Accessory to modernism

THE NEW CRITERION, February 2022

Accessory to modernism

On “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

One of the revelations of “Inventing Abstraction,” the 2012 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was the extent to which painting led the modernist movement from behind. moma has historically positioned its own collection of painting and sculpture at the head of the big parade—banners high and horns blaring—but “Inventing Abstraction” suggested otherwise. The advance of modernism, it turns out, was not quite as straightforward as we once thought. By bringing together “drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance,” the 2012 exhibition made the case that many creative modes assembled for modernism’s march. This seemed to have been especially true in the abstract foment of the early decades of the twentieth century. Experiments in the applied arts, in craft, and in performance could be just as important as what was happening with oil on canvas.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) was one of those artists presented in “Inventing Abstraction.” A needlepointer, costume designer, interior decorator, dancer, puppet-maker, and more, the Swiss artist was an accessorizer at the center of modernism. Yet the centrality of her life and the ephemerality of her work did not help her posthumous reputation. Taeuber-Arp’s legacy was soon eclipsed by the dominance of painting in the post-war years—and, despite his own best efforts, the works of her husband, the artist Jean Arp, who outlived her by more than two decades.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Five Extended Figures, 1926, Gouache, metallic paint, and pencil on paper, Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin. Photo: Alex Delfanne.

“Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction,” the retrospective now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, is the type of sweeping survey meant to inspire reevaluation.1 That an overlooked woman is now up for rediscovery is a part of the pitch. With three hundred objects from over fifty lenders spread out across eight galleries, plus a three-hundred-page catalogue, the museum expects you to depart with more than a casual acquaintance with this “shape-shifting artist you probably don’t know yet,” as moma bills its show.

Taeuber-Arp was indeed wide-ranging in her artistic pursuits, especially in her heady youth, finding the common patterns in art and craft and combining them with her interests in performance, sculpture, and architecture. An early foray into embroidery provided the thread that tied her life and work together. In 1913 she graduated from Munich’s Debschitz School with a focus on textiles and the intention of pursuing furniture design. The disruption of the First World War soon brought her into the orbit of Swiss Dada—and Jean (Hans) Arp, a German from Strasbourg who had moved to Switzerland to escape conscription. The two met in 1915 and married in 1922.

Curated by Anne Umland (moma), Walburga Krupp, Eva Reifert (Tate), and Natalia Sidlina (Kunstmuseum Basel), “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction” leaves no stitch dangling. The chronological presentation begins with the needlepoint, beadwork, wooden objects, and drawings that Taueber-Arp created in Zurich between 1915 and 1920. Influenced by the Jugendstil, along with William Morris and his belief in the transformative power of the applied arts, Taueber-Arp created textiles that were a mix of abstract patterns and abstracted symbols. “In our complicated times,” she wrote, there is a “deep and primeval urge to make the things we own more beautiful.” The orthogonal matrix of textile provided the structure, literally and figuratively, against which she composed her designs.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Cushion panel, 1916, Wool on canvas, Museum für Gestaltung, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Zurich, Decorative Arts Collection, Courtesy Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, ZHdK.

In a work such as Vertical-Horizontal Composition (ca. 1917), a design of wool on canvas, Taeuber-Arp used needlepoint’s rigid architecture both to embed and to disguise iconographic forms. What at first resembles nothing more than a pattern of rectangular shapes might, at varying distances, come into focus as a duck in profile. Taeuber-Arp carried such bitmapped semiotics to her necklaces and purses and other textile crafts. Among its tiles and zig-zags, a CushionPanel from 1916 might be implanted with abstracted flowers in its cross-stitching. An egg-shaped beaded bag from circa 1918 might contain an abstracted forest in addition to its contents.

Taeuber-Arp envisioned such patterns and motifs repeating across media, making furnishings, accessories, and everyday objects “more beautiful.” She also looked to unlock the animation in these abstract forms. As she took her shapes to three dimensions, she used turned and painted wood to create what she called her Dada Cup (1916), Amphora (1917), and Powder Box (ca. 1918)—cool, mysterious objects with anthropomorphic pretension.

Nic Aluf, Sophie Taeuber with her Dada Head, 1920, Gelatin silver print on board, Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin. Photo: Wolfgang Morell.

