Feminist art collective in Berlin

“We live in compromised times in which the allegory of an uncompromised self is isolationist, privileged, and dangerous.” So opens this book on motherhood and art-making seen through a feminist lens. The Berlin-based group Maternal Fantasies continues, “We reject the reproduction of social structures, which exclude children from most public dynamics and surrender mothers into domestic isolation suffocated by underpaid and/or unpaid care work. As artists, researchers, and mothers, our economic and political survival demands a recognition of our domestic labor and the context in which we produce creative/intellectual labor (work which is often also poorly compensated).”

The introductory artist statement raises a pertinent question. “How can art exist as a site for thinking of the maternal as a participatory practice, an affective enmeshment, and a situated political prompt – in order to promote new modes of thinking-with?” This raises the following issue for those who wish to appreciate the art documented in this book. If an artist becomes detached from aesthetic criteria, how are those without a personal stake in the art able to assess and absorb the resultant art? How are we to judge the worth of art?

The authors state that because art production – like childcare – is driven by love, it goes uncompensated. By their own admission, these artists have set themselves to making art that is defiantly not commercial (films, performances, installations, interactive art) and also complain that their art is under-recognised and uncompensated. Of course, it is possible that the art that they consider most appropriate for their maternal interests are best expressed through non-commercial forms. Yet, how could poor income from collective art of an ephemeral nature be otherwise? If one did apply some measurement to the rewards of art, how could any meaningful system of payment exist?

This is a problem which is (at least partly) due to the artists’ resolute rejection of the commodification of art production. If one wishes to live on an anti-capitalist basis then this is admirable but it necessarily precludes an obvious way of funding art production – selling art to private buyers. Readers may be sympathetic to the plight of poor artists, but they may be significantly less sympathetic towards a group of artists who complain of poverty and simultaneously reject the most obvious route towards compensation.  

The egalitarian approach extends to organisation of projects. “In order to form an international and interdisciplinary collective consisting of diverse personas with differing temperaments, talents, and capacities. Maternal Fantasies has developed a rotational format as a working method. Teams take turns in conceptualizing, organizing, leading, and administering the different group projects. During our immersive residencies and studio sessions, we distribute and rotate the individual tasks, which may include conceptual development, directing, performance, pre- and post-production, marketing, grant-writing, and administration, as well as cooking, cleaning, and childcare.”

The poems and extracts from letters and journals present the thoughts of the women. There is a short entry on the practicalities and costs of daily life, which are enlightening and relatable. These outshine the photographs, which are underwhelming. The performances and events may have been more meaningful and satisfying but they cannot be properly evaluated on this evidence. The descriptions of events are rather vague. They seem to range from protests to children’s activities to mutual support. Some of the activities will be familiar to those who know the communes of the 1970s and squats of the 1980s. Many of the projects involved the children. There are some suggested projects outlined in the book. As art, it does not seem very pleasing but then the art was not made for me. As a book, Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) is engrossing and (inadvertently) revealing for the general art follower.

A long essay recounts the making of a group film, interrupted by COVID-19 lockdown. For all the freethinking regarding gender roles and art making, not a single doubt is expressed in this book about the efficacy or justice of indiscriminate lockdown of a healthy and free populace. Authoritarianism seems okay if the excuse is plausible. There is disappointing scarcity of resistance apparent in the writings. (They did not see one another during some stretches of lockdown.) If these mothers had wished to inculcate independence in their children, shouldn’t they have been defying arbitrary and cruel restrictions and presenting brave community action as a defiant response to the authorities?

There seems at least an apparent conflict between feminism and motherhood. The doctrines of female independence work against the maintenance of a nuclear family, which provides – or at least, did previously provide – a home and income to support the mother and child. The demands of motherhood can be viewed as a constraint on self-actualisation. This schism between personal duty and political action create friction. Always there is the contradiction inherent in this project. There is the recurrent focus on the personal experience (pregnancy, motherhood, emotion, memory, practicalities) and the insistent intrusion of politics. “As a collective, we strongly oppose the reduction of motherhood to a singular experience, which our individualistic Western culture tends to do.” In such entries, Maternal Fantasies appears driven by race and class guilt – a purgative, Spartan, communistic sisterhood, done to demonstrate goodness to spite the capitalist society which funds the collective. The obvious enjoyment of the members and their children undertaking the activities is heartwarming but undercut by the relentless feminism. Feminism, as a branch of progressivism/socialism, demands that “the personal is political” in an insistence of enforcing a joyless sex solidarity, contrary to the intimacy and spontaneity of family and parental relationships.  

Another impetus maybe a desire for a disparate (largely expatriate) group to connect. The group is centred in Berlin incidentally. While the group – very multicultural and majority foreign-born – is strongly involved in their own feelings and relationships with their children, they rarely discuss interactions with non-artist Berliners, let alone other Germans. If this group is so concerned to form resilient communities, why does it seem so isolated from the native population? Why does the setting – cultural, linguistic, economic, architectural – not form a greater influence upon their outlook and art work? The collective was formed because of the rootless nature of the lives of the artists, something common in Berlin. “Having moved to Berlin to study more than a decade ago, most of us did not have the social infrastructure and network of extended family, aunts, or grandparents around for support, nor were we fortunate enough or willing to outsource care work to nannies and care workers from more precarious backgrounds than ourselves.” This anger directed at capitalist representative democracy could (perhaps with greater justification) be turned on the chimeras of feminist autonomy and socialist community, with their attendant illusions of self-sufficiency and self-actualisation.

