Taking these representations of the Virgin inscribed in the patriarchal imaginary as a point of departure, it is possible to trace visualities in modern Latin American art that confront the myth of this voiceless, bodiless, holy woman. Among these, the works of artists Norah Borges (Argentine, 1901–1998), María Izquierdo (Mexican, 1902–1955), and Miriam Inez da Silva (Brazilian, 1939–1996) stand out for their construction of alternative visual narratives that not only act as provocations to the canonical imperatives of Marian representation, but also propose a fundamentally different, female approach to the divine. Depending on the image, their approaches vary from personal, affectionate, and sensitive to lively and popularly oriented to corporeal, tactile, and even sexual. By means of what Giorgio Agamben has called “profanation,” all three artists aimed to return the sacred to common and communal use in a way that is neither ironic nor blasphemous—to express religious belief and its creative potential by delineating another form of understanding of religion in modernity. At the same time, they opened a space for aesthetic and ethical experimentation that follows the modernist canon and yet offers original perspectives on the connections between art, politics, and gender.⁴ As the following comparative analysis will show, religious language—against all odds—enabled innovative affective, popular, and corporeal configurations that challenged the ruling sexist and patriarchal order in Latin American social and religious realms as well as in Latin American artistic realms.

Norah Borges’s Quotidian Mysticism

Though she began as a poet, Norah Borges studied wood engraving in 1914 in Europe, where along with her brother, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, she was active in the Spanish Ultraist avant-garde. When she returned to Buenos Aires in the mid-1920s, she brought this experience with her, becoming an active participant in the group of young innovators who came together in the pages of the avant-garde journals Prisma, Proa, and Martín Fierro.⁵ By the end of the 1920s, however, she was married to the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre, and her interest had shifted away from radical expressionism to the tranquility of more ordered form—to an art aligned with the post–World War I conservative cultural French movement known as the “return to order,” or rappel à l’ordre, which overlapped with her connections to the emerging Catholic intelligentsia attempting to forge ties with modern artists and writers.⁶ Thus, her name appears among those exhibiting in the gallery of the Buenos Aires Courses in Catholic Culture at the same time as she was contributing drawings and woodcuts to contemporary journals of cultural Catholicism such as Criterio and Número.⁷ The drawings Niña vestida de primera comunión [Girl Dressed for Her First Communion] (fig. 1) and Aviñon, both published in Número, when taken together, show that Borges’s religious interest cannot be thought of as outside the classical aesthetic of the return to order and its classical emphasis on balance, harmony, and precision.⁸

If, within the history of art, the return to order marked a shift among artists and writers to classicism in a European sense, Borges brought her own uniqueness to this affiliation. To be sure, as Patricia Artundo has suggested, she enjoyed the freedom that came with not fully belonging to postwar European culture.⁹ This is clear in “Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura” (A synoptic chart of painting), an unsigned text credited to Borges and published in Martín Fierro in March 1927. In this writing, the watchwords “order,” “proportion,” “sharply defined contours,” and “definite forms” coexist with an expressed need for colors that “give joy to the eyes,” such as pink and lemon, pink and Veronese green, and salmon-pink, together with the “mystic color” equivalent to the “color that things will also have in heaven.”¹⁰ Borges’s choice of a pastel palette that avoids strong chromatic contrast, along with her interest in circuses, toys, children, and cart decoration, led male critics of the time to condescendingly and paternalistically emphasize its spontaneous, childlike, and hence feminine aspect, while ignoring the formal aspects of her work and its expression of harmony and proportionality.¹¹

As Griselda Pollock explains, although femininity is “an oppressive condition” for female cultural producers, analyses of their output should explore both its limitations and the ways in which women have negotiated and transformed them.¹² In Borges’s case, her exploration of affect was as much a consequence of the “good” feminine attributes that a woman of her social class was expected to cultivate as it was the possibility inherent in nonvisual, more haptic forms of perception. A wager, therefore, on the expression of a sensorial experience of the world as a form of resistance that, when distributed in oppressive pictorial spaces, encourages community among some bodies (women, young people, and children, in particular). In this way, while her formal compositional style deviated from the aesthetic of order by combining geometry with feeling, her religious-themed works, by recurrently investigating the daily, affective aspect of faith, deviated from the virile, aggressive primacy of Catholic discourse in those years. Borges innovatively put forward a pastel-colored, joyful, and amicable spirituality that brought the religious figures she represented closer to those viewing them.¹³ In turn, she granted materiality to the representation of the sacred, making the body itself and the contact between bodies recurrent themes.

In The Annunciation (1945; fig. 2), a traditional subject in the history of Western art, Borges presents the encounter between the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary within a modern, formal configuration simultaneously framed within a familial, affective space.¹⁴ Brought together in an intimate setting but in golden tones denoting the sacred, the scene presumes a certain hierarchy between the characters, since Mary is seated and looking upward at the archangel hovering just above her, thereby granting greater importance to the spiritual being and his tidings. However, unlike other artists before her, Borges depicted this meeting without resorting to symbols or other elements usually associated with it. In fact, Gabriel is wingless and dressed no differently than a mortal. His clothes share a certain contemporaneity and style with those worn by the Virgin Mary, who is dressed in green (as opposed to the traditional blue and red), sports a modern hairstyle, and lacks a veil—just like countless modern young women in the first half of the 20th century. In this way, Borges returned a founding myth in the history of Western civilization to daily life, bringing it closer to her audience, who must pay attention to the title to understand that what is happening is not a simple chat between friends—and perhaps and perhaps not even between women friends at that. In fact, gender ambiguity is a characteristic of this work and others by the artist. The scholar Roberta Ann Quance has highlighted the presence of a “female androgyny” in Borges’s paintings through the artist’s depiction of slightly effeminate beings set in pink worlds, as in her images of lovers, newlyweds, and angels.¹⁵ Without calling herself a feminist or pretending to reflect on gender, Borges destabilized sex/gender limits and granted a leading role to affectivity, a quality marginalized by the sexist structure of modern society and that would acquire political relevance decades later.¹⁶

In many of Borges’s images, through a language of love devoid of romantic cliché, the bodies of her subjects touch or caress each other—including in The Annunciation, where the position of the arms could be understood as a precursor to an embrace. Confronting the relationship between emotionalism, weakness, and female inferiority, Borges reaffirmed the female, in contrast to other women of the avant-garde (like Maruja Mallo or Frida Kahlo) who, as Quance suggests, assimilated male styles and activities in order to “pal around” with male artists.¹⁷ For example, in Borges’s painting Holy Week (fig. 3), the Biblical characters are identifiable by the symbols they carry rather than by their features, which do not differ greatly from one another. Veronica, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus all have oval faces, gentle demeanors, big black eyes, and pastel-colored cassocks, and they are composed in an iconic arrangement. However, the staging of the scene and characters is closer to that of modern daily life than to a historicization and sacralization of Catholicism.

In Norah Borges’s pastel-colored universe, the private, mystic, intimate, and affective coexist with a rational harmony guided by a spiritual imprint. In this sense, religiosity is an aesthetic form and motif that brings the supernatural closer to the everyday, contributing strikingly to undo hierarchical binarisms (sacred/profane, reason/heart, modern/primitive, and feminine/masculine, among others), pillars of a modern Western narrative from which women (artists) found themselves excluded.

Divine Mestizaje: María Izquierdo’s Altars

María Cenobia Izquierdo was born in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, a pilgrimage site thronged by the miracle-seeking faithful. She moved to Mexico City with her husband and children in the 1920s. In 1928, she entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where, in 1929, Diego Rivera was appointed director. Art historian Nancy Deffebach recounts that Rivera praised Izquierdo’s paintings in a student exhibition without knowing who had painted them and was surprised to find out that they had been done by a woman. As a result of this recognition, Izquierdo was invited to show her work in November 1929 in La nueva Galería del Arte Moderno, her first solo exhibition, but then had to abandon her studies when she fell victim to the jealousy and aggression of her classmates.¹⁸ By then separated from her husband, she was sharing a studio and had become romantically linked with the painter Rufino Tamayo; both were connected to the Contemporáneos, a group of young avant-gardists who opposed nationalist discourse and defended the internationalization of Mexican art and literature.¹⁹ Not coincidentally, in the 1930s, Octavio Paz, among other writers, reproduced some of Izquierdo’s paintings in the journal Taller in homage to this “heterodox” whose art, he recalled fifty years later, “was far removed from the muralists’ ideological painting.”²⁰

Along the same lines, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska has suggested that Izquierdo was more Mexican than Frida Kahlo because she was not “folkloric but essential.”²¹ Depicting soup tureens, mermaids, peasants, dollhouses, self-portraits, and tablecloths, in her words, she painted “a still life with huachinango [red snapper].”²² Along these elements, the women in Izquierdo’s paintings (for example, the nudes or ballerinas, tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, and trainers of the circus universe) have active roles. Notably, as Jean Franco suggests, they stand in contrast to the representations of women by the famed Mexican muralists, who usually relegated their female subjects to a passive, secondary role.²³

Izquierdo’s series of altars to the Virgen de Dolores (Virgin of Sorrows), which she worked on at the end of her life, from 1943 to 1948, channeled her interest in 19th-century popular and religious art by means of female representations that have physical characteristics like her own. As Poniatowska notes, these Virgins have Izquierdo’s face as well as the curve of her lips, which evokes harshness and controlled internal rage—perhaps the result of having to create within an artistic field dominated by male muralists.²⁴ Izquierdo’s self-representation may also be connected to her own childhood memories, to the religious universe of Jalisco, to popular beliefs, and to mestizaje as a representation of Mexican national identity.

The Altar of Sorrows emerged as a tradition among Franciscan friars in Mexico in the 16th century, when it was installed only in temples; but upon growing in popularity, it was set up in squares, gardens, and within homes on the Friday of the sixth week of Lent, known as “Viernes de Dolores” (Friday of Sorrows). Although its purpose was to recall the Virgin Mary’s suffering over the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, over time, it assumed festival characteristics, including an association with music and dance, that gave it a popular appeal. Among the objects common to traditional celebrations were paper tablecloths, white-and-purple curtains and garlands conveying purity and mourning; shiny ornaments and jars and glasses of flavored water representing the tears of the Virgin; fruits, such as oranges, symbolizing grief and bitterness; flags as symbols of hope and triumph through the Resurrection; and sprouted seeds as a metaphor for the life cycle but also associated with agriculture, flowers, and candles. For her part, the Virgin was dressed in mourning, sometimes with a heart pierced by daggers, and she had tears in her eyes and on her cheeks.²⁵

Izquierdo respected the traditional altar elements, which she incorporated in her paintings, and yet she included more personal, popular objects, such as decorated ceramic incense burners, among them. But perhaps the most distinctive characteristic is that, in contrast to the sorrowful Virgins of New Spain, Izquierdo’s Virgins are neither white nor alone. Moreover, they are not depicted in a sacred, timeless setting, but rather in a modern space that seems local, secular, and quotidian by comparison.²⁶ By painting an altar installation in a more contemporary way, Izquierdo evoked the domestic intimacy of a religious practice. In her Altar de Dolores (fig. 4), the transparency of the curtains indicates a religiosity that continues into daily life, suggesting a connection with the “beyond” that may be found in the “nearby” of Mexican popular culture. These transparent fabrics do not separate the two realms—rather, they integrate the sacred into everyday life in an intimate way, making clear that it belongs to a reality socially inscribed in the working class, as suggested by the austere frame of the painting and the image itself. According to some scholars, this painting is based on a series of inexpensive reproductions of an Italian Baroque painting that circulated widely in Mexico at the time.²⁷

Unlike Norah Borges, Izquierdo did not present herself as a believer—or even as someone interested in Catholic thought. Her altars instead responded to a popular religiosity practiced outside of the Church, one that, as anthropologist Renée de la Torre has indicated, was neither institutional nor individual, but rather social-communal. Moreover, as de la Torre points out, this popular religiosity unfolded between colonial syncretism and postcolonial hybridism. Within this context, it is not strange that Izquierdo’s Virgin has moved away from colonial, white-centered representation and is, instead, a sacred mestiza with Indigenous characteristics. This shift can be seen in Altar de Dolores and in Ofrenda del Viernes de Dolores (1943), in the Virgin’s dark skin, black eyes, and heavy features.²⁸In turn, the political gesture is explicit: As Deffebach has indicated, the images of the altar are an affirmation of popular customs that emphasizes gender, since in a time when a large part of the Mexican school, associated with the government, affirmed the nation’s virility, Izquierdo insisted that the national patrimony was also profoundly connected to Mexican women.²⁹ Izquierdo never tired of depicting Mexican women—whether sacred or profane—in her paintings and, at the same time, asserted in her own life the daring of a woman artist who transgressed the feminine codes of her age.

Miriam Inez da Silva’s Pop Sacrality

In line with conventional readings of the work of women artists, Miriam Inez da Silva’s paintings, like those of Norah Borges and María Izquierdo, have been characterized as “primitive,” “naïve,” “ingenuous,” and/or “folkloric” because they are associated with the simplicity, purity, and traditions of the state of Goiás in central Brazil. However, as curator Bernardo Mosqueira has noted, da Silva’s work is nonetheless also characterized by impurity, complexity, intention, slyness, and transgression.³⁰ In aesthetic terms, the seeming contradictions may be explained by the convergence of artists who inspired her: the Concretist Ivan Serpa, who was her teacher at the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Río de Janeiro, where she lived from the 1970s onward, and the votive painters whose works hang on the walls of the Hall of Miracles in the Igreja Matriz in Trindade, where da Silva was born and raised.³¹ There are several versions of the origin story of this small city located in the interior of Goiás. According to one, it was established in the mid-19th century by garimpeiros (miners) Constantino Rosa and Ana Xavier, a married couple who, while working there, found a medallion depicting the Holy Trinity crowning the Virgin Mary; another holds that Rosa made the medallion to justify building a chapel on his property. Whatever the case, the object attracted both the faithful and pilgrims, who prayed and gave thanks for the miracles associated with it, and it inspired the construction of a church that to this day houses one of the finest collections of Latin American votive art.³²

Steeped in this popular culture of devotion, da Silva changed its sign. She did not give thanks for miracles that occurred in the past but rather recast them in modern-day renditions on canvas. From this perspective, I analyze da Silva’s Marian representation Nossa Senhora dos Anjos (Our Lady of the Angels; fig. 5), in which the Virgin and Child are surrounded by angels playing musical instruments. In this festive scene set in a bright field of white, there is something surprising: Da Silva has depicted Mary as a modern young woman wearing red lipstick, blue eye shadow, and blush on her cheeks (as are the angels and the Baby Jesus). In turn, while in traditional images of the Virgin, she is fully robed from head to toe, da Silva’s Mary wears a dress that accentuates her slim waist and provocatively reveals her cleavage. Furthermore, with its shimmering blue fabric, puff sleeves, and sweetheart neckline, this garment corresponds to the fashion of the 1980s—as do her high heels. Nor is da Silva’s Virgin veiled; though her hair is down, it is partially pulled back in a contemporary style that distances her from traditional Marian representations. Finally, the Brazilian artist carried out a subtle inversion by clothing her central subject in a blue dress and red cloak—instead of the opposite as is traditional in the visual history of Catholicism. In this way, by transgressing and profaning the codes of Marian representation, the Virgin recovers her feminine condition, evoking the sensuality and body lost in the Christian myth of the conception, without ceasing to be a devotional symbol.

Da Silva’s Virgin makes sense within the artist’s imaginative universe, in which religious figures coexist with figures from popular culture and other forms of belief or worlds—for example, the tarot or extraterrestrials—in joyful, celebratory scenes. In this regard, da Silva’s Mary is inscribed within the chronicle of female characters—from traditional (like brides) to literary (such as Jorge Amado’s female protagonists) or legendary (like in pop culture, the Brazilian singer and songwriter Rita Lee)—that offers a more liberated version of female subjectivity, establishing what curator Kiki Mazzucchelli calls a “microsubversion of the dominant morality of the provincial middle class that rejects the manifestation of women’s sexual desire.”³³ Additionally, the artist has called into question the ideals of maternity; indeed, in da Silva’s paintings, the Virgin often appears exhausted, letting the angels help her to care for the Baby Jesus.³⁴

Da Silva’s “milagros,” or miracles, therefore, serve to dismantle the dichotomies separating the sacred and the profane, sin and holiness, purity and impurity, fantasy and reality, and of course, popular or mass culture and high culture. Regarding the latter, Mazzucchelli proposes considering da Silva’s work within the context of a Pop art all its own, that is, as a form of Pop that is “neither the Pop of postwar US consumer society, nor the politicized manifestations of Pop art that emerged in the Rio–São Paulo axis during the 1960s, but rather the ‘Pop’ of the visual culture of a largely rural country.”³⁵ In adopting this language, da Silva carried out diversions, inversions, and exaggerations that approach a camp sensibility. Through this aesthetic of irony, artifice, and exaggeration, she shaped her political commitment—as in her Seven Deadly Sins series. For example, in Calumny (fig. 6), a woman being slandered for expressing her sexuality and desire resembles the Virgin depicted in Nossa Senhora dos Anjos (see fig. 5) in not only her features and makeup but also in the neckline of her dress, while in Wrath (fig. 7), a femicide is taking place. Without moralizing or conservatism, da Silva placed religiosity at the service of a critique of gender bias and a denunciation of the forms of patriarchy in Brazilian society.

