Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground, perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives, using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy, Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives, their rooms, and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices, both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms, particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

The post The Empathetic Gaze: Toyoko Tokiwa’s <em>Dangerous Poisonous Flowers</em> and the Female Photographic Subject in Postwar Japan appeared first on post.

The following essay by art historian Talita Trizoli reveals the influence of a Catholic and spiritual pathos in the work of influential though relatively unknown Brazilian critic Maria Eugênia Franco. Taking as case studies Franco’s writings on artists such as Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux, and Mestre Nosa and artworks attributed to unrecognized Baroque artisans, Trizoli establishes a direct relationship between Catholic motifs and the development of modernity in Brazilian art and identities.

Religion is eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in those groups. —Emile Durkheim¹

Between 1948 and 1954, Brazilian art critic and curator Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) had a regular column in O Estado de São Paulo, a real achievement given this newspaper, and several others, was marked by misogyny and conservative values.²Over the course of seven years, Franco offered commentary and analyses, predominantly about the art circuit in São Paulo, in addition to lucid criticism of the systemic aspect of the milieu and formal observations on the work of specific artists, most of whom were contemporary.³

Still relatively unfamiliar to the general public, Franco’s critical writings allow us to understand miscellaneous efforts in the modern Latin American context to reconcile form and content—a conflict inherent to aesthetic programs in their various versions and a recurring theme in Brazilian art criticism.⁴

A large part of Franco’s critical work deals with artists and artistic events on the so-called Rio–São Paulo axis, raising structural issues surrounding the organization of the Brazilian art circuit, mainly as it relates to audience formation and cultural institutions.⁵ In terms of the selection of articles commented upon here, the content concerns sacred themes explored by Brazilian artists not only as an object of formal exercise but also as a representation of an affective memory linked to the construction of national identity, since figures dear to popular culture and religious festivals, in this case saints and passages from the life of Christ, have been chosen to allegorize reality in Brazil. 

Embedded in the constitution of Brazilian national identity, the mystical narratives of Catholicism, a fundamental element of Portuguese colonization, formed a set of folkloric entities in the collective imagination that mixed with the mythologies of the various original Indigenous peoples and the shamanic practices of the African subjects exiled by the slave regime. Although the poetic and violent encounter between these cultures generated a rich symbolic ensemble, the Catholic-Apostolic-Roman structure remained the organizing imperative of Brazilian culture.⁶

Coming from a Catholic family, like most of the Brazilian population at the time, Franco was familiar with Christian religious “mysteries” even though she was not a practicing Catholic.⁷Indeed, from the Barroco Mineiro, or Baroque of Minas Gerais, chosen as the first artistic manifestation of the Brazilian spirit, to the religious calendar of collective festivals and the obvious predominance of biblical passages in the history of art, some knowledge of Christian mysticism was almost inevitable.⁸

For Franco, the mystery of the Catholic religious experience emerged as a theme already widely recognized in the artistic sphere rather than as an element of amazement or one of discovery. This aspect can also be seen in the artistic production of her sister, painter Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especially in a series of abstracted representations of Saint Anne (figs. 1, 2) and in banners she presented as objects of scrutiny for the application of chromatic nuance and composition inspired by Giorgio Morandi.⁹

Committed to remaining professionally impartial, Franco did not write frequently about the work of her sister or brother-in-law, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), who was also a painter. (Rather, her exchanges with both frequently took place in person or through letters). She dedicated some of her columns, however, to the work of partner artists in which the sacred theme is manifested alongside formal investigation and dramatic Christian narratives (the mystical pathos), which are mobilized for the sentimental education of the spectator.¹⁰Of these texts, an analysis of artist Samson Flexor (1907–1971) and his work in the article “Flexor e a arte religiosa” (“Flexor and Religious Art”) is significant.¹¹

Flexor was born in Moldova, in the city of Soroca, but after traveling through Brussels and Paris, he settled permanently in Brazil in 1948. Having earned a degree in painting from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studying art history at the Sorbonne—in addition to holding a degree in chemistry, which he had previously earned in Brussels—Flexor was an artist who was intellectual about his own work.¹²He is considered among the pioneers of abstraction in Brazil, mainly after critical contact with Belgian art critic Léon Degand (1907–1958), first director of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) and an advocate of abstraction. It is important to highlight that Flexor was in no way a defender of a dogmatic and protocol-based artistic practice; indeed, he believed in the affective and dramatic dimensions of art—as can be seen in his clashes with members of the Concrete art movement, whom he nicknamed “Concretinos” (a mixture of “concrete” and “cretins” in Portuguese).¹³

It is from this sense of religious pathos that Franco approached Flexor’s work. In her article about the artist, Maria Eugênia highlights two solo exhibitions on display in São Paulo, one at Galeria Domus, the other at MAM. She foregrounds Flexor’s technical dexterity and emphasizes his character as a “subject painter,” highlighting the eleven paintings in the series Composições sobre temas da Paixão (Compositions on Themes of the Passion) at MAM. These canvases, with their Cubo-Expressionist treatment of forms and their icy hues, warm blues, and earth tones, represent passages from Christ’s martyrdom, evoking the most moving moments of his suffering and cathartic self-denial (figs. 3–5). 

It is noteworthy that Flexor was born into a Jewish family but converted to Catholicism in France. After the death of his first wife, Tatiana Yablokof, during childbirth, the painter received spiritual guidance and professional support from local priests, who commissioned the grieving artist to produce several frescoes based on biblical events. From then on, biblical passages, with an emphasis on Christ’s crucifixion at Calvary, would be a recurring theme in his work, even in later life, when his artistic focus became more personal (though nonetheless tragic).¹⁴Maria Eugênia comments in her article on the artist: 

Catholic culture has been predominant in Brazil since the territory was colonized, even determining its later structure as an empire and democracy—despite the modern premise of a secular state within the Enlightenment model.¹⁶As far as the artistic world is concerned, the use of mystical drama in sacred art is both a means of catalyzing attention and a strong empathic device in the narrative of suffering and sacrifice in the name of transcendence—not for nothing, the choice of certain passages and figures from the Bible to consolidate values or reformulate contingencies is recurrent in representations. I consider this condition an example of the intense presence in Brazilian culture of variants of Our Lady—widely used as a resource for appeasing and welcoming the suffering of the population—but also the symbolic correlation of Christ martyred on the cross with the figure of Brazilian national hero Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, who in 1792, became the only member of the revolutionary Inconfidência Mineira to be arrested, tried for treason, and publicly dismembered.¹⁷

The search for a dramatic dimension to the Christian mystery is a problem inherent to Maria Eugênia Franco’s critical analyses of artists other than Flexor, but without the loss of focus on the formal and systemic structuring aspect of the milieu. These dramatic, almost passionate elements identified by not only Franco but also fellow writers such as Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) and Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) are reminiscent of the expressionist influence of immigrant artists established in Brazil and their pupils.¹⁸ Moreover, they are applied to the thematic treatment of scenes typical of the country, as is the case in works by Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962), and Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), among others. Its use by Flexor, but also by painter and poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984), as we will see later through Franco’s perspective, is linked to the experience of collective human suffering during World War II. 

In Franco’s article about Henri Michaux’s watercolors, written during her French stay, one can see by the use of adjectives and a certain psychologizing analysis, her effort to narrate the dimension of anguish and fascinating displacement in the artist’s images, with their washes and autonomist drawing techniques (figs. 6, 7).¹⁹Michaux, of Belgian origin and naturalized French, is still known today for his dramatic forms and investigations of human suffering, which are poetically enhanced by manifestations of the unconscious in the form of dreams and numbing delusions. Portraits and self-portraits made with watercolor stains and thin, tense lines of ink that overlap, forming a suspended plot on the white of the paper, indicate the artist’s proximity to Surrealism or even Dadaism. However, the artist distanced himself from the uncontrolled aspects of these isms, as he was interested in the fissure of human subjectivity, the feeling of lack of belonging intensified by the experience of war.²⁰
Franco describes the paintings on display at the gallery as follows: 

It is interesting that in her articles on Flexor and Michaux, Franco emphasizes the relationship between studies of form and those of composition as they pertain to the dramatic and psychic demands of subject matter. This theme was already present in 1944 in her article²²on the statuary ensemble in Ouro Preto by Antônio Francisco Lisboa (popularly known as Aleijadinho, 1738–1814), her first aesthetic essay, and it is repeated in later articles on the mythical artist and the importance of the Baroque in the constitution of Brazil’s colonial artistic fortune.²³  

Referencing the studies of Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), pioneer in identifying the Baroque of Minas Gerais as the first sui generis Brazilian artistic style, Franco points out the artistic and historical importance of the figure of the crippled craftsman, who suffered like Christ, and calls for a greater presence of his work and state support for its circulation.²⁴In a typed manuscript now in the personal archive of her nephew Alexandre Dacosta, Franco describes an unofficial tour of the Minas Gerais museum complex in 1944.²⁵She writes:

Franco continues her essay with an emotional and qualitative description of the oratorio in question, but what is striking about this youthful text is the description of the scourging of Jesus on the Way of the Cross. As a dramatic, political, and formal exercise, this theme is an exhaustive one for artists, and Franco addressed it repeatedly in her criticism.²⁷The passages of suffering, violence, commotion, and welcome, consisting of fourteen stations, provide a narrative of emotional purging for the faithful, whereby the aim is both to grow closer to the divine through mystical experience and to obtain indulgence for moral failings—in this sense, the formal solution of the unknown artist of the oratory, of begging, of carving the small polychrome figures on a blue background in a narrative of ascendancy through the sacrifice of the son of God, reinforces the idea of ascension and transcendence through the experience of violence.

In 1969, Franco undertook her last public analysis of a sacred and popular representation of Christ’s Calvary, this time not in a newspaper column but rather in an essay published in a limited edition of woodcuts by Mestre Nosa.²⁸The artist from Ceará, whose baptismal name was Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897–1983), had recently arrived in São Paulo and was a prominent figure in the movement for the marketing and appreciation of popular culture. His set of fifteen prints, first commissioned by artist Sérvulo Esmeraldo (1929–2017) and then published in two limited editions—the first in France in 1965 by editor Robert Morel through Esmeraldo, and the second in 1969 by editor Julio Pacello—fueled that frisson of the “primitive,” “innocent,” and “pure” of so-called popular art. Franco’s text reinforces these notions of vernacular artistic production but adds her own set of aesthetic predicates referring to the sacred and formal sphere:

It is interesting that in her critical analysis of the oratorio and of Nosa’s woodcuts, Franco emphasizes the ingenuity of the formal solutions in the face of so-called simplistic representations of a classic and consecrated religious theme in the Christian context. The Way of the Cross and the suffering endured by Jesus have historically been mobilized as moralizing devices for the masses, among whom material self-denial and physical submission constitute an imperative condition for the ascension of the spirit—especially amid economic fragility and political turmoil, as was the case during Franco’s time as an arts professional in the critical and curatorial sectors. Whether under the dictatorial New State (Estado Novo; 1937–45) during the rule of Getúlio Vargas or under later military dictatorship (1964–85), artistic productions of a religious nature had, dubiously, the public function of cultural familiarity and of creating critical metaphors for social causes.

However, with regard to this set of articles by Maria Eugênia Franco, religious themes in Brazilian modern art are a bastion of the constitution of national identity, an aspect of obsession in the late modern generation of the Return to Order. Franco seems to have made a circle of eternal return, albeit indirectly and tangentially, to the mystical Christian realm amid her own struggles to construct the artistic environment and the aesthetic-educational formation of the public³⁰ (synthesis of form with content, synthesis of artistic investigative practice, and the dramatization of affections), even though today she is barely remembered by her peers.

