane autoconfianza”, comenta el profesor. Su receta consta de dos simples palabras: ejercicio y dieta. “No solo se trata de moldear el cuerpo con el entrenamiento sino también de cambiar la mentalidad”, refuerza. Sobre la alimentación Raúl apunta que “hay que aprender a saber cómo y cuándo comer”. Recomienda “ingerir cenas livianas, no beber café en exceso y hacer ejercicio diariamente”. Aconseja beber bastante agua, claro, dos litros y medio diarios, como mínimo. El maestro promete poner en forma a cualquier persona cumpliendo un plan de 90 días. Raúl comenzó en el mundo de los gimnasios a los seis años de edad, haciendo judo, y luego siguió con otros deportes de contacto como la lucha grecorromana y el kickboxing. A los 20 años comenzó a impartir clases de kickboxing y judo, y dos años después, a enseñar nutrición, entrenamiento personal y fisicoculturismo. En aquella época comenzó a competir en torneos de fisicoculturismo, entre otras disciplinas físicas. Luego Raúl dirigió su radar hacia Miami, una Meca para el mundo del fitness, en la que es muy solicitado. “No solo cambio cuerpos sino que también cambio vidas”, es su leit motiv. Se lo puede contactar por el email [email protected] y la cuenta de Instagram @newgenerationmiami
La cantante y compositora colombiana Juliana Barrios presenta su nuevo disco, “La vaquita Martina y sus amigos”, con canciones infantiles. El álbum incluye una decena de temas donde la artista narra historias sobre la tierna Martina y otros animales como “La hormiga Teresa” y “La ratona María Andrea”. “Es un proyecto que acaricié durante años y finalmente pude concretar ahora”, cuenta Juliana, que en 2005 recibió una nominación a los premios Latin Grammy. “‘La vaquita Martina y sus amigos’ entretiene, pero también deja enseñanzas, como en el tema ‘Juana la marrana’, donde remarco la importancia del aseo personal”, agrega la artista, nacida en Cali. Juliana es una cantante espléndida, tanto es así que se graduó en el prestigioso Berklee College of Music. Vive en Miami desde el año 2000. Ha grabado cinco discos. Uno fue formando parte del dúo Bachá, junto al venezolano Jorge Luis Chacín. Juntos grabaron, por ejemplo, “Anita, no te rajes”, de la recordada telenovela del mismo nombre. En “La vaquita Martina” Juliana compuso todos los temas ya que tiene destreza en esa área también: le han grabado canciones figuras como Manny Manuel y Carolina Laó.
Max Bill (Swiss, 1908–1994) artist and designer who founded the Concrete Art movement. His interpretations of Constructivism through painting and sculpture, integrated the study of both geometry and mathematics into his art practice. “I am of the opinion that it is possible to develop an art largely on the basis of mathematical thinking,” Bill once reflected. Born on December 22, 1908 in Winterthur, Switzerland he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924–1927, then with Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus school in Dessau for the next two years. Later the co-founder of the Ulm School of Arts and Crafts, he served as the head of architecture and product design there during the 1950s, and later as part of the Swiss Parliament from 1967 to 1971. Bill died on December 9, 1994 in Berlin at the age of 85.Today, he is perhaps best remembered today for his chronoscopes (wrist watches) which are manufactured by the Junghans company in Germany. His works are also held in the collections of a number of institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among others.
Max Bill (Swiss, 1908–1994) was a leader in the Concrete Art movement. In 1924, he trained as a silversmith at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, but after seeing the work of Le Corbusier, his interests shifted to architecture, and he became a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau. There, he studied under notable artists such as Joseph Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. After moving to Zurich in 1929, Bill began pursuing a career as an architect, sculptor, painter, industrial designer, and graphic artist. Inspired by the ideas of Theo van Doesburg, Bill formulated principles of Concrete Art, applying mathematics and geometry to his work.
In 1944, Bill founded the journal Abstrakt Konkret, and, in the 1950s, started writing monographs, catalogues, and journal entries exploring his theories of Abstract Constructivism. Together with Otl Aicher and activist Inge Scholl, Bill founded the Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design), where he became the head of the architecture and Industrial Design departments. Between 1967 and 1974, he taught environmental design at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (College of Fine Arts) in Hamburg. After joining Allianz (Union of Modern Swiss Artists) in 1941, he founded a publishing company of the same name, and was a member of Abstraction-Création artist association, CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), Academy for the Arts in Berlin, Bauhaus Archival Association of Berlin, I.C.P. (Institut Für Progressive Kultur), U.A.M. (Union des Artistes Modernes), and various other associations and councils of German and Swiss workers. During his career, Bill was awarded the Grand Prix in both Brazil and Italy. His other achievements include the Award for Art in Zurich and two honorary degrees.