You could easily miss the next room, a side gallery that is a highlight of the exhibition. Here Taeuber-Arp brought form to life through her marionettes. For a Dadaist version of the story of “King Stag,” she designed the scenery and puppets of the absurdist production. The eighteenth-century commedia dell’arte fantasy now included a Freudian subplot and a character named “Dr. Oedipus Complex.” Many of Taeuber-Arp’s scenery drawings and geometric figurines are here, along with a film of a reproduction of the performance. Also here are her photographic portraits of the same period, taken by Nic Aluf at the request of Tristan Tzara, where Taeuber-Arp looks out from behind her turned-wood “Dada heads”—the artist as modernist puppet-master, half-masked and half-revealed.

Later in the 1920s Taeuber-Arp brought her orthogonal matrices to stained glass and interior design. She imparted a sense for the “total work of art” to her floor-to-ceiling designs for the Aubette, an entertainment complex funded by the art collector André Horn and his architect brother, Paul. Taeuber-Arp covered every interior surface with textile patterns—most of them preserved now only in drawings and photographs. Inspired by the severe editing of the Bauhaus, she also looked to industrial design. She created desks for apartments in Paris and modular furniture for her own studio-house in Clamart, the town southwest of Paris where she and Jean settled in 1929 (the land was purchased in part thanks to her professional design income). All followed a similar formal logic, building up and cutting into the grid.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Off-Center Abstract Composition (stained-glass window for the apartment of André Horn, Strasbourg, France), 1928, Stained glass, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, France. Photo: Musées de Strasbourg.

Yet Taeuber-Arp’s work never again reached the same level of abstract life as in her early experimental years from 1916–20, at the conclusion of World War I, working with Swiss Dada. As she then turned to oil on canvas in the late 1920s and into the 1930s, the geometry remained but the dynamics fell more flat. Her imbibing figures in Café (1928), with their circle heads and street-sign bodies, fail to rise above graphic design. She carried such colorform shapes through their many permutations and combinations, but the graphic experiments, treating paint like just more needlepoint, were more smoke than fire. In its division of the canvas, cut through with colorful lines, Six Spaces with Four Small Crosses (1932) reaches for a more nuanced syncopation. Still, it is no “boogie-woogie,” Broadway or otherwise.

There are many such modernist echoes throughout this exhibition: not just of Mondrian, but also of Calder and, of course, her own husband, Jean Arp. A walk through moma’s permanent collection suggests these and many more affinities that “Living Abstraction,” in attempting to elevate Taeuber-Arp, ignores rather than explores. The exhausting comprehensiveness of this singular treatment, filling as many rooms as last year’s revelatory “Cézanne Drawing,” ends up diminishing her achievements by spreading the artist too thin.

The story of the supposedly overlooked creative wife, of the artist-victim in need of our rediscovery and salvation, might make for a compelling contemporary narrative, but it does not necessarily align with actual experience. The exhibition claims that “gender discrimination” is “one of the reasons Sophie Taeuber-Arp remains far from a household name.” It laments the “difficulties faced by women of Taeuber-Arp’s generation, in particular those with well-known spouses, to be considered artists in their own right—as individuals first, rather than as partners.” It also criticizes the posthumous catalogue raisonné her husband published in 1948 as “well-intentioned” but one that “occluded the vibrant, cross-disciplinary versatility that is at the heart of her singular life’s work.”

Photographer unknown, Sophie Taeuber-Arp in costume for a housewarming party organized by artist Walter Helbig, Ascona, Switzerland, August 1925, Fondation Arp, Clamart, France. Photo: © Fondation Arp, Clamart.

And yet, in a time before gender became just another political chip, the world that this artist inhabited, especially the life she lived with her artist husband, seemed determined to encourage her. After her death, in addition to publishing her catalogue raisonné, Jean Arp helped organize, at the Kunstmuseum Bern, the first retrospective of her work. With dozens of blue-chip lenders to the present exhibition, both in Europe and America, one must wonder how overlooked Sophie Taeuber-Arp has ever really been.

