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.

The post Jean-Michel Atlan: An Algerian Imprint on Postwar Modernity appeared first on post.

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.

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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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Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today. She worked on her own terms, forging new ground through collaboration with her younger sister, Elīze Atāre (1915–1993), whose lifelong support not only sustained Logina but also enabled her to leave behind a cache of several thousand works, a full investigation of which is ongoing.

Descending Underground in Two Steps

Soviet rule was not a homogenous phenomenon.¹ Political and economic markers, among other factors, outlined the territory that shifted with each new party secretary and five-year plan devised in Communist Party plenary sessions. Against this backdrop, Latvian artist Zenta Logina’s private life and artistic practice played out for more than forty years.²

The first distinctive period in Logina’s life as an artist was under the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin in the 1940s and early 1950s, with the slight incursion of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Zenta Logina was in her late thirties and forties during this time. In different circumstances, she might have been an artist in her prime, mature in her style and established in her career. And, as the examples of some of her peers demonstrate, one could establish oneself quite well in the new order. In Logina’s case, her bleak and mainly formal engagement with the Soviet art establishment signaled her reluctance to be complicit.³ In 1945, she was admitted into the Artists’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Section of Painters. One can only imagine what must have gone through her mind when she was commissioned to produce posters declaring “The Red Army gave us a new lease on life!” and “Only the Stalin Constitution gave you the right to vote!” In 1950, her “insufficient artistic activity led to a decline in artistic quality, which is currently inconsistent with the standard required of members of the Artists’ Union.”⁴ Zenta Logina was demoted to a member candidate or, more technically, expelled. Falling out of this circuit meant that her access to certain resources, including materials, commissions, and exhibition opportunities, was cut.

In the 1950s, after leaving the Artists’ Union, Zenta Logina moved in with her younger sister, Elīze Atāre, who had two rooms in what was a communal flat at 6 Blaumaņa Street in Riga. Elīze took on the household chores and, to support herself and her sister, worked as a graphic artist and industrial designer for several enterprises run by the Soviet socialist state. It was perhaps through this connection⁵ that Zenta was granted a job in the textile industry. This opportunity, in turn, allowed her to regain full-fledged membership to the Artists’ Union in 1953—albeit, in the Section of Applied Arts, which required that she work exclusively as a textile artist.⁶ And again, the lingering impression is that Zenta Logina approached this new role quite formally, that she complied with the rules but did not go out of her way to achieve more. Instead, her artistic energy was aimed at the easel waiting for her at home. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Zenta Logina never ceased to make art—that is, to paint in the manner she did before the occupation. Her main interest was at first in still life, especially flower compositions, but her canvases from this period show a gradual transition from the naturalistic forms of painterly language to a more generalized and abstract style. “It was as if she set a specific task for herself and then lost interest in the painting as soon as she had achieved it. She just piled up painting after painting, pushing each one aside to free up space for the next one,” is how Pēteris Ērglis, heir to her estate,⁷ remembers Elīze describing Zenta’s process.⁸

The second period in Zenta Logina’s artistic life came with her retirement in 1963 at the age of fifty-five and continued for the next twenty years. As of this point, she had time to pursue her art uninterrupted, and to direct her full attention to whatever subject she desired. Her interest in the genre of still life waned, and her subject matter diversified: in some cases, real-life elements such as a coffee table, a wooden log, or a chopper in the mountains can be discerned in her paintings from this period; in other cases, arrangements of color smudges or sharp lines don’t resemble anything in particular and bear the title “Composition”; and in still other cases, a poetic title reveals the idea behind the content of what is otherwise a rather abstract painting. Because of limited resources and the inaccessibility of needed materials, Logina’s paintings are not always oil on canvas—indeed, she used any available stain on any available surface. Gradually, she began breaking up the flat painted surface, adding different elements to it. By attaching wood, metal shavings, wire, string, and fibers with paint, varnish, glue, and epoxy resin, she created texture and added volume and expressiveness to the work and idea she wanted to embody and convey.

