Twentieth-Century German Art. London

Twentieth-Century German Art. LondonReview by: Irit Keynan RogoffThe Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 981 (Dec., 1984), pp. 786+800-801+803Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/881823 .

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EXHIBITION REVIEWS

London. Hayward Gallery Matisse's Sculpture and Drawings

The Hayward Gallery opened in 1968 with a glorious exhibition of Matisse's painting, and let us hope that it does not close as an international centre with this profoundly beautiful exhibition of his sculpture and drawings (to 6th January 1985). It is a measure of the sheer quality of the work on show, and of the sensitivity of its presentation, that the whole ground floor of the gallery is transformed in an atmosphere of contemplative silence: the expansive whiteness of the drawings com- plements the compact intensity of the dark sculpture, against a dignified background of panels painted in subtly modulated greys.

With 155 drawings, four paper cut- outs, and almost all the sculpture, the format of the Hayward exhibition follows on from three previous outstanding exhibitions of Matisse's drawings, at the Bal- timore Museum of Art in 1971, at the Musee Cantini, Marseille, in 1974, and more particularly at the Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, in 1975, which also included all the sculpture. Matisse was a prolific draughtsman and his views on the primacy of drawing are well known. There is no catalogue raisonne of his drawings - let alone of his paintings. How- ever, it would appear from these exhibitions that there is a growing consensus as to the best available Matisse drawings. Seventeen out of the twenty-three drawings now at the Hayward, dating from 1899 to 1910, were in the Paris exhibition. Only one drawing dates from 1891-92, the year Matisse continued his artistic ed- ucation in Paris after an initial start at the Ecole Quentin-Latour in Saint-Quentin in 1889, at the age of nearly twenty. The next seven drawings jump to the years 1899-1903, leaving us unable to trace his early evolution as a draughtsman. Also the Hayward exhibition makes even less attempt than did the Paris exhibition of 1975 to illustrate the full range of Mat- isse's subject matter and types of drawing, from quick croquis in the street to more detailed landscape studies. The selected drawings are neither autobiographical fragments from an artist's visual diary nor solely working drawings for paintings, decorative commissions, prints, or other more synthetic drawings. Even in drawing - his most private medium - Matisse appears to have been fully conscious of the fact that he was making works of art.

By basing his selection on drawings of the human figure John Golding provides both a theme for the exhibition and a means of linking the drawings with the sculpture. Matisse was clearly obsessed with the human figure, its structure, rhythm, gesture and expression; and he elaborated numerous ways of portraying its different aspects and moods. In his cel- ebrated 'Notes of a Painter' [1908], Mat- isse wrote: 'What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life.'

The exhibition is hung chronologically,

so that we are able after c. 1900 to witness the gradual development of his drawings which came to assume in Matisse's eyes equal status with his paintings as an inde- pedent art form and a necessary counter- balance to colour, which received its most intense formulation in the final paper cut- outs. Series after series are grouped around the walls, showing how Matisse explored a given theme: five studies of Yvonne Landsberg, 1914; three highly ab- stracted 'cubist' portraits of 1915-16; eleven ravishing drawings of Antoinette, (Fig.66) which follow on from the series of paintings of the model Lorette, 1916-17; six charcoal and estompe drawings of 1922-24, including the very beautiful Re- clining model with flowered robe, c. 1923-24, suffused in a soft, slightly melancholy light; six drawings in both pen and charcoal of reclining nudes, one of his favourite themes from the second half of the 1930s; two drawings from the Rumanian blouse series, 1936-37, and two charcoal studies on the sonorous theme of a woman sleeping, 1939; all ten drawings of Series F and all seven drawings of Series M from Themes and variations, 1941-42; a suite of ten portrait drawings of Matisse's grand- daughter, Jackie, 1947; the studies for the Vence Chapel, the paper cut-out Blue nudes, and the final brush drawings of still lifes, interiors, trees and acrobats. There are several surprises: notably the superb charcoal Young woman in a 'fishnet' dress, 1939, and the unfamiliar red chalk drawing Reclining nude, 1941 (Figs 65 & 68).