In his text on exvotos, the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman declares that votive images seem not to exist for the art historian, since they generate unease and place the aesthetic model of history as a continuous narrative chain and a family romance of “influences” in crisis.³⁶ In a way, Miriam Inez da Silva’s interest in religious materiality has also placed her at the margins of the grand narratives of modern Latin American art—even though she knew how to combine the lessons of the avant-garde with manifestations of popular culture, rupturing the conventions of religious art, impugning the social customs and rules of the sexist behavior of her time, and creating innovations in the Brazilian artistic field, which thankfully has, in recent years, given her work greater visibility.

* * * *

In our contemporary era, room has been made for the sacred aspect of modernity, which has not died out amid secularization. But in addition, and more importantly, modern art has concerned itself with the intersections of religion, politics, and gender, allowing for emancipatory narratives and gestures outside the institutionality of the divine and thereby coming closer to daily realities. I propose that the work of Norah Borges, María Izquierdo, and Miriam Inez da Silva constitutes a vital contribution to this reflection, since all three, in different ways, used religious material as a means of artistic experimentation and a disputable narrative that they appropriated to imagine feminist ways of inhabiting the world—even when their personal positions did not coincide with this ideology. On the other hand, if one attends to the “activism of their works,” as Andrea Giunta proposes, the representations of the Virgin and the Biblical universe encountered in their paintings crack open the secular, rational agenda of modern art that, as art historian Erika Doss states, was defined by art historians and critics as “anti-religion” and “anti-religious.”³⁷ At the same time, they make it possible to call into question the patriarchal system that supports gender discrimination in both religious discourse and the field of art.

Translated from Spanish by Christopher Winks.

Spanish

“María es el mito de una mujer sin vagina”, sentencia Marcella Althaus-Reid en La teología indecente. Perversiones teológicas en el sexo, el género y la política.³⁸Con un tono polémico, pero no por eso menos certero, la teóloga queer afirma que la adoración de la Virgen en América Latina en el siglo XX no provocó una sensación de empoderamiento para las mujeres, ya que siempre requirió que se negara su cuerpo a través del misterio de su virginidad.³⁹También que se negara su voz, puesto que en sus múltiples apariciones en América Latina, y a diferencia de Europa, ella no hablaba, sino que aparecía ante sus elegidos y elegidas como una mujer de tez clara, envuelta por tela de alta factura y adornada con metales y piedras preciosas. Así, sin voz, pero con un poderoso discurso visual, su imagen cumplió dos roles que, en apariencia, resultaban contradictorios. Por un lado, fue un elemento central del dominio militar y espiritual desde la conquista hasta las recientes dictaduras militares latinoamericanas (patrocinio que se sintetizó en el apodo que asumió a partir del siglo XIX: la “Virgen Generala”).⁴⁰Por el otro, se la representó como madre y esposa ejemplar consolidando dentro del catolicismo un modelo de feminidad obediente, sin agencia ni deseo que, lejos de intervenir en el espacio público, debía recluirse en la “seguridad” del hogar ejerciendo tareas domésticas y maternales. Entre ambos extremos, la imagen de una Virgen María autoritaria se utilizaba en contra del Otro diferente o en contra de la igualdad de sus compañeras de género. La devoción mariana, de este modo, al sostener los valores de pureza, de heterosexualidad (y asexualidad), de eurocentrismo y de la maternidad como destino manifiesto, reprodujo y contribuyó a las desigualdades de clase, género y raza sobre las que se erigieron las sociedades moderno-coloniales y cristianas en Latinoamérica.

Tomando en cuenta estas representaciones de la Virgen inscriptas en un imaginario patriarcal como punto de partida, es posible rastrear otras visualidades en el arte moderno latinoamericano del siglo XX que enfrentaron el mito de una mujer sacra sin cuerpo ni voz. Entre otras, se destacan las obras de las artistas Norah Borges (Argentina, 1901-1998), María Izquierdo (México, 1902-1955) y Miriam Inez da Silva (Brasil, 1939-1996) al componer otras narrativas visuales, o contranarrativas, que no solo provocan los imperativos canónicos de representación mariana, sino que, fundamentalmente, imponen un modo alternativo y femenino de acercamiento a lo divino. Dependiendo del caso, sus aproximaciones se vuelven cercanas, afectuosas y sensibles; vivaces y populares; o corpóreas, táctiles e incluso sexuales. Sin ironía ni blasfemia pero siguiendo un impulso profanador que devuelve lo sagrado al uso común y comunitario, estas tres artistas se interesaron por la creencia religiosa y su potencialidad creativa que delinea otra forma de entender la religión en la modernidad y, al mismo tiempo, abre un espacio de experimentación estética y ética que si bien siguen el canon modernista, proponen miradas originales sobre el vínculo entre arte, política y género.⁴¹Como mostrará el análisis comparativo propuesto, el lenguaje religioso –contra todo pronóstico– habilita novedosas configuraciones afectivas, populares y corporales, que desafían el orden sexista y patriarcal vigente tanto en el campo social y religioso como en el campo artístico latinoamericano.

El misticismo cotidiano de Norah Borges

Primero poeta, luego artista, Norah Borges estudió grabado en Europa, en 1914 con el artista belga Frans Masereel, convirtiéndose –junto con su hermano Jorge Luis– en una participante activa de la vanguardia española ultraísta. Al regresar a Buenos Aires en los años veinte, esta experiencia vanguardista la acompañó y fue una participante activa del grupo de jóvenes renovadores que confluyeron en las páginas de las revistas Prisma, Proa y Martin Fierro.⁴²No obstante, a fines de esa misma década, ya casada con el crítico español Guillermo de Torre, Borges comenzó a interesarse por un arte alineado a la tendencia parisina conocida como el retorno al orden, que abogaba por la tranquilidad de las formas y contrastaba con las expresiones radicales del expresionismo; y esto coincide con su acercamiento a una incipiente intelectualidad católica que intentaba trazar lazos con escritores y artistas modernos.⁴³Por eso, su nombre aparece entre quienes exhibieron por esos años en la sala de los Cursos de Cultura Católica de Buenos Aires, al mismo tiempo que enviaba contribuciones visuales –dibujos y xilografías– a las revistas modernas del catolicismo cultural, Criterio y Número.⁴⁴En esta última publicación, aparecen “Niña vestida de primera comunión” y “Aviñón” (fig. 1), dos dibujos que, vistos en conjunto, muestran que el interés religioso de Borges no puede pensarse por fuera de la estética del retorno al orden y su vuelta a los valores clásicos, metafísicos y armónicos.⁴⁵

Si, dentro de la historiografía del arte, el retorno al orden permitió a artistas y escritores volver su mirada al pasado premoderno, a la figuración y a la búsqueda de los valores clásicos, Borges le aportó su singularidad ya que, como sugiere Patricia Artundo, su filiación contaba con la libertad de no pertenecer estrictamente a la cultura europea de posguerra.⁴⁶Esto es evidente en “Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura”, texto publicado en la revista Martín Fierro (marzo de 1927) sin firma pero adjudicado a Borges. En este texto, los lemas de orden, proporción, contornos nítidos y formas definidas conviven con la necesidad de colores que, según la artista, “den alegría a los ojos”, como el rosa y limón, el rosa y verde veronés y el rosa salmón, junto con el llamado “color místico” que equivaldría al “color que las cosas tendrán también en el cielo”.⁴⁷Esta tendencia al pastel, que evita los contrastes cromáticos violentos, junto con su interés por los circos, los juguetes, los niños y los decoradores de carros, hicieron que los críticos varones, contemporáneos a su obra, enfatizaran el aspecto espontáneo e infantil y, por tanto femenino, de un modo condescendiente y un tanto paternalista, dejando de lado el aspecto constructivo de sus obras, guiado por las premisas de armonía y proporcionalidad.⁴⁸

Aunque la feminidad sea “una condición opresiva” para las productoras culturales, explica Griselda Pollock, los análisis de las obras deberían no solo explorar los límites sino también las maneras en que las mujeres negociaron y transformaron esa condición.⁴⁹En el caso de Borges, el trabajo con el afecto en sus obras es tanto consecuencia de los “buenos” atributos femeninos que debería cultivar una mujer de su clase social como posibilidad de una percepción, ya no visual, sino háptica. Una apuesta, de este modo, por la sensorialidad como experiencia de mundo y como forma de resistencia para algunos cuerpos (mujeres, jóvenes y niños, especialmente), los cuales, distribuidos en espacios pictóricos opresivos, forman comunidad a partir del contacto entre ellos. De esta manera, mientras que su modo de composición formal ofreció un desvío en la estética del orden al conjugar sin conflicto geometría con sentimiento, sus trabajos de impronta religiosa también se desviaron de la primacía viril y agresiva que tomó el discurso católico en esos años, al investigar recurrentemente el costado cotidiano y afectivo de la fe. De forma novedosa, Borges propone una espiritualidad apastelada, alegre y amistosa que acerque los personajes religiosos a quienes ven sus lienzos.⁵⁰A su vez, le otorga materialidad a la representación de lo sacro haciendo del cuerpo, y del contacto entre los cuerpos, un motivo recurrente.

En su escena de La anunciación (1945) (fig.3), tópico recurrente en la historia del arte occidental, Borges presenta el encuentro entre el arcángel Gabriel y la Virgen María dentro de una configuración formal moderna que, al mismo tiempo, está enmarcada dentro de un espacio familiar y afectivo.⁵¹Reunidos en un espacio íntimo, pero con tonos dorados que denotan sacralidad, la escena supone cierta jerarquía entre los personajes, ya que María está sentada y mira hacia arriba otorgándole mayor importancia al arcángel y su noticia. Sin embargo, a diferencia de otras composiciones, Borges representa esta escena sin necesidad de recurrir a símbolos o elementos que remitan a ese episodio bíblico; el arcángel Gabriel ni siquiera tiene alas ni viste de manera distinta a un mortal. De hecho, su vestimenta comparte cierta contemporaneidad con la de la Virgen María, que no solo no está representada con los tradicionales colores azul y rojo, sino que porta un peinado moderno y no utiliza velo, tal como lo haría una joven en la primera mitad del siglo XX. De esta manera, Borges vuelve cotidiano un mito fundante de la historia de la civilización occidental, acercándolo a los espectadores, quienes deben prestar atención al título para entender que no se trata simplemente de una charla entre amigos, ¿o amigas? La ambigüedad genérica es un rasgo presente en esta y otras de sus obras. La investigadora Roberta Quance ha señalado la presencia de una “androginia femenina” en sus pinturas a través de seres vagamente afeminados insertos dentro de un mundo rosa, como sucede con los amantes o los novios, o con sus ángeles.⁵²Sin proclamarse feminista y sin pretender hacer una reflexión de género, Borges desestabiliza los límites sexo-genéricos y, en sintonía, otorga protagonismo a la afectividad, esa cualidad marginalizada por la estructura sexista de la sociedad moderna que cobrará relevancia política décadas más tarde.⁵³

A través de una gramática del amor que no le teme al cliché romántico, los cuerpos representados se tocan o acarician en muchas de sus imágenes –incluso en el caso de La anunciación, la disposición de los brazos podría entenderse como el signo de un potencial abrazo. Enfrentando la relación entre emocionalidad, debilidad e inferioridad femenina, Borges reafirmó lo femenino en sus cuadros, en contraste con otras mujeres de la vanguardia que, como sugiere Quance, se asimilaban a los modos y actividades masculinas para “hombrearse” con los demás artistas (como Maruja Mallo o Frida Kahlo).⁵⁴Por ejemplo, en su obra titulada Holy Week (Semana Santa) (fig.4), una pintura en la que los personajes bíblicos se vuelven identificables por los símbolos que cargan, sus rasgos no se diferencian mucho entre sí. La Verónica, José de Arimatea y Nicodemo poseen rostros ovales, facciones suaves, ojos negros y grandes, sotanas de colores pasteles y una misma disposición icónica. Sin embargo, la representación de la escena y los personajes está más cercana de un contexto moderno-cotidiano, que a la historización y sacralización del catolicismo.

El universo apastelado de lo privado, lo místico, lo íntimo y afectivo de Borges convivió con la armonía racional de sus composiciones también guiada por una impronta espiritual. Lo religioso, en este sentido, es forma y motivo estético que acercan lo sobrenatural a las prácticas cotidianas, contribuyendo llamativamente a desbaratar los binarismos jerárquicos (sacro/profano, razón/corazón, moderno/primitivo, femenino/masculino, entre otros), pilares de un relato moderno occidental en el que las (artistas) mujeres se vieron excluidas.

Mestizar lo divino: los altares de María Izquierdo

María Cenobia Izquierdo nació en San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, un lugar de peregrinaje que se llenaba de devotos en busca de milagros. Se mudó a la Ciudad de México en la década de los veinte, con su marido e hijos. Ingresó a la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes en 1928, donde tiempo después Diego Rivera fue nombrado director. Cuenta la historiadora de arte Nancy Deffebach, que Rivera elogió los cuadros de Izquierdo en una exposición de estudiantes sin saber que ella los había pintado y que se sorprendió al enterarse de que era una mujer. Como consecuencia de este reconocimiento, pudo organizar su primera exposición individual en la Galería de Arte Moderno en noviembre de 1929, pero debió abandonar sus estudios ya que fue víctima de los celos y agresiones de sus compañeros que no entendían por qué ella era considerada la única estudiante con talento.⁵⁵Separada, compartió atelier y estableció un vínculo amoroso con Rufino Tamayo; ambos se relacionaron con los jóvenes de vanguardia conocidos como los Contemporáneos, quienes se oponían al discurso nacionalista y defendían la internacionalización del arte y la literatura mexicanos.⁵⁶No por casualidad Octavio Paz, entre otros escritores, reprodujeron, en la década del treinta, algunas imágenes de Izquierdo en la revista Taller como una forma de homenaje a esa pintora “heterodoxa”, cuyo arte, recuerda Paz cincuenta años más tarde, “estaba muy lejos de la pintura ideológica de los muralistas”.⁵⁷

Siguiendo la misma línea, la autora mexicana Elena Poniatowska sugiere que Izquierdo resultaba más mexicana que Frida Kahlo porque no era “folklórica sino esencial”, ya que pintaba naturalezas muertas, soperas, sirenas, campesinos, casas infantiles, manteles, autorretratos, en sus palabras, “una naturaleza viva con huachinango.”⁵⁸Junto con estos elementos, los personajes femeninos que tienen una presencia recurrente en sus cuadros (como bailarinas, equilibristas, trapecistas y domadoras del universo circense o desnudos femeninos) tienen roles activos y, como sugiere Jean Franco, contrastaban con las representaciones femeninas de los afamados muralistas mexicanos que usualmente otorgaban a la figura femenina un papel secundario y pasivo.⁵⁹

   Su serie de altares para la Virgen de Dolores en la que trabajó desde 1943 hasta 1948 –casi al final de su vida– canaliza su interés por el arte popular y religioso del siglo XIX a través de representaciones femeninas que toman características físicas de la propia artista. Según apunta Poniatowska, estas vírgenes portan el rostro de Izquierdo y la curvatura de sus labios, expresando una dureza y una rabia interior contenida, posiblemente un producto de crear en un campo artístico dominado por los varones del muralismo.⁶⁰También su autofiguración puede relacionarse con la vuelta a la infancia, al universo religioso de Jalisco, a las creencias populares y al mestizaje como representación de la identidad nacional mexicana.

Surgido como tradición en México en el siglo XVI con los frailes franciscanos, el Altar de Dolores pasa de colocarse solamente en templos a hacerlo en plazas, jardines y dentro de los hogares el sexto viernes de cuaresma, conocido como el “Viernes de Dolores”. Si bien su función era recordar el sufrimiento de la Virgen María por la pasión y muerte de su hijo Jesucristo, con el paso del tiempo comienza a tomar características festivas que lo popularizan y lo acompañan de música y bailes. Se utilizaban manteles de papel, cortinas y guirnaldas en blanco y morado que traían las ideas de pureza y luto; adornos brillantes, jarras y vasos de agua de diferentes sabores que representaban las lágrimas de la Virgen; frutas, como la naranja que remitía a la amargura y el dolor; banderas como símbolos de esperanza y triunfo por la Resurrección; y semillas germinadas como metáfora del ciclo de la vida, pero también en asociación con la agricultura, flores y velas. Por su parte, la Virgen viste de luto, a veces con un corazón clavado con dagas, siempre con lágrimas en sus ojos y mejillas.⁶¹

Izquierdo respeta los elementos tradicionales de los altares, los cuales aparecen en sus pinturas, e incluye dentro de estos también objetos de artesanía popular como apuesta personal –por ejemplo, sahumadores de cerámica decorados. Pero quizá el rasgo más distintivo es que, a diferencia de las vírgenes dolorosas novohispánicas, las vírgenes de Izquierdo no son blancas ni están solas. Tampoco están en un ambiente ni sacro ni atemporal, sino en uno cercano, secular y cotidiano.⁶²Al recrear la instalación de un altar a través de la pintura siguiendo cánones modernos, Izquierdo opta por concentrarse en la intimidad doméstica de esa práctica religiosa. En su altar de Dolores, la transparencia de las cortinas marca una religiosidad que continúa en la vida cotidiana, permitiendo una conexión con el “más allá” que, en realidad, se encuentra en un “más acá” de la cultura popular mexicana. Las telas transparentes no separan, sino que integran lo sagrado a la vida íntima, de modo que es evidente que corresponde a una realidad inscrita socialmente en la clase trabajadora sugerido por el marco austero del cuadro de la Virgen y la misma imagen que, según algunos estudiosos, está basada en la reproducción de una pintura barroca italiana que circuló masivamente en ediciones baratas en México.⁶³

A diferencia de Norah Borges, Izquierdo no se presenta como creyente ni está interesada en el pensamiento católico. Sus altares responden a una religiosidad popular que se practica por fuera de la Iglesia y que, por tanto, como ha señalado la antropóloga Renée de la Torre, no es ni institucional ni individual, sino social-comunitaria. Asimismo, de la Torre puntualiza que esta religiosidad popular se desenvuelve entre los sincretismos coloniales y los hibridismos poscoloniales, y no es extraño entonces que la Virgen que pinta Izquierdo se aleje de la representación colonial y blancocéntrica, proponiendo una imagen sacra-mestiza que recupera rasgos indígenas, como se ve en Altar de Dolores y también en Ofrenda del Viernes de Dolores (1943), a través de la piel morena, los ojos negros y las facciones gruesas.⁶⁴A su vez, el gesto político es explícito: como ha señalado Defferach, las imágenes de los altares son una afirmación de las costumbres populares que hace hincapié en el género, ya que en una época en la que gran parte de la escuela mexicana, asociada con el gobierno, afirmaba la virilidad de la nación, Izquierdo insistía en que el patrimonio nacional también estaba profundamente vinculado a las mujeres mexicanas.⁶⁵Profanas o sacras, no se cansó de representarlas en sus cuadros, asumiendo al mismo tiempo en su propia vida la osadía de una artista mujer que transgrede los códigos femeninos de su época.