JUNGHANS MAX BILL
Architect of time
Max Bill was an architect, painter, sculptor and product designer. His work was influenced by the Bauhaus philosophy and therefore always reduced to the essentials. His collaboration with Junghans began during his time as rector at the Ulm College of Design (HfG). From 1956 he designed kitchen, table and wall clocks here, which made design history. The logical dial design was also taken up by him in 1961 with the design of wristwatches, which today are considered design icons. Max Bill strived for constructive clarity and precise proportions. Regardless of whether he was dealing with a watch or a work of art, for him both were “shaping the environment” and had to be suitable for everyday use.
Was Hilma af Klint Europe’s first abstract artist – before even Kandinsky and Mondrian? As an exhibition of her extraordinary, occult-inspired works opens at the Serpentine Gallery, London, we travel to Sweden to find out
Artist Hilma af Klint in her studio at Hamngatan, Stockholm, circa 1895. Photograph: Courtesy of Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
It is a cold afternoon in February and I am about to catch a plane to Stockholm in pursuit of a Swedish artist whom most people have never heard of: Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). I am hoping to find out more about an extraordinary story – a secret life that was not destined to stay secret. I consider a photograph of her – a daguerreotype, taken in 1885, at the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm, from which she graduated in 1887 as a traditional landscape, portrait and botanical painter. The scene is formally set up. She holds a palette in her left hand, an open parasol is behind her. Her face is inward, patient, unexceptional. There is nothing to suggest that this woman, on the quiet, was about to produce breathtaking abstract art as if she was painting in the 21st century – and, in 1906, before Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian.
A second photograph, although unpeopled, will tell more. It is of a room furnished with a cluster of chairs including a decorative rocking chair. A plume of feathers fans out above a small table. And it was in this room that, every week for 10 years (1896-1906), Af Klint conducted seances with four other female artists, “the Five” (de Fem). She was the group’s founder and medium (their experiments with automatic writing and drawing predated the surrealists by decades). It was here, in 1904, that Af Klint received a “commission” from an entity named Amaliel who told her to paint on “an astral plane” and represent the “immortal aspects of man”. Between 1906-1915, there followed 193 paintings – an astonishing outpouring – known as the Paintings for the Temple. Whatever one’s misgivings about the occult, she worked as if possessed – in the grip of what can only be described as inspiration. She explained that the pictures were painted “through” her with “force” – a divine dictation: “I had no idea what they were supposed to depict… I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.”
‘A cartographer of the spirit’: Hilma af Klint at the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm, 1885. Photograph: Courtesy of Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
It is as if Af Klint has appeared out of nowhere – inconveniently for art historians. And the question she raises will not recede: was she a quirky outsider, or was she Europe’s first abstract painter, central to the history of abstract art?
She stipulated in her will that her work should not be shown until 20 years after her death
And why are we only hearing about her now? Hilma af Klint must partly answer – or answer for – this herself. When she died, aged 81, in 1944, she stipulated in her will that her work – 1,200 paintings, 100 texts and 26,000 pages of notes – should not be shown until 20 years after her death. It was not until the 1986 Los Angeles show The Spiritual in Art that her work was seen in public, and although other shows have followed, it is through Stockholm’s sensational 2013 exhibition, Pioneer of Abstraction, that she has blazed into view internationally – it was the most popular exhibition the Moderna Museet has ever held. And now, thanks to this show, she is coming to London’s Serpentine Gallery in an exhibition entitled Painting the Unseen (3 March – 22 May). A thrilling selection from the Paintings for the Temple will include the most staggering of all her works: a group of works called the Ten Largest (eight of which will be shown). These pictures, oils and tempera on paper, are more than 10 feet tall: free-wheeling, psychedelic, animated with fat snail shells, perky inverted commas, unspooling threads, against orange, rose and dusky blue. Man’s evolution is their sober subject, but their gaiety recalls Matisse (Af Klint predates him too).Advertisement
If I had to sum up the work, I’d borrow William Blake’s words: “Energy is eternal delight.” This is painting to gladden the eye (even before you have mugged up on the symbolism). And the Serpentine’s vote of confidence in it could not be clearer: she is the earliest painter to be shown in a one-person exhibition at the gallery.