Having lived in Berlin myself, I know it is possible to separate oneself from German Berliners and from the rest of Germany completely. However, I never did and always made an effort to understand and interact with Berliners, even if I did not have the money or opportunity to travel Germany. Berlin has hardly ever seemed as parochial and tiny as it does in Re-Assembling Motherhood(s). Of course, the totality of their existences cannot be measured in a single short book, but even so, this inward-looking approach is saddening.

The absence of men is expected. Today, for the anti-capitalist woman artist in Berlin, where she supplicates for income from a state-benefits system and artists’-grant panel, the state becomes father. Regrettably, the state is as tyrannically unreasonable as any bullying father, more controlling than any jealous husband, more intrusive than any village priest and more callous than any groping employer. The potential control, independence, dignity and privacy of a nuclear family seem – at the moment – a better bet than the modern authoritarian bio-security state.  

Overall, this is a volume for those interested in feminist art, women’s creative collectives and those studying the sociology of art.

Sascia Bailer, Magdalena Kallenberger, Maicyra Leão Teles e Silva (eds.), Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices, Onomatopee, 2021, paperback, 180pp, 60 col. illus., €18, ISBN 978 9493 148574

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Review: “The World According to Colour”

James Fox, The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, Allen Lane

“In 1856, eighteen-year-old William Henry Perkin was at home, messing around with the dreck of a failed experiment. He had not made the compound he expected. When the black sediment was diluted on blotting paper it flowered purple — the rarest of pure colours. This dyeing substance (mauveine) would revolutionise the worlds of fashion, furnishing and art, making Perkin the equivalent of a multi-millionaire. Aniline dyes would provide a range of vivid, cheap colours in a world where colour had previously come from substances that were rare, expensive and poisonous.”This is one story from James Fox’s book The World According to Colour. Fox treats the seven colours of black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple and green, providing stories related to pigments, perceptions and uses of these colours. There are biological responses to colour. We react strongly to red (colour of blood) and feel instinctive aversion to aposematic colour combinations (the black-and-yellow stripes of wasp and snakes is now a standardised hazard warning signifier). Divergences between cultural connotations are familiar. Different societies marry and mourn in different colours.

“Conceptual linguistic constructions around colour extend from figures of speech (“caught red-handed”, “blackmail”, “yellow belly”) to the existence (and absence) of words….”

To read the full article go to The Critic here: https://thecritic.co.uk/out-of-the-blue/

(c) 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Review: “British Orientalisms, 1759-1835”

“The main objective of this study is to historicize the different and shifting modes through and ways in which Britons may have conceived of themselves and their nation as ‘open’ to the East across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” So writes James Watt, historian of the Britain in the Eighteenth Century, in the introduction to British Orientalisms, 1759-1835. It opens with the “year of victories”. In 1759 Britain won victories over the French in Madras, the West Indies, Quebec and Minden and the French invasion of the British Isles failed. It saw Britain become the supreme world power and the consolidation of a worldwide empire. It was also a time when intimations of corruption of the state and British identity as the British were forced to administer and mix with nations distance and dissimilar to her neighbouring nations. Watt concludes his study in 1835 with T.B. Macauley’s Minute on Indian Education (1835), a paper in which the colonial administrator demeaned native Indian culture and recommended the active promotion of British standards via education of Indians. He recommended the replacement of Persian with English as the language of administration. “[…] Macauley serves as a fitting end point since the ethnocentrism of his ‘Minute’ ostensibly signals a decisive transformation in British self-understanding: rather than thinking of Britons as in any way disoriented by colonial contact, it instead calls for the nation to wield its civilizational authority so as to afford moral direction to its colonies.” Watt uses literary texts of the period as a lens through which to examine these issues.  

Watt analyses Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), an apologue (moral tale). Prince Rasselas tires of entertainment in the cossetted kingdom of the Happy Valley. He escapes with his sister and travels to Egypt. However, he is disillusioned of exotic sights and returns to his kingdom. It was criticised as providing little by way of local colour, thereby frustrating the expectations of those wanting the detail and variety that they expected of tales of the Orient. Johnson was known to be an opponent of imperial conquest and sceptical about the spread of Christianity among non-Western peoples. Rasselas is considered an indirect satire of imperialism and a recommendation for the British to stay on their isle, their own Happy Valley.  

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760) was a series of fictional dispatches from Lien Chi Altangi, a Chinese traveller recording England. His errors and misinterpretations both make him a figure of fun and allow Goldsmith to satirise the manners and customs of England. Altangi delights in vivid descriptions of the East and lionises the warrior spirit of the English. In texts of the time, “Goldsmith’s various narrators and authorial personae at different times share in popular exhilaration at British military triumphs and stand back from the crowd in order to warn that victory comes at a price.” (Namely, the difficulty of governing such a vast and diverse empire.)  