La sacralidad pop de Miriam Inez da Silva

Siguiendo las convenciones de lectura impuestas a las artistas, la obra de Miriam Inez da Silva, al igual que la de Norah Borges y María Izquierdo, fue categorizada como “primitiva”, “naif” e “ingenua” y/o “popular”, porque apelaba a la simplicidad, la pureza y la tradición del interior del estado brasileño de Goiás, en el centro del país. Sin embargo, según el curador Bernardo Mosqueira, hay impureza, complejidad, intención, malicia y transgresión en su trabajo.⁶⁶En términos estéticos, las contradicciones que crea su proyecto artístico en el sistema de categorización del arte podría explicarse por la convergencia de dos artistas que la inspiraron, según ella misma afirma: por un lado, el concretista Ivan Serpa, que fue su profesor en el Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) de Río de Janeiro, ciudad en la que vive desde los años sesenta; por el otro, los artistas votivos, cuyas obras colgaban en las paredes de la Sala de los Milagros de la Iglesia Matriz en la ciudad de Trindade, donde nació y creció.⁶⁷Hay varias versiones sobre el origen de esta pequeña ciudad del interior de Goiás. Una cuenta que fue fundada a mediados del siglo XIX por una pareja de garimpeiros (mineros), Constantino Rosa y Ana Xavier, quienes encontraron una medalla de la Santísima Trinidad coronando a la Virgen María; otra versión sostiene que fue Rosa quien fabricó la pieza para justificar su deseo de construir una capilla en su propiedad. En cualquiera de los dos casos, la medalla atrajo devotos y romerías, que rezaban y agradecían los milagros, y también condujo a la construcción de una iglesia que, aún hoy, alberga una de las mayores colecciones de arte votivo latinoamericano.⁶⁸

Impregnada de esta devoción popular, da Silva le cambia el signo: no agradece a milagros ya sucedidos, sino que los crea en su tela para que sucedan efectivamente en la realidad. Desde esta óptica se podría analizar la singular representación mariana que da Silva realiza de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (fig. 6). Recortándose dentro de un fondo claro limitado por una moldura propia, se ve, como es de esperar, a la Virgen rodeada de ángeles. Estos la festejan, le cantan y tocan música con diferentes instrumentos. Pero dentro de esa escena festiva, algo llama la atención: da Silva representa a la Virgen como una mujer joven maquillada con labial rojo, sombra azul en sus ojos y rubor en sus mejillas (al igual que los ángeles y el niño Jesús). A su vez, si tradicionalmente las vírgenes suelen ser representadas completamente cubiertas, del cuello a los pies, la virgen de da Silva porta un vestido azul que marca la figura de su cuerpo y un escote que muestra provocativamente el borde superior de sus pechos. Además, ese vestido corresponde a la moda de los años ochenta, de tela azul tornasolado, las mangas abullonadas, el escote corazón y los tacones altos. La virgen de da Silva no porta velo; su cabello está semirrecogido, simulando asimismo una tendencia contemporánea, y alejándose de la convencionalidad de la representación mariana. Finalmente, la artista brasileña realiza una sutil inversión al pintarla con vestido azul y manto rojo, en lugar de mantener la iconografía utilizada en la historia visual del catolicismo. De esta manera, al transgredir y profanar los códigos de representación mariana, la virgen recupera su condición femenina, representadas por el cuerpo y la sensualidad, perdidos en el mito cristiano de la concepción sin por ello dejar de ser un símbolo de devoción.

Sin dudas, la virgen cobra sentido dentro del universo imaginario de da Silva en el que los personajes religiosos conviven con los de la cultura popular y con otras formas de creencia –como el tarot o los extraterrestres–, siempre dispuestos en escenas festivas, celebratorias y gozosas. En este sentido, esta imagen mariana se inscribe en una serie de personajes femeninos, tradicionales –como las novias– y populares –como las protagonistas de las novela de Jorge Amado– o masivas –como Rita Lee–, que ofrece una versión más liberada de la subjetividad femenina, estableciendo una “microsubversión del moralismo vigente en la clase media provinciana que repudia la manifestación del deseo sexual en la mujer.”⁶⁹Incluso también se pone en disputa la propia idea de maternidad, ya que muchas veces la virgen se muestra exhausta, dejando que los ángeles ayuden en la tarea de cuidar al niño Jesús.⁷⁰

Los “milagros” que pinta Miriam da Silva, entonces, apuestan por desarmar las dicotomías que separan lo sagrado de lo profano, el pecado de la santidad, la pureza de la impureza, la fantasía de lo real, y, por supuesto, lo popular y masivo de la alta cultura. Sobre esto último, la curadora Kiki Mazzucchelli propone pensar la obra de da Silva dentro del diseño de un arte “pop” singular, y lo distingue de otras corrientes al aclarar: “no el pop de la sociedad de consumo estadounidense de posguerra, ni tampoco las manifestaciones politizadas del arte pop que surgieron en el eje Río-San Pablo en la década de 1960, sino el ‘pop’ de la cultura visual de un país en su mayoría rural.” Adoptando este lenguaje, la artista brasileña realiza desvíos, inversiones y exageraciones que la acercarán a la sensibilidad camp.⁷¹A través de esta estética de la ironía, el artificio y la exageración, da Silva moldea su compromiso político, como se pone en evidencia en su serie de los pecados capitales. Mientras que, por ejemplo, en la imagen sobre la calumnia (fig.6), un personaje femenino es víctima de la difamación por su pose sexual de mujer deseante y sexual –que se asemeja a la figura de la virgen en sus rasgos, maquillaje y escote –; en la imagen sobre la ira (fig.7) se presenta directamente un caso de femicidio. Sin moralismo ni conservadurismo, la religiosidad se pone al servicio de la crítica de género y la denuncia de las formas del patriarcado en la sociedad brasileña.

En su texto sobre los exvotos, el historiador del arte y filósofo Georges Didi-Huberman afirma que las imágenes votivas parecen no existir ya que generan malestar y una puesta en crisis del modelo estético que piensa la historia como una cadena narrativa continua y una novela familiar de “influencias”.⁷²De alguna manera, este interés de Miriam Inez da Silva por la materialidad religiosa también la colocó al margen de los grandes relatos de la historia del arte moderno latinoamericano, aun cuando supo combinar las enseñanzas del arte de vanguardia con las manifestaciones de la cultura popular generando rupturas a las convenciones del arte religioso, impugnaciones a las costumbres sociales y reglas de conducta sexista de su época e innovaciones en el campo artístico brasileño que, gratamente, en los últimos años ha dado mayor visibilidad a su trabajo.

* * * *

Nuestra contemporaneidad ha sabido darle un lugar al costado sagrado de lo moderno, que no se extinguió pese a las teorías fatalistas de la secularización. Pero, además, y más importante, el arte moderno se ha interesado por el cruce entre religiosidades, política y género, permitiendo narrativas y gestos emancipadores por fuera de la institucionalidad de lo divino, y acercándose así a las realidades de la cotidianidad. Propongo entonces que la obra de Norah Borges, María Izquierdo y Miriam Inez da Silva constituye un aporte imprescindible a esa reflexión, ya que las tres, de diferentes maneras, eligieron el material religioso como una vía de experimentación artística y como un relato que podía ponerse en disputa, del cual se apropiaron para imaginar modos feministas de habitar el mundo, más allá de que sus posicionamientos personales no coincidieran con ese ideario. Si se atiende, en cambio, al “activismo de sus obras”, como propone Andrea Giunta, las representaciones de la virgen y del universo bíblico que se encuentran en sus cuadros agrietan la agenda secular y racional del arte moderno que, como sostiene la historiadora de arte Erika Doss, fue definido por críticos e historiadores del arte como “antirreligión” y “antirreligioso”.⁷³ Y, al mismo tiempo, hacen posible la puesta en cuestión del sistema patriarcal que sostiene la discriminación de género tanto en el discurso religioso como en el campo de las artes.

The post Female Approaches to the Divine: The Marian Representations of Norah Borges, María Izquierdo, and Miriam Inez da Silva / Acercamientos femeninos a lo divino. Las representaciones marianas de Norah Borges, María Izquierdo y Miriam Inez da Silva appeared first on post.

This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

The post post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images appeared first on post.

On the cover of the second edition of a Malay novel released in two volumes in 1925 and 1926, the reader encounters a photographic illustration of a woman standing in front of a freestanding oval-shaped full-length mirror. She has turned her body away from the mirror and toward the reader. With her right arm above her head, she strikes an alluring pose. It is a beguiling image, for though her gaze is cast downward, one senses there is nothing demure in her not confronting our intrusive gaze. After all, in exuding both nonchalance and self-awareness, the subject is confident of her attraction and power over readers.

This is doubly so, since the mirror almost fully captures her bodily reflection. In turn, the mirror serves as an important specular narrative device, for in this instance, the existential and moral conundrums faced by a Malay author in early twentieth-century Penang, where the novel was published, is refracted onto and projected against a more tantalizing and exotic backdrop: that of fin-de-siècle Cairo, Egypt.¹ The protagonists of this occidental melodrama and romance are named in the second part of the novel’s double title, Syafik Efendi dengan Faridah Hanom (Syafik Efendi and Faridah Hanom). Over time, the best-selling novel would be better known in the annals of Malay literature as Hikayat Faridah Hanom (The Story of Faridah Hanom).

Yet, as risqué as the enterprise may seem, its author, Syed Sheikh Syed Ahmad al-Hadi, came from a respectable background and is better known as an ardent supporter of Islamic reformism and women’s rights. Though born in Malacca, Syed Sheikh was of Arab-Peranakan descent and spent considerable time in Riau before furthering his education at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. In the course of this essay, I hope to suggest that these subject positions are not mutually exclusive. If they appear to contradict one another, it is only because we assume that the underlying structural principle of culture is reducibly a binary.²

By locating culture and identity as negotiation-driven rather than essentialist, I hope to call into question the dominant ways in which desire is read in relation to the subject who is psychoanalytically conflictual and repressed. A different kind of psychical scaffolding, one that facilitates the configuration of a modern subjectivity, is suggested by the allegorical title of Hikayat setia asyik kepada maksyuknya, which translates as “The Story Concerning the Loyalty of One’s Desire Toward Its Fulfillment.” Unlike in psychoanalysis, it isn’t assumed here that behind the idealized rational person is a barely containable roiling sea of destructive conflicting forces internal to his (and the operative “he” is typically the primary subject pronoun) fragile makeup, threatening to undo the modern subject’s facade of coherence.³

If desire has a role to play at all, it is framed principally through the lens of kesedaran (realization). Realization in this sense is a morally existential question, centered on political, cultural, and economic dispossession of local communities during the height of European imperialism. Though the characteristics of this form of realization have received a wide range of exegesis in the fields of literature; social, economic, and political history; and ethno-nationalist politics, the idea and movement have, by and large, been primarily examined through textual discourses.⁴ In contrast to these widely perused textual sources, the visualities of sense perception are seldom discussed. Existing scholarship tends to brush aside these contradictions faced by early twentieth-century Malay authors in favor of sociopolitical contextualization.

In exploring a series of visual experiments undertaken along the Strait of Malacca that paralleled the political trajectory of kesedaran, it is the near irreconcilable difference between an idealized political vision and a sensually materialistic consumer culture that makes these visual experiments fertile sites in which to explore an aesthetics of kesedaran—whereby what is sensed captures a cosmopolitan field of vision, over and beyond the textual appeal that carries sentiments of being left behind or of cultural decline. In focusing on the aesthetics of kesadaran, I suggest here that desire points to the possibilities of fulfillment rather than to a perpetual deferment of promise or the conflictual tension between modernity and religion.

A Delightful Subject

Who is the modern subject on the cover of Syed Sheikh’s novel? The photograph chosen for the cover of the Hikayat provides an entry point. Scholars have remarked that the photographs chosen to accompany the story are likely celebrity portraits clipped from magazines. Excised from their original contexts, they have been pressed into service in a different narrative universe. In printed form, the photographed woman standing in for Faridah Hanom is the final outcome in a chain of reconfiguration. It is this chain that connects Syed Sheikh’s repurposing of the photographic image in his 1925–26 novel to his earlier exposure to the literary and social activities of the Rusydiyah Club (“Right Guidance” Club) on the Penyengat island of Riau, and the collage experiments of Raja Haji Abdullah and Khadijah Terong, a husband-and-wife literati duo from Penyengat Island, in their surviving manuscripts from 1902–11. It is along this chain that I will make the case for an archipelagic modernism.

The photographic image makes a second appearance in the novel as an insert complemented by a syair verse, a poetry genre that emerged in the seventeenth century. Though seemingly lighthearted on the first read, the syair was typically written by Sufi teachers who traded in relatable imagery and metaphors while communicating mystical spiritual truths.⁵ By the nineteenth century, it was the favorite form to accommodate a wide range of expressions, from biting social observation and fantastical fairy tales to timely customary advice and propaganda speeches.⁶ Its AAAA rhyme scheme made composing relatively easy. In this sense, the comic relief in the verse that accompanies the image in question bears closer examination: 

Faridah berhias mengusik kekasih, menjadikan punca jalan berselisih;

Kehendak puteri hanyalah masih, menduga sabar Shafiq yang bersih;

Tetapi cahaya badannya puteri, memancar keluar menerangkan keseri;

Bagaimanakah Shafiq menahankan diri, jikalau tidak ditinggalkan lari.⁷

In this rather bawdy scenario, a very different kind of masculine subject position can be deciphered, as compared to the Ur-moment of modernism, in which Pablo Picasso’s encounter with the women at a brothel in Avignon led not only to an existential crisis, but also to an aggressive response that devises planar deconstruction in the ground-figure relationship as protective formula.

On the other hand, the radiating light of Faridah seems to refer to a common religious trope that purity of conduct is legible through visible signs such as the effulgent light of saintliness. While Faridah’s radiance can be seen as threatening to the masculine subject, Syafik’s succumbing to beauty is seen as ameliorating rather than entropic.

One sees a playful deployment of this trope for comedic effect, especially when the word keseri is used to depict the moment of revelation. “Keseri” is also a homophone for a type of sweet delicacy—a dessert, or “kuih,” originating from South Asia made with suji flour and fruits for flavor and color. “Keseri” also sounds like “koshary,” an Egyptian street food staple comprising a mixture of rice, lentils, and macaroni that emerged sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. While the distinct Italian inflection is inescapable, the spice and flavor of the dish point to its origin in the khichri, a South Asian rice-and-lentil dish.

In this choice of word to qualify Faridah’s radiance, Syed Sheikh stretches the qualitative marker for the effulgence of Godly radiance, making the word occupy an expansive cultural spectrum. In doing so, there isn’t a need for a culturally specific meaning to cancel out other associations. It is precisely this plurality that sustained and defined the cosmopolitan contours of Penang, the port city in which Syed Sheik set up his publishing venture, and turned the troubles and anxieties of the modern on its head, commenting on the power of wish fulfillment. This relishing play of words illuminates the pleasurable delight the author took in the sensual reconfiguration of the cultural resources at his disposal.

By the fin de siècle, modernizing influences from both Europe and Middle Eastern Islam electrified Raja Haji Ali’s descendants on the Riau Islands.⁸ Those who wielded the pen soon established the Rusydiyah Club, where the dissemination of new ideas and consolidation of old knowledge were carried out from 1895 to 1905.⁹ Gradually, this gave rise to a new sensibility of watan (homeland), and this sentiment of belonging emboldened the political resistance to Dutch rule. By 1911, as a punitive response to this rising sentiment, the Dutch colonial government lay siege to the royal court and deposed the crown prince and supporting members of the Rusydiyah Club on the grounds of treason. Following Dutch annexation of the Riau archipelago, there was an exodus, and many settled in either Johor or Singapore.¹⁰ Though not a member of the Riau aristocracy, Syed Sheikh found his way into this cultural milieu. However, during the time of dispersal, he chose to settle farther north on the island of Penang.