On Thursday morning, walking to the Moderna Museet, I am struck by the uncanny silence in Stockholm, the wide pavements for crowds that never materialise, the sense that everything is clean and cold, candles glimpsed through every window, great white boats parked on the water. There is a feeling that everything about this handsome city is a pledge against the dark, a wait for the light. The water has splintered ice in it, clinking as if in a cocktail glass. And it was here that Hilma was born on 26 October 1862. I am about to meet her great-nephew, Johan af Klint, and Iris Müller-Westermann, curator of the Af Klint show. And I am thinking of Hilma’s attempts to access the other side as I prepare in a modern, seance-free way to summon her.
While waiting for Johan to arrive, Müller-Westermann – her brimming enthusiasm for Af Klint infectious – tells me how the 2013 show’s popularity exceeded her wildest dreams. She describes “nice mothers, in control and perfectly dressed – it is chic to come to this museum – who found themselves crying but unable to explain”. The show moved men too – it was “fantastic”, she says. She had not realised Hilma would touch people in this way. It is obvious how personal this painter is to Müller-Westermann – the life and the work – how anxious she is that the artist be understood. She does not care whether or not she is Europe’s first abstract painter. What she is passionate about is that art-historical wrangles should not get in the way of work that needs to be seen.
‘Staggering’: The Ten Largest, Youth, 1907. Photograph: Albin Dahlström/Courtesy of Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
In MoMA’s magisterial, blockbuster show of 2012, Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925, Af Klint was excluded. Reflex alarm at the occult seems to have been the explanation. What was harder to fathom was curator Leah Dickerman’s contention that Af Klint disqualifies herself by not having defined her paintings as art. Isn’t it amazing, I remark, how conservative art historians who specialise in the radical can be?Advertisement
“Hilma is a disturbing artist,” she responds excitedly. “We ask: what does it mean? Do we rewrite art history? Can we get away with saying she is an outsider? Can we put her in a box? Hilma was no layman, she was a trained and talented artist who knew about colour and composition.” She adds: “Creativity is bigger than art history. Hilma is like Leonardo – she wanted to understand who we are as human beings in the cosmos.” For Müller-Westermann, Af Klint is as important to Sweden as Münch to Norway.
Is it said that Hilma first become interested in the occult after the death of her 10-year-old sister Hermina. At 18, she helped her poor sister accept she was dying of flu. But Müller-Westermann sees this as too narrow a way in. Hilma was “mathematical, scientific, musical – curious”. Spiritualism, she reminds us, was more intellectually respectable then. Yeats, Mahler, Mondrian, Kandinsky – all were in its thrall. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Anthroposophy by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1912 – Hilma engaged with both. Müller-Westermann explains: “You have to understand this was the age when natural sciences went beyond the visible: Heinrich Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves [1886], Wilhelm Röntgen invented the x-ray [1895].” (With pleasing serendipity, the news about the proof of gravitational waves breaks while I am in Sweden – how Af Klint would have loved that.)
It is tempting to tell her story from a feminist point of view – but she was no feminist, and the truth is that she was better off as a female artist in Scandinavia (where they were permitted to work alongside men) than she would have been elsewhere in Europe. Having said that, Müller-Westermann is lightly contemptuous of her male counterparts: “Kandinsky was a super-smart lawyer who knew how to sell himself. It was all about ego. Men say: ‘Things come to me – I’m a genius.’ Hilma was more humble. For 10 years, she trained. She felt ready to trust in something she could not explain. She was about something bigger than ego. She had to ask: do I dare do this?”Advertisement
Fortunately, Af Klint was grounded. She was a conduit first, then an interpreter. She became a scholar of her own work, producing a beautiful and botanically precise symbolic lexicon. It cannot be easily telescoped, but these symbols dominate: spirals (evolution), U (the spiritual world), W (matter) and overlapping discs (unity). Yellow and roses (pleasingly) stood for masculinity. Blue and lilacs meant femininity. She may have been influenced by Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810). Yellow was “next to the night”. Blue was “next to darkness”. Green was perfect harmony. She explored dualities – including male and female sexuality – but unity was always her goal (ironically for a female artist working alone).