Portuguese

O seguinte ensaio da historiadora da arte Talita Trizoli revela a influência de um pathos católico e espiritual na obra da influente, embora relativamente desconhecida, crítica brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco. Tomando como estudos de caso os escritos de Franco sobre artistas como Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux e Mestre Nosa e obras atribuídas a artesãos barrocos não reconhecidos, Trizoli estabelece uma relação direta entre motivos católicos e o desenvolvimento da modernidade na arte e identidades brasileiras.

[…] la religion est une chose éminemment sociale. Les représentations religieuses sont des représentations collectives qui expriment des réalités collectives; les rites sont des manières d’agir qui ne prennent naissance qu’au sein des groupes assemblés et qui sont destinés à susciter, à entretenir ou à refaire certains états mentaux de ces groupes³¹ ― Émile Durkeim 

Entre 1948 e 1954, a crítica de arte, gestora e curadora brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) teve uma coluna regular de crítica de arte no jornal O Estado de São Paulo, um verdadeiro feito, considerando que este jornal, assim como vários outros, era marcado pela misoginia e pelos valores conservadores.³²Ao longo de sete anos, Franco teceu comentários e análises predominantemente sobre o circuito artístico de artes na capital paulista, além de apresentar críticas lúcidas no aspecto sistêmico do meio e observações formais sobre a produção artística, em sua maioria, contemporânea.³³

Ainda pouco conhecida do grande público, a produção crítica de Franco possibilita compreender os esforços de miscelânea entre forma e conteúdo no âmbito moderno latino-americano, um conflito inerente aos programas estéticos em suas diversas versões e um tema recorrente na crítica de arte brasileira.³⁴

Grande parte da obra crítica de Franco aborda artistas e eventos artísticos do chamado eixo Rio-São Paulo, levantando questões estruturais em torno da organização do circuito artístico brasileiro, principalmente no que se refere à formação de público e às instituições culturais.³⁵Em termos da seleção dos artigos aqui comentados, o conteúdo diz respeito a temas sagrados explorados pelos artistas brasileiros não apenas como objeto de exercício formal, mas também como representação de uma memória afetiva vinculada à construção da identidade nacional, uma vez que figuras caras à cultura popular e às festas religiosas, no caso santos e passagens da vida de Cristo, foram escolhidas para alegorizar a realidade brasileira.³⁶

Incrustadas na constituição da identidade nacional brasileira, as narrativas místicas do catolicismo, elemento fundamental da colonização portuguesa, formaram um conjunto de entidades folclóricas no imaginário coletivo que se misturam às mitologias dos diversos povos indígenas originários e às práticas xamânicas dos súditos africanos exilados pelo regime escravista. Embora o encontro poético e violento entre essas culturas tenha gerado um rico conjunto simbólico, a estrutura católico-apostólico-romana permaneceu como o imperativo organizador da cultura brasileira.

Vinda de uma família católica, como a maioria da população brasileira da época, Franco estava familiarizada com os “mistérios” religiosos cristãos, embora não fosse católica praticante.³⁷De fato, do Barroco Mineiro, ou Barroco de Minas Gerais, escolhido como a primeira manifestação artística do espírito brasileiro, ao calendário religioso de festas coletivas e à óbvia predominância de passagens bíblicas na história da arte, algum conhecimento do misticismo cristão era quase inevitável.³⁸

Para Franco, o mistério da experiência religiosa católica surgiu como um tema já amplamente reconhecido na esfera artística, em vez de um elemento de espanto ou descoberta. Esse aspecto também pode ser visto na produção artística de sua irmã, a pintora Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especialmente em uma série de representações abstratas de Santa Ana (figs. 1, 2) e em faixas que ela apresentou como objetos de escrutínio para a aplicação de nuance cromática e composição inspiradas por Giorgio Morandi.³⁹

Comprometida em permanecer profissionalmente imparcial, Franco não escrevia frequentemente sobre o trabalho de sua irmã ou cunhado, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), que também era pintor. (Em vez disso, suas trocas com ambos frequentemente ocorriam pessoalmente ou por meio de cartas). Ela dedicou algumas de suas colunas, no entanto, ao trabalho de artistas parceiros nos quais o tema sagrado se manifesta ao lado da investigação formal e das narrativas cristãs dramáticas (o pathos místico), que são mobilizadas para a educação sentimental do espectador.⁴⁰Destes textos, destaca-se a análise do artista Samson Flexor (1907–1971) e sua obra no artigo “Flexor e a arte religiosa”.⁴¹

Flexor nasceu na Moldávia, na cidade de Soroca, e após trânsito por Bruxelas e Paris, estabeleceu-se em definitivo no Brasil em 1948. Com formação em pintura pela Belas Artes de Paris, mas também com passagens pela Sorbonne na área de história, e uma formação prévia em Química em Bruxelas, Flexor foi um artista intelectualizado sobre a própria obra.⁴²Ele é considerado um dos percursores da abstração no Brasil, principalmente após contato crítico com o primeiro diretor do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, o belga Léon Degan (1907-1958), partidário da abstração. É Importante frisar que o artista não era de modo algum defensor de uma prática artística dogmática e protocolar, pois acreditava na dimensão afetiva e dramática da obra de arte – como se pode ver nos seus confrontos com os membros do movimento da arte concreta, a quem apelidou de “Concretinos”.⁴³

É a partir desse dispositivo dramático que Franco se aproxima da obra de Flexor. No referido artigo de 25 de abril de 1940, Maria Eugênia nomeia duas mostras individuais do artista em cartaz na cidade, uma na galeria Domus, outra no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Ela coloca em primeiro plano sua destreza técnica e pontuar seu caráter de “pintor de assunto”, mas dando destaque ao conjunto presente no MAM, “Composições sobre temas da Paixão”. Essas telas, com seu tratamento cubo-expressionista das formas e seus tons gelados, azuis quentes e tons de terra, representam passagens do martírio de Cristo, evocando os momentos mais comoventes de seu sofrimento e autonegação catártica (figs. 3–5).

Vale notar que, Flexor nasceu em uma família judia, mas converteu-se ao catolicismo na França após a morte de sua 1ª esposa no parto, Tatiana Yablokof, e o respectivo acolhimento espiritual e profissional de padres, os quais encomendaram diversos afrescos sobre eventos bíblicos para o artista em luto. As passagens bíblicas de Cristo, com ênfase em seu calvário, seriam então um tema recorrente para Flexor, mesmo quando o artista adentra a uma produção tardia mais pessoal, mas também trágica.⁴⁴ Maria Eugênia comenta que:

A predominância imperativa da cultura católica no Brasil ocorre desde a colonização do território, determinando inclusive sua posterior estruturação como império e democracia — apesar da premissa moderna de um Estado laico dentro do modelo iluminista.⁴⁶No que se refere ao mundo artístico, o uso do drama místico na arte sacra é ao mesmo tempo um meio de catalisar a atenção e um forte recurso empático na narrativa do sofrimento e do sacrifício em nome da transcendência — não à toa, a escolha de certas passagens e figuras da Bíblia para consolidar valores ou reformular contingências é recorrente nas representações. Podemos considerar como exemplo dessa condição a intensa presença na cultura brasileira de variantes de Nossa Senhora — amplamente utilizadas como recurso para apaziguar e acolher o sofrimento da população —, mas também da correlação simbólica de Cristo martirizado na cruz com a figura do herói nacional brasileiro Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, conhecido como Tiradentes, que, em 1792, tornou-se o único integrante da revolucionária Inconfidência Mineira a ser preso, julgado por traição e esquartejado publicamente.⁴⁷

A busca por uma dimensão dramática no mistério cristão é objeto que tangencia as analises críticas de Maria Eugênia Franco em alguns artistas para além de Flexor, mas sem a perda de foco do aspecto estruturante formal e sistêmico do meio. Esses elementos dramáticos, quase apaixonados, identificados não apenas por Franco, mas também por outros escritores como Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) e Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) lembram a influência expressionista de artistas imigrantes estabelecidos no Brasil e seus alunos.⁴⁸Além disso, são aplicadas ao tratamento temático de cenas típicas do país, como é o caso de obras de Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962) e Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), entre outros. Seu uso por Flexor, mas também pelo pintor e poeta Henri Michaux (1899–1984), como veremos mais adiante pela perspectiva de Franco, está ligado à experiência do sofrimento humano coletivo durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

No artigo de Franco sobre as aquarelas de Henri Michaux, escrito durante sua estadia na França, percebe-se, pelo uso de adjetivos e uma certa análise psicologizante, seu esforço em narrar a dimensão de angústia e deslocamento fascinante nas imagens da artista, com suas aguadas e técnicas de desenho autonomistas (figs. 6, 7).⁴⁹Michaux, de origem belga e naturalizado francês, é conhecido até hoje por suas formas dramáticas e investigações sobre o sofrimento humano, poeticamente potencializadas por manifestações do inconsciente em forma de sonhos e delírios entorpecentes. Retratos e autorretratos feitos com manchas de aquarela e linhas finas e tensas de tinta que se sobrepõem, formando uma trama suspensa sobre o branco do papel, indicam a proximidade do artista com o surrealismo ou mesmo com o dadaísmo. No entanto, o artista se distanciou dos aspectos descontrolados desses ismos, pois se interessava pela fissura da subjetividade humana, o sentimento de falta de pertencimento intensificado pela experiência da guerra.⁵⁰Franco descreve as pinturas em exposição na galeria da seguinte forma:

É pertinente notar que em ambos os artigos sobre Flexor e Michaux, Franco coloca ênfase na interlocução entre os estudos de forma e composição em relação a demanda dramática e psíquica do tema dos artistas. Esse aspecto já se encontra presente no primeiro ensaio estético da autora em 1944⁵² sobre o conjunto estatuário na cidade de Ouro Preto de Antonio Francisco Lisboa (1738-1814), popularmente conhecido como o Aleijadinho de Vila Rica, e que se repetirá nos artigos posteriores sobre o mítico artista e a importância do barroco brasileiro na constituição da fortuna artística colonial no Brasil.⁵³

Tendo como referência nomeada os estudos de Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), precursor do indicativo do barroco mineiro como a primeira manifestação artística brasileira sui generis, Franco aponta tanto a importância artística e histórica da figura do artesão aleijado, sofredor como cristo, clamando juntamente por uma maior presença e apoio estatal para a circulação de suas obras.⁵⁴Em texto datilografado presente no acervo pessoal de seu sobrinho, há o seguinte material produzido dentro de uma excursão extraoficial de averiguação do complexo mineiro de museus⁵⁵ em 1944: 

Franco segue com um descritivo afetivo e qualitativo do oratório em questão, mas o que chama atenção nesse texto de juventude é a repetição do episódio dos flagelos de Jesus na Via Sacra. Como exercício dramático, político e formal, este tema é exaustivo para os artistas, e Franco abordou-o repetidamente na sua crítica.⁵⁷As passagens de sofrimento, violência, comoção e boas-vindas, compostas por quatorze estações, fornecem uma narrativa de purificação emocional para os fiéis, cujo objetivo é tanto aproximar-se do divino por meio da experiência mística quanto obter indulgência por falhas morais — nesse sentido, a solução formal do artista desconhecido do oratório, da mendicância, da escultura de pequenas figuras policromadas sobre fundo azul em uma narrativa de ascendência por meio do sacrifício do filho de Deus, reforça a ideia de ascensão e transcendência por meio da experiência da violência.

Em 1969, Franco empreendeu sua última análise pública de uma representação sagrada e popular do Calvário de Cristo, desta vez não em uma coluna de jornal, mas sim em um ensaio publicado em uma edição limitada de xilogravuras de Mestre Nosa⁵⁸ (ou Noza, variando a grafia). O artista cearense recém chegado a São Paulo, cujo nome de batismo era Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897-1983), foi figura de destaque no movimento de valorização mercadológica da cultura popular, e seu conjunto de 15 imagens primeiramente encomendas pelo artista Sérvulo Esmeraldo, e depois editadas limitadamente em duas ocasiões – a 1ª na França pelo editor Robert Morel em 1965 por intermédio de Esmeraldo, a segunda em 1969 pelo editor Julio Pacello – alimentou esse frison do “primitivo”, “inocente” e “puro” da arte dita popular. 

