It was as if a group of artists decided that they wanted to do some mathematics – that was the impression I was left with at the end of the exhibition entitled Van Doesburg and the International Avant-garde at the Tate Modern. Avant-garde represents a pushing of boundaries of the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. In the culture of art, Theo van Doesburg sought to create a kind of universal aesthetic utopia consisting of brightly coloured squares and boldly delineated lines. He founded the Dutch art movement entitled De Stijl which, translated, means “The Style”. And the work of Van Doesburg and his followers are indeed highly stylized, just like the building blocks of an economics model. In this sprawling exhibition of 11 rooms, you will come across just about as many colourful rectangles and squares as the manufacturers of Rubik’s cubes do – which is a lot more colourful rectangles and squares than you really want to see.
A bit of background: Theo van Doesburg was the leading figure in the development of geometric abstraction following the era of Picasso’s cubism, fostering contacts with devotees of Dada and the Bauhaus, preaching the austere geometrical principles of De Stijl – the art movement he founded – and thus becoming a sounding board and transmitter of ideas for the diverse network of artists who shared his vision. Moved by the idea that art had to improve the lot of the masses by coming down off gallery walls and going into the streets, Van Doesburg wanted to create the kind of art that is universal. He sought to establish a visual vocabulary comprised of elementary geometric forms comprehensible by all and adaptable to any discipline. Despite being the founder, it was not Van Doesburg, but Piet Mondrian who became the artist most commonly associated with De Stijl art movement, especially since he achieved major celebrity when fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, in his fall collection of 1965, featured shift dresses in blocks of primary color with black bordering – a design inspired by Mondrian.
It was not easy to enjoy the exhibition: Van Doesburg’s incessant zest for order and rationality gradually becomes stifling. There is a distinct lack of human element in the works exhibited. Instead, art is rationalized with cartesian formulation and mathematical precision. The work entitled Arithmetic Composition, for example, is a mathematical arrangement based on the ratio 3, 6, 12, 24 on a grid displaying the progression of four diagonally aligned black squares. It is a piece of work that is sombre and precise, not to mention terribly self-important. Van Doesburg justified the work as a way to express simultaneity and time sequences in space – an artistic expression of the 4th dimension, if you will. A lot of the art works present had unsentimentally functional names devised with cold clinical detachment: composition V, composition XX, counter-composition VI, counter-composition XII, etc. With a little derivative ingenuity, one would be able to figure out that the “counter-composition” pictures are the likeliness of the original “composition” pictures tilted at 45 degrees. Incidentally, innocuously tilting the paintings has often been speculated as the primary reason for the fall-out between Van Doesburg and Mondrian: Mondrian never accepted diagonals and insisted on horizontals, whereas van Doesburg proclaimed diagonals to be superior because of their dynamic aspects, and featured much of the diagonals in his art. They found their differences irreconcilable and thus declared a split in their friendship.
Although De Stijl appears to be lacking in appeal as a method of painting, its simple functionality and inherent equilibrium shines through in architecture and everyday design. In the rooms of architecture, there are more madly intricate assemblies of coloured cubes and rectangles, but here they serve a more tangible raison d’etre. Model of the Small Ballroom, Café l’Aubette, Strasbourg, a wooden miniature ballroom designed by Van Doesburg, invites one to peer through the doors into a space of lively balance, where the exuberance of colours is contained by the rigidity of lines and grids. Room 5 of the exhibition was dedicated to De Stijl typography, which is inscribed with a square or rectangle, with absolutely no curves. The typeface is a succinct representation of the artworks in this exhibition – structured, ordered, meticulous, remorselessly simple and unapologetically loud in the invariable use of capital letters. There were also aesthetically pleasing examples of invitation cards, signage and advertising posters incorporated with geometric visions that exude a distinctly modern feel, even today.
Nevertheless, 10 rooms later, one is left with a gasping need for the fluidity and natural curvature that had been present in the earlier works of Van Doesburg, as displayed in the first room. In De Stjil, the artist is a mechanic who manufactures and assembles. With the serialization of artworks, the proliferation of grids, lines and angles, and the mathematical mechanics, one cannot help but feel that to De Stjil group, art seems like something to be controlled, contained and rationalized, rather than expressed and set free. This is a far cry from the “spiritual expression” that art should be about according to Wassily Kandinsky, the man who had once been a source of Van Doesburg’s inspiration. Still, the key of avant-garde is the overturning of what has come before, so we must not be surprised. While it is not difficult to understand the De Stijl notion and desire to elegantly combine mathematics, art and musical symphony, it is much more difficult to appreciate the end result. Modern art has, too often, been a series of very good ideas that gave birth to very ugly manifestations.
Van Doesburg and The International Avant-garde: Constructing a New World is open until 16TH MAY 2010 at the Tate Modern
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