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Special Feature: Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde |
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Number 12: (In)efficacy |
| The Querelle
du Réalisme and the Politicization of French Artists
during the Great Depression |
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| Modern artists have long made claims about the political relevance of their work. From the Neo-Impressionist belief that formally innovative works have a politically transformative effect on their viewers to Wassily Kandinsky’s promotion of the idea of the artist as a spiritual leader in a time of political upheaval, such claims have formed an important part of the avant-garde posture from the 1880s onwards. They have rarely been subjected to any test of accountability, however, and on the few occasions when they have, the results have not been impressive. Futurism molded itself to the priorities of Fascism rather than shaping Fascist policy, and the Surrealists’ flirtation with the French Communist Party in the late 1920s was short-lived. Indeed, modern art’s emphasis on continuous formal innovation, and the resulting inaccessibility of its products to a non-specialist audience, meant that it was inherently unsuited to addressing a wider public, as genuinely political art must surely do. Furthermore, the emergence of modern art was linked, from the beginning, to the growth of the art market, which allowed artists to make a living producing works that did not meet the requirements of traditional state and church patronage. Their dependence on the art market tied modern artists to an upper-middle-class clientele by what Clement Greenberg elegantly described as an “umbilical cord of gold.” [1] This limited their ability to contest conservative capitalist systems from a left-wing position—a significant limitation since, with the exception of the Futurists, all modern artists who expressed a commitment to the political positioned themselves on the left. At the same time, left-wing artists who sought to make their work politically effective in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by aligning themselves with the workers’ movement, and who therefore worked in a realist style expressly intended to be accessible to those unfamiliar with contemporary developments, were for the most part branded as artistically retrograde. As a result of their aesthetic marginalization, the history of these artists and their work largely remains to be written. [2] At the beginning of the 1930s, the situation appeared to be intractable: modern artists made claims to political effectiveness that they were unable to validate, while realist artists fell short of achieving artistic recognition. In France, the Great Depression temporarily disrupted these established positions, and opened, or appeared to open, the possibility of an artistic middle ground that combined a commitment to formal innovation with an interest in making politically effective art. This paper investigates the specific conditions that led to the temporary closing of the gulf between modernists and realists in France, and analyzes the different types of response that these conditions provoked. Before the onset of the Depression, which affected the French economy from 1931 onwards, the market for modern art in Europe had enjoyed more or less sustained growth since the late 1880s. In France, the growth of the market at the end of the nineteenth century freed artists from their former dependence on state support and encouraged a culture of self-conscious artistic independence. The market remained strong throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, fostering an economically and socially self-contained community of artists, dealers, critics and collectors. By the second half of the 1920s, modern art had decisively outstripped traditional forms in terms of market popularity. Accordingly, prices for works by traditional artists remained relatively flat during the decade, while those for modern works saw often-dramatic increases, prompting widespread discussion in the art press of the effects of speculative investment in modern art on artists and their work. [3] The Depression and the resulting collapse of the Paris art market had a devastating effect on this community. All but the most established artists experienced significant financial difficulties, and in many cases these difficulties caused them to question their dependence on a group of sympathizers that was both numerically and socially very restricted. Many expressed an interest in exchanging their hard-won independence for renewed social and political engagement, feeling that the closed circuit of production and consumption that marked the 1920s had driven a wedge between them and the broader public. These fundamental changes in the way modern artists perceived themselves and their social role were accompanied by a considerable quantity of public soul-searching, which allows us to trace changing attitudes with some precision. In 1935, in the depths of the Depression, members of the Association des Ecrivains et des Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists; AEAR), an anti-Fascist group linked to the Paris branch of the Maison de la Culture, a cultural center run by the French Communist Party, conducted a survey of artists’ attitudes. The survey was published under the title “Où Va la Peinture?” (Where is Painting Going?) in the May and June 1935 issues of Commune, a journal produced by the AEAR. Three debates investigating similar issues were then held at the Maison de la Culture in 1936, the first two of which were quickly published as a book titled La Querelle du Réalisme (The Argument over Realism). A significant majority of the participants in “Où Va la Peinture?” and La Querelle du Réalisme made some reference to the fact that the Depression had pushed them towards greater social and political engagement. Given the climate of the period, in which the French government’s ineffectual efforts to address the economic crisis had direct social effects in terms of unemployment, it is often difficult to draw a clear line in the contributions between explicit political commitment and more general affirmations