It was against this larger historical backdrop that a number of surviving manuscripts were written during the first decade of the twentieth century. These works register, in particular, novel attempts at repurposing photographic images, clipped largely from European magazines and newspapers. All of these images have been taped into manuscripts, and each one is composed within a hand-drawn border frame. Moreover, many of these manuscripts are formatted as printed books, and therefore publicly available, even in cases in which their content suggests private use. The repurposing of photographic images has then been enhanced by additional illustrations or through collage,¹¹ reflecting an increasingly visual turn, one in which images circulated freely through print culture and were often consumed creatively through personalized annotations.¹²

Rosalind Krauss makes a case that collage’s “capacity of ‘speaking about’ depends on the ability of each collage element to function as the material signifier for a signified that is its opposite: a presence whose referent is an absent meaning, meaningful only in its absence.”¹³ If Raja Haji Abdullah’s European counterparts were primarily concerned with circumventing representational constraints that emerged from a pictorial convention in which recessional depth is projected through the canvas, the manuscript book offers a different set of semiological challenges—and the gambit took off in a different direction.

This is a different unit of analysis compared to the singularity of a work on canvas, where meaning—no matter how pregnant a painting may be—is sufficiently conditioned and contained by its parergon, that is, the four sides that delimit the pictorial field. On the other hand, the framing device of the collage operation in Malay printed books is a relay device, in which signification operates in reference to the preceding image and in anticipation of the one to come—not unlike the AAAA rhyme scheme of the syair and the narrative structure of the novel, both of which are deployed in the Hikayat. Here the hand-drawn frame locates the formal challenge in relation to the printed book. In this sense, rather than containment, it provides a visual connection, creating a linear narrative that forms the skeletal structure of the book.

At play is an adaptive recontextualization of photographs and imagery found in European print culture, giving them another purpose and alternate meaning through a process of artistic intervention. Syed Sheikh’s exploration of the remediated found photographic image in print was contemporaneous with Pablo Picasso’s experimentation with the figure-ground relationship through the use of collage on canvas. For Picasso, the use of print media in his collages led to analytical cubism. In the case of the Hikayat, living under the shadows of colonialism, printed media showed up as visual detritus that could be adapted purposefully in a local knowledge system.

The image of Faridah suggests that modernism in Southeast Asia possesses its own cosmopolitan trajectory. This story does not have to be a parade of pioneering “father” figures, whose métier and worth are often described by the association of influential European art movements. Instead, contemporaneous with the beginnings of modernism in Europe, was a whole range of creative impulses in other parts of the world that shared modernism’s interest in experimental forms.

In previous scholarly interpretations of the repurposing of images in early printed Malay books, the meaning in these images is primarily explained by securing evidence in sections of texts that share similar imagery.¹⁴ In this argument, images are primarily regarded as illustrations of narrative content that is more authentically captured through the textual record. Instead of falling back on the ideologically heteronormative compact of these prior debates, I draw interpretive legitimacy from the image rather than the text.

Gambar’s Specular Discourse

Faridah’s mirrored image points to the emergence of gambar (image) as a unique discursive operation that draws on customary ideas of power in the visual form to make sense of the expanding horizons of a changed world.¹⁵ Though it is iconographic and reflective, the mirror is also a pictorial device that is highly reflexive, enabling the emergence of a modern self.

To be sure, the use of full-length mirrors in portrait photography had become a convention by the 1920s. Nevertheless, art historian Wu Hung suggests that it is a convention encoded with new meaning and purpose.¹⁶ I suggest that a queer operation is also at play in the recurrence of specular tropes in Malay printed books, in which the mirror signposts a subject’s becoming rather than its foregone conclusion. In this way, I want to re-center shape-shifting, boundary-negotiating, and relation-building as the cultural ethos encapsulated by the engendered subject of modernism. Central to this formal enchantment is the concept of main or “play,” which, as used in Malay ritual theater, suggests that there are parallels between the abilities to shape-shift and to create contacts through the elective forms of affinity.¹⁷ Through main, one loses the self to become another being or assume another form.

The ritual of seduction that entreats the reader in the image of Faridah can be located within a complex moral universe emerging at the height of imperialism. Faridah cuts a figure that is neither dismissive, righteous, nor prudishly bashful, neither sexually wanton nor socially ingratiating. In this sense, the mirror she stands in front of is the specular apparatus of accommodation—showing Faridah’s double, a double that could be anywhere else in the world. In becoming a composite of the world, rather than made schizophrenic, Faridah’s reflection signposts the wholeness of a shared condition. In doing so, she becomes relatable to modern subjects in the making across the world, searching for a compact outside of what Aníbal Quijano has called a “colonial matrix of power.”¹⁸

Yet, the image technology discussed here is not a phenomenon of late twentieth-century “contemporary art.” Krauss suggests that the linguistic power of collage enables communication through the play of absence. She also contends that attending to a crisis in representation could locate a protohistory of postmodernism.¹⁹ In tracking the generative plasticity of images that circulated promiscuously along the volatile currents of global colonial capitalism, a different origin story of modernism might just be the very “contemporaneous alternative to modernism” that Krauss belabors over the anxieties faced by Picasso.²⁰

The waves of desire that underlie such yearning for form didn’t always lead one down a path of anguish or delirium. If our encounter with the woman in front of the mirror was initially an intrusive one, then I hope this essay shows that the gambar of the modern woman finds fulfillment when desire is not defined as a libidinal product that leads to a schizophrenic sense of deficiency. Desire is ultimately loyal to its fulfillment.

Moreover, it fulfills the plea made by film scholar May Adadol Ingawanij for a decolonized art history that playfully prospects, “What if you try to live by playing with using and misusing whatever ideas, speculations and concepts, originating from wherever and passing through whichever paths . . . to push further into somewhere as yet undefined?”²¹

Faridah is not a narcissist absorbed in self-regard. Her coy knowledge, which simultaneously feigns meekness, is the only clue that whatever we have to say about her is always deficient: we can never fully know her or tell her how to behave. This is the postmodern as postcolonial. Over and beyond the author’s intention, or the demands of national art history and the borders it seeks to police, Faridah as gambar exemplifies the conceptual cunning of an archipelagic modernism. She radiates with liquid effulgence. She is in control of her narrative.

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Read the English translation of Okamoto Tarō’s essay here.

In “Watashi to jinruigaku: Pari daigaku minzoku gakka no koro” (“Anthropology and I: My Time at the University of Paris Department of Ethnology,” 1971), the artist Tarō Okamoto (Japanese, 1911–1996) recounts his personal journey through the interdisciplinary, transnational environment of the University of Paris (the Sorbonne).¹ Okamoto’s text first appeared in Japanese in the academic journal Kikan jinruigaku (Anthropology Quarterly) in 1971. It is a retrospective consideration of how he developed a mature painterly style and intellectual framework in Paris in 1930–40—as opposed to a manifesto²— and provides one artist’s perspective on how the Sorbonne led to moments of profound connection as well as of isolation for its international participants. Okamoto registers attitudes and anxieties about how categories of identity (“self” and “other” for example) emerge and find expression. Such iterations can produce alternative epistemologies within a “shared social space,” as Weihong Bao argues.³ And indeed, for its international participants, the intellectual space of the Sorbonne spurred new interest in living cultural forms that troubled existing categorizations of identity.

Okamoto narrates his progress toward belonging within two interrelated Paris-based communities, often cited in studies of his work and career but little explored in English-language scholarship: those of the Abstraction-Création artists with whom he began exhibiting in 1933, and of the scholars pursuing a Durkheimian mode of “ethnology” practiced by Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Paul Rivet (1876–1958), and others at the Sorbonne.⁴ Okamoto audited classes on Hegelian aesthetics with Victor Basch (1863–1944) from 1932, and he studied ethnology under Marcel Mauss at the Musée de l’Homme from 1937 before returning to Japan in 1940. During this time, he frequently exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants, and elsewhere, with his new artist cohort.⁵

In this essay Okamoto recalls his feelings of isolation as a Japanese artist in Paris, particularly as World War II loomed and his Japanese nationality became a point of tension with his Parisian colleagues. He articulates a frustration with the “sojourn” style of painting practiced by his fellow Japanese expatriates that inscribed them as foreign visitors, and a feeling of “emancipation” from the sojourn mode at finding an intellectual home among the Abstraction-Création artists. Okamoto describes how this association of artists, with their interest in formal relationality, characterized abstraction as an approach rooted in a “globality” (sekaisei), specifically, their shared visual language of abstraction.⁶ Painterly practice began with the “self” and contributed to “movement” or mobilization—of forms, of ideas, outward.⁷

Okamoto’s painting Kūkan (1934/1954; fig. 1) appears in Abstraction-Creation’s 1934 catalogue alongside two works now represented in MoMA’s permanent collection: Vasily Kandinsky’s White—Soft and Hard (March 1932; fig. 2)⁸ and an alternate version of Constantin Brancusi’s The Cock (Paris 1924; fig. 3).⁹ Okamoto’s abstract forms exist on the edge of representation, much like in Brancusi’s sculpture, which seems to be in a process of anthropomorphic becoming. In Okamoto’s work, the left-hand object appears to drift toward the right-hand one within a dark, vacuum-like ground, suggesting the possibility of their coming together, albeit in a meeting that is imprecise or uneven—much like Kandinsky’s colliding and precariously balanced forms. 

In Kūkan, the soft, winglike form seems to be drawn to the dowel-like form—as if by gravity—about to glance off, orbit, or entwine it. This unbalanced duo calls to mind the concept of the informe as expressed by Georges Bataille (1897–1962). For Bataille, the informe is that which denies binary oppositions and instead points to entropic repetition or abrasion. It performs, as Brent Hayes Edwards discusses, a “declassifying process,” or a bending “out of shape” of categories of understanding.¹⁰ In Bataille’s Surrealist art magazine Documents (1929–1930), the aesthetics of the informe are heavily indebted to the “primitive” bodies and cultural artifacts that were also the subject of ethnological study in the 1930s. For Bataille, their juxtaposition to images from contemporary cinema or Montmartre jazz culture undid the usual opposition of modern to primitive.¹¹ Rosalind Krauss describes Bataille’s informe as a method of “deviance” for upsetting “the separations between space and time; . . . the systems of spatial mapping; . . . the qualifications of matter; [and] . . . the structural order of systems. . . .”¹² As Okamoto notes in his essay, Georges Bataille, along with Raymond Aron (1905–1983) and Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001), gathered around the Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) at the École pratique des haute études in the 1930s.¹³ In Hegelian terms, their project was one of “reconciliation,” or mediation, of the individual subject to greater and shared goals, and of the modern “now” to histories of community and shared identification.¹⁴ But this process of reconciliation, as both Okamoto’s painting and Bataille’s Documents explore, also uncovers gaps, inequalities, and those areas that resist falling easily into existing categories of understanding.

Kūkan was exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris’s Montparnasse, where Okamoto’s self-expressed aim of emotionality was well received by art critic Pierre Courthion (1902–1988).¹⁵ In his review of Okamoto’s composition, Courthion observes a use of counterpoints to create resonance between objects. He comments that the Japanese expatriate “has a foot on each continent,” but as a painter, possesses “specific Japanese qualities” that allow him to work through the problems of plasticity.¹⁶ Ultimately, he draws a connection between Okamoto’s Japanese-ness; his perceived foreignness among his Parisian cohorts; and the appeal of the “refinement, musicality, and rhythm” in his compositions through 1937 to Parisian viewers.¹⁷ In his view, Okamoto’s artwork “resonates” with contemporary Paris while embodying cultural difference. 

In a series of memoires published in 1941, shortly after his return to Japan, Okamoto recalls often performing the role of a representative of Japanese “tradition” while in Paris—as he does in Courthion’s essay:¹⁸ “Understanding and communicating tradition, I came to feel, was a way of coming to know oneself. When you’re in a foreign country, ‘tradition’ and ‘self’ [jiko] can completely merge in one’s mind. . . . But it’s very dangerous to merge those things even if the latter is often conveyed in/through the former. . . . I came to believe that tradition is my verso [ura].”¹⁹

Tradition is in a person’s “blood and bones,” he says elsewhere.²⁰ In his view “self” sits between inward “tradition” and outward iterations of its significance, or difference as called out by the network or group. We might consider how constructions of racial difference in particular had high stakes in Paris and globally from the time anti-Semitism took center stage in French military justice and national politics during the Dreyfuss Affair (1894–1906). Mauss and his colleagues expressed concern in this period with the potential slippery slope of racial science within academia, the leaking of its judgments into the atmosphere of contemporary society, and the way it textured the rhetoric of colonial campaigns.²¹

Against this backdrop, the sociology-ethnology contingent at the Sorbonne attracted visual artists, writers, and theorists from diverse national and methodological backgrounds. They formulated interdisciplinary discourses in conversation with Sorbonne-based scholars. Okamoto himself attended Rivet’s seminars at the Sorbonne and participated in curatorial research at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in the Trocadero. Through the amassing and curation of collections of specimens (biological and manmade alike) at the Musée de l’Homme, Rivet attempted to bridge the discursive gap between sociology, its new branch discipline of ethnology, and the older race-based physical anthropology.²² Rivet had trained in “in the field” in South America, in the vein of orthodox physical anthropology forged in such colonial contexts that used biological data—such as cranial measurements—to argue that civilization and cognitive capacity varied according to an observable world hierarchy of “races.” Rivet, however, rejected physical anthropology’s isolation of biological data and instead modeled a more comprehensive approach to the study of so-called primitive world cultures, one that included language, cultural narrative (particularly religion and spirituality), and material culture. 

The “primitive” was still a fraught category used by Mauss, Rivet, and other members of their extended circle. But Okamoto observed a developing interest in humanity’s universal, shared lifeforce (seimeiryoku), an understanding that emerged out of conversations regarding the primitive.²³ He recalled in an interview in 1980 that universal lifeforce, or “existence” (sonzai), elucidates commonalities between world cultures.²⁴ But Okamoto also saw this lifeforce as something intimately tied to national, ethnic, and personal identity—the basis for articulations of Japanese-ness, for example, the “original source” (as he calls it in “Watashi to jinruigaku”) of his own “entire self.” Mauss, whom Okamoto pointed out is the nephew of sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), viewed ethnology as a new synthesis of ethnographic and linguistic methodologies.²⁵ He approached the science of man from a “social perspective,” informed by Durkheimian sociology’s interest in the “organs” and systems of cultural narrative and social behavior, particularly religion.²⁶ The “self” in this context is understood within and against cultural systems, institutions, and provisional categories of understanding such as the “primitive.”

As a foreign expatriate and student, Okamoto found himself occasionally slipping between the role of investigator/intellectual/creative producer and subject of inquiry or regard at the Sorbonne—as he does in Courthion’s description above as well.²⁷ We might, for instance, consider his description in “Watashi to jinruigaku” of a blood-typing experiment in the classroom Rivet shared with his research partner and wife, Mercedes Andrade (1875–1973). Students were supposed to prick their fingers and draw blood, but Okamoto “mischievously” (chamekki) recounts evading the experiment and simply reporting that his blood type is “C.”²⁸ Andrade finds Okamoto’s apparent squeamishness amusing, but Professor Rivet runs home to consult literature on the matter upon hearing of this novel type, Okamoto recounts.²⁹ It is unclear in this account whether the “C” blood type caused confusion because it defied assumptions about Okamoto’s “type” as someone of a particular cultural or ethnic origin, or for another reason.³⁰ But we nonetheless can observe here a rejection of the system of scientific inquiry on the part of Okamoto when it rendered him the subject of investigation. He also undertook a playful, perhaps critical, engagement with that system’s rules and history of formation at a moment when ethnology itself was still in the process of becoming.³¹

Okamoto observes in “Watashi to jinruigaku” that “art is a deductive rolling-out of an image from an isolated space.” Abstraction-Création provided Okamoto with a space in which his artwork and ideas were able to encounter those of others. Ethnology, then, provided the artist with the critical tools to question subjective judgment. He writes that Abstraction-Création and ethnology functioned as “two mental bearings” that informed his approach to art as well as to his sense of self. We can also observe how Okamoto actively shaped these intertwined spaces of art and intellectual discourse. His artwork elucidates commonalities as well as divergences among the artworks he and his peers exhibited, pointing to a diversity of interpretations and priorities. His voice in the seminar or museum space likewise shaped the group’s mutual understanding of major ideas, particularly when his actions point to the limits and tensions inherent to existing ways of studying culture.

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This postcard of a lithograph by Farkas Molnár (1897–1945) is one of a series of twenty postcards printed and marketed to publicize the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar. Designed to convey a positive image of the institution, which had been under attack, and to present an attractive vision of modern living in the future, the exhibition opened with the slogan “Art and technology: a new unity,” a credo that the school’s founder and director Walter Gropius had adopted to frame the event. The exhibition was advertised in as many ways as possible, including through graphic design by Bauhaus faculty and students.

Molnár was born in the town of Pécs in southwestern Hungary in 1897, and originally studied to be a painter. While traveling in Italy in 1921 with two friends, the painters Henrik Stefan (1896–1972) and Hugo Johan (1890–1952), Molnár painted a number of highly structured, fantasy cityscapes in a style similar to Cubism, but with a more colorful palette. His 1922 lithograph Fiorentia, which features a central tower, is also from this period. In Fiesole, he heard about the Bauhaus from one of its former students Werner Gilles (1894–1961), whom he and his friends happened to meet in their wanderings. Gilles told him that there were several Hungarians from Pécs already at the school: Marcel Breuer (1902–1981), Alfred Forbáth (1897–1972), and Andor Weininger (1899–1986). Upon hearing this news, Molnár contacted Forbáth for more information, and on August 1, 1921, he, Stefan, and Johan all applied. All three were admitted, and they began their studies in the winter semester of 1921–22. Besides studying, Molnár worked in Gropius’s private architectural office. He remained at the Bauhaus for five years.¹

Molnár’s lithograph for the 1923 exhibition is striking in its verticality. His blocky design is of a tall building whose prominent central tower is flanked by two equally vertical but shorter side towers, one of which features accentuated horizontal elements, perhaps balconies. The three sections of the building are arranged one in front of the other, with the left tower occupying the foreground, the tallest tower positioned in the middle ground, and the right tower, which has a low wing on its right-hand side, set behind. It is a balanced, rational-seeming design, but—perhaps hinting at its utopian character—it is afloat in space. The bases of the front and back towers consist of the words “Weimar” and “Bauhaus,” while Ausstellung (exhibition) is inserted vertically along the tallest tower, driving the viewer’s gaze upward. The typeface used in the image is the same as the one used in another piece in the postcard series, a work by Kurt Schmidt (1901–1991), a fellow student at the Bauhaus and Molnár’s close friend. 

