On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art contrasting lifestyles BY JAMES R. MELLOW The Museum of Modern Art recently juxtaposed two remarkably contradictory life styles, the naturalistic and the mechanistic. It honored the first...
...For van Doesburg (1883-1931 ) Mother Nature was the principal obstacle in the path of architecture's progress...
...As impresario of de Stijl, and editor of the publication of the same name, van Doesburg proposed a purposeful style marked by elementary planes and primary colors, unadorned surfaces, structural sobriety and rectitude...
...she stood in the way of its coming to terms with technology and the machine age...
...r^an Doesburg believed human nature could be redeemed by an architecture that was squared and trued according to Cubist discipline...
...It honored the first with a striking exhibition—a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Hector Guimard (1867-1942), turn-of-the-century Parisian architect and designer...
...carved out of stone, it bears only a vague relation to traditional tombstone shapes...
...This belief threads its way through several ambitious modernist styles and movements...
...He died in New York a neglected man...
...Now it is the total environment that needs overhauling...
...It was clear, however, both from Guimard's surviving and no-longer-extant work, that he regarded his design as an all-inclusive and pervasive force that would wrap man up in a seductive, quasi-naturalist environment...
...It was the beginning of the later geometric style of flat, primary-colored planes that van Doesburg adopted for his paintings and architectural drawings...
...He seems to have envisioned his style—which he later called the "Style Guimard"—serving society from the cradle to the grave...
...In the light of this fanaticism, one can easily see why the waywardness of nature would never do...
...Matters of strict construction were of enormous importance to followers of de Stijl...
...His tall, burgeoning structures for the Paris Metro stations (one of which has been a fixture of the Modern's sculpture garden for years) were so well-known and popular in the early 1900s that they became a personal trademark...
...That it has ended in disappointment one can gather readly enough, for the renovation of society is no longer a matter of redesigning public amenities and public buildings, or providing pleasant garden cities for the working classes...
...He provided the theoretical groundwork for the Bauhaus' eventual reform when—as a result of political pressures—it moved to Dessau and began its machine- and technology-oriented stage...
...In his world there were only to be sleek and winding forms, no hard and blunt edges to bump up against and do one's self harm...
...The manner is everywhere suave and sinuous...
...While the Modern's exhibition did not include any cradles, it is difficult to believe that such a prodigiously inventive and painstaking designer as Guimard could not have produced a suitably Art Nouveau example of one...
...In the pages of de Stijl van Doesburg castigated the school as "a parody of the new creativity," a propagator of an altogether defunct and "ultrubaroque" approach to design style...
...Van Doesburg was, no doubt, a proselytizing nuisance, but he had a profound theoretical and practical effect on 20th-century architecture...
...Unfortunately, several of them, like the Castel Henriette, a charming maison de plaisance, are now demolished...
...He nonetheless recognized that its success—van Doesburg's success—"corresponds to a whole state of mind: we no longer believe in mystery...
...For this reason he set himself in opposition to the Bauhaus program, lecturing Gropius' students against the old-fashioned, medievalizing and handicraft view of design their school seemed to be promoting in its first, or Weimar, phase...
...Through his direct and indirect influence at Gropius' Bau-haus—the radical German school of design which became the seat of the International Style—van Doesburg affected the course of architecture for several decades...
...it was, indeed, the presiding social esthetic at the Bauhaus...
...His style anticipated the coming architecture of modular units, curtain walls and machine-produced structural elements...
...Also included were a great many photographic studies of Guimard's most notable buildings, nearly all produced during his most productive decade...
...although his contributions to Art Nouveau were acknowledged (principally by the Modern's Alfred Barr, who acquired a number of the museum's Guimard holdings from the architect's widow), his style had been thoroughly repudiated...
...Originating in 1917, it came to international prominence in the '20s, and it is on the '20s that the Modern's "Theo van Doesburg: The Development of an Architecture," concentrates...