The exhibition includes all the known surviving sculpture, with the exception of Dance, 1907, carved in a chunky primitive style around a wooden cylinder, which is presumably too fragile to travel, and Venus in a shell I, 1930. which is illustrated in the catalogue, but replaced in the exhibition by a second cast of Venus in a shell II, 1932. Matisse no doubt made other sculptures - which must have been destroyed. Even the precise dating of some of his major sculptures is not entirely certain. The serf, for example, usually dated from 1900-03, was surely reworked sometime after it was photographed with its arms in 1908. Most of his some seventy pieces of sculpture were executed during periods in the first half of his career when he was concerned with a new structural reading of the human figure in painting. In the exhibition this means that the sculpture often has to run behind the chronological arrange- ments of the drawings, thus emphasising the continuity ofMatisse's preoccupations in both media.

It is fascinating to observe how themes developed and changed form and mean- ing from sculpture into drawing as Mat- isse's career progressed. The reclining nude theme receives its first major formulation in the sculpture Reclining nude I (Au- rore), (Fig.69) and then goes through a whole series of transformations in both sculpture and drawings until it is finally laid to rest in the moving studies for The entombment, 1949. The crouching nude theme, which had been the subject of several sculptures from Copy after Puget's 'Ecorch?, 1903, to Crouching Venus, 1918, is

only fully realised two-dimensionally in the paper cut-out Blue nudes of 1952. Even Matisse's pantheistic identification of the standing figure with the growth and form of a tree can be traced through the development of the four Back reliefs, 1909-c. 1930, to the final brush drawings of trees, 1931.

The exhibition is accompanied by two excellent catalogues: The Sculpture of Henri Matisse by Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, which reproduces the photographic sources for not only several major sculptures but also the Tate's painting, Standing nude, 1907, and The Drawings ofHenri Mat- isse by John Elderfield, with an introduction by John Golding (?12.50 & ? 16, Thames & Hudson). Elderfield's lengthy essay, which is the most thorough and per- ceptive analysis of the drawings to date, demonstrates once again that it is very difficult to discuss Matisse's drawings and sculpture outside the development of his art as a whole.

NICHOLAS WATKINS

London Twentieth-century German art

Long submerged within that collective identity known as Neue Sachlichkeit, Karl Hubbuch recently had his first one-man show in this country at Fischer Fine Art (closed 30th November). Together with the great exponents of this style in Germany in the 1920s, Hubbuch shared a fascination for the banality of.everyday life observed with a sober and critical eye.

The early phases of expressionism had combined utopian ideals with the nervous energy stemming from the discovery of modernism, and hinted at the possibility of achieving freedom and salvation through art. For the following generation, which took up the tradition during and after the first world war the depiction of a brutalised humanity was not only a visual code for acid social and political criticism, but also a warning against false idealism.

Kasimir Edschmied's dictum that all expressionism contains an element of ecstasy is interesting to investigate in the light of Hubbuch's relationship to other more prominent figures in the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Certainly the self- loathing and virulent social criticism contain an element of passionate and ecstatic engagement. Hubbuch lacked the remarkable ability of Grosz, Dix or Schad to supply a visual code and a cast of characters for current preoccupations with defeat in war, rampant inflation, aborted revolution and the heady excitement of an anarchic present. Perhaps because of his 'craving for isolation', as his contem- porary Rudolph Schlichter phrased it, he substituted irony for the rage that to his colleagues signified a sense of engagement. Hubbuch shows far greater detachment; a fascination with objects and textures and the juxtaposition of these with human figures and human passions provide the key to an understanding of his art.

In two of his most often reproduced and

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74. Nude in Bauhaus chair, by Karl Hubbuch. Crayon, indian ink and water- colour, 65 by 47 cm. (Exh. Fischer Fine Art, London).