The image of a high-rise reflects the popularity of American architecture among the Bauhaus students and faculty. Architectural modernity and Americanism were interconnected concepts in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, as demonstrated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1921 design for the Berlin Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project and Walter Gropius’s 1922 Chicago Tribune building architectural competition entry. Molnár, who worked alongside Gropius, probably knew of both. His design is similar to Gropius’s competition entry, which also consists of vertical constructions of different heights, one of which has a lower part attached to it, and features horizontal elements that enhance the strict, right-angle-based geometry of the building overall. Since skyscrapers had not yet been built in Europe, designing them—in anticipation of a fundamentally new skyline in post–World War I Europe—had a futuristic ring to it.

Molnár’s architectural designs during his time at the Bauhaus were radically clean in contour and in the modern spirit of what was to become known as the “International Style.” This style informed his Red Cube House design from 1923, and his drawings of modern skyscraper-type buildings, some of which he published in the Hungarian avant-garde journal Ma in July 1923, the same time the Bauhaus exhibition opened in Weimar. These buildings were also inspired by the Bauhaus stage on which Kurt Schmidt and Georg Teltscher’s (1904–1983) Das mechanische Ballett (The Mechanical Ballet) was performed as part of the 1923 exhibition. 

Molnár published an account in Ma of the Bauhaus’s new, post-expressionist stage designs, which he described as “the realization of the will to construct.”² In his capacities as visual artist and architect, he took deep interest in the multimedia possibilities of this new type of stage work, operating with abstract elements that he saw as similar to architecture. Stage design, he wrote, must be guided by modern technology, science, and rational thinking: “The mechanical stage does not represent, does not decorate, it constructs.”³ The mechanical stage, as he stated, operates with mechanical figures that mediate between the designed space of the stage and the living humans who are its spectators. Molnár interpreted the mechanical stage as the unity of space, color, time, rhythm, and music. Thus, it is a realization of the same concepts as the architecture Molnár championed as a member of the Bauhaus group KURI, which in German is an acronym for “constructive, utilitarian, rational, and international.”⁴

Work for the stage was model-size architecture to Molnár, who was coauthor, with Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943) and László Moholy Nagy (1895–1946), of volume four of the Bauhaus Books series The Theater of the Bauhaus.⁵ His postcard image anticipating a skyscraper projects a more futuristic idea than did the actual Bauhaus exhibition, and thus indicates the imagination rather than the realities of the time.

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It had just started to snow when I arrived at Loheland last spring, although it was mid-April and forsythia blooms were already dotting the woodland compound. Nestled into the foothills of the Rhön in central Germany, near the small town of Fulda, the woodland compound, once an art school for women, overlooks a flat expanse of farmland on one side, and the forest on the other. Transposed against the soft curves and steeply pitched roofs of mossy, elfin buildings, some constructed as early as 1919, the weather only served to heighten the almost comically picturesque scene before me. It was not hard to imagine the four women who, pictured in a late 1920s photomontage, are jumping in unison in white skirts, on the very same lawn before me. Nor was it hard to imagine Bertha Günther—an early Loheland student whose photograms made from leaves, plants, and petals would be some of the first László Moholy-Nagy would see prior to his own experiments—gathering her materials in this very remote place a century ago.

2019 marks the centennial of the Bauhaus, a cause for celebration throughout both Germany and much farther afield, including here at The Museum of Modern Art. Although it is widely known that this radical testing ground of modernism was established in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919, few are aware that just one hundred miles away, another experimental center of utopian artistry and intellectualism opened that same year, but with one key difference: all of its students were women. Founded by Louise Langgaard and Hedwig von Rohden on a fifty-four-acre plot of undeveloped arable land, the Loheland Schule für Körperbildung, Landbau und Handwerk (Loheland School for Physical Education, Agriculture and Crafts) set out to educate a “new generation of women.”¹ Its students would not only receive vocational training that would enable them to make a living, but through a type of separatism, would also ostensibly be liberated from the conservative, bourgeois culture in which most of them had been raised. Anticipating Loheland’s future motto, in 1911 Langgaard would surmise, “I have in mind a new type of female artist, namely women who are calmly and confidently at peace with themselves.”² In September, in celebration of the school’s hundredth anniversary, the Vonderau Museum in Fulda, in partnership with the Loheland Foundation, will present Loheland: Lived Visions for a New World, curated by Michael Siebenbrodt in cooperation with Elisabeth Mollenhauer-Klüber of the Loheland Archive. 

Today, Loheland is home to a Waldorf school, but most of its original buildings, such as the 1924–25 sandstone Evahaus, which is named for the expressionist dancer Eva Maria Deinhardt, still stand. Deinhardt, a model Lohelander who was frequently photographed in various states of rhythmic intensity, was known for her woodcuts, beekeeping, and pedagogy, in addition to her athleticism.³ The remarkable Waggonia, a cluster of four train cars acquired through the Prussian State Railway and retrofitted in 1926 to serve as tailoring and leather workshops, residential dwellings for composers of the community, and the Lichtbildwerkstatt Loheland (Loheland photography workshop), is also still intact. In its heyday, under the direction of Valerie Wizlsperger, the workshop disseminated promotional images throughout Germany via postcards and print advertisements depicting Loheland architecture, women running and throwing spears in the mountains, vegetables in various stages of development, wooden cabinetry, and clusters of dancers wearing handmade costumes.

Like the Bauhaus in Weimar, Loheland’s mission was to provide a holistic education, in which students engaged in physical exercises, sensory training, and self-exploration alongside craft and design. These teachings would mirror the process-over-product philosophy of Johannes Itten, the bald and monkish Bauhaus master who began workshop sessions with yogic exercises, including rhythmic chants.⁴ In 1919, Gropius wrote to von Rohden, “What you are doing is so perfectly in tune with our inner structure that I very much want the Bauhaus to come in contact with you.”⁵

Established under the influence of anthroposophy, an occultist philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner, and the emergent Lebensreform (Life reform) movement, which ushered in a swell of collectivist pedagogical experiments throughout Germany, Loheland promoted a philosophy of interdisciplinarity in which the applied arts in concert with spiritualism and alternative forms of everyday living were seen as a balm to industrialization and the increasing fracturing of the social collective. Langgaard had been a member of the Anthroposophical Society since 1913 and graduated from the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a drawing teacher; von Rohden had been involved in the counterculture youth movement Wandervogel, which in addition to heralding a back-to-the-land ethos, sought forms of community outside of the patriarchal structure; and both women were part of the Association for Classical Gymnastics, which abetted the increasingly popular field of gymnastics.⁶

Considered an accessible form of expression for women, in which they were freed from the constraints of the corset, gymnastics in tandem with expressive dance had fast become a component in the repertoire for modern living—an uptick not inconsequentially linked to the fact that the job of gymnastics instructor was one of the first in which women could gain professional certification.⁷ When Loheland opened, movement training formed the backbone of its curriculum. Yet this conceit was twofold: although the founders maintained that the rhythmic movements and melodramatic poses of what would be dubbed Tänze der Loheländer (Lohelander’s Dances) were knowledge producing, and integral to the effort to “disentangle [students’] creative abilities”⁸ —that is, to promote self-actualization—this training also provided students with teaching certifications in gymnastics and thus was a means to future employment opportunities. As the enterprise quickly expanded to institute a curriculum in which classical gymnastics and expressionist dance were combined with biodynamic farming and workshops in weaving, woodworking, leatherworking, pottery, and photography, this pedagogical philosophy would extend even further. These workshops, too, served the same dual function: the goals were to learn and know everything, to create a type of mental circuitry connecting nature, experimentation, and process as a defining counterpart to aesthetics—but they included providing women with a trade and thus the chance to be part of public economic life.⁹

The faculty of Loheland understood, possibly earlier than that of the Bauhaus, the role that photography could play in pushing forward pedagogical and economic missions. While the Bauhaus in Dessau waited until 1929 to open an official photography department, Loheland consecrated the Lichtbildwerkstatt Loheland(Loheland photography workshop) in 1926, although engagement with the medium had begun much earlier.¹⁰ By 1917, while preparing to open the school, von Rohden was said to have asserted that in order to attract the attention of important people, “pictures” had to be used.¹¹ Accordingly, photographs of Loheland dancers in futuristic costumes, their muscles contorted in sensual, affected postures, could be found throughout the German media during the institution’s early days,¹² while Valerie Wizlsperger’s still life photographs of arranged wooden buttons and tight close-ups of brocade exemplified the spirit of the burgeoning field of modern advertising in the illustrated press. Within the corpus of existing literature on women’s engagement with photography at the Bauhaus, as well as the relationship between the “New Woman” and photography in Weimar Germany more generally, the camera has been understood as an “instrument of self-determination”—both an example of women participating in public life, as well as a vehicle that allowed for critique of recent shifts in gender roles.¹³ Yet, within the scope of the Loheland project and its orientation toward holistic interconnectivity, one gets the sense that the process of generating photographic images played a part that was equal in importance to their dissemination. What’s more, the very nature of the school’s intensely utopian isolationist strategy challenges an easy reading of photography as simply self-promotional. At Loheland, photography was both inward and outward—for it enabled a type of self-determination at the fringe.

This can be seen in the work of Bertha Günther, a largely unknown figure who between 1920 and 1922 created a body of delicate small-format photograms composed of local plant life. In the summer of 1922, before their arrival at the Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy, while on holiday in the nearby town of Weyhers, visited Loheland. Deep in their discussions about the ideas that would soon constitute “Production-Reproduction,” for which Lucia Moholy would receive no credit, Moholy-Nagy would later write that on this trip he learned of the photogram technique in part through a “Loheländerin” who “reinvigorated a generally overlooked process of placing objects on photographic paper and thus creating shadows.”¹⁴ That “Loheländerin” was Günther, who would ultimately be expunged from the Bauhaus master’s photographic history: by 1928, in a letter to Erich Buchholz disputing claims by El Lissitzky about the origins of the photogram, Moholy-Nagy would omit her name entirely.¹⁵ Their encounter, however, not only suggests an important intermingling between the two institutions, it also positions Günther’s work in relation to emerging technological philosophies, representing another approach to picture-making in which photography could be a form of visual material that didn’t necessarily need to communicate to a public. 

Herbert Molderings has suggested that Günther’s photograms, which were mounted on board, were possibly exhibited or used as anthroposophical teaching aids.¹⁶ Sandra Neügartner has similarly drawn comparisons between the photograms and the balance studies conducted by Langgaard and von Rohden, in which bodily movements were instrumentalized with photographs of balancing wooden blocks.¹⁷ As such, for all of the esoteric coding that surrounds Loheland pedagogy, the gentle overlays and spontaneous impressions of rustling leaves in these photograms reveal an approach to photography as a means of not just representing, but also evoking the experience of being in that tiny slice of the world in the Rhön.

While I was at Loheland, breathing the air, walking through the leaves like those that Bertha Günther collected, I was struck by a comparison that Loheland archivist Mollenhauer-Klüber makes between two photographs: the famous 1926 image of the Bauhaus masters on the flat roof of the new school building in Dessau (in which Gunta Stölzl is the lone woman in a line of “serious” men wearing elegant coats and hats and holding cigars) and an image of the Loheland “elders,” a group of women sitting in the grass with their backs to the trees.¹⁸ Although by 1926, the Bauhaus instructors had moved away from the spiritualist, mystical ideas promoted in Weimar toward a more analytic engagement with technology and mass production in Dessau, in these photographs, Mollenhauer-Klüber noted, there is a simple yet evident contrast between how these institutions fashioned themselves within their distinct visions of modern life: one raised up high, in the sleek and streamlined technosphere, the other on the ground, enmeshed in nature. For me, the two photographs also evoke different approaches to collectivism and the applied arts and their relationship to gender—the most salient points of both commonality and rupture between the two schools. At Loheland, isolation and a strong connection to nature were conceived of as projections of a possible future in which women could experience freedom and a life unfettered by the constraints of either gender or the working conditions imposed by others. Such a position is, from today’s perspective, deeply flawed, as utopian as it is ultimately untenable and potentially apolitical. It is for these reasons, however, that the women of Loheland are such compelling figures, raising germane questions about the New Woman, work, and a modern world beyond the center.

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The Magazine as a Source of Information

The primary role of a magazine, in particular a special interest magazine, is to keep its readers up-to-date on news that is relevant to their field of interest. One such publication, the architecture-focused magazine Stavba, which the Klub architektů (Club of Architects) began publishing in 1922, was instrumental in bringing information about the Bauhaus to modern architectural circles in Prague. First mention of the Bauhaus in Stavba dates from the magazine’s second year, when the school is mentioned in articles written by Adolf Behne, a German architect and theorist. In his first contribution, Behne gives a short overview of modern post-expressionist architecture in his own country, in which he stresses the name of Walter Gropius and Gropius’s role as founder of the “Staatliches Bauhaus” in Weimar. A few months later, Behne reported in Stavba on the exhibition of international architecture organized by the Bauhaus in the fall of 1923. In this article, he deems the school interesting and rich but criticizes “the praise for straight line and right angle” that he had observed in the majority of its exhibited projects.¹

Both of Behne’s articles were written specifically for Stavba and translated by Karel Teige, a Czech graphic designer and architectural theorist who subsequently became the leading Czech expert on the Bauhaus. Indeed, Teige, who was in direct contact with Gropius and later on with the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (and who would go on to give a series of lectures at the Bauhaus in March 1930), wrote regularly on the Bauhaus for Stavba between 1924 and 1930 and dedicated one special issue of ReD—the art magazine that he founded, edited, and designed and that was published by members of the Czech avant-garde art collective Devětsil—to the school in 1930. 

Teige’s opinion of the Bauhaus was not initially enthusiastic. In his first article, he draws into question aspects of its pedagogy in particular. Considering the Bauhaus in the historical context of modern art and architecture schools, he suggests that the Bauhaus is “not a model school” because it values craft, a feature associated with traditional nineteenth-century schools of fine and applied arts. Moreover, he comments, “Nowadays the art school of any kind, even the best, is a nonsensical anachronism.”² He accuses Gropius of indecisiveness concerning the teaching of the systematic use of the machine in production (whereby industrial process replaces artisanal manufacture) and asserts that the right “architectural school has to be a scientific school” and to move away from purely formal artistic concerns. In Teige’s argument, the notion of “standard” is the ideal.

Five months after Teige’s article appeared, Stavba published one by Gropius. In this text, which is based on the Bauhaus director’s lectures in Prague and Brno in December 1924, Gropius discusses machine-made housing and makes an impressive mea culpa in explaining the lack of audacity in his earlier projects.³ Interestingly, its publication coincided with a radical switch in Teige’s opinion of the Bauhaus: two months later, Teige wrote that Gropius managed to progressively transform the Bauhaus into “a united and model school of architecture, working in a true modern way, like any other school in Europe.”⁴ In this same article, he expresses indignation at the closure of the school in Weimar at the very moment it had abandoned “arts and crafts relics.” 

In later issues, Stavba announces the school’s move to Dessau,⁵ and its new structure is noted by Bedřich Václavek, another important member of Devětsil, who was settled in Brno.⁶ Finally, Teige describes the new buildings that Gropius had designed for the school, having seen pictures of them in an article in the magazine Bauhaus (which is mentioned in Stavba among other recommended readings).⁷

Through this series of articles published between 1924 and 1928, the Bauhaus entered the international network conscientiously constructed by the Czech avant-garde during the 1920s. The circulation of the magazine’s issues facilitated the exchange of articles and images that in turn disseminated a new conception of life in the modern world—a conception infused with the political commitment of avant-garde artists and architects, who couldn’t imagine their everyday practices as disconnected from the social preoccupations of their time.

After a two-year period of silence on the Bauhaus in Stavba, which had in the meantime changed its director, Teige published his famous study “Ten Years of the Bauhaus.”⁸ In this article, he summarizes the history of the school from its first late-expressionist years, through its evolution, the result of fruitful contacts with Netherlandish and Soviet avant-gardes, to its recent functionalist achievements. He expresses his satisfaction with the orientation of the school under the direction of Hannes Meyer, whose philosophy of architecture—which was less about formal composition and more about social concerns—was similar to that of Czech modernist circles. Indeed, Teige writes that the Bauhaus, which had produced “the bauhausstil [Bauhaus style], a modernist manner and fashion,” had been in need of a “revision.” Just such a shift was accomplished through the appointment of Meyer. As Meyer wrote in ReD that same year, the Bauhaus as a “High School of Creation” was “not an artistic but [rather] a social phenomenon.”⁹ In highlighting its creative and friendly atmosphere, and conveying the impression of the school as a happy place for people seeking to change society, Stavba and ReD played a role in drawing young people from Czechoslovakia to it.¹⁰

Further, as depicted in these magazine presentations of the 1930s, the Bauhaus was to be understood as the model of a modern-life laboratory that, though structured around architecture, also influenced design. This was illustrated through objects shown in an important Bauhaus exhibition organized in Dessau, which Teige reproduced in an article for Stavba. This piece introduced the magazine’s readership to the look of furniture designed at the Bauhaus as well as to the special layout devised by the German school to display its products and communicate its theories. This means of presentation was reflected in Teige’s design for a special Bauhaus issue of ReD, which had, relative to Stavba, a much more “Bauhaus-style” look, discussed below.