É interessante que em sua análise crítica do oratório e das xilogravuras de Nosa, Franco enfatize a engenhosidade das soluções formais diante das chamadas representações simplistas de um tema religioso clássico e consagrado no contexto cristão. A Via Sacra e o sofrimento suportado por Jesus foram historicamente mobilizados como dispositivos moralizantes para as massas, entre as quais a abnegação material e a submissão física constituem uma condição imperativa para a ascensão do espírito — especialmente em meio à fragilidade econômica e à turbulência política, como foi o caso durante o tempo de Franco como profissional das artes nos setores crítico e curatorial. Seja sob o ditatorial Estado Novo (1937–45) durante o governo de Getúlio Vargas ou sob a ditadura militar posterior (1964–85), as produções artísticas de natureza religiosa tinham, duvidosamente, a função pública de familiaridade cultural e de criar metáforas críticas para causas sociais.

No entanto, no que se refere a esse conjunto de artigos de Maria Eugênia Franco, os temas religiosos na arte moderna brasileira são um bastião da constituição da identidade nacional, um aspecto de obsessão na geração tardo-moderna do Retorno à Ordem. Franco parece ter feito um círculo de eterno retorno, ainda que indireta e tangencialmente, ao reino místico cristão em meio às suas próprias lutas para construir o ambiente artístico e a formação estético-educacional do público⁶⁰(síntese da forma com o conteúdo, síntese da prática artística investigativa e dramatização dos afetos), ainda que hoje ela seja pouco lembrada por seus pares.

The post Catholic and Popular Mysticism in Brazilian Modern Art: The Quest for Maria Eugênia Franco’s Critique of Sacred Representations / Misticismo católico e popular na arte moderna brasileira: a busca da crítica de Maria Eugênia Franco às representações sacras appeared first on post.

Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

Cliquez ici pour lire la version anglaise.

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The somewhat offhand archive called Track Changes nests in the permanent, and therefore more premeditated, display of the art collection of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center at the University of the Philippines in Manila. The items in this collection are organized according to a loose art-historical diachrony and within broadly conceived tropes of light, province, unease, and passage. Layered around this nucleus of privileged objects are select contemporary artworks and archival materials. The latter comprise Track Changes, which aims to introduce the public to the archives of the Vargas Museum and the University of the Philippines. The clusters of things are rendered equivalent to and contemporaneous with the encounter of the art through a paracuratorial supplement that exists adjacently to the collection; this arrangement enhances a porous scenography that pursues the interdisciplinarity research inscribed in the word “Filipiniana,” which may mean anything, and so everything, or at the very least, something Philippine. And because Track Changes reminds the public that the museum is the custodian of more than just art as validated by an elite and an expert class, it alerts them to the redistribution of the values of the motley “stuff” of which the museum is steward.

In certain ways, the initiation is an insertion into the stable canon of the collection, thus alluding to a “distraction,” to drag or to pull in different directions in Latin and late Middle English, but not altogether a disruption. It is a practical diversion, so to speak, a delay of expectation consisting of vitrines resting on the spindly legs of wooden tables that may easily be moved or stored. The room housing the collection is surrounded by glass, the panes of which are framed by aluminum, and dappled by various illuminations at different times of the day from the outside. Not a typical white cube, it situates the viewer amid art and nature in a kind of wraparound transparency that instills the feeling of being in a museum and, at the same time, experiencing a kind of continuum with external happenstance, be it rain or a riot. Track Changes is both implicit and complicit, receding and advancing within the institution but not seeking a center; in fact, it is at the sides, flush to the glass wall and so invites oblique reading in the way of an annotation or an aside. While sufficiently present, it is neither ubiquitous nor conspicuous: rather, it is intermingled and intermittent though delicately indented.

The initiation into this endeavor is titled The Native Strain: Guillermo Tolentino and Aurelio Alvero. It focuses on the relationship between Jorge B. Vargas (1890–1980), collector and donor of the collection; artist-professor Guillermo Tolentino (1890–1976); and curator-critic Aurelio Alvero (1913–1958). These three figures are related at certain nodes. Vargas collected the stalwart academic sculptor Tolentino, and Alvero helped Vargas set up his collection. Furthermore, the archives of Tolentino are in the University of the Philippines, which administers the Vargas collection and where Vargas was a student in its first law class and later a regent. Relating Tolentino and Alvero to Vargas is particularly intriguing as it gives us a glimpse into the aesthetic and political implications of making art, making nationalisms, and making museums in the interwar, war, and postwar years in the Philippines.

Jorge Vargas aspired to a postwar national culture through an art collection, as stated in the founding papers of the collection. The latter yield references to cultural heritage being vital for a “young Republic” and the logic of art being a kind of “accumulation” that serves as a gauge of a “level of culture.” According to a 1948 document that conceptually forms the basis of the Vargas collection, the pieces are viewed as “representative of a national art.” The first catalogue, published in 1943, spells out the aims of the collection: “‘encouraging Filipino artists and assisting in the presentation of their works’ . . . helping ‘Filipinos to know and treasure our cultural heritage’. . . and . . . contributing ‘to the proper presentation of Philippine art.’”¹ Vargas commissioned modernist painter Victorio Edades (1895–1985), who studied architecture and mural-making at the University of Washington in Seattle and worked in a salmon cannery in Alaska, to write the first catalogue of his collection; and Alvero completed a catalogue of his own collection titled Art in Tagala (1942/1944).² These efforts may well be the earliest anthologies of art criticism and curatorial writing in the Philippines to the degree that they attempted close readings of works in a collection.

Alvero and Tolentino were nativists who exalted the pre-Hispanic Philippine lifeworld; at the same time, they were decisively (other)worldly, advocates of abstraction and builders of monuments. The term “nativist” is deployed here as a provocation and pertains to the range of articulations that may be considered not-yet or never-to-become colonial (and therefore potentially national or nationalist) or, perhaps, the basis of the exemplary folklore that is the nation, or its afterlife via a new folkloristics in the contemporary. Tolentino was a sculptor of the classical tradition, of the heroic and allegorical kind, and a spiritist who convened séances. He also proffered claims on the Philippine primeval such as its writing system or script, spinning some esoteric codes and wildly transhistorical comparisons.

Jorge Vargas was born into a family that had significant interests in sugar in the central Philippine islands of the Visayas. He was a political figure in the Philippines, its first executive secretary, who served the governments of the United States and Japan from 1935 to 1945. Apart from playing a vital role in American bureaucracy with various portfolios including defense and agriculture, Vargas was invested in the scouting movement, international sports, and the collecting of a gamut of things that, from art to ashtrays, included stamps, coins, photographs, books, and documents, inter alia. He was accused of conniving with the Japanese and later convicted, only to be absolved by the postwar government. He donated his collection to the University of the Philippines, which opened the museum in his name in 1987.

Kept in the vitrines of Track Changes are important texts that tend to inflect the trope of the Philippine bildung. Tolentino’s excursus references a deep past, an ancient ethnic and racial community lying beyond the strictly colonial and imperialist civilization. For instance, in Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog (The Language and Script of Tagalog, 1937), he unfolds an almost encyclopedic account of the Philippines through the different systems of knowledge, describing flora, fauna, and people in lofty and idiosyncratic Tagalog, an ethnolinguistic marker of communities around the capital of Manila.³ Tolentino illustrated some of the pages, including the one imagining how the Tower of Babel might have looked from an interplanetary perspective and in the context of the birth of Tagalog as one of the world’s languages.

Alvero, who opened his collection to the public in 1942, was born to intellectuals. His father was the painter and interior decorator Emilio Alvero (1886–1955), and his mother was Rosa Sevilla (1879–1954), founder of the Instituto de Mujeres (1900), the first Filipino-run lay Catholic school for women. He was an accomplished orator and took up law and education simultaneously. He was a poet and taught English, history, and the Tagalog language. He was tried as a Japanese collaborator and imprisoned from 1945 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1952. He cofounded the Young Philippines, a fringe nationalist party of the 1930s advocating that “The Political Salvation of the World Lies in Dictatorship Rather than Democracy.” Alvero founded a “quasi-fascist, blue-shirted” organization that was modeled on groups in Germany, Italy, and Spain.⁴ He went by the name of Magtanggul Asa, which in the local language means “Defending Hope,” and wrote prodigiously on Philippine culture. A case deserving closer study is the monograph titled The First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala written in 1954 in Manila, in which he theorizes the rubric of the “non-objective” based on the First Non-Objective Art Exhibition in the Philippines, which opened in 1953 at the modernist nerve center in postwar Manila, the Philippine Art Gallery. Here, he would realign the idiom of western abstraction twice: first through the term “non-objective” and second through “Tagala,” a reference to the dominant ethnic society in the country that is appropriated presumably as an alternative to the colonial appellation of the archipelago, which is the Philippines, the genealogy of Filipiniana. With Alvero and Tolentino looming in the mindset of Vargas, the absolute and the occult alternate with the self-conscious and the internationalist to conjure the fantasy of the modern. 

Alongside documents related to Vargas, Alvero, and Tolentino, the vitrines also contain visual material from the Japanese occupying forces that portray the Americans as murderous, while promising social stability and prosperity through the banking system, health service, and a market economy under their auspices. Curiously, in their illustrations, which are veritable wartime propaganda, the template is American comics and editorial cartoons, thus indicating a persistence of American popular visuality across colonial cultures.

To discuss Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero as an ensemble is to anticipate a theoretical and historiographic framework of the Philippine modern that considers the aesthetic, artifactual, and discursive implications of the archival material inscribed in or ornamenting the collection. What might be offered here concomitantly is a method that contemplates the postcolonial modern through a paracuratorial visibility. In this regard, the modern is not singularly intuited as a mode of progress or criticality; like the vitrines in Track Changes, this modern is, as alluded to earlier, offhand. For the ethos of Vargas insisted on a certain pleasure in appreciating the distracting collectible, perhaps an elaboration of the desire to belong to an abstract collective.

The term “kawilihan” is key. Kawilihan was the name of Vargas’s residential complex and the site of the collection before its transfer to the university. It roughly translates as fascination, distraction, or absorption. It shapes the time and pursuit of leisure, even of reverie. The complex was imagined as Pleasantville and was part of the development of the suburbs of Manila. It had a garden where Vargas raised vegetables, chickens, and pigs, and ample spaces where he hosted costume parties. Besides being a concept-work, kawilihan was also real estate, the land that bought and preserved the art.

The care and thoughtfulness that sustained fascination and the longing for culture would not have found its distinct institutional framework had Vargas not settled on an intellectual scheme that braided culture and nation, not to mention art and garden. It was a scheme seen within the context of fondness for materials in a collection thriving on heterogeneity and later subjected to analysis in a university museum. Across these interactions, the collection would feed into a life of ferment, speculation, and scholarship. These three impulses of fascination, culture, and university animate the collecting instinct of Vargas and the collection. The phrase “university museum” holds two of modernity’s most consummate bureaucracies: the university and the museum, from which stem the prospects of enlightenment and radical epistemology through knowing and sensing. The alternation between homegrown joy and critical institution is instructive.

The joy derives from kawilihan. It is at once residence, collection, museum. Its root “wili” is also attentiveness, interest, penchant, liking, pleasure, enjoyment. In the early lexicon, it straddles between afección (in Juan de Noceda and Pedro San Lucar), a profound, deep-seated affection on the one hand, and afición (in Pedro San Buenaventura), a habit, inclination, talent, or an enthusiasm on the other. These words gravitate toward “love”; in one Filipino translation of “wili,” it is considered “mataos na pagmamahal,” or a lofty devotion to a beloved.⁵ If kawilihan as a structure of feeling hangs over a particular sensitivity to a precious belonging, then it is a cognate of the ethos of care and inevitably of curation in the sense of a possession being under the care or in the custody of, or of curiosity, the inquisitiveness about things. Because the state of kawilihan or the condition of wili is absorption, love becomes a discursive articulation of the word: the collector, or lover, loses the self, which is absorbed in the collection.