The rise of the East India Company, which provided the foundation for British imperial rule in India, provided opportunity for British administrators and traders (and their servants and families) to visit India and leave written records. The records varied from letters and reports to poems and novels, all of which contributed to the British public perception of India. Charles Johnstone’s The Pilgrim (1775) was the fictional tale of a woman’s adventures in India before returning home. Watt considers the story to be critical of Major-General Robert Clive, whose administration was considered to have contributed to the 1770 Bengal famine. In Samuel Foote’s play The Nabob (1772) “Sir Matthew Mite attempts to use his riches [obtained by trade in India] to gain the hand of a baronet’s daughter and to buy his way into Parliament, and the mixture of social ambition, conspicuous consumption, and Orientalized manners that he displays identifies him as a composite portrait of Clive and other prominent contemporaries. The Nabob satirizes Mite’s efforts to pass as a gentleman and to legitimize his new wealth […]”

Other accounts were lewder and indulged the readers’ libidinal curiosity – but in doing so they tended to confirm the corrupting and decadent nature of the East, region of the feminine and sensual abandon. Hartly House, Calcutta (1789, publ. 2007) by Phebe Gibbs includes an account of a rape by a British man of an Indian woman, which likely resulted in capital punishment. Although the author declared that such crimes were “more oftener perpetrated than detected”, it shows that far from impunity, British people in India could expect equal punishment. It also shows that British writers approved of this legal equality in regard to serious crimes.   

In The History of Women (1779), William Alexander discussed the situation of women in the East. He advanced the idea that as society advanced, it freed women from labour but that this freedom caused now-indolent women to gravitate to corruption and pursuit of vice. Thus, financial and material security led women to become less maternal and faithful, more selfish and depraved. “[…] female virtue is becoming ever more scarce, as the feminine qualities of care and concern for others ‘diminish gradually, in proportion as women advance more toward that perfection, or rather imperfection of politeness’.” Materialism undercuts morality; freedom leads to transgression; absence of hunger heightens the drive to satiate carnal desires. According to Alexander, this is seen no better than in the harems of the East, where there is nothing more for a woman to do than indulge herself – she is literally permitted to do nothing else.

One interpretation of Orientalism is one of horizon expansion rather than a means of “otherising” or “exoticising” inhabitants of foreign societies. An example is Sir William Jones’s Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772) and his Persian grammar (1771). Jones was a judge in Bengal and developed into a fluent Persian speaker. He developed the idea of Indo-Aryan cultures and languages sharing a root – the first time that English language had been associated with non-European languages. Jones hugely advanced British understanding of India and Persia. He translated Hindu myths and poems into English; he codified Hindu and Moghul law. Upon his premature death at the age of 47, Jones was idolised for his erudition and sympathy for the peoples of India.

Robert Southey’s Thabala the Destroyer (1801) “is an important text for my book as a whole since it both helped to establish the Orientalist epic poem as a medium of political engagement and in its own distinctive fashion extended the Jonesian project of cultural translation.” Watt dissects the politics and symbolism of Southey’s epic (which was heavily footnoted by the poet), showing how the attitudes and ideas relate to the wider trends. Roderick the Last of the Goths (1814) about the king of the Visigoths battling the Moors in Spain. It is compared by Watt to Thabala and assessed as an allegory of Continental politics under Napoleon. Watt notes how contemporary critics responded to it. Southey led the way for the Romantics taking up Orientalist epics. Thabala was followed by Byron’s The Giaour (1813), Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818)

As Watt demonstrates, the response of the British to newly gained empire was mixed and often hostile to the corruption, death and cultural influence that came with subjugating and administering peoples of far-off lands. Far from welcoming the glory of supremacy, British people saw empire as an enterprise that brought out the worst in individuals – the temptation to carnally sin, the opportunity to abandon land, family and religion and the lure of gold and indolent life were identified (with some evidence) as ever-present threats to Englishmen.

Watt’s assessment of British writing reflecting upon Empire in the Enlightenment-Romantic period is well grounded, thoughtful and catholic. British Orientalisms helps to explain the complexities of responses to empire and dismantle recent narratives that are driven more by present-day politics than evidence.

James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759-1835, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 285pp + vii, hardback, £75, ISBN 9781108472661

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my books and art visit www.alexanderadams.art

Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Algers

[Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O), 1955, Privatsammlung
© Bridgeman Images / Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021]

This publication is a catalogue for an exhibition in Berlin (Museum Berggruen/Nationalgalerie, Berlin). The review is from the catalogue.

In 1954 Picasso began a series of variants of Eugene Delacroix’s Les Femmes d’Alger (1834). This series was apparently prompted by three proximate causes. Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s new mistress and future wife, reminded him of a figure in Delacroix’s painting; the news coverage of the Algerian civil war kept Algeria in the public’s attention. The death of Matisse – the only contemporary artist that Picasso considered a true equal and rival – left Picasso in search of artists that he considered historical peers. Matisse (as was Delacroix) a genuine Orientalist. Matisse (unlike Picasso) had visited North Africa to paint, thus he had had memories and insights of the Orient that Picasso did not have. Matisse painted odalisques long after his trips to North Africa. One recurrent motif of Matisse’s (while residing in Nice in the 1920s) were of French models in harem pants, reclining in the painter’s hotel room. This exhibition included nine of these, plus art by Delacroix, Ingres, Matisse, Manet and others. The graphics by Picasso include drawings and prints. The exhibition includes art by contemporary Algerian artists.