In the 1970s, the boundaries between the various types of art in which Zenta Logina engaged became even fuzzier. Paintings resembling reliefs led to three-dimensional objects and sculptures, and in the most radical cases, matured into full-blown spatial objects or installations. Newly devised shapes manifested the content in unique and sensuous ways. The subject matter of Logina’s output from this time is frequently astronomy, and specifically astrophysics, its concepts, data, and phenomena. For example, works such as Solar Wind, Meteorite, Black Hole, Cygnus Constellation, Alpha Centauri, and Formation of a Planet, among others, are exactly about that. Moreover, her juxtaposition of the macro-level Universe and the micro-level human experience suggests an exploration of more philosophical, cultural, and existential topics. Zenta Logina’s lifelong friend, astronomer Natālija Cimahoviča (1926–2019),⁹ summarized this as follows:

“In Logina’s works, an adequate understanding of the composition of the Universe . . . was combined with an awareness of one’s cosmic self, of the part of man and the Earth in cosmic processes. In the colorful reliefs, galaxies glow and seemingly rotate, cosmic matter swirls, stars are born, and human thought vibrates. . . . Each person creates their own world. Artist Zenta Logina has given us a world of cosmic existence. There the enlightened soul of humanity is in constant dialogue with the darkness of people’s lack of reason, . . . rigidness of the formal logic—with the delicate twines of intuition, it’s a dialogue between the unchained spirit and the rules dictated by the physical form. Artist Logina’s world soars in the infinite space and time, it’s a view of the Earth from Space, the striving of man to rise over the strata of seemingly indispensable activities and unnecessary material things.”¹⁰

Works such as Weeping Planet, Burned-Out Planet, All Flesh Is Grass, Difficulties Shall Be Resolved, The River of Oblivion, The Shield of Justice, We Ourselves, and The Warning, among others, evoke the dark feeling of inevitability; they speak about the scale of human life and its fate in contrast to that of space and time, about the culture and its dependence on, interaction with, and responsibility toward the planet Earth and the Universe. Zenta Logina’s works confront the ecological disasters of the Soviet era as well as offer fertile ground for contemporary ecological discourse.

The Outside World

In the mid-1960s, the USSR underwent several institutional and organizational changes, the effects of which were felt well into the 1970s. In contrast to the fine arts, where “formalism” was targeted and censored for being too individualist and not promoting the ideals of the Soviet socialist ideology, the industrial arts, and by extension the applied arts, enjoyed more freedom of expression—if the goal was to provide Soviet citizens with useful and beautiful household objects, comfortable public spaces, and stimulating work environments. Consequently, the design sphere became an outlet for a variety of alternative artistic modes of expression. In 1963, the year Zenta retired, Elīze enrolled in a decorative arts workshop, where she learned to weave. It is impossible to tell whether she did so to secure an ongoing flow of resources, or as an act of sisterly love and support. However, her desire to show the world the art that she admired is clear—Elīze graduated in 1965 with a tapestry based on one of Zenta’s paintings. At this time, Elīze still worked as a designer. In fact, she was involved with several state-run industrial design enterprises until 1971, when she, too, retired. In the years that followed, in the relative seclusion of their two rooms, the sisters created their own alternative universe. To avoid unnecessary encounters with other inhabitants of their flat, they furnished their personal space with everything they needed to engage in their daily routine. They even brought in a stove to use for not only cooking but also dyeing yarns, which they did by hand. They tucked a loom between furniture, piles of books, stacks of completed artworks, and works still in progress.¹¹

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Elīze Atāre took up weaving based on Zenta Logina’s paintings as well as sketches, which the sisters designed together. They called these collaborative works “wall rugs” as they often were made in a way that deviated from the traditional tapestry-weaving techniques—Elīze used diverse methods, some of her own invention, and came up with a synthesizing, original approach. Over her lifetime, she wove sixty-five such wall rugs, ranging in size from small (approximately 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches) to huge (approximately 78 3/4 x 98 1/2 inches). The sisters’ previous affiliation with the applied art industry served as a gateway. Their tapestries were put on display in applied art exhibitions in Soviet Latvia and abroad, and quickly gained recognition. Numerous institutions and organizations bought them for their collections. However, people who saw these wall rugs woven by Elīze Atāre were not always aware of Zenta Logina’s contribution—let alone the artworks upon which they were based.