A room in the Moderna Museet has been dedicated to Klint, and it is here we are to meet Johan. It is dominated by Swan (No 15), one of the Temple paintings exploring male and female energy (pink/spiritual love, red/physical love). It is striking, simple, peaceful. Looking at this piece is Johan: a trim man in his 70s with a smart overcoat, an explosive laugh and boundless energy. He has travelled the world as a financier and describes himself as having an affinity with his great aunt as a “seeker” – his passions are for Buddhism (and tennis).
Hilma was born into a Protestant, bourgeois naval family with no interest in art. She grew up in Karlberg castle, a naval academy. Her father, Captain Victor af Klint, was an admiral, mathematician and occasional violinist – with, as his portrait reveals, the same steady blue stare as his daughter, and flourishing sideburns. He died in 1898. It was to her nephew Eric, Johan’s father, that Hilma left her work. Johan describes his father as “very kind”. To Hilma, he must have seemed a safe pair of hands. But how did he feel about her bequest?
The Dove, Noi by Hilma af Klint. Photograph: Albin Dahlström/Courtesy of Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk
“He was horrified,” Johan laughs, as we get into the car to drive to Adelsö, the island 45 minutes west of Stockholm where Hilma spent her childhood summers. “He was an admiral of the fleet. He tried to understand Hilma’s interests – but shook his head.”
Hilma died without a krona, leaving only her work behind. Johan does not know how she survived. After her death, the farmer who owned the land on which her house and studio were built (she had left central Stockholm by this time) declared his intention to burn it down. Eric had the daunting task of emptying the studio at speed: “He built wooden crates and rolled everything up – 1,000 or more paintings were stored in our attic. We had a tin roof. Imagine! In summer it was sometimes 30 degrees, in winter, minus 15. Terrible. It is a miracle the paintings survived.”
But how lucky, I say, that Eric did his conscientious best by her. Artists need other people. Daniel Birnbaum, director of Moderna Museet and co-curator of the Serpentine exhibition, when I phone him later, observes: “Where would Picasso have been without his critics, his mistresses, his gallery owners?” He marvels that: “During her lifetime, Af Klint had no lobby, zero, nothing. Her art was like a thought experiment: if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, did it fall?”
It is a very Swedish image. We cross the water on the ferry to Adelsö where many a tree might fall unobserved. It is overcast, sleety: not a day to reconjure a luminous childhood, although the place has bleak presence. We drive past pine, silver birch and bedraggled snow to Hanmora, a family farm that has seen better days (bought in 1800, since sold) and to neighbouring Tofta where Hilma stayed. It is easy to picture the freedom she felt here. You could walk wherever you liked, “as long as you behaved”. There was no such thing as trespassing. Johan describes blueberrying, mushrooming, sailing, deer, elk and all the birds that he, too, enjoyed here as a child. “But light is the greatest influence. The ‘blue hour’ – dawn and dusk. And, in early summer, everything is clean. This is the wonder: the year dies and is reborn.”
Hilma’s passion for the natural world connects her traditional and abstract work. She knew its plants (she studied Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist) and animals (she worked as a draughtsman for a veterinary institute). Johan later shows me, in his sitting room, an exquisitely imprecise blue landscape glimpsed through the golden branches of a tree. You can already see in it a shift towards the abstract. As Birnbaum brilliantly explains: “Dig down into nature and into cellular structures and you find abstraction there. She was into geometric abstraction; her vision was to do with evolutionary theory, the biomorphic – she was very up-to-date.” And he lists contemporary artists who have found inspiration in Af Klint: Cecilia Edefalk in Sweden, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in Paris, RH Quaytman in New York, and Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder (whose work will be shown at the Serpentine with Hilma af Klint).
Does Johan really believe she had the gift of prophecy? ‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘it is in our family’
But I am still in the dark about what she was like. Her personality? Johan hesitates – he was five when he met her. “She was very kind… reserved but not a recluse.” He probably does not remember more. Later, he emails me his father’s unpublished recollections. She had intensely blue eyes. She was tiny – about five feet – which makes her full-scale works all the more phenomenal. She painted on the ground (Johan detected, on one painting, a small footprint – Hilma was here). His father judged her unsentimental, no fantasist – high-minded. A word that reappears is “resolute”. She was a vegetarian. Like Chekhov’s Masha, she always wore black. “Life,” she declared, “is a farce if a person does not serve truth.” She sounds formidable – not cosy at all. But who knows? Did she have a sense of humour? “Oh yes,” says Johan.