[Henri Fantin-Latour, Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, d’après Eugène
Delacroix (Frauen von Algier in ihrem Gemach, nach Eugène Delacroix), 1875/76, Musée du
Louvre, Musée national Eugène Delacroix, Paris, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand
Palais / Harry Bréjat]

Delacroix executed his painting in 1834, following his return from North Africa. It shows three women in an apartment (the artist made a point of calling it an “apartment”, not a harem) with a black servant. The walls are tiled and the floor covered with rugs. The figures sit around a ceramic brazier and a hookah pipe. Delacroix did several versions, including a print, which reduced the scene to two figures, one baring her breasts. Delacroix’s paintings (including street scenes and a Jewish wedding) became touchstones for both Orientalists and radicals. The Orientalists appreciated the subjects and the authenticity; the radicals admired the creativity and handling.

[Henri Matisse, Odalisque au coffret rouge (Odaliske mit roter Schatulle), 1927,
Musée Matisse, Nice. Legs de Madame Henri Matisse, 1960 © François Fernandez /
Succession H. Matisse / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021]

Over the winter of 1954-5, Picasso painted 15 oil-on-canvas variants (given letters A to O) and made supplementary pictures. Picasso turned Delacroix’s chaste women in nude sexual athletes, twisting like tops. Poses are like those in the paintings and drawings are compared to a sequence of thumbnail sketches the young Picasso had drawn in 1905. The Algeriennes’ angular flat forms are bent like cardboard echo the planar sculptures Picasso was making at the time. While there is a sexual dimension to the variants, it seems more of a test of ability, imagination and audacity – taking on one of the masterworks of a great masters of French art.

[Eugène Delacroix, Deux femmes arabes assises (Zwei sitzende arabische Frauen),
ca.1832/34, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques, ParisPhoto, © RMNGrand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado]

The initial versions are small – obviously started on blank canvases that were just to hand. The lines are curving. The figures’ positions are accurate to the original but they are nude. The four figures are reduced to three occasionally because Picasso tended to enlarge the figures, which meant he could not accommodate four figures in a painting. By canvas C, the figure on the right in reclining on her back. The lines become straighter. The later versions (H-M) are in grisaille, like ink wash drawings. These are probably the most satisfying because they tamp down the sexual provocation and the play of lines, forms and facets replaces the strident colours. Two are single figure studies. The final version is the most complete and settled. It balances the sensuality of the setting with the invention of Picasso and the harmonious colour combinations. A very useful double-page spread shows all of the paintings in sequence and in proportionate size.

This journey was recapitulated in four states of a lithograph made in 1955. His sketches show him wrestling with the figures and design, trying to emphasise this or that aspect. Some portraits of Jacqueline dressed as an Algerian show Picasso forcefully placing his mistress in the history of Orientalist art and the grand tradition of French painting. The famous linocut after a Cranach portrait is another venture into the variant territory, which Picasso had been mining since at least his Poussin variant of 1944. Of course, all artists have produced copies of older art as part of their apprenticeships and learning their craft. Academic artists and students in France often made copies that were sold to the state, which allocated them to regional museums. Picasso had many copies in his youth. He touched on pastiche in the 1900s with El Greco, then again in the 1910s with Ingres’s portraits and then again in 1930s with parodies of Van Gogh and El Greco. By the time of the Poussin variant of 1944, Picasso saw the Old Masters as a subject in themselves. More precisely, he saw himself responding to the Old Masters in a self-reflective, ironic manner as subject matter. That multi-processed production of masterpieces about masterpieces (with a critical apparatus, audience and a collector base ready to adulate the products without demur) detached Picasso from any subject other than himself.

[Pablo Picasso, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version L), 1955, © Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Roman März / Succession Picasso / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021]

Whatever the value of the series, it marked a slump in Picasso’s creativity. It was followed by variations after Las Meninas (1957), Cranach portraits (1958), Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1960-1), Rape of the Sabine Women (1962) and others. Picasso entertained himself with these dialogues but they are of little value to others. Paradoxically, these tussles with the great masters indicate a lack of serious of Picasso’s part. Imagine Degas, Poussin or Manet spending months on making fanciful variations of old art in Picasso’s method. These painters did take up old art and made it new. Manet completely reimagined a Raphael composition as Déjeuner sur l’herbe, imbuing it with new meaning and extra significance. It commented on the sex politics of his age, referring obliquely to a source that viewers did not need to know in order to appreciate Manet’s painting. Picasso’s variants after Déjeuner sur l’herbe imbue the source with no new meaning and far from matching (or illuminating) the subject, Picasso’s art shows his weakness. His self-image as a great impaired his ability to make meaningful art and tackle subjects outside of himself.

Just as Picasso worked after Delacroix, so other artists worked after Picasso. The most notable example is Roy Lichtenstein’s Femme d’Alger (1963) a Pop art version of a single seated figure by Picasso. The model was a combination of versions K and L, flattened, schematised and colourised. Areas of solid tone and dotted tone in primary colours. It is an indirect portrait of Picasso as iconic creator of Modernist art, not intended to relate to Delacroix or Algeria.