The first and only solo exhibition of Zenta Logina’s works of the Soviet period was organized by Elīze four years after Zenta’s death in 1987. The era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s launched a wave of events previously unimaginable. It included exhibitions of works of artists who, up until then, had never been acknowledged on such a scale. These exhibitions were often memorial, serving as tributes to the heritage of particular individuals rather than records of ongoing artistic efforts; nonetheless, in 1987, the public had a chance to explore the world of Zenta Logina in her own right, when a corner of the veil was lifted off her more abstract body of work.¹²

Paradoxically enough, Zenta Logina’s art could have been interpreted favorably in the context of Soviet Union’s political and cultural program. It resonated well with the scientific aspirations and technocratic flare of the system—evoking space exploration, chemistry and nuclear physics, and cybernetics; it even brings to mind the peace movement and ecological concerns of the 1980s. However, the system had cast her as a treacherous element,¹³ and she had opted not to associate herself with it. Her focus on particular themes was, in fact, a form of dissociation from the Soviet social and political reality, a way of rising above it and finding a common ground in the universal. In the 1990s and 2000s, interest grew in the artists and cultural workers who had been neglected and suffered under Soviet rule. Zenta Logina was one such artist, and thus, an emblem for the correction of historical wrongs. However, the research into her artistic legacy on its own merits has only recently begun, and there is still much to be done. Unfortunately, there are no known sources enabling us to encounter Zenta Logina’s own voice. Her subjectivity is being constructed through the accounts of others, and by the interpretation of her artworks. As of today, her work is an integral part of the Zuzāns Collection, which to date, has acquired the largest holding.¹⁴ There are other institutions and organizations in Latvia, Russia, and the United States¹⁵ that house the sisters’ artworks, or significant bodies of information, and welcome researchers to examine it firsthand in order to further understand her practice.

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In 2011, in my role as curator, I had the privilege of assisting Carlito Carvalhosa (1961–2021) with the installation of his work Sum of Days in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Family Atrium of The Museum of Modern Art,¹ a space devoted to large installations and performances that was conceived by Yoshio Taniguchi as part of the extension of MoMA in 2004.

Carlito Carvalhosa passed away on May 13, 2021.

Born in São Paulo, Carvalhosa lived most of his life in Rio de Janeiro, where he embraced the radical legacy of several generations of artists from Rio who preceded him. He brought their achievements to new, unprecedented dimensions in terms of concept, form, and scale.

This assertion is all the more significant since the radical weight of some of those predecessors’ propositions was carried by the generations that followed them as a conclusive “no way out” in terms of art practice. Such is the case of artists like Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, whose late works, ephemeral and anti-monumental, clearly stepped on territories that transcended the conventional frames of art, toward the extended fields of the beyond-art: therapy or social practice, quasi-cinema and anti-art.

By 1980, young artists working in Brazil therefore had to embrace this exhausting legacy while inventing ways to keep their own practices alive: they had to welcome it as a humbling lesson, and at the same time, were confronted by the necessity of forging new paths of their own; they had to accept the legacy of their predecessors while re-inscribing their own practices back into the historical conventions of visual art.

Only from this perspective can one grasp that, for instance, the abundance of painting surfacing in Brazil by the mid-1980s was much more than, and certainly more significant than, simply another purely fashionable return to painting.²

Neo-Concretism’s Theory of the Nonobject, Oiticica’s General Scheme of the New Objectivity, Clark’s Phantasmatic of the Body, and Antonio Manuel’s Body/Work³ were milestones of aesthetic newness as well as experiences of art exhaustion, historically and formally, predating manifestations such as relational aesthetics and post-subjective performative art. The equation to solve was, likely, what the afterlife of painting (and of art for that matter) could be following the invention of typologies such as Parangolé (Oiticica), Obra mole (Soft Work) (Clark), or Objeto ativo (Active Object) (Willys de Castro).

The entire repertoire of Carlito Carvalhosa’s oeuvre responded to this historical challenge, from his inception as a painter embedded in the dark sources of the formless to his striking performative installations using fabric, neon, wood, wax, mirrors, and sound.

It therefore occurred to me, while we were installing Sum of Days at MoMA in 2011, that Carlito’s work implied an unprecedented amplification of the category tokened by Lygia Clark as Obra mole.