Timed to this exhibition, A Life through Art, a new bilingual biography written by Taeuber-Arp’s great-niece Silvia Boadella, translated from the German by the New Criterion contributor Tess Lewis, tells quite a different side of the story of this artist whose life and work confronted two world wars while remaining faithful to the promises and possibilities of modern art.2

The book is a welcome pendant to the exhibition, adding some warmth to the typical chilliness of a moma presentation. Boadella has written evocative vignettes of Taeuber-Arp’s “life through art,” inspired by family stories and the artist’s creative record. She begins with a retelling of Taeuber-Arp’s final night and her untimely demise: “Sophie lies very still, the white duvet pulled up to her chin. The smoke spreads more thickly. The fire in the stove goes out . . . ” As she is accidentally poisoned by carbon monoxide alone in a remote garden house, the book reads like a fever dream from the great beyond.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Four Spaces with Broken Cross, 1932, Oil on canvas, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. Photo: Bertrand Prévost.

Indeed, Taeuber-Arp “lived” abstraction through an abbreviated life that was as interesting, in many ways more interesting, than the objects and designs she left behind. After all, she inhabited Europe’s foremost creative circles, traveling with Kurt Schwitters and Hannah Höch to the island of Rügen in Germany and with Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings to the Amalfi Coast. Interweaving artists such as Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay in addition to Taeuber-Arp’s own husband, this book does much to reanimate the excitement of her times and the energy of a life that, in contrast to this exhibition’s heavy-handed editing, included other creative souls.

This is what is ultimately missing from moma’s presentation. Yes, as the exhibition catalogue proposes in its “Directors’ Forward,” this modernist polymath was a “designer of textiles, beadwork, costumes, furniture, and interiors, as well as an applied arts teacher; dancer; architect, painter, sculptor; illustrator; magazine editor; gifted amateur photographer; and champion of abstract art.” We now have evidence of this and then some. Yet in its great effort to single out Sophie Taeuber-Arp—even (as the catalogue admits) “deliberately exclud[ing] the drawings and collages that her grieving widower posthumously identified as ‘duo’ ”—“Living Abstraction” takes the life out of the living. We are left with hundreds of creative fragments but, in the end, a still life in need of its golden thread.

1. “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction” opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on November 21, 2021, and remains on view through March 12, 2022. The exhibition was previously on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel (March 19–June 20, 2021) and Tate Modern, London (July 13–October 17, 2021).

2. Sophie Taeuber-Arp: A Life through Art, by Silvia Boadella, translated by Tess Lewis; Skira Editore, 224 pages, $39.95.

Fine Prints

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, December 2021

Fine Prints

Amid the turbulence of modernism, British artists made art for themselves. A review of Modern Times: British Prints, 1913-1939 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until January 9, 2022. 

The print is a curious category in the world of art. Prints are not singular, of course — not typically at least. They are not ubiquitous, either — at least, again, not typically. They exist somewhere between art objects and art products. Printmakers often use the tools of sculpture to create works on paper. Three-dimensional carved objects become two-dimensional printed products. Think about it and you realize prints are far more curious than they let on.

While art history typically does not know what to do with its curiosities, artists can sometimes make much out of the opportunities of hybrid creation. A century ago, a selection of British artists made the most out of the process at a time when war, strikes, the Depression and modernization were all sapping the opportunities of their generation. Printmaking was theirs for the print-taking. With inexpensive materials, at first wood and later the same linoleum blocks you might find on your kitchen floor, they cut forms in relief with simple sculpting tools and used them to print bold, inexpensive images. Their woodcut and linocut works captured and gave their buyers ownership over the accelerating speeds and abstractions of the times. In simplified line, color and form, the modern British print made sense out of modern British life.

Edward Alexander Wadsworth (British, 1889–1949), Liverpool Shipping, 1918, Woodcut on Japanese paper

Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939, a major exhibition of one hundred of these works now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reveals the senses and sensibilities of Sybil Andrews, Claude Flight, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Power and Edward Wadsworth, among others — the artists who made British printmaking modern. The exhibition also pays tribute to Leslie and Johanna Garfield, the husband-and-wife collecting team who pursued these rare works over three decades and gathered them together. They lived with them among tens of thousands of other prints in their Upper East Side apartment, tucked away in special drawers and sliding walls, before transferring 700 of them to the Metropolitan in 2019. It was a significant acquisition, instantly making the Met a leading collection for British prints. This is our first chance to see it all together — including for Leslie Garfield himself, as he told me at the opening.