75. Gramophone, by Karl Hubbuch. Signed. Crayon, 53.5 by 44 cm. (Exh. Fischer Fine Art, London).

76. Abstract (552-4), by Gerhard Richter, 260 by 200 cm. (Collection the artist; exh. Diisseldorf).

77. Death kiss, by Ina Barfuss. 1983. Gouache, 75.5 by 55.5 cm. (Galerie Munro, Hamburg; exh. Diisseldorf).



EXHIBITION REVIEWS

exhibited works, The cousin brings breakfast and Liebestod in the Jaegerstrasse, both of 1922, passionate and violent behaviour is depicted against a mass of detail. In each case the detail implies a code of behaviour which is defied by the actions of the characters. In the first the room is filled with a plethora of bourgeois bedroom comforts: overstuffed cushions and duvet with frilled edges, cupboards, cabinets and washstand. In contrast to these well established symbols of Gemiitlichkeit we see the passionate and demented behaviour of the male figure and the submission of the woman. In the Liebestod, a title which mocks the pathos of operatic tradition, we find a crime of passion enacted against a background of urban commerce repre- sented by a bar, a brothel, a pawnshop and a hotel. The background is indicative of a reality in which human relationships are commercialised, and against which the tragedy played out in the street seems a hopeless and pathetic gesture. This con- frontation between reality and its values and what appears to be defiant, excessive behaviour is everywhere in Hubbuch's work. For example in Nude in Bauhaus chair (Fig.74) he juxtaposes the pared down chrome and leather construction, a meta- phor for the 'form is function' aesthetic of the Bauhaus, with the uncomfortable pose of a soft nude with a quizzical expression.

His fascination with the expressive autonomy of objects exemplified in the Gramophone (Fig.75) is a synthesis of Berlin Dada's ideological emphasis on machines and mechanical processes and the hermetically sealed still life works of his Munich contemporaries Kanoldt and Schrimpf. Hubbuch, born and trained in Karlsruhe with frequent study trips to Berlin, moved between the two geograph- ical and ideological extremes of the New Objectivity movement. In Berlin he asso- ciated with George Grosz and Rudolph Schlichter, and through them with the Novembergruppe and Rote Gruppe, with whose radical socialist and later commu- nist views he was in complete accordance. However, when he tried to submit political drawings to Grosz and Heartfield their response was 'Not direct enough, too involved'; obviously Hubbuch's art, though socially and indirectly politically motivated, was too preoccupied with style and too intricate to make a popular political statement.

On the other hand Karlsruhe was geo- graphically and spiritually closer to Munich, where the so called right-wing or neo-classical faction of New Objectivity was centred, whose style evolved around the transfiguration of objects into the timeless and the universal. Hubbuch, who served as professor at the Karlsruhe academy until his dismissal by the Na- tional Socialists in 1933, became the founder of an independent version of the spirit of this movement and together with Scholz and Schnarrenberger, exhibited as a regional faction in both major group exhibitions, Mannheim 1925 and Am- sterdam in 1929.

The recent exhibition covers Hub- buch's achievements both as superb

graphic artist and as a painter. In paintings such as Four women in the cafi and Self- portrait with Marianne at studio window (1930, Fig.63), he exploits the late medi- eval tradition of northern Europe for its qualities of mystery and the grotesque. The women in the caf6 remind one of the toothless gnomes of Bruegel and Bosch, while the artist's studio in the portrait is engulfed by an Altdorfer landscape. The influence of this type of imagery on his work makes us aware that much of the crowded, frenzied and distorted city scenes are modern renderings of that late mediaeval hell. Hubbuch emerges from the present exhibition as a painter of indi- vidual distinction and as a unique media- tor between right and left, tradition and innovation. A catalogue somewhat richer in critical information could have provided an even better introduction to his work.

George Tappert, another painter affiliated to this movement, was on view at Leinster Fine Art (10th October to 10th November). He too was a Berlin contem- porary of Neue Sachlichkeit and a political affiliate of Grosz and Hubbuch's. The exhibition provided us with a very valuable insight into the diversity encompassed by such a group identity. This group of water-colours and drawings showed an affectionate side of Tappert's art, which seemed almost like an updating of the popular work of Heinrich Zille, concen- trating on charaterisation rather than on social scrutiny.

IRIT KEYNAN ROGOFF

Manchester William Morris

This year is proving to be an annus mirabilis for Pre-Raphaelite exhibitions. After the successful Tate Gallery show in the summer, an exhibition of comparable scope that fittingly celebrates the 150th anniversary of Morris's birth has been on view at the Whitworth Art Gallery (William Morris and the Middle Ages, 28th September to 8th December). It is highly appropriate that this major exhibition should be mounted in Manchester, always a centre for Pre-Raphaelite studies, where the energetic visitor can also see Madox Brown's frescoes in Alfred Waterhouse's Gothic revival Town Hall.