This was not only, for Clark, a way to question the solid certainty of sculpture by using malleable rubber and by posing, literally, sculptures on the arms and over the body of the beholder, it was also a natural continuity of her quest for a spatial form that would not be determined by notions such as inner and outer, center and periphery, top and base, etc. In her journey looking for this permanently fluid form of sculpture, what mattered was the idea, and the experience, of emergence.

Irene Small has written, while considering Oiticica’s “soft” and performative works known as Parangolés, that they condense “the organism’s capacity for change into its material structure, resulting in a composite body in continuous flux but with no stable shape. Such a body can no longer be assessed in a single ideal state. Rather, the Parangolé embodies emergence in its very form.”⁴

One can easily apply such a description to Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days, an immense, architectural, scenic Parangolé that set a performative dimension for space itself. Between an overwhelming Parangolé and a gigantic Obra mole, Carvalhosa’s installation consisted of a spiral-shaped labyrinth made of white fabric hanging from the ceiling of MoMA’s atrium, lighted by vertical lines of neon attached to the walls, radiantly filling the abyss of that architectural hole. One might bring to this description, also from Clark’s theoretical repertoire, the notion of empty/fullness as being potentiated by Carvalhosa to a point that it materializes a monumental fragility embodying the space we inhabit.

But Sum of Days was not only a towering feature bringing sculpture’s softness and the void of the full to a not-yet-seen milestone, it was also a sonic experience, an immensely complex and subtle one, implying the participation of Carvalhosa’s friend Philip Glass and his ensemble, whose scheduled performances inside the impeccable labyrinth of the work were systematically recorded, as were the audience’s noises and voices made while inhabiting the structure.

For that matter, Carvalhosa conceived a sophisticated recording system with elongated cords and microphones also hanging from the ceiling and attached to the surrounding walls, melancholically drawing against the whiteness of the space their lines as enigmatic graphic presences. Throughout the duration of the show, these recordings of sound and noise—sounds of music and music of sounds—were played back into the work, producing a constant, lofty layering of illegible and haunting densities of sonic presence.

The work functioned like a physical tautology: there was indeed the sum of days emerging, incrementally, through an accumulative temporality, a time that was not sequential anymore but made present as a mass, in the uncanny slickness of sound layering, occupying as seemingly immaterial as it was invisible the spiral of white draperies cascading from the atrium’s ceiling.

One has to consider this exceptional feat: Carlito Carvalhosa’s Sum of Days is an installation—sculptural, architectural, sonic and performative—that is capable of transforming—translating, transfiguring—the sequentially driven course of time into a spatial simultaneity. As such, the secular and binary distinction between spatial, simultaneous forms of art and sequential arts of time, established by Lessing in his Laocoon,⁵ and revamped by Greenberg in his “Newer Laocoon,”⁶ happens to be entirely deactivated, dismantled, deconstructed, and ultimately neutralized in our experience of Sum of Days.

Alexandre Kojève’s notion of désoeuvrement, or even Saint Paul’s katergeín,⁷ are rather more adept terms for this achievement because, by propelling to a new level the consequences of radical Brazilian categories such as Parangolé or Obra mole, Carlito Carvalhosa’s masterwork signaled the overcoming of a formal regulation that had dominated Western visual arts for centuries. Sum of Days is an enormous, fluid, porous, and fragile form that contains its space rather than being contained by it, a sculpture of sound that materializes as emergence, a sculpture of time. Consequently, the deactivation of sequential and spatial art polarities implied by Sum of Days makes possible a landmark achievement sought by artists and philosophers, poets and fablers, since unimaginable bygone days of art: temporality shaping itself as space, space emerging as time, elliptical, returning, surging.

Suspension (literally) and occupation through sculptures and installations, opaque material densities and reflexing surfaces (also literally), were the simple keys of a work that unfolded from Carlito Carvalhosa’s restless artistic practice—in the form of three-dimensional paintings and countless sculptural achievements—for forty years, since the early 1980s until his untimely death. I was lucky enough to have known him, to have continued my exchanges with him up to his last days on Earth.