The catalogue includes various essays on the production of Picasso’s series (excerpts of Leo Steinberg’s 1972 text), the reception of the series and Algerian responses to the art. The selection of art is limited but relevant. This catalogue is ideal for Picasso fans and those researching the production and reception of Orientalism in the modern era.

Gabriel Montua, Anna Wegenschimmel (eds.), Picasso & Les Femmes d’Algers, Hirmer, 2021, hardback, 192pp, 130 col. illus., German/French/English text, £39.95, ISBN 978 3 7774 3584 8

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

Review: “Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern”

Charles Dellheim, Professor of History at Boston University, sets out in Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern to show how Jews made a disproportionately large contribution to the ascendancy of Modernist art. As discussed in a previous review, Jews are commonly linked to the avant-garde and Modernism. Dellheim’s project is to explain why Jews entered the European art trade and were particularly supportive of Modern art. In Vienna of the belle époque under Franz Joseph I (an era of industrialisation, expansion and modernisation of the city, as capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) the arts were open to all people of means. The exclusion from certain fields of Jews (voluntarily or involuntarily), left them with free rein in the arts. “This left the Jewish bourgeoisie an unprecedented opportunity to seize the aesthetic initiative. And they made the most of it.”

Dellheim – a descendant of German Jewish refugees – defines Jews as ethnic Jews rather than just those practising Judaism. He rejects the idea that there is anything inherent in Jewish genetics that makes Jews inclined towards, and proficient in, art dealing and appreciation, preferring to see the matter as one of acculturation, law (Jews being restricted in certain matters) and economics (again, determined by law as well as broader economic opportunities). Strong in-group preference facilitated the establishment of profitable and long-lasting family businesses, some of which have lasted over 150 years.  

Jewish art dealers

Dellheim notes that entry of Jews into art collecting, dealing and creating was a late development. Jews were concerned with religion, scholarship, law, trade and finance, not much with the visual arts until the second half of the Nineteenth Century. (Before the emancipation of the Jews in France in 1791, Jews had no right to join a guild – including the Guild of St Luke – or trade fine art.) The public art gallery and the annual salon opened art to the general public. The crisis of academies and salons being unwilling or unable to absorb and co-opt new artistic forms sufficiently rapidly led to a new opportunity for private dealers and middlemen to act as bridges between avant-garde producers and prospective bourgeois collectors. The new entrants into this field included Jews, who had some natural advantages by having preferential access to credit from Jewish financiers to establish businesses, finance speculative acquisitions and sustain businesses during downturns. Some of these networks had been well established in the preceding century, during which the ending of absolute monarchies, the reduction of power in the hands of the aristocracy and the transfer of capital to industrialists all led to a professionalised art market, public auction houses, specialist publications and the foundation of art history as a professional discipline (a movement originating in Vienna) lubricated by the dispersal of noble collections. Thus, a network of Jewish art historians, collectors, publishers and dealers – working with Jewish bankers – led to the flourishing of the European art trade, albeit primarily in Old Masters, in the pre-1850 period.

So, when the rise of the Realists, the Barbizon School and the Impressionists took place over the 1850-75 period, the Jewish art network was already established and ready to take up the opportunity and absorb new entrants. Nathan Wildenstein started selling minor paintings by Old Masters in the 1870s, while working as a textile merchant. His motto was, “Boldness in buying. Patience in selling. Time does not matter.”

Wildenstein became a partner of Ernest Gimpel, another Alsatian Jew, who had worked for Jewish bankers as a commodities broker. These bankers had social access to the richest families in France, who were hungry for social status through art acquisition. Gimpel and Wildenstein made their fortunes through selling French art from Colnaghi in London. Colnaghi had acquired most of his stock from the descendants of French émigrés who had fled the revolution. Watteau’s The Poet’s Dream was bought from Colnaghi for 10,000 francs; ten years later it was sold to a French banker for 150,000 francs. When he established Hôtel Wildenstein at 57 rue la Boëtie, it was a palace of culture and statement of ambition to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the high society of Paris.  

[Image: Hotel Wildenstein, Paris]

The Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain are a legacy of the Duveen family of art dealers, founded by Joel Duveen, a Dutch Jewish immigrant to Hull, where the family trade was import-export. If anything, the liquidation of aristocratic collections was even more rapid and extensive in Britain than elsewhere. Dealers facilitated the transfer of art masterpieces from British stately homes to magnate mansions in American cities. The Duveens had branches in London, Paris and New York. They formed a secret partnership with Italian-art expert Bernard Berenson, a Lithuanian Jew. Denied a professorship at Harvard University, Berenson went on to become a scholar, critic and populariser of Renaissance art. He is attributed with stimulating rich Americans to collect European art, thereby accelerating the transatlantic art trade and elevating prices. Berenson was a close adviser to Isabella Stewart Gardner – leading cultural light of Boston high society and one of foremost American art collectors. Berenson acted as an authenticator and insider contact for the Duveens – which clashed with scholarly detachment and disinterest. His high public and credibility made him an invaluable ally for a dealing house.

