Breakthrough: A conversation with Fernando Cocchiarale about the exhibition “Ruptura” and the foundation of Concrete art

BY CYNTHIA GARCIA

Judith Lauand (1922), Espiral (Spiral), 1956, enamel paint on eucatex, 40 cm diameter.

The exhibition “Ruptura” (Rupture), first presented in New York in 2017, is now in São Paulo at Galeria Luciana Brito, with fifty small to medium-sized artworks by eleven pioneering artists of Brazil’s signature movement, Concrete art.

Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998), Arranjo de Três Formas Semelhantes Dentro de Um Círculo, 1953, enamel paint on Kelmite cardboard, 60 x 60 cm

“Brazil is a romantic country. Concrete art was a movement that needed discipline, and Brazil also needed discipline, a certain character, order, to educate the people. I think that Concretism was important in this sense,” renowned art critic Mario Pedrosa said just months before his death in 1981, in describing why the movement flourished in the country. It also explains the frenzy around Swiss artist and former Bauhaus student Max Bill, who landed in São Paulo in the 1940s and gained guru-like status among a group of young artists who were captivated by the concepts of Concrete art he promoted, as first expressed ten years earlier by Dutch artist Van Doesburg in Paris. Backed by the new theories and with representational art no longer able to answer their issues with the industrial world, Grupo Ruptura (Rupture Group) was founded in 1952 in São Paulo.

Anatol Wladyslaw (1913-2004), Untitled, 1953, gouache on paper, 50,5 x 35 cm.

Concrete art advocated a wholesome revolutionary practice based on Constructivism and Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, wrapped up in the Bauhaus experience. In the words of the group’s mentor Waldemar Cordeiro, “Concrete art synthesizes all modern art tendencies that developed quantitative methods of structuring images based on media arising from progress in mechanics and engineering; it poses an extensive repertoire of image processing using machine language. Quantification in Concrete art, however, does not mean numerical conversion of geometric aspects but instead capturing the digital structure of perceptual analog values. In this respect, Concrete art may be described as more akin to Gestalt psychology than to geometry.”

Hermelindo Fiaminghi (1920-2004), Untitled, 1956, enamel paint on Eucatex, 44,5 x 44,5 cm.

Among the seven original founding members, four were European immigrants fleeing the Nazis: Austrian Lothar Charroux (1912-1987), Hungarian Kazmer Féjer (1923-1989), as well as Anatol Wladyslaw (1913-2004) and Leopoldo Haar (1910-1954), both from Poland. The Brazilian-born artists in the group where Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998), Hermelindo Fiaminghi (1920-2004), Maurício Nogueira Lima (1930-1999) and Luiz Sacilotto (1924-2003). Following the Bauhaus credo, most of them expanded their practices and contributed to the fields of industrial design, architecture and landscape design.

Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), limited edition of aluminum lamp with discs originally designed for his landscape projects, 1957:2018, 54 x 30 x 30 cm, ed:20.

This exhibition also launches a special edition of twenty units of a shrewd modernist 1957 garden lamp with six parallel aluminum disks originally designed by Waldemar Cordeiro for his signature landscape projects. Charismatic and argumentative, Cordeiro was a visionary who died just as his ideas were gaining notoriety outside the intellectual circle. He was the group’s spokesman, author of the Rupture Manifest (1952), and also penned harsh art chronicles published regularly in the mainstream media throughout the 1950s. “The fascination with the machine led to the demise of naturalistic beauty” was his poetic explanation of the advent of Concrete art. His interpretation of its rigor was expressed as, “the precision of art is not a craftsmanship precision, but one of meanings.” But when it came to the dispute with Rio’s rival Neo-Concrete group, Cordeiro lashed out, “[They] have not yet given the qualitative leap that will allow them to state the problem of vanguard art in a straightforward manner,” and to deepen the antagonism with Neo-concrete’s mentor, he whipped, “I no longer doubt Ferreira Gullar is aspiring the impossible: a Concrete art that is no longer concrete.”

Kazmer Féjer (1923-1989), Plexiglass 01, c. 1970, plexiglass cast, 22 x 85 x 35 cm.

This must-see show at Luciana Brito also honors the last two original Concrete artists still living: the only female member, Judith Lauand, now ninety-six years old, and poet Augusto de Campos, eighty-seven, whose contribution to the current event comes in the form of a book with concrete poems hailing his colleagues.