The exhibition sets Morris's concern for the Middle Ages within the broader context of the revival of interest in mediaevalism in the nineteenth century. The organisers have successfully cast their nets wide in public and private collections for their exhibits. Surprises come thick and fast in the introductory section, domi- nated by a suit of armour, which, with paintings by E. H. Corbould and F. Gaudi, tells the always enjoyable story of the debacle of the Eglinton Tournament. Nearby Landseer's portrait of Queen Vic- toria and Prince Albert as Queen Philippa and Edward III at a bal costume at Buck- ingham Palace in 1842 strikes an appropriate note of courtly romance. Water-colours by David Roberts of Sir

Walter Scott's Abbotsford and of Scar- isbrick Hall by A. W. N. Pugin, together with works by C. W. Cope, William Dyce and J. R. Herbert relating either to the Westminster decorations or to Royal Academy historical paintings fill out this section, the centrepiece of which is Daniel Maclise's impressive Robin Hood of 1839 (Madame Tussaud's), a paradigm for the early Victorian concept of the Middle Ages as 'Merry England' at its jolliest.

A scene from the Life of St Frideswide of 1859 by Burne-Jones (Cheltenham Ladies' College) with a Gozzoli-like blend of pigs, sunflowers and knights in armour, introduces the theme of the Pre- Raphaelites' interest in mediaevalism, so stimulated by Ruskin. His didactic influence is seen in an instructive plaster cast (Guild of St George) of a spiral relief from the north door of Rouen Cathedral, which strikingly presages Morris's later designs for chintzes and the borders of books. Source material of another type is examined in Victorian text books on his- toric dress, extensively used by the Pre- Raphaelites. But such works were not their only inspiration, as is demonstrated by Jane Morris's jewel casket (Fig.78). A hinged casket with a gabled lid in the form of a Gothic reliquary, its painted 'panels by Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal depict courtly scenes of the early fifteenth century. The central panel derives from a French miniature of 1403-08 illustrating the Poems of Christine de Pisan (Fig.80), which was studied by the artists in the British Museum.

The jewel casket is displayed in a recreation of a room in the Red House, one of several imaginative room settings, the most notable recreating the Medi- aeval Court at the International Ex- hibition of 1862. The Pre-Raphaelite use ofArthurian themes is shown both in studies for the Oxford Union frescoes and in later stained glass designs. Ecclesiastical commissions for stained glass were of great importance in the early years of Morris and Company, and the windows pro- duced for four churches by G. F. Bodley form the subject for a rewarding audio- visual show; Morris's vigorous draughts- manship is seen here to great advantage, as for example in a cartoon of 1862 for the Archangel Gabriel (Fig.79).

For Morris and Burne-Jones the works of Chaucer proved a life long source of inspiration which culminated in the Kelmscott Press Chaucer, vividly described by Burne-Jones 'as a little like a pocket cathedral'. The book gains from being seen with less familiar works inspired by Chaucerian themes, particularly Burne- Jones's drawings for the uncompleted em- broidery panels based on the Legend of good women, conceived in 1863 for Ruskin's cherished girls' school at Winnington, one of which shows Chaucer in his study (Fig.81), asleep on a canopied chair, surrounded by manuscripts. A selection of Merton Abbey tapestries of the Holy Grail whets one's appetite for the exhibition on this theme to be shown at Birmingham in March 1985, while a delightful smaller item is Morris's painted tile depicting Chaucer

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61. Trinity College Church and Trinity Hospital from the south-west with Calton Hill in the background, by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. 15.7 by 20.8 cm. (Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh).

62. London river - the Limehouse barge-builders, by Charles Napier Hemy. 1874-77, 91.5 by 137 cm. (South Shields Museum and Art Gallery).

63. Self-portrait with Marianne at studio window, by Karl Hubbuch. c.1930. 47 by 63 cm. (Exh. Fischer Fine Art, London).

64. Ruin of a Northumbrian keep, by Charles Napier Hemy. 1864. 43.3 by 68.8 cm. (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle).



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Twentieth-Century German Art. London