Gimpel, Wildenstein and the Seligmann brothers followed the Duveens by opening branches in New York to feed the apparently insatiable demand for Old Master art for New Money collectors. At the end of the century, the collections of Jewish bankers joined the inherited art of the British aristocracy entered the art trade, with much of it heading West to the USA. “The rise of Jewish art collectors provided an opening for Jewish art dealers who social connections mattered more inside their own communities than outside of such.” Having favoured status gave Jewish collectors and dealers access to art (and credit) that allowed the creation of great collections at a slightly lower financial and time cost than would have been the case for gentiles. The establishment of dynasties cemented this. After all, when grandfather died and his collection had to be sold by his legatees, they could turn to the art-dealer grandson of the dealer who had sold the art originally to buy it back.

[Image: Paul Rosenberg, Paris, c. 1920]

Modernism and Jewishness

The Rosenbergs (father Alexandre, sons Paul and Léonce) and the Bernheims backed avant-garde art, collecting and selling Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. The Bernheims were big backers of Impressionism and benefited when it occupied centre-stage in the French art scene (at least, commercially) for over half a century. Paul and Bruno Cassirer paved the way for the Post-Impressionists in German through a Berlin gallery and a publishing house (which published van Gogh’s letters in German). The Secession movement of Vienna and Berlin was backed by many Jewish collectors. Gustav Klimt’s portrait subjects form a veritable checklist for the wealthiest Jewish women of Vienna.

In Vienna, Franz Joseph I found himself patronising the Secession exhibitions despite being temperamentally ill-disposed to Modernism – he particularly loathed the Loos House that faced the entrance to his palace. The Kaiser was politically supportive of Modernism because his fractured, multi-cultural, multi-lingual composite empire was being torn apart by separatist movements and Modernism was the only school of art that had no distinctive national character, did not assert an ethnic identity and was not supported by anyone except the cosmopolitan liberal elite and a few radical artists and architects. Thus, the art patronised by the wealthy Jewish upper class found itself a de facto empire style despite being (or perhaps because it was) widely despised.

Hitler lived in Vienna at this time and grew to detest Modernism. When Hitler inaugurated the House of German Art in Munich in 1937, this Nazi brainchild was declared to be explicitly intended to reverse the tide of Modernism. “[…] art and art activities are lumped together with the handiwork of our modern tailor shops and fashion industries. And to be sure, following the maxim: Every year something new. One day Impressionism, then Futurism, Cubism, maybe even Dadaism, etc. A further result is that even for the most insane and inane monstrosities thousands of catchwords to label them will have to be found, and have indeed been found.” We can see the typical Nazi condemnation of Kulturbolshewismus (cultural Bolshevism) in Hitler’s linkage of Modernism to Jewry. “Judaism was very clever indeed, especially in employing its position in the press with the help of so-called art criticism and succeeding not only in confusing the natural concepts about the nature and scope of art as well as its goals, but above all in undermining and destroying the general wholesome feeling in this domain.” As Dellheim writes, “The conviction that modernism was a Jewish threat to German culture became a staple of reactionary ideology. It fit in easily with the image of the rootless, abstract, cosmopolitan Jew, always consuming, never producing, and greedily sucking the life out of the true Germany.”

Dellheim is equivocal on whether Modernism was (at least partly) Jewish. He notes the Jewish Modernist artists (Pissarro, Leibermann, Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Lipchitz), collectors (the Stein siblings, the Cone sisters, Peggy Guggenheim) and critics (C.R. Marx, W George, Vauxcelles, Salmon). He then goes on:

Both Jewish entrepreneurs and avant-garde artists were archetypal outsiders, whose social paths otherwise might not have crossed. Both were largely excluded from the old regime in art and society and, moreover, stood to benefit from its destruction. Both were on the margins of their respective worlds as a small religious minority in largely homogenous societies with long histories of antisemitism. Prejudice made it extremely difficult for Jewish bourgeois to attain the degree of social status or respectability that their non-Jewish compatriots could take for granted. Avant-garde were on the margins of the official art world that upheld classical standards and shaped professional success. Neither Jewish entrepreneurs nor avant-garde artists were willing to remain on the periphery, however. Both craved professional success and social acceptance to one extent or another. They were outsiders who were determined to become insiders. But they wanted to do so, if possible, on their own terms rather than by capitulating to traditional ways or majority opinion. The need to circumvent entrenched authority provided common ground for avant-garde artists and their Jewish champions.

Readers might consider that the author could have pursued further this posited division between Jews and the traditions of the nations they inhabit. He lays out this powerful case and does not draw out its implications.

According to Dellheim, Modernism was not a Jewish project – the majority of its producers, dealers and consumers were non-Jewish, and it was not initiated by Jews – Dellheim sees that Modernism was a unique social, financial and artistic opportunity for Jews to acquire advantage. It must be said that many Jewish dealers and collectors were heavily invested in traditional art; however, there was nothing to prevent them from either additionally or successively transferring their backing to Modernism. We might see Modernism as speculative and risky compared to the Old Masters, and that new entrants might see openings that more conservative bodies might miss or disdain. “Marketing modern art – like many of the endeavors in which Jews clustered – was a middleman business that offered limited barriers to entry, the prospect of high returns, competitive advantages to family firms and ethnic networks, scope for international trading, and geographical mobility. The barriers to entry were few, the required capital modest, the competition limited, and professional hierarchies only beginning to gel. Successive waves of artists and schools created openings for dealers seeking a foothold in the commerce of art.” This is the rapid turnover of schools and styles in the Modern era – a hyper-charged cycle of innovation, popularisation, exploitation and obsolescence that can be found in movements lasting less than a decade, as artists, dealers, critics and collectors scrambled to establish themselves as pre-eminent before the next generation displaced them.