In the Pedro Serrano Laktaw dictionary, the absorbed subject is an “aficionado, apegado, encariñado,” that is, generally attached, and a connoisseur. Such cultivated attachment and connoisseurship are mediated by an object of desire. The example of the lexicographer is intriguingly allegorical and potentially moral: “Hindi mawiwili ang aso, / kundi binibigyan nang buto.”⁶ The dog will not be engaged if not given a bone. Wili, therefore, hinges the subject to the object for it to be distracted.

Criticality informs the second aspect, specifically how the conceptualization of culture and the state, or how the state represents the polity through culture, or the ethical necessity of representativeness for a common image of an ethical community that professes the symbolic birthright of a tradition.⁷ To be more concrete in the Philippine historical context, the trope of the American Commonwealth and the Japanese Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to a collective and expansionist imaginary rooted in colonial history. And the sui generis Vargas was right at the center of these projects and at the same time the collector of the evolving Filipiniana of the Philippines. No other figure in Philippine history rivals his acumen and dexterity in terms of the country’s political and aesthetic education. The historian Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote a detailed account of the Vargas collaboration case, opines that the “collaboration question was . . . the brainchild of the Americans who, acting under the pressure of the prevailing war psychosis, dictated to the hapless Filipinos what they should and should not do or think in relation to the incidents and accidents of the war.”⁸

What Track Changes does is to create a relationality between the historiography, which is also the museology, of colonial and modern art and the curatorial supplement that is not programmatic or thematic, but rather contingent and tropic. It insinuates itself from within the institution and beside, or within reach of, the displayed collection to hopefully choreograph, or subtly incite, the frisson of “situated knowledge” across the varia or corpora in the room. In other words, the paracuratorial in this instance coordinates, hints at, a cognitive mapping of things in a tentative totality without lapsing into ideological iconography or art-historical repetition. The “para-” turns out to also be “proto-” in that it reveals symptoms of the museological unconscious of Vargas as well as the apparatus that enabled the collection to cohere and then ramify across temporalities through curatorial activation. The native, the national, and the non-objective suffuse this utterance of the modern—all caught up in contradictions but also pointing to a third moment beyond the dualisms that underlie all stylizations of coloniality and its attendant class-, gender-, race-continuous discriminations. Track Changes proves to be a viable intersectional site that cannot be quickly co-opted by narrow specialization and the positivisms it attracts.

The native, the national, and the non-objective initiate a relay between expressions of the subjectivity that is the Philippine, construed as a figurine and not an identity. The latter dilates across the said three registers in which various imaginaries coalesce to generate particular phases, and plasticities, of modernity: the supposed authenticity of the indigenous (the native), the idealized cultural character of postcolonial autonomy (the national), and the eccentric entitlement to a transcultural and international abstraction (the non-objective) in which all empirical and rational references are banished as if to perform the purity of the native and the melancholic hubris of the national. In a certain way, the Philippine is all of these, condensing in the acquisitive personas of Vargas, Tolentino, and Alvero, who communed with the archaic, the multitude, and the dead—all taken by liberal sympathies, cabinets of curiosity of their own. In this sequence of categories, the notion of the modern becomes exceptionally complex, interpellated by the difficult desires of belonging, and not belonging, to the aesthetic polity of the colonial western by sketching out a cognate genealogy of the Kantian sensus communis: the bodies of willful subjects, which include the collector, the collection, and the culture. This can only be the very groundwork of the museum, its curatorial substrate, when it renders the art ambiguously present in its space, “derived from distractive experience” and turned into an “abstraction of bits of the world.”⁹ Modern art critic Richard Shiff brings distraction, abstraction, and the (non)objective together rhythmically: as the art is grasped so does it “draw away” and “draw apart” from how it is sensed as actually existing and how its becoming real is not only poignantly, but also punctually prefigured.¹⁰

To end with another distraction: In 2022, the Philippine government asked the Vargas Museum to temporarily keep and curate the collection of about five hundred pieces from the collection of Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1986, at a time when the couple’s son Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had become president. The items in the collection comprise paintings on canvas, glass, and wood. They are crafted from the tradition of lacquer, egg tempera and copper, and the ornament of gold leaf, among other mediums. These objects are paintings from the late Gothic and Rococo periods in Italy, reverse glass paintings from former Yugoslavia of folk-fantastic style and called “naif” in Southeast Europe, and lacquer vanity cases and religious icons from Russia. The Marcos government was hailed as developmentalist and cosmopolitan but was deposed by a popular uprising in the wake of autocracy and allegedly massive thieving.

While not cohabiting with the display of the collection and Track Changes, the Marcos collection finds its place alongside the Vargas Collection guided by a kindred paracuratorial sensibility. The task of a university museum is to invite a mindful and urgent study of these objects as well as the tricky lives of Vargas and Ferdinand Marcos, both of whom were enmeshed in the history of colonialism, the formation of nation-states, the accumulation of wealth, and the status itself of objects in collections. With their contentious imbrication as the ecology, essential questions may be revisited: What is an object? How does it become property or patrimony? Why is it in the world, why are we around it, and what do we as subjects do about it?

When the initiatory and coincidental Track Changes asks these same questions, digressively and not aggressively or even transgressively, it drags and pulls the museum in different directions, paracuratorially. As the title “Track Changes” suggests, it traces the indicia of amendments to the text, the writing itself of difference—or the difference finally of curatorial writing.

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“In cosmic beauty, there is no place for degrees or locations in time and space: Cosmic beauty is infinite. Words like pretty, ugly, tragic, funny, and useful—the abiding limits in the brief race toward death—on the other hand, are part and parcel of sensual reactions.”¹

With these words, Costa Rican artist Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) describes the crucial difference between an art that leads to the infinite—abstract art, in his case—and a transient art that reflects immediate emotion—a characteristic particularly evident, in his view, in figurative art.² Manuel de la Cruz understood art as a tool to integrate humankind into the universality of the cosmos in order to yield cosmic beauty. The quote above is taken from his lecture “El arte como integración cósmica” (“Art as Cosmic Integration”), which he gave in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in 1957. In this talk, the artist laid out his theories on the cosmic value of geometric abstraction. Over the course of the 1950s, he not only lectured and wrote on these ideas, he also developed a body of work that reflected his thinking, a line of production that he would extend into the early 1970s.

Also in the 1950s, another artist from Costa Rica embarked on a body of work tied to the transcendent. But unlike Manuel de la Cruz, Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982) did not attempt to integrate universal truth into her art.³ Instead, she professed to accept that it was impossible to access one’s ultimate reality. In the paintings, drawings, and stained-glass works that she produced in the 1950s through the end of her life, landscape and the human figure predominate; her lines and brushstrokes convey a specific way of perceiving the natural environment, humankind, and the spirituality in which both are steeped (fig. 2).For Luisa, the perceptible forms in her surroundings were the elements in which it was possible to experience and even see the transcendent.

In this essay, I will address these artists’ visions of the spiritual and the transcendent and how their work reveals predominant twentieth-century stances on the role of art in the representation and transformation of the spiritual.⁴Manuel de la Cruz exemplifies an artist who understood art and his own work as evidence of the vibrations of an irrefutable universal truth. Art, for him, was a device that when understood in terms of cosmic beauty, transports the human being to an absolute human state. Luisa, on the other hand, held that one cannot know ultimate truth in this lifetime. That said, she expressed no doubt that the natural environment and humankind are imbued in spirituality, an immanent charge so potent that it can change our very perception of things. Her work is not a device for integration, but instead the materialization of a spiritual world enmeshed in daily life.

Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz were part of the generation of pioneering Costa Rican artists who, in the 1930s, introduced the avant-garde to their country.⁵ In the late 1940s, Manuel de la Cruz ventured into abstraction, and in the early 1950s, he moved to Venezuela.⁶ It was in the context of a Venezuelan art scene influenced by Neo-Plasticism, a movement spearheaded by Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944), that Manuel de la Cruz developed his theories.⁷ Early in her painting career, Luisa focused on landscapes and portraits. Starting in the late 1940s, her work grew more hermetic as she looked to the natural landscape of the Costa Rican highlands. At that juncture, her palette darkened, and her images became suggestive of an adverse and unstable environment, one that inspired a degree of abstraction in her depictions of nature. The artist addressed a range of religious and mythical themes, and she almost obsessively fashioned scenes in which nature takes precedence over humankind. Though she pursued her artistic career in Costa Rica, a collection of drawings preserved by the Sáenz-Shelby family suggests that the natural settings and cities she visited in the United States and Europe also influenced her production. Indeed, these places resonate in many of the sketches closely tied to the work she began in the 1950s.

In 1956, Manuel de la Cruz published the essay “El arte abstracto: Realidad de nuestro tiempo” (“Abstract Art: The Reality of Our Times”) in the Costa Rican magazine Brecha. In this text, he states that abstract art is the “reaffirmation of eternal aesthetic truths.”⁸ Abstraction, in other words, was, in his mind, a universal art that transcends geographic boundaries. In his lecture in Maracaibo in 1957, the artist suggested that the components that make up the universe are number, rhythm, order, and balance. He described an eternal cosmos in which any independent form is ultimately tied to a universal whole, where life consists of endless integration and reintegration of energy, and the human spirit and the universe are vibrantly connected.⁹ From this perspective, he argued, art can be seen as “a way to unleash certain reactions we call aesthetic. . . . It is aimed at a certain aspect of the human in an inevitable pursuit of attuned cosmic vibrations [where] the human moment is seen as a bridge to its universal integration.”¹⁰ These “cosmic vibrations” are what is emitted by the harmonic rhythm manifested in the geometric shapes, lines, and colors used in painting, which itself facilitates cosmic integration (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz presented three routes—the spontaneous, the intuitive, and the intellectual—by which art can lead to cosmic integration. Based on these, he outlined categories for an art history in which abstract art from the first half of the twentieth century corresponds to the intellectual route. That said, all three routes are revealed throughout history, and the art at play in each of them is tied to the cosmic eternity that envelops humankind.¹¹Manuel de la Cruz looked to the “inner necessity” declared by Vasily Kandinsky (French, born Russia. 1866–1944) in 1911 in Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting) to understand major historical events in the world of the arts and culture. In “El Cuadro Tridimensional” (“The Three-Dimensional Painting”), which he published in 1958, Manuel de la Cruz asserts: “Both during his era and beyond it, Fra Angelico is interesting—and will always be interesting . . . not because he painted angels, but because of how he painted them. He imbued them in that mystical oneness common to all men, even when that zeal is directed to Buddha or Quetzalcoatl. He is interesting, then, because of how he expressed his ‘inner necessity.’”¹²

Manuel de la Cruz expressed that he saw the transition from “primitive” thought to rational thought, and that the final route—the intellectual—was, for him, the one that lays out a path to truth, to “its cosmic reason, its vital, eternal and universal rhythms.”¹³ He argued that it is possible to imbue the work of art with the conditions that enable cosmic integration, and further, that these conditions are present to a large degree in the work of Mondrian and Kandinsky (figs. 4, 5). As he asserted in his 1957 lecture, “Both of them understood that the only way to reach the infinite rhythm is through abstraction, the elimination of any trace of reference, sensuality, or allegory, the total omission of the romantic.”¹⁴

In the context of this lecture and his essays, Manuel de la Cruz’s geometric abstract painting underscores his commitment to the notion of universality. In his Abstracción geométrica nº 8 (Geometric Abstraction No. 8; fig. 6), for example, flat color planes interact with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, as well as with simple geometric shapes. In works like Equilibrio cósmico (Cosmic Balance), slightly curved lines generate a tension between color and form.¹⁵

Unlike Manuel de la Cruz González, Luisa González de Sáenz did not leave a body of writing describing her vision of art. What we have instead are brief interviews, critical reviews of her work over the course of decades, and the testimony of friends and family. In other words, Luisa appears to have been less inclined to describe her process. She seems to have been most interested in how art could become a daily means of expression. When her art was exhibited to the public, what was on display was her perception of the environment, the spiritual, and humanity.¹⁶ In figure 7, for instance, we see a landscape, in all its vastness and spirituality, overpowering the solitary individual and the path they have trodden. The night sky transforms into a flying creature that seems to have emerged from the night itself.