One of South America’s most prominent art experts, Fernando Cocchiarale, wrote the exhibition’s presentation. For more than three decades, the Rio-born scholar, curator and author has been a teacher at PUC-RJ University and at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Laje, both in his native town. From 2000 to 2007, he was chief curator of Rio’s MAM, among other important posts in the field of visual arts. In 2013-2014, Cocchiarale co-curated, along with Arlindo Machado and Analívia Cordeiro, the exhibition that won the year’s critics award, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia Exata” (Exact Fantasy), at Itaú Cultural in São Paulo and in Rio’s Paço Imperial.

Manifesto Ruptura (1952) by Waldemar Cordeiro (1925-1973), poster design by Leopoldo Haar (1910-1954)

Fernando, tell us about the onset of the influential Manifesto Ruptura.
On December 9, 1952, the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo opened the first show of Grupo Ruptura, the pioneering São Paulo branch of the Concretist movement. That day saw the release of the group’s founding document, the “Ruptura Manifesto” by Waldemar Cordeiro, theorist and spokesman for the group’s ideas. This concise text exposed a set of new spatial, chromatic and formal principles with a rigor never before seen in the history of Brazilian art. It conveyed the meaning of the rupture proposed by its signatories Lothar Charoux, Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Kazmer Fejer, Leopoldo Haar, Luis Sacilotto and Anatol Wladyslaw, later joined by Hermelindo Fiaminghi, Judith Lauand and Maurício Nogueira Lima.

Leopold Haar (1910-1954), photo document of undated work, 18 x 24 cm.

What did the manifesto advocate?
The manifesto included a list of trends that were the group’s artistic rivals, whose apparent modernity concealed their incomprehension of the new, as they were producing “new forms out of old principles.” These tendencies encompassed “all the varieties and hybrids of naturalism; the mere negation of naturalism, that is, the ‘wrong’ naturalism of children, the insane, the ‘primitive’ artists, the expressionists, the surrealists, etc.; the hedonist non-figurativism spawned by gratuitous taste that seeks the mere excitement of pleasure or displeasure.”

Lothar Charroux (1912-1987), Untitled, 1956, India ink on paper, 34 x 50,8 cm. Courtesy Galeria Luciana Brito

What set apart Grupo Ruptura from other vanguard movement of its day?
The artists of the “Ruptura Manifesto” questioned their contemporary adversary, informal abstractionism, and all the figurative trends that had for centuries dominated Brazilian art. This simultaneity of trends of various historical periods from which they broke away in a single manifesto revealed the limits of the initial modernism in Brazil. Unlike similar movements in Europe, it did not promote a spatial or discursive break away from the principles of classical art, nor did it generate any “ism”—a factor that lent a radical, entirely new and unique sense to the rupture headed up by Cordeiro.

Luiz Sacilotto (1924-2003), Concreção 5837 (Concretion 5837), 1958, enamel paint on aluminum, 50 x 80 cm.

How do you analyze the movement in relation to modernism per se?
Processes of modernization effectively founded in the European paradigm of rupture were very rare. They were exceptions especially if we consider the unfinished experiences of modernization in Latin America, Asia and Africa. The issues conveyed by the group were of another, more profound and radical order: to break away from the colonial past that hindered the effective modernization of Brazilian art and of the country itself.

Mauricio Nogueira Lima (1930-1999), Objeto Rítmico nº 4 (Rythmic Object Nº4), 1953, automotive paint on chipboard sheet, 50 x 60 cm.

What is the contribution of Waldemar Cordeiro, main theorist of the movement?
For two decades Cordeiro’s participation was decisive in consolidating São Paulo and Brazilian vanguards. Founded on the principles proposed by Concrete art, he promoted a rupture from Brazilian figurative modernism of the first half of the twentieth century. He also contributed to the theoretic and practical integration between art, landscaping, urban planning, criticism of art and politics. Not only that, he also engaged himself in the critical debate with the concrete vanguard group from Rio de Janeiro, Grupo Frente, the embryo of Neoconcretism. In the 1960s, Cordeiro  approached the worldwide emergence of Neofigurativism. Between 1968 and 1973, the year he passed away, he dedicated himself mainly to the investigation of computer art.

Waldemar Cordeiro, Untitled, 1952.

To wrap up, what is your view on the legacy of the Grupo Ruptura?
The group’s unprecedented renewal became fundamental in unfolding important repertoires that today constitutes the vast, multifaceted and complex Brazilian contemporary art.

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.

Born: September 13, 1902, Zürich, Switzerland

Died: September 16, 1988, Zürich, Switzerland

Art forms: Painting

Associated periods or movements: Concrete art

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.