The course of history

Dellheim outlines the Intimiste circle, Berthe Weill and Alfred Flechtheim (dealer of Otto Dix). Picasso would have numerous Jewish dealers: Weill, D.-H. Kahnweiler, the Rosenbergs, Louise Leiris, Georges Wildenstein and others. So associated was Picasso (and Cubism) with Jewish and German names, that he kept a low profile during the Great War, for fear that French patriots would attack his art. (Spotting the non-French “k” in a Picasso painting was enough to stir ire.) Paul Rosenberg was a great champion of Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Braque and other top-level Modernists. René Gimpel made a point of supporting Modernist artists who were Jewish (Modigliani and Soutine).

The bulk of the book is a lively and well-sourced account of the Modernist art market from the 1910s up to the return of dealers following the end of World War II. The travails of art restitution bodies and the Monuments Men are raised here, though Dellheim acknowledges the extensive coverage of that subject already. Although those familiar with the major dealers and artists will know the outlines already, lesser-known incidents catch the attention. For instance, a Dusseldorf auction arranged by Flechtheim was bombed by the SA on 11 March 1933. The explosion did not kill anyone and was presumably an effort to frighten the Jewish art dealer and to damage his display of “un-German” Modernist art. He recounts the sad end of Paul Cassirer. Married to the beautiful actress Tilla Durieux (painted by Franz Stuck), Cassirer was so suicidal or reckless due to her rejection of him that he fatally wounded himself in the courthouse during their 1926 divorce proceedings.

[Image: Tilla Durieux at Paul Cassirer’s funeral, 1926, Berlin]

The wartime pillaging of Jewish collections is the “betrayal” in the title. Many colleagues and friends of the dealers – who fled, leaving behind most of their collections – collaborated with the Nazis, due to cupidity, envy or fear. Some Jews in neutral countries profited through acting as dealers for art that was stolen or extorted from fleeing collectors and dealers. The dispersal of Jewish collections has still not been entirely resolved to this day. It has been the subject of many books and documentaries and now is almost its own branch of law.

The scope of Dellheim’s subject is so huge that the book cannot help but have omissions. The Jewish patronage of the Secession in Vienna is only lightly sketched and the role of Jews around the early vanguard Modernism of the USSR is omitted. This book nicely sets up what could be a follow-up – an examination of Jewish dealers, artists and critics in the next phase of Modernism, the School of New York. A large percentage of the actors in 1940s Abstract Expressionism and dealers in the New York art scene were Jewish. Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg and Irving Sandler were pioneer critics and artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Philip Guston addressed explicitly Jewish themes in their art. All the time Leo Castelli, Frank Lloyd and Ileana Sonnabend were waiting in the wings, ready to advance following art movements.  

Dellheim has had to balance storytelling and analysis and has generally prioritised the former, which is to the benefit of general readers. His chapter “Between Bohemian and Bourgeois” (about the competing drives of Jews to rebel or to assimilate) seems tantalisingly inconclusive. He correctly ascertains that the bourgeois and the bohemian are not diametrically opposed but takes it little further. We could say that both bourgeois and bohemian are archetypes of liberalism – the support of progress (in whatever form that takes), consumers of culture (in whatever form that takes), self-regarding keepers of the flame of modernity (in whatever form that takes), opposers of tradition, religion and aristocracy (right or wrong, regardless). Bourgeois and bohemian are two sides of the same coin, two stages (youthful rebellion, materialist maturity) of conformity within the modern Western middle-class. One hungers for a little elaboration from Dellheim on this.

Belonging and Betrayal is a fine account of the broad and controversial subject of Jewish participation in the rise of Modernism in European art. Dellheim is well informed, thoughtful, sympathetic and a good writer. This book is suitable for anyone studying the history of the art trade, Modernism in the fine arts and the Jewish contributions to European culture.

Charles Dellheim, Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern, Brandeis University Press, 21 September 21 2021, hardback, 674pp, 24 col./96 mono illus., £32.00, ISBN: 978-1-68458-056-9

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To see my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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Jean-Paul Sartre: The Fanatic as Critic

French philosopher, playwright and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) wrote criticism of literature and art. Sartre’s art criticism is a small section of his large literary output. Comprising volume 7 of the Seagull Sartre Library, On Modern Art collects six long essays by Sartre on art of his period. The subjects are Alexander Calder, André Masson, Wols, Alberto Giacometti (twice) and Robert Lapoujade. The texts were written between 1948 and 1963.  

In a widely read article of 1948, Sartre masterfully summons the essence of Giacometti, finding something essential and primal in his search to conjure a human presence out of matter. The Biblical connotations of making man from clay are never far from Sartre’s evocations. He quotes the artist saying, “I was happy with them, but they were made to last only a few hours.” The author manages to spend almost as many words rhapsodising the “plump contour of a marble haunch” (that Giacometti eschewed) as he does describing the sculptor’s wizened forms. Sartre’s approach is not art historical but rather evocative and philosophical, reaching for the essence of the art and implications for thought on these topics. A typically Existential view is the importance of humanity as a measuring stick. “[…] human beings possess absolute dimensions for other human beings. If a man walks away from me, he does not seem to grow smaller, but his qualities seem rather to condense while his ‘bearing’ remains intact. If he draws near to me, he does not grow larger, but his qualities open out.” This observation follows Giacometti’s comment that “Distance should at least, then, effect its contraction in all three dimensions. But it is breadth and depth that are affected; height remains intact.”