of a desire to reconnect with the public. Amédée Ozenfant, for example, held that “any artist who willingly holds himself above the political and social mêlée, believing that this gives him some kind of an advantage, is in fact depriving himself of any chance of being in tune with his times” [4], making no real distinction between the social and the political. Overall, though, the sense that it was time for modern artists to break down the barriers that had grown up between them and the wider public was very strong, and in the hands of certain artists it was couched in specifically political terms. Ideas about the forms that this renewed social and political commitment should take varied widely between artists, however. The widest gulf was between those who believed that sufficiently radical formal innovations could have a concrete political effect in their own right, and the growing numbers who held that any meaningful political or social commitment must be accompanied by two things: relevant content and a form sufficiently legible for uninitiated viewers to be able to comprehend the work. The first position was most articulately propounded by an artist who had been arguing this line since the 1890s, the long-time anarcho-communist Paul Signac. As early as 1891, Signac had written that “[the revolutionary] tendency is encountered much more strongly among the pure aesthetes, revolutionaries by temperament, who, striking off the beaten path, paint what they see, as they feel it, and very often unconsciously supply a solid axe-blow to the creaking social edifice.” [5] His point of view had not changed significantly by 1935, when he continued to assert the importance of form and color over that of subject matter—even in the face of some vigorous questioning from the organizers of “Où Va la Peinture?” In terms of efficacy, Signac’s position seems doubly questionable. For the anarcho-communism he espoused, a vital political force in France in the 1890s, had become increasingly marginalized during the early twentieth century, losing out to the more organized structures of Socialism and Communism, and his Neo-Impressionist style, radical in the 1890s, could no longer be held to be progressive by the time of the Great Depression. A position related to Signac’s, combining political commitment with reluctance to embrace a return to identifiable, topical subject matter, was advanced by several artists with links to Surrealism, including Christian Bérard, René Mendès-France and Yves Tanguy; it was most elegantly expressed by Max Ernst’s metaphor:
Given the Surrealists’ emphasis on the unconscious as the most important source for the content of their art, the resistance to predetermined subject matter is predictable. It is worth considering, however, that the traditional Surrealist belief in the revolutionary potential of an art derived from the unconscious was the subject of vigorous debate in the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically because certain members of the group questioned its efficacy. The debate focused on the relationship between Surrealism and the French Communist Party (PCF), with some arguing that affiliation with the Party was a precondition of effective political action, others that it represented an unacceptable constraint on artistic freedom. The Surrealists as a group had committed themselves to a revolutionary posture in a 1925 Declaration by the Bureau de Recherches Surréalistes, and they began to contribute to the Communist journal Clarté later the same year. In 1927, André Breton, the leader of the group, published the manifesto Au Grand Jour, which came out strongly in favor of the PCF, and in 1928, those who refused to join the Party were expelled from the Surrealist movement. This was the moment of closest engagement between the Surrealists and the PCF, since in 1929 Breton rejected Stalinism in the Second Surrealist Manifesto. Breton then struggled to find an accommodation with the orthodox Communism of the PCF, and eventually broke completely with the Party in 1933. Louis Aragon, another important early member of the Surrealist group, followed a very different trajectory. He continued to be engaged with the PCF throughout the early 1930s, attended the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Moscow in August and September of 1934 (the conference at which Andrei Zhdanov set out the policy of Socialist Realism) and published his realist novel Les Cloches de Bâle in the same year. Aragon was also an influential figure at the Communist-sponsored Maison de la Culture in Paris, one of the main organizers of the Communist-inspired Congrès International des Ecrivains pour la Défense de la Culture (International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture) in 1935, and a contributor to both published debates in the Querelle du Réalisme. In his contribution to the first debate, Aragon expressed a clear vision of the type of realism he believed was the most appropriate response to the economic and political circumstances of the period: “This realism will no longer be dominated by nature—in other words it will not be naturalism—but will be a conscious expression of social realities and an integral part of the struggle to modify those realities. In a word, it will be a socialist realism...” [7] In line with his endorsement of the Soviet model, Aragon was critical both of Signac’s emphasis on formal radicalism and of the Surrealist dependence on the subconscious. In the first debate he launched an attack on the formalism into which modern artists had retreated:
Then in the second debate, in an obvious stab at the Surrealists, he noted: “Now you are unhappy that great social upheavals are disturbing the calmness of your chimeras and the languor of your visual meditations.” [9] The party-line Communist Aragon, however, was not the only contributor to the Querelle du Réalisme who doubted the political effectiveness of art that was only radical in the formal sense. Edouard Goerg had studied before the First World War with Maurice Denis and Paul Sérusier—both of whom had come to prominence in the 1890s as part of the Nabis group—and later been influenced by George Grosz’s highly politicized brand of Expressionism. Goerg emphasized the link between the formal focus of artistic practice in the 1920s and the social isolation of the modern artist:
The reference to classic modernist theory is quite direct here: it is clear that Goerg was thoroughly conversant with the emphasis on formal properties over subject matter that had underpinned the development of modern painting since the turn of the century, and saw it as lying at the root of the sense of ineffectuality artists were experiencing during the Depression. The Depression, then, gave rise to a critique of the formalism of modern art during the preceding decades, a formalism that had steadily eroded art’s social and political functions. The solution most commonly proposed in the context of “Où va la Peinture?” and La Querelle du Réalisme, significantly outweighing the positions represented by Signac and the Surrealists, was to produce a more accessible art, dealing with topical subjects and capable of engaging wider audiences. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that such opinions represented an unquestioning embrace of realism. The majority of contributors were veterans of modern art’s efforts to distance itself from the sentimental and anecdotal forms of realism by now associated with academic painting. For this reason, the exponents of a more engaged art spent as much time specifying what aspects of realism they were determined to avoid as they did outlining the forms they thought it should take. Jean Lurçat, whose work of the 1930s was indebted to Surrealism but who had previously worked in a style informed by Cubism, pointed out that “The painter is not just a recording machine” and launched an appeal not to “start the naturalist experience over without moving things forward” [11]. Edouard Goerg, in his comments on the social isolation of the artist who restricted himself to formal investigations, remarked that nonetheless “the painter [...] never finds ready-made canvases in nature, apt to be cut out and put in a frame.” [12] Motivation to avoid the most transparent forms of realism came not just from the taint of academicism that such forms carried but also from the fact that by the middle of the 1930s they were developing even uglier associations. Since the National Socialists took power in Germany in 1933, they had been encouraging the production of an art that was figurative in style and reactionary in content; an initiative accompanied by an increasingly strident rejection of modern art. In the Soviet Union, the enthusiasm for modern art that followed the 1917 Revolution had been eroded during the 1920s and was decisively supplanted in 1934 by the official imposition of Socialist Realism, a style believed to be more effective at communicating the aims of the regime. One might expect that the artists of the Maison de la Culture, drawn to the organization by its anti-Fascist platform, would have wanted to distance themselves most clearly from the German version of realism. In practice, however, there is almost no mention of this subject in “Où va la Peinture?” and La Querelle du Réalisme. What loomed much larger was the suspicion among modern artists that they might eventually be pressured to adopt the Soviet model. This was largely because the Maison was run by the French Communist Party, which wielded considerable influence over cultural policy as a key participant in the recently elected left-wing coalition government known as the Popular Front. Aragon’s contribution to the first Querelle debate, cited above, can only have added to artists’ concerns. In practice, however, Aragon was almost completely isolated in the debates. The artists he was addressing were simply not prepared to give up their hard-won freedom to transform the subjects they depicted in the pursuit of greater expressiveness, and, for all their interest in greater social and political engagement, they were loathe to have their approaches dictated by politicians. Against this background, the contribution made to the second debate by Jean Cassou, a Communist poet and art critic speaking in his capacity as the newly appointed liaison between the Ministry of Education and the Fine Arts Administration, was a masterpiece of double-talk. Committed to promoting the Communist line but clearly cognizant of the concerns evinced by a majority of the artists present, Cassou chose to elaborate on the concepts of “obligation” and “freedom” in art:
The implausible lengths to which Cassou went to try and justify the coercive effects of the policy of Socialist Realism—and we should make no mistake that Socialist Realism, with the extensive apparatus of state control and predefined subject matter it entailed, lies behind his remarks—indicate that he understood how vigorously French artists would resist any Soviet-style interference in their work, even as they went in search of greater political effectiveness. Indeed, what many of the artists who participated in the Maison de la Culture were seeking was a middle ground, a position somewhere between politically ineffectual formalism and ideologically subservient realism that would allow them to reconnect with a wider public on the terrain of topical and legible subject matter without entirely giving up the formal innovations pioneered by modern artists. Thus Ozenfant suggested
He did not, however, provide any real details of what this new art would look like. Only two artists got down to the nuts and bolts of describing what form it might take. Goerg, whose critiques of formalism and reservations about transparent realism I have cited above, actually laid out a blueprint for the artistic process in his contribution to the second debate. He started by suggesting there are two forms of realism. The first involves disinterested observation of the world; the second, which he favored, requires the artist to “take a stand facing reality” [15], and obliges him to find a subject that engages his emotions and resonates with other human beings. The artist then laid out the precise steps for transforming this subject into a work of art, with an initial process of abstracting from the motif followed by a selection and organization of pictorial elements designed to enhance their expressive aspects and improve the overall visual coherency of the work. Goerg was