She never married, although Johan says (tactfully, as if she might be listening in) that she had hoped to wed a man with an English name: Halliday. “That never materialised and she was sorry and there was a crisis.” He is hazy about the details. Later on, women seem to have answered her emotional needs. Johan mentions Gusten, one of her group, who died. Hilma poured her friend’s spirit into her painting.
Sometimes depression struck. In 1908, after making 111 paintings, she collapsed: “She had completed a painting every third day – including the 10 huge ones. She was exhausted.” And there was further reason for despond. That same year, Steiner was lecturing in Stockholm. She invited this charismatic man to see her paintings (Mondrian petitioned Steiner too, but always in vain). She had hoped he would interpret the work. Instead he advised: “No one must see this for 50 years.” For four years after this verdict she gave up painting and looked after her sightless mother. Johan shows me a photograph of Hilma at Hanmora, looking down with tenderness, a hand on her mother’s shoulder – the more sympathetic of clues to her character.
Back at Johan’s flat he shows me another photograph. It is a map, a “Sea atlas of Sweden and its islands” by Gustav af Klint (Hilma’s grandfather): intricate, beautiful, an astonishing labour based on the measurements he took around Viborg in the mid-1780s. I am dismissing this as irrelevant when it suddenly strikes me: Hilma was not as removed from her forebears as one might superficially suppose. She was a cartographer of the spirit. And she had an energy, zeal and perfectionism to equal her grandfather’s. She even thought in terms of maps. In an extraordinary, hair-raising watercolour, A Map of Great Britain (1932), she foresaw the second world war. A pale face blows fire towards Britain, darkness is about to engulf us. But does Johan really believe she had the gift of prophecy? “Oh yes,” he says, “it is in our family.”
The artist is said to have foreseen the second world war in this 1932 watercolour. Photograph: Albin Dahlström/SERPENTINE GALLERY
On the last morning in Stockholm I meet Patrick O’Neill, who married into the family, and runs the Hilma af Klint Foundation, set up in 1972 by Eric and until recently run by Johan. He says her work is now stored in a basement outside Stockholm, its market value tricky to assess. He explains that the foundation’s statutes require that Af Klint’s work be cared for, maintained and made accessible. But her abstracts have never been available on the international art market – it is one reason she has been off the radar. O’Neill believes this needs to change. His goal is simple: that she gets the attention she deserves.
He has no quarrel with the foundation’s stipulation that works such as the Temple cannot be sold – but Af Klint’s output was huge. His dream is to raise money to fund research into her work. Daniel Birnbaum’s slant on the future is different: he recommends the foundation donate selected works to museums internationally. “Why keep the paintings in a basement outside Stockholm? I’m not making a morally incorrect suggestion. Hilma was a secret painter with a group of women hiding in a studio in northern Europe. She was almost invisible.” And visibility, we agree, is all.
Just before leaving I meet Johan for a drive to the former navy graveyard Galärvarvskyrkogården, where Hilma is buried. He leads the way to a small stone set into the ground – modest compared with the flamboyant tombs surrounding it. It has started to snow and it is impossible to read the inscription. Johan brushes the snow away with a glove and reveals a name – Viktor af Klint. I am mystified, then I understand: she is buried with her father. Her name has gone. “We come and we vanish,” Johan says. But at least – as the Serpentine’s show will gloriously testify – she has not vanished without trace. Seventy years after her death, Hilma af Klint’s moment has come.
Hilma af Klint: Painting the Unseen is at the Serpentine Gallery, London W2, 3 March to 15 May
Verena Loewensberg (b. 1912 – d. 1986 Zurich, Switzerland) began her studies at the Basel trade school in 1927 where she was introduced to design and colour theory, then went on to a weaver apprenticeship as well as training in dance and choreopgraphy; the echoes of all these disciplines can be found in her work as an artist.
Verena Loewensberg
Between 1934 and 1936 Loewensberg visited Paris several times often accompanied by Max Bill, with whom she had a close lifelong friendship and who introduced her to the artists of the group ‘Abstraction-Création‘; Hans Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Theo van Doesburg, as well as Georges Vantongerloo who had a lasting effect on her work. As of 1936 she belonged to the Swiss avant-garde, while after the war she became known as the only female artist of the small circle of the Zurich Concrete, with Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse and Camille Graeser.
Although her work is fundamentally constructive in nature, it was also imbued with great freedom, poetry and musicality. Loewensberg worked with visual elements that seem contradictory: her work contains circular shapes, cloud forms, irregular pentagons and sharp and obtuse angles, as well as colours that the strict constructivists who only worked in primary colours would deem unacceptable. Obsessed with visual problems, she solved them with a clear and precise attitude, suppressing any handwritten trace on the canvas.