Luisa’s creative work is overwhelmingly figurative. Figuration was for her, as she stated in 1957, “the best form of expression [for me]. Truth is the ultimate pursuit of art and all forms of expression. [Figurative art] is my truth.”¹⁷ She drew on highland landscapes—trees, mist, gusts of wind, and temperature—for that personal expression.¹⁸ The artist believed that the inability of humankind to perceive nature differently was an impediment born of a spirit largely closed to sensory experience.¹⁹ In her mind, society shuts down the possibilities of the gaze available only to an open spirit. Her art, then, gradually came to engage not only what is observed by that spiritual vision, but also what is transformed, via the spiritual, in the human being and nature. As she states in a recording from Carlos Freer’s 1999 documentary Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz (An Evening of Herself: Portrait of Doña Luisa González de Sáenz): “I am not sure if there is such a thing as spiritual change, though that is something we all go through, right? We often evolve, and our spirit is transformed, without even realizing it, right? I gradually became very interested in the human soul, and I saw it as much in nature as in persons themselves.”²⁰

According to Costa Rican writer Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), Luisa had the ability “to materialize the spiritual, to render it visible, to make it our own; [and] to spiritualize matter, to render it impalpable—and that is no less our own.”²¹ She would transfigure observable nature by means of a style characterized by strong brushstrokes or lines that yield an atmosphere so integral, adverse, and shifting that it veers into abstraction as the elements represented blur into one another. This is evident in an illustration she made to accompany the short story “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático” (“María de la Soledad: Episode in the Life of Doctor Lunatic”), which was written by her brother Mario González Feo (fig. 8). In this drawing, she has referenced two sentences uttered by the main character in the story: “How I wish I could feel the vital force of that transfigured evening. Because the whole evening was transfigured!”²² Also relevant is the passage that precedes these sentences: “There are things and persons that are transfigured at a given moment by dint of the extraordinary force we call mystery. They are still themselves, but it is as if an inner light, an inward flame . . . lit them up and gave them an interior transparency—that is transfiguration.”²³ The image shows a figure in a desolate landscape; her body is part of the natural space in general, but mostly it forms the rays of a “light” in the sky. We can distinguish between the terrain on which the figure stands and the sky, and we can sense the tension between that source of light and the figure. At the same time, the quality of the line gives these elements—figure, sky, light—a sense of mobility and adversity.

The idea that spiritual observation and expression are individual runs through the artist’s life and work: the soul is inevitably and innately alone, even when in the company of others.²⁴ Most of the human figures that cross Luisa’s landscapes do so alone; when there is more than one figure, they do not seem to notice one another. Her work, on the other hand, is steeped not only in spiritual transformation and solitary pilgrimage, but also in acceptance of the impossibility of seeing the true face of transcendence or of life after death.

Luisa was fond of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (Persian, 1048–1131), and she made several drawings inspired by it. The Rubaiyat values taking immediate pleasure in life, since human knowledge is categorically incapable of answering the fundamental questions faced by humanity, such as the reason for life and death. Luisa’s drawing of quatrain 68, for example, reflects these ideas (fig. 9): “We are no other than a moving row / Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go / Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held / In Midnight by the Master of the Show.”²⁵ Here, once again, the artist has used light to transfigure space. With the force of her line, she makes us feel that we are witness to an inevitable transformation or transience, one that will affect both humankind and nature. In another sketch (fig. 10), she has transcribed a passage from quatrain 32, which discusses those places of knowledge inaccessible to humankind: “There was the Door to which I found no Key; / There was the Veil through which I could not see.”²⁶

The representation here is more somber than in the other works discussed. A path in a desolate nighttime setting leads to a door, behind which lies the transcendental to which humans have no access. The faces and bodies of the three lantern-lit figures walking toward that door are covered. These figures do not have the key to that space of knowledge—to be sure, no one does.

It is entirely possible that Luisa’s art was influenced by literary and philosophical sources other than the Rubaiyat, though we cannot know for certain which ones. As previously mentioned, the artist did not make this information public. By attempting to reconstruct in part how the artist seems to have understood her work, we can say that she was conscious of a spiritual world that the human soul was capable of perceiving both in the soul itself and in the natural environment in which the soul unfolds. This interaction leads to a constant but solitary transformation of the soul and of nature in an individual spiritual experience that continues throughout existence. That sensibility is patent in Luisa’s work—as is the interaction between and mutual transformation of the individual and the environment. At the same time, she seems to have understood the limit of that experience; as is evident in her work, any other aspect of the transcendent, especially anything related to life after death, is shrouded in impenetrable mystery.

Manuel de la Cruz, on the other hand, made the points of reference for his artistic agenda known. These influences range from a Hegelian notion of history and trust in science to the aesthetic and spiritual theories of modern abstract artists who were, in turn, influenced by the Theosophical Society, which had its own stance on scientific advancement.²⁷ Similar ideas are at play in Manuel de la Cruz’s writings and Mondrian’s essays. For the Dutch artist, “Art—although an end in itself, like religion—is the means through which we can know the universal and contemplate it in plastic form.”²⁸ Manuel de la Cruz, like Kandinsky, asserted that he was living at a watershed moment in history, a time when truths were revealed; art could help, he argued, to manifest that revelation.²⁹ With Neo-Plasticism, Mondrian himself foresaw a new culture “of the mature individual; once matured, the individual will be open to the universal and will tend more and more to unite with it.”³⁰

Through influences such as these, Manuel de la Cruz developed his own vision of a macro-history. He was interested in deciphering the mystery of time and the relative truth regarding the role of humankind in the cosmos—concerns he shared with esotericism.³¹ And these concerns also informed his conception of Neo-Plasticism. In his writings, he follows a narrative akin to that of a number of esoteric traditions in which “all things originate in one and all things in turn flow and return to one.”³² It is within this conceptual framework that Manuel de la Cruz forged his vision of art history. In his view, this history advanced toward cosmic truth and the repudiation of a certain sensual and superficial individualism whose final champion was Romanticism.³³

In closing, we might read Luisa’s art in the context of the historical progress posited by Manuel de la Cruz. Some strains of Romantic thinking resonate in her work, at least in terms of an aesthetic that expresses the spirituality innate to nature. Think of William Blake (English, 1757–1827) and Caspar David Friedrich (German, 1774–1840), for instance.³⁴ The Romantics, like Luisa González de Sáenz, understood that the spiritual can be captured in its environment through the subjective, that is, through a personal vision. True knowledge—or the knowledge to which the individual can gain access—exists only in the subjective,³⁵ an idea that aligns with Luisa’s perception of the possibility of seeing the world through the opening of the soul.

How to understand humankind in our environment and the universal principles that govern us were concerns shared by Manuel de la Cruz and Luisa. Their distinctive artistic and, perhaps, personal experiences led them to contrasting sets—or fabrics—of beliefs, practices, and systems as well as strategies. Manuel de la Cruz’s work engages the control and understanding of truths that can be materialized in an object, and Luisa’s the veiled nature of the spiritual that is, nonetheless, experienced and, therefore, potentially materialized in the object.

I am grateful to Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López, and Leonardo Santamaría Montero for their comments on early drafts of this text. I would like to thank Sofía Vindas Solano and the Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural for the information they provided on Luisa González de Sáenz and for access to primary sources relevant to her life and work. Lastly, I thank the Museo de Arte Costarricense and the Museos del Banco Central for allowing me to reproduce works from their collections.

Spanish

“La belleza cósmica no admite gradaciones o localizaciones geográficas o cronológicas, es infinita, mientras que las reacciones sensuales llevan aparejados los términos de bonito, feo, trágico, humorístico, útil, límites constantes en su fugaz carrera hacia la muerte”.³⁶

Con estas palabras, el artista costarricense Manuel de la Cruz González (1909–1986) determinaba la diferencia crucial entre un arte que conducía al infinito, ejemplificado en su caso por la abstracción, y un arte transitorio que respondía a emociones inmediatas, características que son más evidentes en el arte figurativo.³⁷ El artista conceptualizó el arte como una herramienta que generaba la integración del ser humano en la universalidad del cosmos, lo que daría como resultado la belleza cósmica. Esta cita forma parte de la conferencia impartida por Manuel de la Cruz en Maracaibo, Venezuela, en 1957, titulada “El arte como integración cósmica”, en la cual propuso sus teorías sobre el valor cósmico del arte abstracto geométrico. A lo largo de la década de 1950, el artista también dictará otras conferencias y escribirá ensayos al respecto, además de iniciar una producción de obras que reflejan sus preceptos teóricos y que culminaría a inicios de los años setenta.

En la misma década de 1950, otra artista costarricense iniciará una producción también vinculada a lo trascendente, pero, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz, no había en su trabajo una intención de integración en esa verdad universal, sino una aceptación de la imposibilidad de acceder a la realidad última del ser. Me refiero a Luisa González de Sáenz (1899–1982), cuyas pinturas, dibujos y vitrales se enfocaron, a partir de los años cincuenta y hasta el final de sus días, en un estilo donde el paisaje y la figura humana predominan, y las formas de expresión en la línea y la pincelada plasmaban una manera de percibir el entorno natural, el ser humano, y los aspectos espirituales imbuidos en ambos (fig. 2).³⁸ Luisa trató las formas perceptibles proporcionadas por su entorno como los elementos en los que era posible sentir y ver lo trascendente.

En este ensayo me concentro en las propuestas sobre lo espiritual y lo trascendente propias de estos artistas, y en cómo sus obras revelan posturas predominantes en el siglo XX sobre el papel del arte en la representación y transformación de lo espiritual.³⁹ En el caso de Manuel de la Cruz, veremos un entendimiento del arte y de su propia producción en cuanto componentes que evidencian las vibraciones adecuadas de una verdad universal irrefutable. El arte se convierte, además, en un artefacto que al ser comprendido bajo conceptos como la belleza cósmica, acerca al ser humano a su estado absoluto. En contraste, la obra de Luisa no acepta que el ser humano pueda conocer, en esta vida, una verdad última y, sin embargo, la artista tiene claro que el entorno natural y las personas están permeados de una carga espiritual, una cualidad inmanente tal, que lo vuelve capaz de modificar la percepción de las cosas. Su obra no es un artefacto para la integración, sino la materialización de un mundo espiritual imbuido de la cotidianeidad que nos rodea.

Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sénz pertenecieron a la generación costarricense de artistas de los años treinta, fundamental para la introducción de las vanguardias artísticas al país.⁴⁰ Hacia finales de la década de 1940, Manuel de la Cruz inició su incursión en el arte abstracto.⁴¹ A inicios de los años cincuenta arribó a Venezuela y ahí, influido por el ambiente artístico del país y por el neoplasticismo, movimiento ampliamente divulgado por Piet Mondrian (neerlandés, 1872–1944), desarrolló sus teorías artísticas.⁴² Luisa comenzó su carrera artística con pinturas de paisajes y el arte del retrato. Desde finales de los años cuarenta empezó a generar obras más herméticas, sirviéndose principalmente del paisaje natural de las zonas de altura. Su paleta de colores se volvió oscura y su estética sugería un escenario pictórico adverso y en movimiento, cuyo resultado plástico indica una cierta abstracción de los elementos naturales. La artista trató disímiles temas religiosos y míticos, y forjó, de manera casi obsesiva, escenas donde la naturaleza imperaba sobre los seres humanos. Si bien desarrolló su carrera artística en Costa Rica, podemos constatar, gracias a la colección de dibujos preservada por la familia Sáenz-Shelby, que los entornos naturales y ciudades que visitó en sus viajes a Estados Unidos y a Europa influyeron en ella, llevándola a realizar una gran cantidad de bocetos de esa temática que guardan una estrecha relación con la producción iniciada en la década de 1950.