...Van Doesburg's willingness to compromise and use diagonals, rather than adhere to Mondrian's rule of the right angle, ultimately led to the two artists severing personal relations...
...Yet these two antithetical styles shared one thing in common: a persistent and modernist faith in the capacity of architecture to renovate society by rebuilding—re-structing—the world it lives in...
...The machine was, in van Doesburg's view, "a phenomenon of spiritual discipline...
...The second life style is currently being featured at the Modern in its concise collection of the work of Theo van Doesburg, painter, architect, designer, sometime friend of Mondrian, and Pope of de Stijl— the Dutch-born movement that with rabid directness was known simply as "the Style...
...Few examples are more instructive of the rigorous and single-minded geometry of de Stijl than the early series of Mondri-an's paintings and drawings which begin with a naturalistic tree in space and, by way of Cubism, end with nothing more than tawny planes and black crosses...
...And, obviously, a style like Guimard's, which tried to temper machine esthetics with pretty glosses from nature, was absolutely beyond the pale...
...Organized by F. Lanier Graham, the museum's associate curator of collections, the show closed this month, and now moves on to San Francisco, Toronto and, finally, Paris...
...It was indicative of Guimard's point of view that when modern architecture passed him by, leaving his most important work stranded like some lovely and convoluted seashell on a deserted beach, he could refer to the modernist esthetic as "Today's Fashion of the Naked...
...For a time, his Art Nouveau designs were even dubbed "Le Style Metro...
...Even the armchairs he proposed for one project—prototypes for modern club chairs that are still in production—were square and uncompromising cubes...
...That, perhaps, defines the style best: Its forms—its undulating walls, its undulating staircases, wrought-iron balconies and gateways—never quite settle into recognizable and static shapes...
...The show did include a grave: a photograph of the Guimard family tomb in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetery...
...As painters, both van Doesburg and Mondrian pursued Cubism to its logical conclusions in a strict and pure abstraction...
...The Modern's Guimard retrospective offered an awesome array of his work selected from the hundreds of objects and 50 or more buildings recovered by the museum's staff in the course of its five years' research for the exhibition...
...it was to be a means of social liberation...
...Projects of the early '20s, they are rendered in isometric views, in planes of red, yellow and blue...
...Beds, chairs, perfume bottles, corner cupboards, the embroidered silk panels for his wife's wedding gown, concert halls, radiator grills, cane handles, keys: Each and every item is perfect of its kind, beautifully adapted to the curvaceous lines, mysterious protruberances and sensual swellings that give Guimard's style its distinctly erotic cast...
...It is an imposing, not-quite-definable edifice...
...But its pictorial quality, (clearly indicated by van Doesburg's architectural drawings), was decisively indebted to the precepts of Cubism...
...De Stijl owed its structural and reformist tendencies to several sources, among them the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and the antiart propaganda of the Da-daists...
...Guimard's incredible whiplash and tendril style suggested that every project he turned his hand to —rooms, buildings, furniture—was inextricably entwined in a luxuriant cycle of growth and imminent blossoming...
...In its dedicated an-tinaturalism there could hardly have been an architecture more antithetical to Guimard's floriferous Art Nouveau...
...And no longer is it an article of faith, as for Guimard and van Doesburg...
...Guimard was scarcely so influential a figure...
...The vault might easily be a military bunker, or a piece of Futurist architecture—except for its growth of stretched and unfurling, taffy-pulled decorative forms...
...it has become a question of survival...
...During the early phases of his career—roughly from 1895-1905, when, so to speak, Art Nouveau withered on its vine—Guimard was a celebrated personality, a much-sought-after architect, a designer whose ambition it was to "do over" life, transform it into a complete work of art...
...Designed by Ludwig Glaeser, curator of architecture, the show includes 40 color studies and architectural designs...
...The practical van Doesburg schemes on display in the current exhibition—for a private house, an artist's house, a combined house and gallery for art-dealer Leonce Rosenberg—are vintage International Style...
Vol. 53 • May 1970 • No. 11