Mourning his passing, I keep thinking of the vast history of draperies; of ancient, glorious winged victories; of wandering pagan Nymphs wrapped in their habits and morphed by the wind; of Dionysian rhythms of samba in the heights of Rio’s hills that break in rapture among dancing Parangolés.

Ceaseless transfiguration and dérive of forms are the endless matters of art history. But it only falls on few, touched by the duende or lifted by the angel—as Lorca would say—to embody the fullness of their potentiality. Carlito Carvalhosa was one of them and his work will overcome his passing, time and again, casting on us the unfinished enlightenment of its dromenon.

All images are installation views of the exhibition Carlito Carvalhosa: Sum of Days unless otherwise noted.

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In the 1970s, a new generation of artists involved in industrial design and architecture in Soviet Estonia was beginning to reconceptualize the practice of art-making. These artists/designers were interested in the surrounding environment—the Soviet reality, with its specific aesthetics—and searching for ways to comment on, analyze, and visualize the changes taking place in both the material culture and the built environment around them. The exciting amalgamation of different disciplines within the practices of several young artists at the time resonate today. One of the notable representatives of this phenomenon is the artist and designer Sirje Runge [Lapin].¹

Runge graduated in 1975 from the Estonian State Art Institute (ESAI).² Though she majored in industrial art, she positioned herself in the 1970s not only as a designer but also as a visual artist. She actively exhibited her artwork, in which she incorporated design principles—and at the same time, approached her design work as a form of art. Indeed, throughout the decade, Runge undertook several design projects parallel to the artworks she was exhibiting and, in one way or another, tried to open up possibilities to synthesize the two. A case in point is Runge’s ambitious thesis project Proposal for the Design of Central Areas in Tallinn. Comprising ideas and plans for a range of artistic interventions in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, it suggests visual, technical, and spatial changes to the city, including ways to alter the cityscape itself and designs for modular structures that could be easily erected within a given space. The diversity of her chosen locations reflects the artist’s versatility and interest in different layers of the urban environment. Indeed, her proposal considers abandoned industrial areas to be as interesting and important to the city’s fundamental structure as its center, the historic and iconic plaza known as Victory Square.³

Up until the day she presented it, Runge was unsure if the defense of her unorthodox thesis would be a success or total failure.⁴ The fact that everything went well is testament to the progressiveness and foresight of the industrial art department. It is noteworthy that the project was re-exhibited on the walls of the ESAI in the mid-1980s. As a student from the class of 1986 recalls, Runge’s colorful, visionary, playful project was in stark contrast to the overly gray atmosphere of late-Soviet Tallinn—visible through the windows of the Institute.⁵

Runge’s thesis imagines and visualizes a more attractive, thrilling, and inclusive urban environment than the actual city at the time. Her suggestions range from repainting houses to enliven the existing architectural system, and thereby create a new, independent aesthetic structure, or layer,⁶ to more conceptual and fantastical ideas. For example, she envisions building cylinder structures that symbolize chimneys in what would be huge installations in abandoned industrial sites, explaining, “These cylinders periodically emit fumes of a certain color. The fumes are harmless and pleasant smelling, and they reduce through their consistency the pollution of the surrounding air. The smoke-producing and air-cleaning chimneys refer to the possibility that by changing the content of industry, we might also change its harmful impact on people.”⁷ Runge has recalled that she did not consult with any scientists back then, hence this idea was purely conceptual, i.e., a way of visualizing the problematics involved with polluting the environment in the process of production.⁸

In addition to repainting houses and altering urban industrial sites, Runge proposes modular structures that would be easy to assemble and un-assemble, move, and reconfigure, as well as monumental objects that could be erected in different parts of the city. These ambitious projects are intended to promote use of unused or abandoned parts of the city or to revitalize areas that do not have a dominant architectural structure—such as slums, parks, or beaches. The function of the modular constructions is both aesthetic and utilitarian. For example, by incorporating multimedia components, like a television screen or radio, they could be used to inform people of news regarding city life. Others might integrate vending machines stocked with essential goods. These playful modular and multifunctional objects encourage new ways of using the city space. For example, it would be possible to climb their different layers to listen to music in a personalized music center,⁹ interact with others, and enjoy light effects. It is also important that these pieces could be reconfigured, or otherwise altered in response to city alterations or changes in the habits of citizens. Ultimately, the goal was to improve city life, because, as Runge explains, since the city is the concentration of material and mental resources of humans, it should first and foremost serve people as opposed to the urban mechanism.¹⁰