En 1956, Manuel de la Cruz publica en la revista costarricense Brecha el ensayo “El arte abstracto: realidad de nuestro tiempo”. El artista entiende el arte abstracto como la “reafirmación de las eternas verdades estéticas”,⁴³ un arte universal que trasciende geografías. En la ya mencionada conferencia de 1957 en Maracaibo, el artista propone que el universo está comprendido en el número, el ritmo, el orden y el equilibrio; un cosmos eterno donde toda forma independiente al final está sujeta a una totalidad universal. La vida consiste en infinitas integraciones y reintegraciones de energía, y el espíritu humano se concibe como una conexión vibrante con este todo universal.⁴⁴ El arte es, en este contexto, “una manera de provocar determinadas reacciones que llamamos estéticas . . . [que] se dirigen a determinada porción de lo humano en inevitable búsqueda de vibraciones cósmicas afines, tomando el momento humano como puente hacia su integración universal”.⁴⁵ Estas ‘vibraciones cósmicas’ son lo emitido por el ritmo armónico que se expresa en las formas geométricas, líneas y colores empleados en la pintura, lo que posibilita el proceso de integración cósmica (fig. 3).

Manuel de la Cruz también establece tres vías artísticas para la integración: la espontánea, la intuitiva y la intelectual; y con ellas compone clasificaciones para una historia del arte, siendo el arte abstracto de la primera mitad del siglo XX la principal vía intelectual. Las vías se muestran a lo largo de la historia, y el arte contenido en ellas son referentes de la eternidad cósmica en la que estamos comprendidos.⁴⁶ Manuel de la Cruz emplea la “necesidad interior”, proclamada por Vasily Kandinsky (Francés, nacido en Rusia, 1866–1944) en 1911 en Über das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerei (De lo espiritual en el arte, y la pintura en particular), para entender grandes acontecimientos históricos en el mundo de las artes y de la cultura. En su ensayo “El Cuadro Tridimensional”, publicado en 1958, Manuel de la Cruz nos dice que: “Fra Angelico interesa e interesará siempre, en su época o fuera de ella . . . no porque pintó ángeles, sino el cómo los pintó imbuyéndoles esa unión mística que es común a todos los hombres aún [sic] cuando ese fervor se canalice hacia Buda o Quezlcoatl [sic], vale decir, cómo manifestó su “necesidad interior.”⁴⁷

Manuel de la Cruz ve entonces la transición de un pensamiento primitivo a un pensamiento racional, y es en la última vía donde se puede plantear un camino hacia la verdad, “su razón cósmica, sus ritmos vitales, eternos y universales”.⁴⁸ El artista propone que a la obra de arte se le pueden suministrar las condiciones necesarias para alcanzar la integración cósmica. Esas condiciones están en gran medida representadas por Mondrian y Kandinsky (Figs. 4–5), ya que “ambos comprendieron que sólo por la abstracción, la eliminación de la referencia, de lo sensual y alegórico, el olvido en fin de todo lo romántico, es que podía llegarse al ritmo infinito”.⁴⁹

Cuando observamos la pintura abstracto-geométrica de Manuel de la Cruz en el contexto de estos ensayos, advertimos el compromiso con la noción de universalidad. En su cuadro Abstracción Geométrica Nº 8 (fig. 6), por ejemplo, encontramos plastas planas de color que interactúan con líneas horizontales, verticales y diagonales, además de sencillas formas geométricas. El artista también se sirvió de leves curvaturas de la línea que generaban tensión entre los colores y las formas seleccionadas, tal y como puede verse en Equilibrio cósmico.⁵⁰

Luisa González de Sáenz, a diferencia de Manuel de la Cruz González, no dejó escritos sistemáticos sobre su modo de visualizar el arte. Lo que conocemos de ella son breves entrevistas que le realizaron, comentarios a sus obras de críticos de arte a lo largo de los años, así como los testimonios de familiares y amigos de la artista. En otras palabras, Luisa sería reservada respecto de los procesos existentes detrás de su obra. El interés se dirigía en cambio a cómo el arte se convertía en un medio diario de expresión: cuando este era expuesto al público, lo que se mostraba era su percepción sobre el entorno, lo espiritual y la humanidad.⁵¹ En la Figura 7 vemos, por ejemplo, el potencial que le dio la artista al paisaje, su inmensidad y su espiritualidad, con respecto al solitario individuo, de quien Luisa nos deja conocer el camino que ha recorrido. El cielo nocturno se transforma en lo que podemos dilucidar, es una criatura voladora en movimiento, como si estuviese atravesando o surgiendo de la noche misma.

Luisa encontró una base para la creación en el arte figurativo, al cual consideraba su “mejor forma de expresión, y como en arte y en toda manifestación se debe buscar la verdad, ésta es mi verdad”.⁵² El paisaje de altura, entre otros, le suministró esos componentes para una expresión personal, tales como la forma de los árboles, la niebla, la fuerza del viento y la temperatura.La artista sentía que la imposibilidad de percibir la naturaleza de forma distinta por parte de las personas era un impedimento causado por la falta de apertura del espíritu a otro tipo de sensaciones.⁵³ La sociedad no se permitía explorar las posibilidades de la mirada que únicamente un espíritu abierto podía proveer. En este sentido, la obra de Luisa se involucró gradualmente no sólo en lo que se observa a partir de esta mirada espiritual, sino también en lo que se transforma espiritualmente en el ser humano y en la naturaleza. Como la artista comenta en una grabación que aparece en el documental de Carlos Freer, Una tarde de ella misma: Retrato de doña Luisa González de Sáenz, realizado en 1999: “No sé si hay un cambio espiritual, que generalmente todos tenemos, ¿verdad? Hay ciertas evoluciones que sin darse uno mucho cuenta va[n] transformando el espíritu, ¿verdad? Me fui interesando tanto, y ver en la naturaleza tanto [como] en las mismas personas, el alma humana.”⁵⁴

Luisa poseía la capacidad, de acuerdo con el escritor costarricense Abelardo Bonilla (1898–1969), de “materializar lo espiritual, hasta hacerlo visible y nuestro; espiritualizar lo material hasta hacerlo impalpable, que es también hacerlo nuestro.”⁵⁵ La artista ofrecía una especie de transfiguración de la naturaleza observada, a través de un estilo en el que tanto la pincelada como la línea de dibujo eran fuertes y generaban una atmósfera integrada, adversa y en movimiento, al punto de generar cierta abstracción y falta de claridad entre los elementos representados. Esto se puede advertir en una ilustración que realiza para el cuento “María de la Soledad: Episodio en la vida del doctor Lunático”, escrito por su hermano Mario González Feo (fig.8). El dibujo refiere a dos líneas del personaje principal: “ojalá pudiera sentir ahora la fuerza vital de aquella tarde transfigurada. ¡Porque toda la tarde estaba transfigurada!”.⁵⁶ El texto que precede estas oraciones resulta a su vez valioso: “hay cosas y personas que en un momento dado, por la fuerza extraordinaria de lo que llamamos misterio, se transfiguran. Siguen siendo ellas pero una como luz interior, una llama interna . . . les da iluminación, transparencia interior: eso es, transfiguración”.⁵⁷ La imagen muestra una figura situada en un paisaje desolado y su cuerpo se está integrando con el espacio natural, específicamente con los rayos de la “luz” que está en el cielo. Podemos distinguir entre el terreno sobre el que está la figura y el cielo, y también la tensión entre esta fuente lumínica y la figura. Al mismo tiempo, el trazo posibilita la sensación de movilidad y adversidad en cada uno de los elementos mencionados.

La observación y la expresión de lo espiritualmente percibido son actos individuales. Esto daba pie a un pensamiento recurrente en la obra y en la vida de la artista: la inevitable e inherente soledad del alma, que no es posible eliminar aun estando en compañía de otros.⁵⁸ Nos encontramos con paisajes donde la gran mayoría de las figuras humanas transitan en soledad, y si es que hay varios personajes, estos no se percatan los unos de los otros.Por otro lado, aunado a las transformaciones espirituales y el peregrinaje solitario, la aceptación de la imposibilidad de conocer la verdadera cara de la trascendencia, de una vida después de la muerte, permeó su obra.

Luisa profesaba, por ejemplo, un gran cariño por los Rubaiyat, cuartetos atribuidos a Omar Khayyam (persa, 1048–1131), y realizó dibujos referentes a algunos de sus pasajes. En los Rubaiyat es valioso el goce inmediato de la vida, ya que no hay conocimiento humano capaz de darnos las respuestas a las preguntas fundamentales de la humanidad: los motivos detrás de la vida y la muerte. Un dibujo de Luisa, donde se ilustra el cuarteto LXVIII de los Rubaiyat,refleja estas ideas (fig. 9): “No somos más que una hilera en movimiento / De sombras mágicas que van y vienen / En torno a la linterna iluminada por el sol / Y sostenida a medianoche por el Maestro del Espectáculo”.⁵⁹ La artista vuelve a emplear la luz como elemento que transfigura el espacio. Debido a la fuerza del trazo, la artista posibilita la sensación de que nos hallamos ante la inevitable transformación, o transitoriedad, tanto de los individuos como de la naturaleza. Contamos también con un boceto en el que está anotado un fragmento del cuarteto XXXII (fig. 10) sobre aquellos sitios del conocimiento a los cuales el ser humano no puede ingresar: “¡De esa puerta la llave no encontré yo jamás; ese velo ocultaba lo que existe detrás…!”.⁶⁰ A diferencia de otros ejemplos que hemos expuesto, el tema se representa en un estilo más sobrio. Ante un espacio nocturno y desolado se encuentra un camino que se dirige a una puerta, la cual resguarda aquello trascendente a lo que el ser humano no puede acceder. Los tres personajes caminan hacia la puerta, iluminados sólo por sus lámparas, con sus rostros y cuerpos cubiertos. Ni dichos personajes ni nadie posee la llave que permite ingresar a dicho espacio del saber.

El uso de los Rubaiyat nos permite suponer que varios elementos de la obra de Luisa se vieron influidos por referencias literarias o filosóficas, aunque no sea fácil establecer cuáles fueron. Y es que, como ha sido señalado antes, no hizo pública esta información. Al reconstruir parte de la forma en que Luisa entendió su obra, podríamos decir que la artista estaba consciente de un mundo espiritual que el alma humana era capaz de percibir, tanto en ella misma como en el entorno natural en el que se desenvolvía. Esta interacción provoca la transformación constante del alma y de la naturaleza, y dicho proceso espiritual constituía una experiencia individual que se vivía, a lo largo de la existencia, en soledad. Luisa expresó su sentir por vía de una obra donde se pudiese visualizar precisamente esta interacción y transformación entre el individuo y su entorno. Al mismo tiempo, estaba consciente de que ese era el límite de su experiencia y que cualquier otro aspecto sobre lo trascendente, en especial lo concerniente a la vida después de la muerte, quedaba resguardado en el misterio.