trying to map a middle path between formalism and abstraction on the one hand and naive realism on the other, aiming for an art that could resonate with non-specialist audiences without being stylistically regressive. During the 1930s, he practiced what he preached, working on a series titled “Ainsi va le monde sous l’oeil de la police” (“So goes the world under the eye of the police”) in response to the rising tide of political oppression in Europe. Any systematic assessment of his achievement as a political artist is rendered very difficult, however, by the relative obscurity in which he worked for much of his career. If an artist’s political effectiveness is determined as much by their public profile as by the level of commitment exemplified in their works, then his impact was clearly limited. No such qualifications need be offered for the second artist who put forward a model for an art that could communicate effectively. Fernand Léger was acknowledged as a leading modern artist, in France and internationally, between the wars, and his continuing status is evidenced by the heavyweight retrospectives he has been accorded in recent years. [16] In “Où va la Peinture?” he proposed that the artist could bridge the gap between recent innovations in painting and a non-specialist audience by focusing on the modern object. He developed this argument in a talk titled “Le nouveau réalisme continue” (The New Realism Goes On) in the second Querelle debate, suggesting that each epoch has its own version of realism and that the technological advancements of the modern age demand “a new realism, quite different from earlier plastic conceptions.” [17] Léger dates the origins of the ‘new realism’ to Impressionism, and admits that it has not reached a wider audience because it has traditionally been the preserve of dealers and collectors. He goes on to argue, however, that this is no reason to return to past styles. To do so would be to “... insult these completely new men, who desire only to understand and to go forward; it is to decree them incapable of rising to this new realism which is of their epoch, the one in which they live and work, and which they have created with their own hands.” [18] Artists, Léger goes on to say, should forge ahead with the new realism, especially in the form of collective mural projects that renew the pre-Renaissance tradition of a truly popular art. In terms of converting theory into practice, however, there was a significant problem with the ideas Léger was putting forward. He admitted in his talk at the Maison de la Culture that the present limitation of modern art’s audience to a relatively small group of initiates was a product of the “current social order,” and that only a “social evolution” would allow ordinary people access to this art. [19] It seems he was thinking not so much of a revolution along traditional Marxist lines as of the changes he anticipated the new Popular Front government would bring, since he stressed the importance of increased leisure time—a key element of the Popular Front platform—as the basis for establishing new audiences for his new realism. The Popular Front’s tenure turned out to be rather short, though, and a number of the socially progressive measures it instituted were partially rolled back after its final dissolution in April 1938. Thus the social evolution Léger envisaged never really took place, and his dream that modern forms would be widely understood and endorsed was not realized. [20] Although Léger himself continued to develop a clearly figurative but identifiably modern style that he hoped would communicate his faith in social progress, after World War Two he was in a minority. The historical moment during which a significant number of artists could imagine an art that split the difference between modernist hermeticism and naive realism, and thereby achieve political effectiveness, did not last long. In the second half of the 1930s Germany and the Soviet Union intensified their efforts to develop transparent forms of realism with maximum ideological impact while systematically excluding and oppressing modern artists. The totalitarian instrumentalization of art frightened off many of the modern artists who had been motivated to reintroduce legible subject matter into their art, because it established an ever more direct link between realism and political authority over the artistic sphere. By 1938, Paris had essentially returned to the pre-Depression status quo: modern artists made claims to political commitment but refused to be held accountable for the effectiveness of their works, and artists who measured their political commitment in terms of party membership were increasingly pressured to produce transparently realist works. These respective positions were exemplified by the two leading lights of 1920s Surrealism. Louis Aragon continued to promote the Communist party line, advocating Socialist Realism in literature and the visual arts, whilst André Breton co-authored, with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky, the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” which argued—under the slogan “complete freedom for art”—that revolutionary art cannot be accountable to any political party or regime. [21] As Europe moved towards war, political and aesthetic positions hardened, and in the process the vision of an art combining formal innovation with political effectiveness was lost. The middle ground had been squeezed out.
Toby Norris is Assistant Professor of Art History at Assumption College, Worcester, Massachusetts. He completed the dissertation Modern Artists and the State in France Between the Two World Wars at Northwestern University in December 2005. In February 2006 he co-chaired the CAA session “Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists, and the Arrière-Garde: Traditional Art in France, 1900–1960” with Natalie Adamson of the University of St. Andrews. An anthology based on the session will be published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2008.
Endnotes [1] Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”,
in John O’Brian (ed), Clement Greenberg: The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Chicago/London, University of
Chicago Press, 1986, 11. |