Verena Loewensberg
From the sixties onwards, her work is of an independence and autonomy that eludes classification. She created an extensive series of reduced, purely coloured compositions that tackle the problem of figure and reason repeatedly, as well as radically reduced, purely linear black and white compositions finding barring at the time of colour field painting, conceptual painting and minimalism. In 1992 Loewensberg had a Retrospective at Aargau Art Gallery, Aarau and in 2007 had a large-scale exhibition at House Konstruktiv, Zurich
In 1936 she painted the first concrete pictures and helped in 1937 with the founding of an association of modern artists in Zurich. In the center were the Zürcher Konkreten. Loewensberg associated with Max Bill, Camille Graeser and Richard Paul Lohse. She participated in their successful group exhibitions. In addition, she was inspired by the work of Georges Vantongerloo and Piet Mondrian.Throughout her life, Verena Loewensberg refused to engage in any sort of restricting theoretical discourse. Her artistic oeuvre therefore covered an enormous scope, ranging from color field painting to monochromatic works. She occupied herself with the square, rectangle, circle and line, as well as with color and its interaction. Between mathematical principles of order and intuitive compositions, between emptiness and abundance, between non-color and colorfulness, between rest and motion, she created a stimulating interplay. Her stylistically diversified oeuvre started out from an open concept of concreteness, which bears witness to the artist’s intellectual and artistic independence as well as to the up-to-date character of her artistic contribution to this day.
Una traducción del ensayo, “Making Art Concrete” de Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
Ensayo: Pia Gottschaller Traducción: Carolina Azuero Gutiérrez
Cuando, hacia 1960, el artista del neoconcretismo Hélio Oiticica declaró que “Todo arte verdadero no separa la técnica de la expresión”1, los doce artistas de Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil de los que se hablará a continuación, ya llevaban alrededor de 25 años de trayectoria con su propia experimentación vanguardista. Las obras creadas durante dicha exploración (pinturas, objetos escultóricos y obras en categorías híbridas como los “no-objetos”) se caracterizan por un vocabulario geométrico extremadamente reducido, cuya aparente simplicidad a menudo no deja ver el enfoque meticuloso de los artistas hacia los materiales y la técnica. La relativa escasez de elementos compositivos que distrajeran la vista, permitió a los artistas del concretismo y neoconcretismo enfocar toda su atención en cada pequeño detalle: el método exacto para pintar una línea recta, por ejemplo, o el proceso empleado para lograr una superficie perfectamente homogénea. Su lucha para hacer realidad conceptos utópicos con medios ordinarios es palpable en las superficies de sus obras de arte y, en la medida en la que los artistas aceptaban o rechazaban la presencia de trazos individuales de la mano humana en sus obras, muestra dónde se ubicaban dentro de la tradición del modernismo abstracto. El filósofo y escritor italiano Umberto Eco escribió que “una obra es a un tiempo la huella de lo que quería ser y de lo que es de hecho, aun cuando no coincidan los dos valores”2. A continuación, se presenta un análisis de la brecha entre el propósito y la materialización basado en el estudio de hechos históricos, textos sobre historia del arte, documentos tales como manifiestos, declaraciones de los artistas y entrevistas, así como información obtenida por medio de la observación detallada de las obras y análisis científicos realizados de las mismas. Al recrear la génesis de este conjunto de obras provenientes de la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, este estudio pretende brindar una contribución inicial para una mejor comprensión de un periodo de la historia del arte que, en ciertos aspectos, hasta el momento solo se conoce de forma somera. Los hallazgos de este estudio se pueden organizar y presentar de distintas maneras, ya que las obras seleccionadas fueron creadas por artistas que trabajaron en distintos países y ciudades durante periodos de tiempo que solo se superponen parcialmente. A pesar de que existen numerosas confluencias en el desarrollo y los objetivos de los distintos artistas, la presente discusión sigue un orden principalmente cronológico, desde 1946 hasta 1962. Dentro de dicha cronología, la discusión se divide en dos categorías geográficas generales: por un lado, Buenos Aires y Montevideo en la región del Río de la Plata y, por el otro, São Paulo y Río de Janeiro. De las obras de arte concreto que se presentan a continuación, las más tempranas fueron creadas por artistas de la primera región desde 1945/46, mientras que la obra brasileña más temprana que….