Manuel de la Cruz, en cambio, se interesó en que supiéramos cuáles eran las referencias de su programa artístico: desde una especie de espíritu hegeliano sobre la historia y una fidelidad a la ciencia hasta las teorías estéticas y espirituales de artistas abstractos modernos que, dicho sea de paso, estaban influenciados por la Sociedad Teosófica, la cual proporcionaba su propia postura sobre los avances científicos.⁶¹ Cuando comparamos los escritos de Manuel de la Cruz con los ensayos de Mondrian, por ejemplo, encontramos propuestas similares entre sí. Para el artista neerlandés, “el arte –aunque sea un fin en sí mismo, como la religión– es el medio a través del cual podemos conocer lo universal y contemplarlo de forma plástica”.⁶² Manuel de la Cruz replicó, además, un sentir similar al de Kandinsky: decía estar viviendo en un momento decisivo de la historia, en el cual las verdades se estaban revelando y su arte podía ayudar a manifestar dicha revelación.⁶³ El mismo Mondrian con el neoplasticismo profetizaba el desarrollo paralelo de una nueva cultura, que sería “aquella del individuo maduro; una vez maduro, el individuo estará abierto a lo universal y tenderá más y más a unirse con ello”.⁶⁴

Con este tipo de referentes Manuel de la Cruz generó su propia versión de una macrohistoria, manifiesta en esa preocupación común con el esoterismo por descifrar el misterio del tiempo y la verdad relativa al papel del ser humano en el cosmos.⁶⁵ Su concepción del arte neoplástico no está exenta de esto, ya que como leemos en sus escritos, se sigue una narrativa similar a la de varias tradiciones esotéricas, donde “todas las cosas se originan en uno y todas las cosas a su vez fluyen y vuelven a uno”.⁶⁶ Es en este contexto que Manuel de la Cruz forjó una visión peculiar del progreso en la historia del arte, en la que, a través de las épocas, hay una cercanía a la verdad cósmica y un rechazo ante cierto individualismo, sensual y superficial, cuyo último gran campeón fue el Romanticismo.⁶⁷

Podríamos finalizar con una lectura de la obra de Luisa en el contexto de este supuesto progreso sugerido por Manuel de la Cruz. Su producción artística guarda un cierto eco con algunas líneas de pensamiento del Romanticismo, por lo menos en lo que refiere a una cierta estética donde se expresaba lo espiritual inherente a la naturaleza, como lo sería en el caso de William Blake (inglés, 1757–1827) o de Caspar David Friedrich (alemán, 1774–1840).⁶⁸ Los románticos, al igual que Luisa González de Sáenz, entendieron que la forma de preservar lo espiritual en su entorno se produce a través de lo subjetivo, esto es, una visión personal de lo espiritual. Es en lo subjetivo, de hecho, que el verdadero conocimiento existe, y al que en verdad el individuo puede acudir.⁶⁹ Esta idea se alinea con la percepción que tuvo Luisa sobre la posibilidad de ver el mundo a partir de la apertura del alma.

Tanto Manuel como Luisa tuvieron inquietudes sobre cómo comprender al ser humano en su entorno y sobre los principios universales que nos gobiernan. Los problemas artísticos y, en todo caso, personales que surgieron, los llevaron a un entramado de creencias, prácticas y sistemas, y a soluciones plásticas contrastantes. Las obras artísticas de ambos responden, para el primero, al control y entendimiento de las verdades que se pueden materializar en un objeto y, para la segunda, a la veladura inherente a aquello espiritual que, sin embargo, es experimentado y, por lo tanto, también se puede materializar en el objeto.

Agradezco a Gabriela Sáenz-Shelby, Valeria Mora López y Leonardo Santamaría Montero, por sus comentarios y críticas al revisar los primeros bocetos de este texto. Quiero también agradecer a Sofía Vindas Solano y al Repositorio Centroamericano de Patrimonio Cultural por su apoyo en proporcionarme información y acceso a diversas fuentes relativas a Luisa González de Sáenz. Finalmente, va mi agradecimiento al Museo de Arte Costarricense y a los Museos del Banco Central por el permiso de reproducción de sus obras.

The post The Cosmos and the Spiritual: A Fabric of Beliefs in the Work of Manuel de la Cruz González and Luisa González de Sáenz / El cosmos y lo espiritual: un entramado de creencias en las obras de Manuel de la Cruz González y Luisa González de Sáenz appeared first on post.

My initial encounter with Marta Staņa (1913–1972) and her work in architecture occurred in 2002 when, as a young architecture journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Latvian-Australian architect Andrejs (Andrew) Andersons (born 1942), who hailed from Riga. During our conversation, Andersons highlighted Staņa’s remarkable work, which, to my surprise, was not widely known in contemporary architecture circles at that time.

Further investigation revealed that Staņa was better recognized among artists and designers, many of whom had been her students at the Riga Art and Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Andersons’s insights inspired me to delve deeper into Staņa’s story, prompting me to conduct interviews with her contemporaries who were still alive at the time. Additionally, I visited the Latvian Museum of Architecture, where a portion of her archive is housed

In the years that followed, I dedicated myself to research and had the privilege of curating an exhibition showcasing Staņa’s work. The exhibition Behind the Curtain. Architect Marta Staņa, held in 2010 at two venues in Riga—the Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and the Dailes Theatre—focused on her public buildings and architectural competition entries. However, there remained a folder containing newspaper clippings and notes about her smaller projects, including private homes, summer cottages, exhibition designs, illustrations for magazines, and even designs for gravestones. I put this folder aside to explore in the future. It is also essential to know that many of her design proposals, books, photographs, and personal belongings remain in the possession of individuals residing in the houses she designed. Some documents were lost during the restructuring of archives belonging to Soviet-era organizations, and some of the recollections of her contemporaries lack supporting documentary evidence. Nevertheless, thanks to the gradual digitization of museum collections, it has become possible to compile a relatively comprehensive list of her works.

For example, the small Tukums Museum preserves a furniture set consisting of a chair, a dining table, and a sideboard, along with a rug, wall art pieces, and metal candlesticks. This set was displayed in 1962 in the annual design exhibition held at the Latvian National Museum of Art, a highly popular show, the design of which Staņa also contributed to. Her innovative approach of presenting individual furniture pieces organized in sets, juxtaposed with traditional and contemporary crafts, ceramics, and textiles, was praised by her students and critics alike. This unique integration of modern furniture within the broader context of various art forms as well as architecture was a characteristic not only of the exhibitions she designed and co-curated but also of her own designs.

In 1963, she provided the design for an exhibition of work by her close friends and collaborators Erna Rubene (1910–1990), a respected master of traditional crafts, and Margarita Melnalksne (1909–1989), a ceramic artist. For their show, Staņa designed the general layout and furniture stands and created furniture pieces, such as tables and cabinets, to provide context for the entire exhibition.

Having designed the Dailes Theatre (1959–77) in Riga, the most celebrated public building in the mid-twentieth-century modernist style in Latvia, Staņa is one of a few Latvian architects whose main architectural work built during the Soviet occupation has retained its original shape and function. Among her other notable projects are a sleek cinema extension, innovative residential building typologies, schools, private residences, and summer cottages. Unfortunately, apart from the Dailes Theatre building, all of these structures have been modified to meet contemporary functional and energy efficiency requirements. While Staņa’s legacy encompasses a significant number of ambitious projects, ranging from high-rise office buildings and apartment blocks to schools and cultural venues, many of these exist solely as blueprints and architectural competition proposals.

After earning a diploma from the Jelgava Teachers Institute, Staņa initially pursued a career in teaching before enrolling in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Latvia in 1936. Upon graduating from the Faculty of Architecture in 1945, she was offered an assistant position under Professor Ernests Štālbergs. However, the tumultuous events of the time, including the repatriation of Baltic Germans, the initial Soviet occupation, subsequent deportations, the German occupation and persecution of Jews, and the subsequent emigration of Latvians to avoid the consequences of the Soviets’ return in 1945, greatly disrupted the established architecture school. The academic staff faced complete reconstitution, and Staņa became a member of the faculty during this process. She stood out as a talented young architect and a protégé of Štālbergs. Moreover, her previous teaching qualifications made her the sole professional educator among the other faculty graduates and other possible candidates for the job. Unfortunately, the academic community in the field of architecture, already weakened by the circumstances, suffered another blow when Staņa and her professor were dismissed from their positions at the University of Latvia during the academic purges of 1949–50. Immediately after that, the Faculty of Architecture was also closed, completely destroying the national school of architecture. Architecture was further taught at the Faculty of Building Construction at Riga Technical University.

During most of the 1950s, Staņa was engaged in a significant project for the remote fishermen’s kolkhoz, a newly made Soviet collective farm, in the coastal village of Skulte (Zvejniekciems), now part of Saulkrasti city. Her involvement included designing a master plan for the village, encompassing various facilities such as a workers’ club, a school, and a low-rise housing complex for teachers. The kolkhoz, which emerged from a prosperous fishermen’s cooperative that had been nationalized by the Soviets, possessed substantial resources and ambitions, enabling the commissioning of an entire village.

Initially, Staņa’s early proposals for the village adhered to the obligatory Stalinist architectural style prevalent at the time. However, in the mid-1950s, she embraced a newfound liberation inspired by the sweeping modernisation throughout the Soviet Union. This shift allowed her to explore innovative approaches in her designs. One noteworthy project that exemplified this progressive mindset was the school in Zvejniekciems. Developed immediately after the club, showcasing the canonical Stalinist architecture, the school design offered pioneering qualities, such as a horizontally arranged layout, with distinct volumes dedicated to each function. Abundant natural light flooded the learning spaces, creating an inviting environment. Furthermore, the school offered direct access to the surrounding nature, fostering a harmonious connection between the built environment and the outdoors.

Following her victory in the Dailes Theatre building competition in 1959, Marta Staņa joined the State Design Institute in 1960, where she dedicated herself to the ongoing design of the theatre until her final days. Her proposal with the main foyer’s horizontal volume situated on the second level remains unique within the context of Riga, where historical architecture predominantly prevails. By incorporating wide windows in foyers and designing a hall capable of accommodating 1,000 audience seats, Staņa introduced a fundamentally new architectural and theatrical experience opening it up to the city. Unfortunately, in line with the typical constraints of the Soviet economy, the construction of the theatre spanned 18 years due to changes and material shortages. However, despite modifications made throughout the design process, the architect’s original idea remained intact. The architecture of the theatre encompassed not only the building itself but also the surrounding public space, which underwent renovations in 2023 by MADE architects. This serves as a rare example of a building constructed during the Soviet era that has not only retained its original purpose but also complies with modern standards of public space and accessibility.

During her tenure at the institute, Staņa actively participated in numerous local and international design competitions, earning the admiration of colleagues for her ability to swiftly translate ideas into drawings, proving her talent for architecture and exceptional artistic skills. Among other notable works during her time at the institute were experimental apartment blocks characterized by spacious balconies, efficient utilization of space and natural light, and unconventional arrangements of facade panels. Additionally, outside of her official working hours, she passionately designed private homes and summer cottages for her colleagues and friends. These projects, created on limited budgets, exemplified Staņa’s remarkable ability to work harmoniously with available, low-quality materials, often repurposing leftover resources while maintaining a connection with nature.

For most of her projects, Staņa also provided interior design ideas, including furniture, lighting, and textiles. Staņa’s passion for illustration led her to collaborate with magazines, where together with her friend Erna Rubene she shared their expertise through illustrated advice on modern living. Her artistic skills and a keen eye for design were instrumental in providing practical and visually appealing suggestions to readers.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Staņa also dedicated herself to teaching, primarily within the interior design departments of Riga Design School and the Art Academy of Latvia. Although teaching may have held a lower status in terms of prestige, it was highly regarded by students who valued her unique guidance and expertise. Staņa’s educational method incorporated the concept of working with space and its objects as a cohesive ensemble, showcasing her approach to complex and rational thinking. She consistently encouraged her students to strive for excellence, offered constant encouragement and provided inspiration. Although she did not receiving any awards during her lifetime, her students, such as stage designer Andris Freibergs (1938–2022), who has mentored a new generation of internationally acclaimed stage designers, attest to the enduring effectiveness of her teaching methods and her talent as an educator: “I was so taken by her. I joined the interior design department of the Art Academy because Marta Staņa started teaching there.”¹ Many young designers had the opportunity to prove themselves by contributing to Staņa’s architectural projects, for example, in Zvejniekciems, where both the club and school buildings display graduation works, such as stained glass windows, ceramics and textiles, of Riga Art and Design School students.