Calder’s mobiles are evoked through a reference to nature through the eye of a poet. “Valéry said the sea is always beginning over again. One of Calder’s objects is like the sea and just as spellbinding: always beginning over again, always new. A passing glance is not enough; you must live with it, be bewitched by it.” Once again, Sartre knew the artist and could call upon his memories of encountering the art in the presence of the artist.

Masson and Wols have both sunk in terms of appreciation. What seemed innovative art turned out to be innovative but poor art. Masson is more impressive in theory than practice. He was a leading practitioner of Surrealism, who developed the automatist method of applying paint or glue at random and then interpreting the marks in a way that echoes the Rorschach test. The automatist practice was developed over 1926 by Masson and Ernst; Rorschach published his method in 1921. Masson produced art that rode the line dividing the temperate and the histrionic, frequently crossing into the latter. His collaboration with Georges Bataille was the most controversial and stimulating part of his career.

While Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet – other painters of highly textured Modernist paintings – have remained highly admired (and highly valued), Wols has slipped from view. He seems more of an amateur, a dabbler or dilletante. The small size of his paintings, lack of ambition, repetitiveness and the emphasis on technique over content mark Wols’s dainty paintings as minor works by a minor artist.  Sartre writes engaging about Wols the man. “I got to know Wols in 1945. He was bald and had a bottle and a knapsack. In the knapsack there was the world, his concern; in the bottle, his death. He had been handsome but he wasn’t any longer: at thirty-three you would have taken him for fifty, were it not for the youthful sadness of his eyes. No one, himself included, thought he would live to a ripe old age.” He died in 1951, at the age of 38, dead of alcoholism. Sartre does well to compare Wols to Klee, another painter who worked on a small scale. “Klee is an angel and Wols a poor devil. The one creates or recreates the marvels of this world, the other experiences its marvellous horror. All Klee’s good fortune conspired to create his one misfortune: happiness remains his limitation. All Wols’ misfortunes gave him his single piece of good fortune: his misery is boundless.” Sartre perceives in Wols’s cramped frenetic paintings a giddy vertigo and nauseating lack of fixed reference points – something sickly and self-absorbed. While Klee’s world is full of things, beings and places, Wols’s is on the verge of nothingness. Sometimes, one imagines Wols compulsively trying to block out the gaping blankness of an empty sheet or board in an act motivated by horror vacui. One can imagine the hungover Wols (face pale, stomach tight) hunched over his painting, dabbing, dribbling, scraping away, driven by animal anxiety to distract himself from his state.   

Robert Lapoujade (1921-1993) is not so much forgotten in the anglosphere, more never noticed. He was a French painter who worked in the tachiste style, making pictures that are diffuse, with repeated dabs of strong colour on a neutral ground. Some are abstract; the portraits are semi-abstract; some scenes of crowd have energy, though they lack the hypnotic repetition of Henri Michaux’s ink drawings. Paradoxically, it is Lapoujade’s undistinguished paintings that prompt Sartre’s best (and longest) essay in this collection. The artist’s subjects were crowds rioting regarding the civil war in Algeria and this leads Sartre to consider the political angle of art. Sartre’s politics are evident only in the Lapoujade essay. He relies on his impressions and does not refer much to aesthetic and art-historical considerations. Of course, that is not what one would go to Sartre for. It is to Sartre’s benefit, as he is better suited to a more wide-ranging and discursive approach than anything narrowly art historical.

Sartre accuses Titian of excessive tact. His work for princes marked Titian as a dissembler of history in service of the aristocracy. “On these grounds, I regard Tiziano Vecellio as a betrayer: he forced his brush to render tranquil horrors, painless pain and deathless dead: it is his fault that Beauty is a traitor to humanity and that it sides with kings. If a pig-headed painter with a room overlooking a triage camp paints fruit bowls, then that is not so serious: he sins by omission. The real crime is to paint the triage camp as though it were a fruit bowl.” It is a great piece of rhetoric and nonsense art criticism in service of Marxism. Sartre claims for Lapoujade the position of class solidarity: “Yet, amidst the human presences embodied in his canvases, he is the first not to claim any privilege.” It is revealing that it is – alone in this collection – the ecstasy of angry protest in the cause of Algerian independence that elicits from Sartre a paean in stirring prose. It is the annihilation of the self in the instance of collective action that moves Sartre (advocate of murder of Europeans in the Arab nationalist cause and Maoist to his dying breath) to excitement. Sartre was less dangerous around pictures than he was around human beings.  

Jean-Paul Sartre, Chris Turner (trans.), On Modern Art, 2021, Seagull Books (distr. University of Chicago Press), paperback, 126pp, £9.99/$12.50, ISBN 978 0857 429 100

© 2021 Alexander Adams

To view my art and books visit www.alexanderadams.art

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