Magazine as Artistic Item

The Bauhaus approach to graphic design had also been under discussion since 1925 in the pages of Pásmo,¹¹ ReD, and Typografia,¹² and thus Czech graphic designers were aware of the radical changes inspired by the New Typography movement, which brought together Jan Tschichold, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and Piet Zwart, among others. Advocating for extreme formal purity in graphic and information design, Bauhaus teachers were involved in the reform of typography, setting up a typographical standard characterized by sans-serif fonts and the suppression of capital letters. At the same time, to express the modern spirit of the Machine Age, they promoted use of elementary geometrical figures in place of ornamental ones, which had been banished (as they had been already in architecture, thanks to Adolf Loos); photography as a typographical shortcut (or “typophoto,” as László Moholy-Nagy named it¹³); and the standardization of paper size by DIN (Standards Association of German Industry¹⁴). To sum up: maximal objectivity replaced subjectivity. At the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer designed the “universal” type that Teige commented upon (and suggested modifications to) in ReD.¹⁵ These new standards revolutionized the design of printed matter—and formed a modern vocabulary that inspired the popular term “Bauhaus style.” Ultimately, however, this categorization was looked down upon by proponents of the Bauhaus once it was adopted by those they believed didn’t understand the social and political commitments of the international avant-garde behind it.¹⁶

This evolution in modern graphic design directly impacted the formal appearance of avant-garde magazines—as is clear in the Czechoslovak context when comparing Disk, Život, or Pásmo (which are laid out in a playful, post-Dadaist and early Constructivist manner, or at least, reflect a lack of graphic homogeneity)¹⁷ with magazines published in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s (which display perfect functionalist discipline). Indeed, in examining fronta, the almanac published in Brno in 1927, one can see how the bridge from artistic amateurism to typographical professionalism was crossed. Designed by Zdeněk Rossmann, who would later study briefly at the Bauhaus, fronta reflects an advanced understanding of the Bauhaus principles of graphic design. The cover possesses some similarities to the Bauhausbücher series (designed by Moholy-Nagy), which was a real inspiration for Rossmann’s own typographical practice. In a radical manner, Rossmann opted for the exclusive use of lowercase letters, not only on the cover of the almanac but also inside, and in this sense, fronta evokes the Bauhaus magazine bauhaus.

Rossmann was one of the most active users of lowercase letters as is evident in the design of his numerous book covers and the various other ephemera that he created during his Slovak period, in particular. In 1931, after a short semester spent at the Bauhaus, Rossmann was appointed head of the graphic design department at the School of Applied Arts in Bratislava (ŠUR), which was founded in 1928. He was also put in charge of designing the school’s official documents, and thus for promoting its image in a clear, modern way that was naturally close to Bauhaus aesthetics, whose graphic ideal he shared. As an ambitious young man who spoke several languages and was part of a strong international network, his reputation grew quickly in the small Slovak metropole, and he was solicited for many projects. Soon after arriving in Bratislava, he was involved in the publication of a new modern magazine called Nová Bratislava (New Bratislava).

Nová Bratislava was published over five months in 1931–32. Its editor in chief was Daniel Okáli, a Slovak writer and left-oriented literary critic also involved in the publishing of the magazine DAV, which had paved the way for a modernist style in Slovak literature and art during the 1920s.¹⁸ Another important figure in the undertaking was Antonín Hořejš, a versatile, intellectual Czech connoisseur of music and applied arts, who was closely associated with the foundation of the ŠUR. The editorial circle was completed by Rossmann and the Slovak architect Friedrich Weinwurm.

All four issues of the magazine were designed by Rossmann following precise guidelines: They were printed on A4 size paper (the new DIN standard adopted from Germany), with the text structured in two columns and the cover respecting a rigid grid. At the bottom of the cover, Rossmann placed the outline of a map of Czechoslovakia that included a dot showing the location of Bratislava and the title of the magazine written in lowercase letters in three languages (Slovak, German, French).¹⁹ At the top, he left space for photographic illustrations. The pictures used were mainly taken by Jaromír Funke, a pioneer of Czech avant-garde photography, who settled in Bratislava because he obtained a teacher position at the ŠUR.

The title of the magazine Nová Bratislava suggests a link with the reputed German Das Neue Frankfurt (New Frankfurt). The Slovak magazine aimed to be the“monthly magazine for the new Slovakia,” by covering the look and the role of modern architecture and urbanism from a social perspective in addition to providing overviews of contemporary literature, art, and music. Indeed, Bratislava—a growing city—was considered an urban laboratory in terms of developing an image of modern Slovakia. Even if no mention of the Bauhaus appears explicitly in the magazine, its formal appearance was definitely influenced by the New Typography’s precepts as developed in the 1920s—and its spirit is close to Hannes Meyer’s in terms of conveying the necessary connections between one’s art and one’s sociopolitical convictions.²⁰ Rossmann admired Meyer, and the magazine gave him the opportunity to express this through a short article on the German political situation, which, written in a satiric vein, ends: “The crisis doesn’t exist! Long live Richard Wagner! Long live Niebelungen! Long live Kaiser and the Reich!”²¹

Above all, Nová Bratislava was an efficient tool in terms of enabling Slovak artists to be in contact with foreign protagonists of the avant-garde movement, as shown by a letter from Antonín Hořejš to the Dutch designer Piet Zwart, now in the collection of MoMA’s Architecture and Design Department. In this missive, written on pure functionalist letterhead designed specially by Rossmann for the magazine, Hořejš asks Zwart to send him his new book about advertising—probably the 1931 brochure R(eclame), which Meyer had shown him in Brno. He also suggests that Zwart stay in touch with the magazine and requests additional information about his work. In exchange, Hořejš promises to inform Zwart about events in Slovakia and sends him an issue of the Almanac of the Cooperative Unitas (1931)—a colorful publication highlighting the new functionalist buildings constructed by his editorial colleague Friedrich Weinwurm in Bratislava, as well as a booklet summarizing new Czechoslovak design productions. Through this exchange, Hořejš hoped not only to obtain interesting visual material for Nová Bratislava but also to promote Slovak avant-garde productions abroad.

Indeed, the magazine Nová Bratislava was essential within the context of the Slovak avant-garde scene. The Slovak avant-garde movement was structured around the school ŠUR, where contributors to the magazine taught and which was sometimes referred to as the “Slovak Bauhaus.” 

This nickname originated in an article that, written by Josef Rybák, a Czech avant-garde graphic designer and art critic, in February 1931 for the magazine DAV, is entitled “The Bauhaus of Bratislava.”²² In this article, Rybák, who was covering the closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau under National-Socialist pressure, appeals for the development of new kinds of schools that would be, like the Bauhaus, “laboratories that are real avant-garde from the point of view of the work and of the spirit.” He asks, “Are there such schools?” and then answers, “In Bratislava, today, before our eyes, there is an attempt to build and organize a school which could give a positive answer to this question.” 

Rybák believed that the success of the ŠUR depended on its teachers and he expresses that the prospect of lectures by Tschichold, Moholy-Nagy, and the Czech graphic designer Ladislav Sutnar, which was announced in the program of the school, made him happy. Thus, the parallel between the ŠUR and the Bauhaus was drawn.

However, just four years later, in 1935, the Hungarian art critic Ernst Kállai published the following statement in the magazine Výtvarná Výchova (Artistic Education), whose editor in chief was the artist, ethnographer, and art theorist Josef Vydra, director of ŠUR at the time: “The School is not and does not want to be a copy of the famous Bauhaus, even if since its origins, it has closely observed the Bauhaus story. On the contrary, the Bratislava’s school is of a more vivid kind, because it is more closely linked with industry and production than the Bauhaus ever was.”²³

The controversy of “the Slovak Bauhaus” was thus launched and would be continued in the decades that followed. Previous research on the ŠUR has already questioned the accuracy of this nickname, which supposes a strong link with the German school.²⁴ Often the difference between the two institutions is stressed through comparisons of their pedagogical structures. It has been pointed out, for example, that the Slovak school did not have the same fundamental organization as the Bauhaus because it opened as an evening school for people already engaged in professional life.²⁵ But this changed, and if World War II had not interrupted the activities of the school (which was closed by the extreme-right Slovak State), its leaders would have set up a structure more similar to that of the Bauhaus—as Rossmann had proposed in 1938.²⁶

The other distinctive trait of the school was its ongoing dialogue with the popular traditions of arts and crafts. Indeed, Slovakia was mainly a rural territory and as such, unlike Germany, did not have a history of high culture. Folklore played an important role in the definition of the Slovak national feeling,²⁷ whether expressed through music, dance, clothing, or everyday objects (made of wood or ceramic). Vydra was well placed as director of the school, given his expertise in the history of folklore, and his passion for this rich creative heritage was taken into consideration when educating students in the applied arts. It was reflected in particular and in a very original way in the paintings by Ludovít Fulla, who taught at the school—despite the fact that in his typographical practice, he made use of the radical modern vocabulary, as one can see in his layout for the magazine Slovenská Grafia(Slovak Graphy)²⁸ and for the special publication Súkromné listy (Private letters),²⁹ which he set up with his friend the painter Mikuláš Galanda, who also taught at the school.

Unlike the Bauhaus, the ŠUR did not have or plan to have an architecture department; however, this lack was somehow compensated for by the strong editorial involvement of the teachers (especially Rossmann) in the sphere of architecture and urbanism, as it can be seen in the magazines Nová Bratislava and Slovenský Stavitel. One might say that they taught architecture vicariously through these magazines, in lieu of in a formal class setting.

One thing is sure: the ŠUR was thought of and used as a tool in the progressive modernization of Slovakia (which included education, urbanization, industrialization, and so on). The word “Bauhaus” evoked the modern-life laboratory and the quest for modernity, if not modernity itself, in the minds of the larger public of that time. 

As Frederic J. Schwartz has remarked, “In the popular parlance of the Weimar period, the word ‘Bauhaus’ did not necessarily refer only to the institution itself but to the tendency of which it became emblematic.”³⁰ “Bauhaus” was by that time a modern label, and the original expression “the Bauhaus of Bratislava” (surely more accurate than “the Slovak Bauhaus,” given the Bratislava’s location in the very rural and traditional country that Slovakia was at that time) reflected the unique position of the school within the context of the small Slovak cosmopolite metropole. The ŠUR was capable of attracting modern people from abroad, via the good communication exploring the strong visual identity of the label.

The Magazine as a Tool of Propaganda for Modern Lifestyle

In the history of periodicals, visual identity moves sometimes in a rather unexpected way from purely modernist circles to a wider audience through the mass media. A case in point is that of Nový Svet (New World), an illustrated magazine published in Bratislava from 1926. In the fall of 1930, Hořejš, Rossmann, and the Czech designer Jindřich Halabala edited some articles in which they presented modern furniture designed by Halabala, among others, and produced by the firm Moravian UP. Wardrobes, armchairs, tables, kitchen furniture, lamps, beds, and other domestic objects made in wood and metal were shown in photographs accompanied by a text that explained, in a pedagogical way, the challenges of new types of housing (in particular, small urban apartments). The furniture for such housing, especially in the case of metal objects, was formally inspired by the Bauhaus style, with purity of functional form, hygiene, and order all seen as necessary components of the new lifestyle. All ornamental decoration was banished and historic styles were rejected. The authors suggest that “only the new apartment can be the appropriate environment for a new life and a new education” and claim “the modern apartment as a condition for perfect life.”

Unlike Nová Bratislava, Nový Svet was not an avant-garde art magazine. It had a much wider readership than the modernist periodical and offered a broader audience for articles on the new “domestic culture” or “culture of living” (equivalent to German “Wohnungskultur”) in Czechoslovakia.³¹ Clearly, the main aim of these articles was to present the modern design inspired by the Bauhaus products to the larger public, which could not be reached through avant-garde magazines.

In some way, this little avant-garde incursion in the sphere of popular printed periodicals prepared the way for the magazine Nová Bratislava, in which the topic of modern living was capital. However, the more engaged tone of Nová Bratislavamoved the topic from the enthusiastic description of a new kind of lifestyle to more political propaganda for the new human environment. Indeed, in a very surprising way, the same authors who wrote in optimistic terms for Nový Svet expressed pessimistic opinions in Nová Bratislava. For instance, Hořejš judges that the question of the “social functionality” of the new domestic objects remains unanswered. He suggests that the modern movement involved in industrial production and standardization has become “a fashion”—an analysis that brings to mind the ultimate disillusion of the Bauhaus protagonists (especially Meyer). The paper is illustrated with photographs of Halabala’s furniture—which is deemed trendy but likely unaffordable for most.

If one trusts Hořejš’s analysis, it seems that modern architecture and design in Czechoslovakia had a destiny similar to that of Germany. The emerging consumer society adopted the new aesthetics (labeled “Bauhaus style”³² in Germany) through objects delivered by rationalized industrial production. But the social dimension originally aimed at by the design of such objects was dismissed because of the economic rules of the capitalist market. Nevertheless, three years later, in another issue of Výtvarná Výchova, Kállai gives a more optimistic vision of the Bauhaus legacy, suggesting that “the fertile rays of its [the Bauhaus’s] spirit are still alive.”³³ So, who was right? Did the modern movement fail in its attempt to transform the society or was the spirit of the Bauhaus still alive in the 1930s?

In fact, in interwar Czechoslovakia, the success of functionalism was a reality. During the 1930s, members of the middle class progressively adopted this aesthetic as “their natural lifestyle,”³⁴ thanks to the intensive promotion of modern domestic objects in exhibitions and in magazines, not only through advertising (often designed in the Bauhaus style) but also through editorial commentary. There were several factories and firms that spread the modern lifestyle: among them Sandrik in Slovakia (which produced metal tableware), Moravian UP (Jan Vaněk’s well-known furniture manufacturing company), and the Czech publishing house DP (Družstevní práce, or Cooperative Work, with its arts and crafts branch Krásná Jizba). DP was a successful venture by Ladislav Sutnar, the Czech designer who, in traveling to Germany, discovered the power of a good marketing plan, which included the “right promotion[al] and information campaign.”³⁵ He promoted the line Krásná Jizba (Beautiful Room) through magazines such as Žijeme (We live), which was published by DP. Subtitled an “Illustrated Magazine of Today’s Era,” it reported in a panoramic but homogenous way on the various aspects of the modern lifestyle, which included the important question of artistic education. Edited by designers, architects, and art critics (including Hořejš, Sutnar, Janák, and the Czech architect Bohuslav Fuchs), it was well designed in all aspects of the word and was successful in reaching the broad middle-class readership.

In conclusion, the Bauhaus culture inspired the Czechoslovak design scene through various kinds of magazines in complementary ways. People with some knowledge of the Bauhaus reported on its teaching methods, on its evolution, and on the work of its protagonists in professional publications (such as in Stavba). They adopted the Bauhaus philosophy in their own work and promoted their own social and political concerns in engaged avant-garde magazines designed in a Bauhaus-inspired style (such as fronta, ReD, and Nová Bratislava), and finally, they spread the idea of a new lifestyle inherited from the Bauhaus experience through more popular magazines (like Nový Svet and Žijeme). Even if the word “Bauhaus” was not always pronounced, the visual identity of this label, which was constructed by collective efforts and adopted by the Czechoslovak milieu, was strong enough to attract people who desired to live in a modern world.

The post A Look at the Czech and Slovak Avant-Garde within the Frame of the Bauhaus Network appeared first on post.

In 2018, on the eve of the Bauhaus centenary, the exhibition BAUHAUS VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels in The Museum of Modern Art Library explored the intersecting parallels of these two sites of radical experimentation. Its selection of ephemera, publications, and correspondence highlights the extensive circulation of ideas and people between the two institutions. Many of the items on display come from the personal papers of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of MoMA, who visited faculty at both schools in 1927–28, including Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy in Dessau (the Bauhaus’s second location), and El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Vladimir Tatlin in Moscow. Barr took this opportunity to collect from them first-hand information, books, catalogs, and photographs, which shaped his vision and multi-departmental plan for MoMA, established in 1929.

The exhibition was organized by Meghan Forbes and Evangelos Kotsioris. The video here features Anna Bokov’s presentation at a “post presents” event organized in relation to the exhibition on October 17, 2018. For an illustrated checklist, installation views, and related essays, please visit the exhibition page at moma.org.

The post Vkhutemas + Bauhaus: On Common Origins, Different Futures, and Creation with Fire appeared first on post.

“Reproductions . . . more than originals, mediate the artistic-cultural relations of today,” declared Czech avant-garde catalyst Karel Teige in 1922, joining other experimental artists, writers, editors, and designers exploring the expressive possibilities of new photographic and printing technologies.¹

Teige and fellow members of the 1920s leftist avant-garde group Devětsil put these ideas to the test in the production of experimental journals such as Disk (two issues published, 1923 and 1925), Pásmo (Zone; 1924–26), and ReD (Revue Devětsilu; 1927–31). “Little magazines” such as these thrived in Europe during this period, integral to an international network in which members of the avant-garde could share ideas.²

But what was involved in bringing these abstract ideas about mechanized life to the messy reality of print publishing? What can be learned from the close examination of Czech journals in particular? 

