ARTS
Art goes West
John McEwen
Westkunst (Rheinhallen, Cologne, till 16 August) and Paris-Paris, 1937-1957 (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, till 2 November) are two mammoth exhibitions that, collectively, go most of the way towards wrapping up Western art history to the present; but, to a rare degree, they are also charged with political and symbolic significance. Westkunst, in a general as well as German context, is a deliberately provocative title. Have we it asksin the facetious sense, gone west? Are we going west? 'No Future!' may be the battle cry of Punk, but the whole impetus of Modernism is belief in the future. Such questions are very ticklish indeed in West Germany at the moment, with front-line tension high, the economy faltering and a sense of disillusionment, not least with America, in the air. But Westkunst, considered geographically, is not so much ironical as educational, even challenging. There can never have been a show that confronts Germans so forcefully with the magnitude of their cultural deprivation through the suppression of the Reich and the consequent flight of their artists; or one that more poignantly exposes the defiance of the spirit in times of war. And an even more explicit treatment of this delicate subject confronts the French in Paris-Paris, where photographs, uniforms, texts and knick-knacks support the art, and document collaboration as well as resistance in the dark days of the Occupation. Already in the Beaubourg series there has been a ParisBerlin show, now, with Westkunst surveying the period from 1939 to the present, we have a French show in tandem with a German. This was not planned, apparently, and Westkunst is, in any case, sponsored by the city of Cologne, not the West German government, but nevertheless it lends a further political intricacy to the exhibitions that would be missing if they were being shown in other countries.
Westkunst takes place in a vast hangar of a building normally reserved for trade fairs. There is an introductory film programme, a sandwich bar, an art bookshop, but basically none of the pandering to general taste that makes such a spatial discomfort and intellectual confusion of Paris-Paris. It is a specialist show, divided into two, separately catalogued, parts. Much the larger and correspondingly more important of these is devoted to a survey of Western art, mostly in the form of painting, from 1939 (the end of Surrealism and Constructivism as fashions) to 1972 (similarly the end of Minimalism and Conceptualism); with the second part devoted exclusively to some of the stars of 1981, selected and presented, for financial reasons, by a random number of the classier contemporary art galleries in Europe and America. It is therefore most accurately described as two exhibitions one a historical survey, the other an art fair with the absence of anything very much to do with the Seventies (video, photography in particular) creating the divide.
The first thing to report from an English point of view is that there are only a handful of English artists included, however, their effect proves disproportionate to their number. Three of them Moore, Bacon and Hamilton are honoured with the inclusion of several works a piece, and easily stand the test of this extension of interest. There is no sculpture by Moore, which seems a reasonable decision in view of the exhibition policy to select works on the basis of their originality rather than popularity. His sculptural explorations were essentially complete by 1939, and he is accordingly represented by the apogee of his graphic work, the wartime sketches of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in the.. Underground; an image of confinement complemented by Oskar Schlemmer's secretive views from a window during his last discredited days as an artist in Germany at much the same date. Next, as we follow the fairly strict chronological order of the exhibition, comes one of the highlights of the entire display: an array of full-blooded Francis Bacon pictures, the series on the theme of 'Study for Portrait of Van Gogh' once more reunited. Here, in the convulsive meeting of abstract and figurative tendencies, is the paradox that forms the mainstream concern of painting today. 'You know,' says Bacon discussing these pictures in his celebrated interview with David Sylvester (Thames & Hudson, f4.95), my case all painting and the older I get, the more it becomes so is accident.' A remark that dismisses notions of progress and signals the end of Modernism, the real story of post-war culture and, inevitably, Westkunst but, in the late Fifties, not yet. In 1956 another highly significant contribution is made by an English artist, Richard Hamilton, with his prophetic installation for the Whitechapel's This is Tomorrow exhibition. A reconstruction, specially made by the artist for the present show, can be seen to anticipate all manner of pictorial styles and images that were to obsess Op and Pop practitioners in the Sixties: the black and white dazzles of Bridget Riley; Rosenquist's enormities of slippery food; Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe all are foretold. It may have proved a false dawn, but Hamilton read the art-historical moment to perfection.
Up to, and for a few years beyond this point, the survey meanders to great effect. In the early rooms Kandinsky's last works are a revelation: quick and contrapuntal celebrations of technological life, an age away from the great symphonies of his youth in praise of nature. Pollock's introduction of speed to painting, the perfect expression of American phenomenology, the philosophy of action, can be seen to open the floodgates to happenings and exhaustion of the spirit, pulling the plug on orderly Modernism once again. Bacon maintains a tremulous equilibrium in the flux. There are the false dawns of Op's optimistic belief in technology, Pop's in leisured commercialism. But with the midSixties the ideas, the schools, the styles come thicker and faster, just as the exhibition runs short of space. The last rooms are little more than storage, a mayhem of facts, copied down, as it were, willy-nilly in the final moments of an examination. But the art, too, exhibits much the same feverishness, irony and theatricality replacing optimism and dedication. Belief in progress for whatever reason, the disillusion with science, the failure to harness technology to artistic purpose, the gathering threat of technological control, the barrenness of the Moon, the acceptance of the millennium, 'No Future' evaporates entirely, the inspirational wave turns back on itself with the 1981 stars doing pots like Picasso s in 1940, pictures in the style of the Cobra Group of the Fifties. The present is in the past in a way it was not at the outset of the war.
Paris-Paris, finishing with 1957, avoids this backwash. It is a maze of a show, a case of complete cultural overkill. It would take a year just to read one's way through it all, literary history documented as exhaustively as everything else and most French writers proving to have minuscule handwriting. French painting is generally considered to have been a bit dull at this time, nevertheless they produced two masters, Dubuffet and Yves Klein, whose work looks outstanding both here and in Cologne. Scottie Wilson in the 'Art Brut' section proves the only British representative. Struggling free of the crowd, clutching a half-ton catalogue, it becomes clear that exhibitions of this kind have soaked up art to such an extent that they are now its substitute. The Beaubourg, for all its Jacques Tati-ness, has restored, France to the centre of artistic affairs, although French artists seem extinct. Maybe art has gone underground in these days of cultural Occupation, just as it did in the war for rather different reasons.
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