Staņa died of cancer in 1972 and her career as an architect was relatively brief, lasting less than twenty years. Her work is characterized by a distinct clarity of vision, scope, and bold lines, skillfully incorporating people in motion and elements of nature. She viewed architecture, both in practice and education, as a unified approach to space, where architecture harmoniously interacts with the surrounding environment, interior spaces, and art objects within them. Staņa has not left a written theoretical legacy. Even in discussions held at the Latvian Association of Architects, she participated with simple, rational comments. She also helped her colleagues practically, even working in several teams during one competition. Staņa was not able to see the Dailes theatre building completed, nor was she able to live in the house and work in the studio she designed and started to build for herself by the Baltic Sea. Many of her ideas remained only as drawings. “I was born too soon. No one can build my ideas,”²she has said.

The assignment of roles to female architects was one of the many architectural histories explored during the 2019 exhibition A Room of One’s Own at the Estonian Architecture Museum³ in Tallinn. The curators raised questions about authorship in architectural collaborations and the distribution of awards in the field. In 1967, Staņa completed a mandatory biography questionnaire before her trip to former Czechoslovakia. She confirmed that it would be her first trip abroad and that she had never received awards for her work. While the Soviet labour market maintained equality between men and women, awards and participation in such trips were privileges reserved for male colleagues with prominent positions and Communist Party membership.

Regarding work placements, every architecture student was guaranteed a job at one of the State Design Institutes. However, not everyone managed to secure a position at the prestigious City division, which offered the opportunity to work on large public buildings. Women architects were often sent to remote locations, the countryside, or employed in other industries, such as road design. Female architects also played valuable roles in competitions, yet authorship and recognition frequently favoured male leaders. For instance, in 1963, an article⁴ in the magazine Māksla reported the participation of the Latvian team in the international competition for the monument in Playa Girón, Cuba. Similar to other competitions, a team of renowned professionals was formed, later working on Staņa’s idea. However, the accompanying photograph only featured her male companions. In that same year, one of the authors, Ivars Strautmanis, highlighted this competition as a personal achievement in the newspaper Rīgas Balss⁵, without mentioning other team members. Both articles in this case reflect the male perspective of the author, photographer, and editor. Such articles, omitting co-authors, reinforce the perception of authorship, perpetuating it in subsequent publications and conversations to this day. Additionally, it was common practice not to invite female team members to present projects on television or in documentaries, which were abundant to promote Soviet propaganda through culture. When women managed to appear on screen, they were often given the role of attractive background or exhibition visitors.

However, Staņa did not require an official title to earn recognition and praise from art and cultural circles. Her projects may have been unrealised or small in scale, budget, and impact on the official architectural agenda, nevertheless, her position on the periphery led her to work on cultural projects. These projects, though modest, have recently become accessible for examination thanks to the digitalization efforts of museums and archives. It has been a tremendous pleasure to discover footage of the interior she designed for the editorial office of Māksla magazine or blueprints of storage cabinets created for the Museum of Literature and Music while writing this article and adding two more works to her portfolio. In the Soviet Union, architects were not rewarded with prizes or bonuses for empowering the female community, designing museum cabinets, or experimenting with houses for private clients using leftover construction materials. Staņa’s architecture, indeed, exemplified empathy and embodied the paradigms of our time, transcending the boundaries of the 20th century.

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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.

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Soviet occupation and Russian imperialism at large have had profound and long-lasting ramifications, particularly for the generations of migrants and immigrants who continue to grapple with piecing together their fragmented identities. Latvian artist Zanis Waldheims’s life and work offer an evocative example of how the experiences of such individuals can provoke a form of expression at once restricted and expansive, tightly controlled and struggling to break free. Working on his thesis for more than forty years, he created a world of philosophical diagrams. In this series of six hundred meticulously rendered pencil drawings consisting of recurring geometric compositions—in his words, “map[s] for human orientation”¹ —each line and shade is assigned an existential value. These “values” are explained in the artist’s obsessive annotations, which fill the many sprawling sketchbooks, notebooks, and preparatory drawings in his archive.

An artist who came of age amid World Wars I and II, Waldheims was among those who, in their aftermath, sought to be part of a progressive Western Europe. However, his expectations of inclusion were not met, and as the Soviet regime and influence encroached on his homeland, he mediated his disappointment and feelings of betrayal by reading. Craving access to open intellectual and ideological fields of thought, he was engrossed in exploring the work of Western rational and empirical philosophers, historians, and linguists as oppressive Soviet-backed regimes were tightening their grip in the Baltic sphere. Observing the precision with which the occupiers peddled communist dogma and propaganda, he saw little room for imagination. Waldheims, who was trained as a lawyer, blamed the manipulation of the masses on the fickle, double-sided words of those in power. Soon after leaving Latvia as an exile, he developed a complex visual lexicon that functioned outside of usual significative systems and began to incorporate drawings and diagrams in his texts.² He engaged in writing, which he categorized as “exhaustive thinking,”³ throughout his life as an immigrant living in Paris and Montreal, where he eventually settled.

Once in Canada, in particular, Waldheims used drawing and diagramming to articulate his philosophical ideas, which he documented extensively through writing, drawing, and journal entries. He drew on the likes of Benedict de Spinoza, Will Durant, Henri Pirenne, and Maine de Biran, conceiving of human consciousness as a multilayered, multifaceted object that could be mapped or otherwise visually articulated. Inspired by Biran’s ideas, he attempted to create a set of images synthesizing different theoretical fields. Conceived as graphs or scientific illustrations, these works show how diverse systems of knowledge relate to one another, the descriptions of the layers and their indexical meanings forming an integral part of his oeuvre. Psychology, phenomenology, mathematics, physics, and linguistics overlap to create an “exhaustive” set of diagrams representing all sciences and humanities as facets of one massive prism. Through drawing, Waldheims grappled with the notion of art-making from the perspective of a self-identified non-artist. In his first set of notebooks, he wrote that “it is art that tries to symbolically represent metaphysical conceptions, as transformed into conceptions of a particular geometrization, able to present the totality of an explicit content on a surface that by constitutive degrees is completely used up.”⁴ Siloed from the formal and professional art context of his contemporaries, Waldheims understood not only his own art practice but also all artwork as potentially scientific work.

To this day, some of the world’s foremost art institutions remain consumed with the task of filling the critical gaps created by authoritarian regimes in Europe. Art history is constructed on this momentum. The question that arises in response to Waldheims’s work is not whether he was a pioneer in his field of geometric abstraction—he certainly was not—but rather how it is that, somewhere, this particularly stylized mode of expression was adapted by a person who had no interest in its previous iterations. Waldheims did not imagine himself to be part of the abstract art movement nor did he see himself as a player in the grand scheme of art history. This is perhaps due to the fact that in his time, little information on fringe groups affected by world events was available. The microhistories⁵ now surfacing offer more potent ways of looking at the canon, which was shaped by the same colonial forces that shaped the political world.

In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet regime imposed stringent restrictions on the expression of ideas perceived as radical, a shift significantly impacting contemporary artistic practices. As a result, metaphor emerged as a crucial instrument for communicating simple political truths; for example, Soviet fiction produced during this period is known for the double entendres embedded within it. It was during this time that Waldheims, who was by now living in Montreal, developed a keen understanding of the role of language in constructing truths. As he noted in 1969: “All verbal ‘truths’ are merely the truths of degrees of a totality. It is only the drawing that can convey the simultaneous meaning of the truths of a totality. Thus, once again, we must draw more and write less!”⁶

Vexed and frustrated by the ambiguous and playful linguistic elements that could lend themselves to poetic interpretation in art, Waldheims was particularly critical of the subjective nature of figurative and history painting, which he saw as stunted methodologies of self-expression. Alluding to his own inability to come to terms with either language or image, he frequently compared himself to Spinoza as excused by Durant: “Writing in Latin, he [Spinoza] was compelled to express his essentially modern thought in medieval and scholastic terms; there was no other language of philosophy which would then have been understood . . . [for example] objectively for subjectivity, and formality for objectively.”⁷ Compelled to express his point of view with the limited means available to him, Waldheims decided that “since human actions obey laws as fixed as those of geometry, [the field of ] psychology should be studied in geometrical form, and with mathematical objectivity. I will write about human beings as though I were concerned with lines and planes and solids.”⁸

Informed by his own life experiences and political trauma, Waldheims saw parallels where there were none, and he borrowed from various philosophical methodologies to construct a collage that suited his unique perspective. Paradoxically, his creations are far more interesting to art historians than to mathematicians. Despite this fact, he had few opportunities to exhibit them. In his lifetime, Waldheims showed some works in Quebec, in the local school and library in Lachine in 1976, as well as at the regional museum of Lachine shortly before he died. Posthumously, his works have been researched and exhibited by curator Inga Lāce at the Festival SURVIVAL KIT 8 organized in 2016 by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga;⁹ at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga in 2018 as part of an exhibition focusing on Latvian artists in exile and the theme of migration;¹⁰ at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in 2021 in combination with ephemera from his archive;¹¹ and at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź in 2021 in dialogue with the work of other artists engaged in nonfigurative forms of expression.¹² Until their inclusion in these exhibitions, his drawings were mostly kept by his longtime friend Yves Jeanson or otherwise found in the National Archive of Latvia—as opposed to in an art museum. But now, they have entered the collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art and the Muzeum Sztuki, where they are more accessible to art researchers.

The compendium of sketches, drawings, and notes within these collections is accompanied by a veritable library of philosophical and theoretical texts, mostly of French origin, that are marked up with marginalia. In these annotations, Waldheims forges connections between his theoretical drawings and the words or concepts in the books he was reading, providing unique insights into his creative process. His own texts are replete with small symbols that serve as shorthand to evaluate the conceptual balance of the main text. These gestures, which he borrowed from the written vocabulary of psychologist and anthropologist Joseph Campbell, are meant to draw attention to elements of the text that he found relevant to the use of geometry in his drawings while also punctuating the tempo of the writing. By redirecting the texts, both his own and that of others, Waldheims injected the particular works with a sense of paranoia and delusion, as well as with a strong desire for cohesive systems. However, the musings and connections between the drawings, texts, colors, and shapes are anything but universal, for they are but one man’s attempt to connect the dots—an endless and almost obsessive pursuit. Waldheims numbered and renumbered his drawings, seemingly forever unsettled regarding the correct order of things. Indeed, he appears to have been unsure of whether freedom precedes art or whether nature, liberty, and community are on equal footing. Causality, if it exists at all, is not overbearing; to be sure, Waldheims believed that everything is connected. He was lost in space because he was lost in time, and yet through his relentless attempts to map his whereabouts, he managed to create the conditions for his own universe.

Waldheims, like many post-Soviet migrants, was unable to return to his homeland or to reunite with his family. As an artist in exile, he found solace in his artistic creations, which served as means of expression of his inner world. Edward Said has aptly described the exiled as individuals who strive to rebuild their shattered lives, to create new worlds that are both a compensation for their losses and a testament to their resilience. However, as Said notes, the exile’s new world is often unreal, in effect resembling a work of fiction.¹³ Just the same, the exiled artist proves that new worlds can be created, that they can emerge from the interstices between languages and cultures, and the fissures between rational and irrational systems of inclusion and exclusion. Fiction provides a window into a different reality, a world in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined blur, and where alternative forms of expression and meaning-making can flourish.

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