To find out, I joined an impromptu team of researchers at the MoMA Paper Conservation Lab. There, Meghan Forbes (C-MAP Fellow for Central and Eastern Europe), Barbora Bartunkova (Museum Research Consortium Fellow), and I (Reader Services Librarian) sat with Erika Mosier (Associate Conservator) and Lee Ann Daffner (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs) to share our varied expertise. Laura Neufeld (Assistant Paper Conservator) got into the act later, capturing the magnified images shown here. 

Gathering around the microscope, we examined several journals in the MoMA Library collection, seeking evidence of how group members manifested their ideas about the power of reproduction through actual photomechanical reproduction. We wondered, how did image processing work then? Were the methods they used similar to those employed in European printing centers such as Paris and Berlin, or were there local differences? What kinds of production choices did the group make, and what creative strategies emerged in the process?

Our adventure began with the word štočky. Translated variously from Czech as cliché, copy negative, or copy print, and pronounced to an American ear like “SHTOTCH-kee,” these photo-based images appear to have been key elements in the printing process and crucial to the exchange of visual ideas among publishers. But what are they exactly? How did they function in the printing process? And why were they passed around so much by editors? 

These questions emerge from Meghan’s dissertation, “In the Middle of It All: Prague, Brno, and the Avant-Garde Networks of Interwar Europe,”³ through her primary source references to the exchange of štočky. For example, in a 1930 letter in German, Neue Stadt and Neue Frankfurt editor Josef Gantner urged Teige, “Please send me immediately the cliché of the Prague housing estate [Baba, the Czech Werkbund modernist housing development].”⁴ We would learn from other examples that the term cliché was used interchangeably with štočky in German and French correspondence of the time.⁵

As a catalyst for avant-garde publishing, Teige was a good source for such material, based upon “the method of interchange he set up at an early stage through [the journal] Stavba. The regular accounts of current developments that Teige published in the magazine depended on a network of contacts, constantly maintained by correspondence and the exchange of documents.”⁶ He also had štočky on hand from the production of Pásmo and Disk, even sending a list (for return) to Devětsil colleague Artuš Černík in Brno.⁷ I discuss one of these images, a work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, below.

Expanding upon this research using the MoMA Library collection, Meghan spotted an advertisement for štočky in another Czech journal from this period: “All štočky for Vest Pocket Revue are supplied by [the graphic arts association] Polygrafia in perfect condition.”⁸ Another full-page ad in the journal ReD touts, “Why throw money out the window on expensive štočky when you can obtain them at a lower price and better made from B. Peješ and Company?”⁹

From this evidence, then, we knew that štočky are images in some physical form that could be readily circulated and printed. But we wanted to learn more.

Back in Paper Conservation, we examined issues of the 1920s Czech journals Disk, ReD, Pásmo, Vest Pocket Revue, and the book Film¹⁰ from the MoMA Library collection. Our search for štočky focused here on images in Pásmo, nos. 9 (1924) and 10 (1925), specifically the masthead, a “photographic poem” by Jiří Jelínek, and a reproduction of Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper project.

To understand what we were looking at, we needed to review printing processes of the time, specifically letterpress production, and to distinguish the mechanics of printing solid areas (such as lines and shapes) and tones (photographs in particular). At this point, Lee Ann looked up from the gelatin silver prints on her examination table. Standard commercial printing at the time, she explained, involved arranging metal type and images (the latter processed into typelike blocks) in a metal frame, or chase. Once set up in the printer, the composition was repeatedly inked and pressed into paper. 

Štočky, it turns out, played a key role early in this process of transforming images into small metal printing blocks (here called line blocks and halftones). They and their brethren clichés, copy negatives, and copy prints could take a variety of forms: they could be negative or positive photographic images developed on glass, paper, or film; they could also be either screened (I’ll get to that) or unscreened. One thing they had in common, however, was though they were expensive to produce, they could be sent through international mail, which enabled them to be circulated among publishers.

Crucially, štočky (I’ll call them “process images” from here) served as a key reproductive step in the process of turning an origin image, such as a line drawing or photograph, into print form. Moreover, the images they were based on were generally made with print publication in mind. In fact, the term camera ready then referred to an origin image that would hold up well during transformation into a process image, then printing block, then composition (known as a “forme”), and then print.

To make this first reproduction, images entirely composed of black and white (known as line art) were photographed one way, and continuous tone images (such as photographs) were photographed in a slightly different way. Both were photographed in high contrast to make a printer-friendly image, but continuous tone images were shot through a screen, filtering the tones into black dots of varying size. In this way, all elements of a composition (type and images) were rendered in pure black and white, ready for etching into blocks. From here we’ll call these “line blocks” (for black-and-white images) and “halftones” (for tonal images such as photographs).

Lee Ann pointed us to an example of a line block from the time, discussed by Adrian Sudhalter (Distinguished Scholar, Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) during her reconstruction of Tristan Tzara’s unrealized publication Dadaglobe.¹¹ To make this block for the related publication Dadaco,¹² an image of a certificate was photographed in high contrast and then etched into zinc. The zinc plate was then attached to a wood block, making it interchangeable with type and other print elements.

While this process may appear to be fully mechanized, for most of its history, photomechanical reproduction was a complex, labor-intensive craft involving optics, chemistry, metalworking, woodworking, and other technical skills. Printing meant working with materials such as acid and cyanide, hammers and chisels—and even a substance known as “dragon’s blood.”¹³

“Plastic anvil” is theoretician Reyner Banham’s way of describing how industrial production (such as letterpress printing) depended upon such technicians “performing a function relying heavily on coordination of hand and eye, knowledge of material, and accumulated years of what can only be called craft skill.”¹⁴ Machine precision, he argued, was a myth “propagated by twentieth-century aesthetes,” in particular “the high poetry of Le Corbusier and the Futurists in the 1920s.”¹⁵

Banham made a further point relevant to process images: traditional manufacturing depends upon limited precision, which was “not that aspect of machinery that was so much admired in the 1920s and 1930s.”¹⁶ Specifically, the interchangeable part so fundamental to industrial production “can only be made to interchange by making the fit sufficiently sloppy.”¹⁷ This built-in imprecision, or tolerance, he argued, enables parts to work together just right. If we think of process images as an interchangeable part of avant-garde exchange, we can see that they fit this criterion well. These idea-parts were easily transportable and also malleable enough to work together through the mail and the production process.

Looking for these process images—and plastic anvils—back in the lab, we next focused the microscope on line block and halftone images in Pásmo.

We started with the bold masthead of early issues such as Pásmo 1, no. 9 (1924). Commanding the right column, a strong graphic forms a sans serif P from a strip of film and, apparently, a circle, with the journal title in a serif typeface beside it. 

In her dissertation, Meghan notes that pásmo translates as zone, but also as band or belt.¹⁸ This linear quality makes for a compelling image in itself, but also anticipates intense interest in typographic experimentation. Much of this was focused on reforming traditional typography in line with modernist principles of functionalism and mechanization. Like the Pásmo P, these experiments often involved reduction to geometric elements (circles, lines) and elimination of traditional attributes (e.g., capitalization, serifs, variable strokes, and italics).

The best-known example is Herbert Bayer’s 1927 Universal alphabet.¹⁹ Bayer’s experimental lettering system would become known to Devětsil group members through the journal ReD, in which a rendering of it was reproduced in 1929—and critically evaluated by Teige himself.²⁰ Also in 1927, Kurt Schwitters introduced Systemschrift, a reform alphabet based on phonetic principles.²¹ Preceding all of these is the logo for Max Burchartz’s design firm Werbebau, which features a lowercase b. Moreover, similar P’s and a lowercase b are reproduced in Jan Tschichold’s influential Die neue Typographie.²²

At first glance, the P appears to be solid black. One assumes that the circle is a flat shape, with an overexposed filmstrip added to render the letter. But Meghan noticed some tonal variation in the circle, suggesting an image of a vinyl record (or possibly a reel of film), and indeed, one can make out a pattern suggesting just that when looking at it through a microscope. Looking even more closely, a series of tiny white flecks within a faint outline of frames hinted that an actual film clip could have been used as the stem of the P.

If the P was intended to be a strictly black-and-white element, it would have been prepared and processed that way. In other words, a big black circle, probably hand drawn, would have been overlaid with an overexposed strip of film. This would then have been photographed in high contrast (i.e., made into a process image), on its way to becoming a line block.

But if the P was intended to read as a photomontage of an LP and a film clip, it would have been photographed and processed as a halftone. In this scenario, an image of an LP and a strip of film would have been pasted together and then rephotographed through a halftone screen. Under the microscope, halftone dots are clearly visible on both the LP and the film strip, strongly suggesting that the creators intended it to be read as a photomontage and not as a simple graphic. 

The next Pásmo image we placed under the microscope prompted similar questions about photomontage and publisher intention. This time we looked at an example of Devětsil’s signature photographic poems or picture-poems, of particular interest to Barbora.

Turning to page 6, we found “Remo Fotografická báseň” (Photographic poem by Remo [Jiří Jelínek]). Combining image and type for expressive purposes, picture poems were conceived by Devětsil’s offshoot Poetist group as a thoroughly modern expressive form, merging the “economy, truth, [and] brevity” of telegrams and photographs.²³

Poetism grew from Devětsil interest in mass-produced imagery. The modern picture, Teige argued, should be “either a poster—that is, public art, like the cinema, sports, and tourism, with its place in the street—or a poem, pure visual poetry, without literature, with its place in the book, a book of reproductions, like a book of poems.”²⁴ He was confident that “picture poems conform precisely to contemporary requirements. Mechanical reproduction provides the means for making picture books. Books of picture poems will need to be published. Methods of mechanical reproduction will assure the wide popularization of art.”²⁵

The Pásmo image clearly aspires to this ideal. Montaged elements include musical notation, photographs depicting ships and wildlife, and words, such as the English phrase “NEVER MORE” hand lettered in the middle. Some of these are joined and some are set into heavy black or white borders. A white L-shaped border holds the components together, with the date 1924 and the inset “MANON” suggesting a title or label, possibly referencing an eighteenth-century comic opera by Jules Massenet or another musical reference (Jelínek was an accomplished jazz trumpeter).

Here the production photographer was presented with a single image composed of both line art and continuous tones. Processing it as a line block would have reduced the photographs to high contrast black-and-white shapes. Processing it as a halftone would have tended to yield fuzzy, low-contrast line art. The photographer chose the latter, as the murky result shows. 

What’s lost in the murk are the choices made by (perhaps) the artist and (definitely) by the production team to yield the best result. For example, the photographer could optimize exposure, the developer could burn and dodge, the platemaker could do some precise chiseling, and finally the printer could optimize ink flow to achieve the most legible outcome. 

What’s unclear is how much the artist understood this process and whether he took it into account in making the work. If reproduction was truly the future of art, as Devětsil proposed,²⁶ did Remo consider camera readiness when making the origin image? Consider the musical notation, for example. Was it a piece of found material, cut and pasted into the composition, or was it rendered specifically for it? Incorporating found material might have been a purposeful choice, celebrating the readymade element of collage at the expense of print legibility. But if the notation was rendered specifically for the purpose of reproduction, then the artist had to make choices about scale, line weight, and contrast, which would have influenced how the work communicated in print.

Production considerations also figure into the layers of borders within and beyond the origin image. The work plays with this dark and light framing, with further complexity added by photographs butted together and partially layered. One possible production effect is found in the heavy dark border edging the origin image: its varying thickness (thinner on the sides, thicker on the top) suggests that the work’s proportions were modified to fit the print layout. 

Then there’s the thin outer border around the whole image, shown here magnified. Edging images—either by chiseling into the block or by adding lead rules around it—was standard procedure at the time, and the practice is found throughout the issue. It served as a way to delineate images, especially those with large unprinted areas, as seen in the final image we examined. But in the picture-poem, the edging blurs the border (so to speak) between the origin work and the print layout. Was Remo aware of these factors when preparing the work, and if he was, would it have influenced how he made the origin image?

A close look at the initial collage, if extant, might provide evidence (or its absence) of preparing the work for camera readiness. Despite the group’s preference for reproductions, some maquettes survive,²⁷ and perhaps these works will have their day under the microscope, too.

Finally, we looked at Pásmo 1, no. 10 (1924), zooming in on an image of Mies van der Rohe’s Friedrichstrasse skyscraper project (1921),²⁸ one of several versions of this influential perspective view.²⁹

Pásmo reproduced the now-historic large-scale perspective drawing only a few years after Mies put charcoal to tracing paper and arranged for publication of the results in several German journals. It’s unclear how the Pásmo editors sourced the image, but they either received a scaled-down process photograph in the mail from an international contact or made one from an available reproduction. From there, the image was clearly processed as a halftone and paired with commentary. 

The image is striking for its forceful composition, in which a stark tower dominates a Berlin street relegated to the shadowy edges of the frame. In 1924, the idea of a glass tower was powerful in itself, but as we would see, its power was enhanced by the creation and dissemination of the drawing. Moreover, the drawing’s power originates in compositional and print-savvy choices strongly influenced by successive alterations to copies of the photograph upon which it was based.

Mies’s talent for making and disseminating images is well established, and Friedrichstrasse is particularly well studied. Lepik, for example, asserts, “Everything suggests that this entire series of large montages and drawings was produced for either publication or exhibition, each one moving farther from the original context of the architectural competition,”³⁰ with its strict submission requirements. 

Mies quite possibly commissioned site photographs for the project, and research by Sudhalter points to commercial photographer Curt Rehbein. Rehbein had a studio nearby, and his professional stamps are found on copy prints of the architect’s projects from the early 1920s.³¹ The photographs exist today only as early copy prints.³²

Sudhalter deduces that the commissioned photograph most likely involved ”a large glass negative . . ., a powerful, wide-angle lens, [and] a tripod.”³³ Together, lens, plate, and framing enabled dramatic perspective, telescopic depth of field, and emphasis on the open space of street and sky. 

Here’s where process images came in: Mies “seems to have had multiple prints of the image developed in which the sky and building site were blocked out, leaving an area of white emptiness at the composition’s center. These working prints would presumably have had a matte paper surface, conducive to pencil or charcoal, and would have been of a scale comfortable for drawing.”³⁴

Which is exactly what happened next: In this first altered version, the skyscraper is drawn in, following the forced perspective of the photograph. The rest of the photograph remains largely unaltered, contrasting the traditional street view with the soaring, hand-drawn tower. In a second altered version, the surrounding traditional buildings are heavily shadowed in “thick crayon,”³⁵ but with gaps at the right and bottom edges, anticipating subsequent cropping. 

The final drawing reproduced in Pásmo was clearly derived from these overdrawn photographs, and the image takes advantage of both media. Here, overhead lines and hanging streetlights have been edited out, traditional buildings have been fully shadowed into framing edges, and the foreground fades in a few clear tonal steps into the deep background, where an enhanced bridge frames the perspective vanishing point. Arguably, these combined visual strategies helped the work to reproduce well.

Which brought us back to the lab. In the Pásmo image, production effects influence how the work communicates. For example, the tower reads as more of a solid volume than the transparent glass of Mies’s fantasy. This is partly the result of the low-quality halftone and paper, as well as the small size of the reproduction. Also, the publishers’ addition of a border (discussed previously in the picture-poem) effectively fences in the dramatic open sky. One wonders if such effects of reproduction influenced the editorial commentary on the work as an example of “resisting the incessant and newly appearing senile neo-classicism.”³⁶

It’s unknown exactly how the Friedrichstrasse image made its way to Pásmo,³⁷ though its inclusion in Teige’s 1927 štočky inventory strongly suggests that it came through the avant-garde network. To get more of a feel for this type of distribution, I’ll conclude with reproductions circulated through another institution dedicated to spreading new ideas: The Museum of Modern Art.

Soon after its founding in 1929, MoMA recognized the power of disseminating images of modern art, architecture, and design for publication. This is seen most strongly in a collection known as the Architecture and Design Department Photo Files. The files date to the Museum’s early years, and by 1946, the design section alone constituted “nearly 2,000 photographs, mounted and labeled . . . in daily use by students, journalists, and the Museum’s own staff, especially the Circulating Exhibitions Department. The file provides material for the Museum’s design exhibitions and publications.”³⁸

File copies of Friedrichstrasse images evince years of use. One shows crop marks, used to trim and resize analog images for publication. In another, the sky has been clearly lightened in the darkroom, presumably so that the image would print better. A third credits the photographer who made (yet another) copy print. “Please return” stamps are common on these prints and negatives, reflecting their frequent and often (involuntarily) permanent loan. In this way, the image endured long enough to be distributed internationally through the twentieth century.

Finishing up in the lab, we turned to the first page of Disk, another Devětsil journal, where a typographic manifesto by Štyrský declares: “A picture must be active. It must do something in the world. In order to accomplish the task . . . it must be mechanically reproduced. 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 copies. . . .”³⁹ Teige famously went a step further, predicting, “Mechanical reproduction and print will finally make the original superfluous: after all, once we print a manuscript we toss it into the wastepaper basket.”⁴⁰ Our investigation of these journals shows that štočky, one step removed from originals, were actively saved and exchanged, and not instantly discarded.