“You go to books on modernism — nothing. You go to books on British modernism — nothing.” That’s what Jennifer Farrell, the exhibition’s curator, suggested to me about the lack of notoriety for these works. Modern art in Britain often gets overlooked for its Continental and American cousins, and unfairly so. In form these British prints could go toe to toe with their Italian Futurist or French Cubist relatives. A generation later, British artists such as Richard Hamilton — another Garfield focus — were manufacturing Pop art before Warhol’s American factory ever cranked out its first soup can. In many cases, British artists’ turn to form over function took on “modern times” in ways that other modernisms rejected. Faced with the true shock of the new, and sometimes battling psychological demons, these artists printed form in order to function in Britain’s twentieth century.

A hundred years later, up against far different challenges, Farrell just about had to unlock the Metropolitan herself to get these acquisitions inventoried and photographed in time for this exhibition, the print department’s first since winter 2020. But I could think of worse ways to spend the pandemic. The dynamism of this work — the colors, the energy, the crowds depicted — speak to what we were all missing.

The selection begins in the early 1910s with Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth and Vorticism — the short-lived British response to Futurism, so named by Ezra Pound for the vortex “from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.” “Newcastle,” a tiny print by Wadsworth from 1913 and among the earliest in the show, turns the gears of industry into rotating, gnashing, zig-zagging teeth of black and white. The deadly engine of World War One would soon make that vortex all too real. As artists were called up to camouflage ships at sea, Wadsworth’s “Liverpool Shipping” of 1918 turns an entire image into a dazzle pattern of lines that energize and confound their forms.

Such lines — centrifugal and confounding — followed British printmaking through the interwar years. Now, instead of simply black and white, we see artists use all sorts of stunning colors, printed through an increasingly complex arrangement of blocks. At the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, a London school founded by the engraver Iain Macnab in Pimlico in 1925, Claude Flight practiced, taught and popularized linocut techniques. Flight wanted the price of a print “to be equivalent to that paid by the average man for his daily beer or cinema ticket.”

Such a democratic impulse did not make his students rich, but Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power, Lill Tschudi and other Grosvenor School artists went out to apply Vorticist swirls and jags to the circles of the Tube, the curves of the concert hall and the eddies of the crew oar. Tschudi’s “Underground” (1930) uses forms of color to trace the tunneling curves. Andrews’s “Sledgehammers” (1933) swings and dazzles in clanking colors of green, blue, orange and brown. Meanwhile, Power’s “The Merry-Go-Round” and “Whence & Whither?” (both c. 1930) turn crowds, whether on a carnival or escalator ride, into swirling masses.

Cyril E. Power (British, 1872–1951), Whence & Whither?, ca. 1930, Linocut

Is all this activity enough for Garfield? Surveying the exhibition opening, he admitted to me that he is still collecting. “It’s terrible, I am. I bought something yesterday.” He said he was setting his alarm for six the next morning in order to be up in time for the London sales. “Come,” he says, taking me by the arm.

He brings me over to Robert Gibbings’s “Dublin Under Snow.” This small black-and-white print from 1918 falls outside the purview of Modern Times but was nevertheless included here as a last-minute addition. “Dublin Under Snow” turns the snow-covered rooftops as seen from Gibbings’s barracks into an abstraction of alternating angular forms. Gibbings was a master of printmaking’s negative spaces, with its reversals of carved and inked forms.

Farrell suggests that the work evokes the famous final lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” published in Dubliners just a few years before in 1914: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Sybil Andrews (Canadian (born England), 1898–1992), Sledgehammers, 1933, Color linocut.

While Leslie was the initial collector of prints — he purchased his first Erich Heckel woodcut in 1954 — it was Johanna who directed their interests to British printmaking and the more colorful works of the Grosvenor School. “If we had different pictures on this wall, our children would be different,” she once told Leslie. Johanna passed away in August, just as the exhibition of her collection was being finalized. While it could not appear in time in the catalog, “Dublin Under Snow” serves as a quiet tribute to her. “This,” Leslie tells me, “is Jo’s favorite.”

Portrait of the scam artist

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION,

Hunter Biden: portrait of the scam artist

I can’t think of many other art shows that have been more heavily discussed than seen

“Put your phone in your pocket and keep it there.” So I was told by the guard blocking the entrance of the Georges Bergès Gallery. I wasn’t going to argue. That’s because I was about to become one of the few to see The Journey Home: A Hunter Biden Solo Exhibition.