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El Lissitzky’s Proun 19D from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art was made sometime between 1920 and 1921, just a few years after the Russian Revolution, and has been traditionally understood within the sociocultural context of the emergent Soviet Union. In the catalogue Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (2015), Proun 19D is reproduced immediately after Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918) and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Spatial Construction no. 12 (c. 1920), suggesting it is inextricably linked to Russian Constructivism.¹ Further underscoring its revolutionary political dimension, the Museum’s gallery label from 2010 interprets the work’s “radical reconception of space and material” as “a metaphor for and visualization of the fundamental transformations in society that [Lissitzky] thought would result from the Russian Revolution.”²

Notwithstanding the ubiquity of this interpretation, a closer look at the life of Proun 19D exposes the divergent interpretations that the work has accrued since its inception. Never shown in the USSR, the painting was first exhibited in 1922, in Erste russische Kunstausstellung (The First Russian Art Exhibition) in Berlin, an official display of modern Russian art intended to promote Soviet cultural production abroad. Organized at a time of political reconciliation between the USSR and Germany, following the lifting of the Soviet blockade in 1922, the exhibition took place only several months after El Lissitzky’s relocation to Berlin, a period in which the artist’s close collaboration with Western artists such as Theo van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters flourished.³ MoMA’s Proun 19D was subsequently purchased by Katherine Dreier (1877–1952), a prominent German-born American collector known for her commitment to promoting modern art through a distinctly spiritual lens that universalized the notion of “Constructivism” and imbued abstraction with a cosmic dimension.⁴ When Lissitzky’s work finally entered the MoMA collection in 1953 as part of Katherine Dreier’s bequest, its meaning shifted yet again, as it was fitted into Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s formalist display of Russian avant-garde work organized as part of MoMA’s XXVth Anniversary Exhibition: Paintings from the Museum Collections (1954–55).⁵

This essay’s primary aim is to investigate the historiographical record of Proun 19Dand to examine the history of its reception in the United States. My analysis begins with assessing the work’s political dimension vis-à-vis the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then moves on to focus on Dreier’s ownership of the work in relationship to the early twentieth-century American and European interest in the spiritual capacity of abstract painting.⁶ I conclude with an analysis of the divergent theoretical frameworks within which the work was placed after its arrival at MoMA, an examination that also functions as a case study of American efforts to institutionalize Russian avant-garde art. By evaluating the various ways in which the non-mimetic nature of Proun 19D lent itself to a plurality of readings that go beyond its traditional Russian Constructivist pedigree, I also seek to illuminate the polysemic potential of abstraction more broadly.

Lissitzky’s Prouns, which the artist began making sometime in 1919, infused the previously flat geometric forms of Suprematism with a sense of virtual architectural space.⁷ Instead of depicting two-dimensional planes of color, as Malevich did in his Suprematist compositions, Lissitzky employed axonometric projection. After drawing a geometric figure according to the rules of traditional Renaissance perspective, the artist would rotate the work ninety degrees and add a new volume corresponding to the new orientation. This shift effectively confounds the viewer’s relationship with the composition and contributes to what art historian Yve-Alain Bois describes as the Proun’s “radical reversibility.”⁸ Bois recognized the profound impact this visual effect has on the spectator and illustrated the specific political dimension of the work vis-à-vis the 1917 revolution. Accordingly, he asserts that the viewer “must be made continually to choose the coordinates of his or her visual field, which thereby become variable.”⁹ Thus, he acknowledges that the verticality of the painting was replaced by the horizontality of the document, providing in turn a “blueprint for the revolution.”¹⁰ Proun 19D meets the criteria for this kind of perspectival ambiguity: the top left-hand corner evidences an arrangement of polychromatic and interspersed geometric shapes that results in a multitude of viewpoints, confounding the spectator and destabilizing one’s spatial relationship to the picture plane. Further, a flat black line cuts across the composition diagonally, connecting the aforementioned assembly of shapes with a triangular dark form seen on the bottom. Finally, a gridlike structure, consisting of several rectangular and predominantly opaque shapes, grows out of the base shape, while a translucent yellow sphere is suspended above it.

While Malevich’s theories and teaching exerted a significant influence on Lissitzky, the political resonance of the Prouns is ambiguous. By 1922, UNOVIS, or Champions of New Art, an artists’ collective established in 1920 in the city Vitebsk, was split into two camps: one faction dedicated itself to socially engaged Productivism, while the other became loyal to a more distinctly philosophical interpretation of Suprematism.¹¹ Roughly at the same time, Lissitzky, who first participated in UNOVIS in 1920, departed Vitebsk for Berlin, providing much room for art historical debate regarding his ideological affiliations during this period. Some scholars have claimed that Lissitzky became an agent for the Soviet secret police; others have argued that his Communist views, even if implicit in the Prouns, were the result of little more than cultural conformism.¹² Bois’s visually rigorous analysis of the revolutionary substructure in the Prouns situates them within the sociocultural milieu of the nascent Soviet Union and avoids the pitfalls of assigning a definitive political interpretation to these complex compositions. At the same time, however, it also sidesteps the important question of Lissitzky’s reception in the West. Though the artist later returned to the Soviet Union—associating himself with the propagandistic production of the early Stalinist period in the 1930s—his sojourn in Berlin in 1922 exposed him to an audience already familiar with diverse Western idioms of abstraction. Who was among the public that saw Lissitzky’s Proun 19D when it was first exhibited in 1922 and, more importantly, how much of a revolutionary dimension, as articulated by Bois, was this work capable of transmitting?¹³

The First Great Russian Art Exhibition, which opened at van Diemen Gallery in Berlin on October 15, 1922, was an eclectic display—featuring approximately six hundred works representing styles that ranged from Russian Impressionism to the latest examples of Soviet Constructivism—that constituted an official cultural event between the USSR and Germany following the lifting of the Western blockade in January 1920 and the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo on April 16, 1922.¹⁴ While the van Diemen Gallery exhibition did not deliver a strong political message formally, scholars have recognized that its emphasis on Russian Constructivism—paired with the political undertone of its catalogue texts—provided an opportunity to win over the Western intellectual elite to the left.¹⁵ Lissitzky became closely associated with the exhibition as the designer of its catalogue’s cover. Adorned with letters that resemble factory gears that seem to morph into larger machine-like structures, Lissitzky’s composition exemplifies a type of utilitarian design commonly associated with Russian Constructivism. Otto Karl Werckmeister has pointed out that Lissitzky’s cover replaced an earlier attempt devoid of political emblems, a fact that made it difficult “to ignore the apparent ideological suggestions of this substitution,” an implicit nod to the Communist reorganization of post-revolutionary Russia.¹⁶

Despite the show’s politicized goals, reviews of the First Great Russian Art Exhibition in Berlin reveal that critics might have, in fact, privileged artistic innovation over ideology in their reception of the show.¹⁷ In regards to Lissitzky’s oeuvre specifically, this tendency is further evident in art criticism that preceded the Berlin exhibition. In the July 1922 issue of the journal Das Kunstblatt, published only a few months before the show opened, the Hungarian critic and Bauhaus associate Ernst Kállai interprets Lissitzky’s Prouns as models “of technological qualities that mirrored aspects of the universe itself.” He wrote: “A technical planetary system keeps its balance, describes elliptical paths or sends elongated constructions with fixed wings out into the distance, aeroplanes of infinity. . . . The living, artistic kernel of the construction opens. What are mere utilitarian purposes beside this overflowing energy and dynamism?”¹⁸ These “utilitarian” purposes in a traditional Russian Constructivist understanding imply a sustained study of materials and new spatial solutions put to use to aid in constructing the new Communist society. Yet, in the critic’s view, the primary purpose of Lissitzky’s work was, perhaps akin to Malevich’s Suprematism, to offer a new abstract idiom that did not rely on the outside world. As such, Kállai’s review indicates that Lissitzky’s disruption of the traditional relationship between the viewer and the picture plane—reinforced by the use of radical materials—may have been understood to have a predominantly cosmic dimension.¹⁹

Whether a similar interpretation of the work was embraced by Dreier, the future owner of Proun 19D and an avowed supporter of theosophy—a nondenominational spiritual movement advocating for unification of human beings and promoted in the United States by Helena Blavatsky—remains unknown.²⁰ Nonetheless, tracing Dreier’s visit to the exhibition provides important clues regarding the collector’s approach to the Russian avant-garde, and to Lissitzky’s work in particular. Dreier visited Berlin in the fall of 1922 and hoped to diversify the predominantly French avant-garde aesthetic of the New York art circles, though she remained unaware of the van Diemen exhibition until she arrived in the city. Well acquainted with Russian modern art—she had, by then, organized exhibitions of works by Vasily Kandinsky and Aleksandr Archipenko in New York—Dreier nonetheless tended to see it, to quote Dickran Tashijan, through a “largely personalized lens” that was primarily reliant on aesthetic preoccupations and not dictated by her concern for the theoretical nuances between various Russian avant-garde movements.²¹ This approach was further evidenced by the stylistic and conceptual eclecticism of the works she acquired at the van Diemen exhibition.²²When seen as a whole, they appear to share an important formal feature: prominent receding and projecting geometric planes, particularly evident in the recurring inclusion of a triangular shape. This characteristic is manifest in all of the paintings and sculptures selected by Dreier, for example in the oil painting titled Tochil’schik Printsip Mel’kaniia (The Knife Grinder or Principle of Glittering; 1912–13), Malevich painstakingly fragmented a human figure by fusing the Futurist interest in the machine with the Cubist geometries of pictorial space, and in Spatial Construction (Construction no. 557) from 1920, Konstantin Medunetsky undermined the visual stability of his abstract sculpture by piercing through it with an angled triangular plane.²³ This specific formal characteristic is also alluded to in Dreier’s personal copy of the van Diemen catalogue, in which a paragraph containing statements that refer specifically to the “abstract planes” of Suprematism is marked.²⁴ Perhaps in selecting these particular works, the collector was affirming the dematerialized and cosmic dimension of Suprematist theories promoted by Malevich, the progenitor of the movement.

Upon her return to New York, Dreier displayed Lissitzky’s Proun 19D at the 1924 exhibition Modern Russian Artists held in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue at 57th Street. Intended to introduce Russian avant-garde art to the American public, the exhibition’s goal was hindered by shortcomings in Dreier’s holdings, prompting her to fill in the remaining gallery space with French modern paintings, including Cubist compositions by Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes. Art historian Barnaby Haran notes that the eclectic display resulted in a narrative stripped of its contemporary cultural context, especially in relation to the Soviet Union and Russian Constructivism.²⁵ Works by Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin were shown next to paintings by Marc Chagall and David Burliuk, while examples of print media—a critical element in the development of the visual culture of the USSR—were missing entirely.²⁶ Despite being accompanied by a relatively comprehensive catalogue, the show was marked by formal and art historical variety. Lissitzky’s Proun 19D, in particular, suffered from the surrounds. As a critic writing for the Christian Science Monitor misinterpreted, “This picture, which is aided and abetted by bits of old cardboard boxes and strips of silver paper, calls up the emotional contour of a frenzied golfer trapped in a bunker.”²⁷ Having likely recognized that Proun 19D evidenced a type of visual vocabulary that did not easily conform to predominant modernist tendencies originating from France, he read the work associatively, identifying it with a distinctly Western pastime.

Dreier’s landmark exhibition of modern art at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926–27 offered the collector a chance to give Lissitzky’s work, as Tashijan has argued, “her own spiritual spin.”²⁸ Illustrating “the close unity” that Dreier believed existed among all humans, the exhibition distributed diverse works by a range of artists freely throughout the galleries. Her entry note on Russia in the exhibition catalogue seems to frame the 1917 revolution primarily as an event that allowed the “spirituality” of Russian art to permeate other nations.²⁹ Accordingly, the Prouns that Dreier chose to display in the Brooklyn Museum were intermingled with abstract works by Western artists, with Lissitzky’s l.n. 31 (c. 1922–24) turned upside down to fit her own vision. Though it is uncertain why Proun 19D was not included in the 1926–27 show, it is likely that Dreier had a particularly close connection to the work, since, for at least a decade, it hung in her house in Connecticut, which was commonly referred to as “The Haven.” In a 1941 photograph of Dreier’s residence, Lissitzky’s composition is shown tucked between two large windows and with a sizeable birdcage to its right in the small dining room. This placement is striking since, as Christine Poggi notes, Lisstizky was not in favor of his work being used to decorate bourgeois interiors.³⁰ Although by 1941 Dreier had donated much of her collection to the Yale University Art Gallery, she did not part ways with Proun 19D until her death in 1952.

The composition subsequently became part of a larger bequest the collector made to MoMA before she died. The work was officially given to the Museum in 1953 and exhibited almost immediately in an ad-hoc summer installation organized by Alfred H. Barr Jr., then director of the collections. In one installation shot illustrating the stylistic and art historical diversity of Dreier’s collection, Proun 19D is seen placed next to three other works from Dreier’s bequest: a three-dimensional construction by Naum Gabo, a painting by Fernand Léger, and an abstract composition by American artist John Covert. In the following year, Lissitzky’s composition was swiftly separated from the rest of the bequest, having been refitted into a historical narrative of Russian avant-garde art in a display conceived by Barr.

If Dreier valued Lissitzky’s work for its ability to reflect the spiritual potential she believed formed a foundation of the modern era, then Barr employed Proun 19D to supplement his sequential model of modern art. Accordingly, Lissitzky’s work, having been swiftly separated from the rest of Dreier’s bequest in the XXVth Anniversary Exhibition, found itself in a space dedicated to Russian “nonobjective art” and thus with its Russian Constructivist lineage reinstated. The viewer would be expected to recognize the progression of modern Russian art: moving left to right, one would begin with Malevich’s earliest Suprematist compositions, made before 1917, then proceed to his post-revolutionary White on White, before finally encountering an example of Rodchenko’s Constructivist painting and Lissitzky’s Proun 19D, both of which were hung on the adjacent wall. Barr had a sustained interest in Lissitzky’s painterly practice and Prouns, but by the time of his landmark 1936 show Cubism and Abstract Art, the museum did not own any of these works. Dreier’s bequest of Proun 19D filled that lacuna, offering Barr a conclusion to the nonobjective experimentation of Suprematism in a painterly realm, augmented by daring experimentation in faktura.³¹ Understood within the context of the 1954–55 display, then, Proun 19D became a hermeneutic bridge, linking the flatness of the Russian avant-garde painting tradition to its later three-dimensional constructions, making it in turn a particularly well-suited object for Barr’s modernist teleology.

Moreover, the display of Lissitzky’s Proun 19D in the 1954–55 show seems to have served a purpose that was markedly political. Some twenty years earlier, Barr’s emphatic focus on the Russian avant-garde in Cubism and Abstract Art served to reinforce the freedom of expression in light of the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe.³² During the inaugural event of the 1954–55 exhibition, that strategy—now targeting the postwar Soviet Union—was echoed in a speech titled “Freedom in the Arts,” delivered at MoMA by President Eisenhower. In it, the president fiercely reaffirmed the Cold War–era relevance of the First Amendment, while implicitly denouncing artistic oppression in the USSR. Participating directly in this cultural battle, MoMA’s collecting strategy in the 1950s, as has been recently illustrated, focused precisely on acquiring works that directly contradicted the doctrine of Soviet Socialist Realism, a style of artistic production traditionally understood in the West as totalitarian propaganda. Abstract painting was particularly suited for this purpose, as its repudiation of realistic representation implied independence and thus spoke directly to the cultural freedom the American government was hoping to preserve. Although Abstract Expressionism remained the most potent weapon against contemporary Soviet art—as Serge Guilbaut has shown—Barr’s selection of nonobjective Russian painting was a powerful gesture, pointing to the cultural relevance of the so-called reactionary style that had been prohibited in the Soviet Union since the early 1930s.³³ A certain desire to demonstrate the oppressive plight of Russian abstract painters is also evident in MoMA’s publicity materials of the period. Confining Lissitzky’s prolific oeuvre to painterly practice, a 1953 press release describes the artist as someone who “was denied the freedom of his brush and died in disappointment probably about 1947.”³⁴ Such rhetoric, which overlooked the artist’s cooperation with the Stalinist regime, likely prompted MoMA visitors to see Lissitzky as a victim of Communist oppression. The resolutely abstract nature of Proun 19D embodied the artistic creativity and freedom denied in the USSR. And, ironically, the intricately non-mimetic language of the composition now satisfied cultural expectations of the very ideology that the Russian Revolution was originally intending to combat.

One wonders how much the divergent frames of reference of Lissitzky’s composition relate to the uniquely American attempt to proselytize modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Since the conclusion of Barr’s tenure, Proun 19D has been placed in diverse curatorial contexts, and oftentimes juxtaposed with contemporaneous Western works—yet Dreier’s role in bringing the painting to the United States and introducing it to the public has, until now, never been mentioned. In the most recent MoMA exhibition devoted to the history of the Russian avant-garde, A Revolutionary Impulse: The Rise of the Russian Avant-Garde (2016–17), Lissitzky’s Proun 19D was hung next to another Proun painting, surrounded by other works from the series, and augmented by a comprehensive display of Lissitzky’s typographical and functional designs. Incorporating what Barnaby Haran noted was lacking in the 1924 exhibition, the MoMA display elucidated the historical context behind Lissitzky’s prolific oeuvre and made it possible for the viewer to draw visual parallels between the Prouns and other examples of his Constructivist practice. This thought-provoking choice was logical and warranted: seeing Proun 19D amid contemporaneous ephemera provided an important sociocultural contextualization. While the pristine quality of white museum walls stood in stark contrast to the domestic warmth of Dreier’s living room, neither the work’s provenance nor the history of its reception at MoMA were the organizing principles of the exhibition (one could hardly expect an expansive explanation of the painting’s ownership). And yet, one cannot help but wonder how much an examination of the work’s many lives would augment understanding of the object and its art historical significance. Perhaps then, resisting an urge to apply a stable signification to abstraction—and to modern art more broadly—can offer but one productive way to expand and reshape the canon.

The author would like to thank Elizabeth Buhe and David Joselit for their constructive feedback on this article.

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