I can’t think of many other art shows that have been more heavily discussed than seen. This critic is guilty as charged. But the press, and the public, are not all to blame for the ratio’d attention. The Journey Home has been open “by invitation only” for just about its full run. Invitations have not been abundant. You will not find the show listed on the gallery website or given any sense of its start or end. After a vandal painted “Daddy” on the gallery walls in hairspray, it’s been a soft launch and soft close for the hard-living show. Instead the paparazzi have swarmed outside. Last month the political painter Scott LoBaido unveiled his “Portrait of the Scam Artist” on the street; the work depicts Biden painting doodles in bed with his crack pipe while collecting communist cash. But Biden, born again and again and again, has been undeterred. That’s what this show, at least for him, is all about. “Biden attempting to save his soul,” is how the critic Donald Kuspit has put it, “not simply express it.”

Hunter himself arrived at the gallery earlier this month with his new wife Melissa Cohen and new legitimate heir in tow, landing on the front page of the New York Post. “Vincent Van Dough,” declared the tabloid, “He’s in the Monet: Hunter Biden’s Corrupt Art Show Opens in NYC.” As it happens, just as soon as it opened, the show has closed. It could have been last week. Or maybe it was yesterday. In any case, one Friday evening, the doors were open, and I went in.

“Hunter will go down as a great artist for this century,” Georges Bergès has told the press. “If anything, his father will be known as the father of a great artist.” It has been quite a fifteen-minute run for Berges’s Soho shop. The New York Times gave The Journey Home the full review treatment at the start of November. “Emotionally Honest, Generically Smooth,” ran the headline. Jason Farago described this Hunter Biden Experience as “rather random, rather personal, rather ingenuous.”

Not to be outdone, Kuspit has called Biden a “master of color” making “masterpieces of what has been called transcendental abstraction.” He compared the president’s son to Kandinsky, only better: “Biden plays the keyboard of colors as deftly as he does, however different his abstract music, for it has a more urgent sense of purpose.” When I read this review, my first thought was that Kuspit must be the Zodiac Killer. I can’t imagine anyone writing such words who is not also looking for a presidential pardon. Now we see that Kuspit is curating the next show at Bergès. You don’t need to be Burisma to take a bite out of Biden.

The gallery was eerily empty for my visit. The house lights were dimmed save for a spotlight on each of the works. A brick of incense burned in a side room next to a small tinkling fountain. There were quoteworthy sayings written on the walls and right on the paintings. The gallery, the art, and the presentation all conveyed the impression of a physical-therapy office that doesn’t take insurance. Only Bergès’s occasional high-pitched cackle, echoing across the gallery from some undisclosed location, was there to break the spell.

It is the spell of privilege, of permanent adolescence, of living life high above common concern and plastering it all with bongwater symbols and sayings that The Journey Home tries to cast. As non-fungible tokens of grift and graft — such considerations dwell beyond the event horizon of what you see on the gallery walls. Instead what you get are tattoo-like symbols of snakes, birds, dragons and Celtic writing all stenciled in gold pen. You read the saying by Joseph Campbell that “we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path.” The pre-socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea informs us that “one path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is.” This one, also written in gold pen, appears on a painting featuring a bald female figure resembling the V’Ger robot from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

When Biden descends from this astral plane, he lets his paints run in bloody patterns. He drips out pointillist landscapes trip-trap. His blows pigments into floral patterns, in particular across “Untitled #13” — arrangements that are inoffensive but inauthentic. The wild artist is falsely tamed.

You find a sweep of styles and techniques presented here across two floors, none of it dated, none with any sense of direction. But those works labeled “mixed media” seem to convey a truer artist. Here through computer manipulation, Biden has distorted images, mostly of himself. He prints them out and doodles on top of them. When I entered the exhibition, there was a velvet rope closing off the downstairs half of the show. At some point it came down and I descended. A gallerist followed close behind. “One of us has to be downstairs with you,” he explained, “just in case…you never know.” Here, in “Hockney,” we catch a glimpse of the pool of Biden’s Hollywood Hills home — and Ms. Cohen-Biden’s derriere floating therein. There it is again, in “Self Portrait,” behind some crystal schlock, another bikini-clad babe next to Biden, all covered in paint.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, it is said that an anal stage follows the oral stage in early-childhood development. Biden has lived life as the anal-explosive son, but many of his paint-the-dots numbers are fussy, restrained, retentive. It seems more honest to start with those digital images that made him famous and manipulate them further, as he does here, pouring paint or wherever else on the end result. If your art is crap, it’s best not to pull the handle.