Because the environmentally and socially conscious ideology of Runge’s project is characteristic of contemporary Soviet design theories of the 1970s, it offers insight into Soviet design ideas of the period, highlighting the problems inherent to their implementation. The study program of the ESAI industrial art department, which was established in 1966, supported and enhanced Runge’s interest in the artist’s role in a society defined by technical-industrial culture.¹¹

The main reasons for establishing the design study program were the changes taking place in Soviet society. Industrialization and the rise in production volumes in the 1960s created an opportunity and need for new product designs, packaging, and advertising, etc. The department was headed by the energetic and enthusiastic interior designer Bruno Tomberg (1925–2021), whose focus was the universal study of creativity. Inspired by leading design schools of the first half of the 20th century—by the Bauhaus in Germany, and Vkhutemas and the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow (INKhUK¹²)—as well as by Le Corbusier and De Stijl and concepts of contemporary design, the work of the department centered on the relationships between design, environment, and society. Within the program, the universal ideals of the Bauhaus were combined with contemporary design ideology based on notions of social responsibility and synthesis.¹³ Tomberg strived to teach his students to integrate contemporary science, technology, and aesthetics in a way that created a harmonious material environment.¹⁴

An important source of inspiration within the department in the beginning of the 1970s was the book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) by Austrian-born American designer Victor Papanek (1923–1998).¹⁵ Papanek states that because the main role of design is a formation of individuals and societies, a designer must be socially and morally responsible.¹⁶ He advocates that design should be an innovative, creative, and transdisciplinary practice to satisfy the real needs of people and, moreover, that the work of designers should be based on scientific research. He argues that poorly designed objects and structures in fact contaminate the environment.¹⁷

The records of the ninth congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, which took place in Moscow in 1975, reflect a similar emphasis on the need for ethical and ecological design. In that congress, theoreticians of the Soviet technical aesthetics concluded that “contradictions between nature and technology, laws of nature and human activities of production and technology are the results of one-sided and imperfect development of industrialization and the logics of capitalist societies.”¹⁸ It is significant that Soviet design theoreticians made an ideological distinction between capitalist and socialist design objectives. They put forward that the main function of the former was to shape consumer expectations, while that of Soviet design (at least in rhetoric) was to realize the most socialist and progressive ideas.¹⁹ Moreover, they argue that societal relationships under socialism are principally different than those under capitalism. Because the income gap in socialist countries is smaller, there is no need to produce objects that convey social status, and so the focus can remain on creating a more harmonious and humane environment.²⁰

These idealistic notions are fundamental to the rhetoric that design should contribute to the formation of the Soviet people, that is, the Soviet subjects necessary to build up society.²¹ But the economic situation of the 1970s did not support redesigning and modernization of the built environment in the way that was theorized. It was the so-called Era of Stagnation, when Leonid Brezhnev was in power (1964–82) and social, political and economic problems were worsening in the Soviet Union. There was an ever-deepening deficit in consumer goods and materials, and the country was far behind in terms of technological development. Nonetheless, though the overall economic and political situation did not support implementation of the most interesting and progressive proposals for improving the environment or product development, it did not stop designers and artists from envisioning alternative means of production, city planning, and living—as Runge’s ambitious thesis.

Runge’s thesis is testament to her early interest in physical and abstract structures, in relationships and everyday life within the urban space. Her project takes into consideration the perspective of a pedestrian, because in her point of view, the city should be built and evaluated first and foremost with the people who use it daily in mind, taking into consideration not only their physiological-psychological requirements, but also their aesthetic needs.²² The work presents the idea that the urban environment should not define the actions of its users, but instead, exist as an egalitarian, open field that allows for different modes of usage. In effect, by creatively combining design and visual arts, she suggests a new city environment, one that engages people empathically through visuals, sounds and tactile objects, transforming their relationship with the urban setting by making it more actively engaging and integrated. Mari Laanemets has suggested that “Runge’s aim was a specific ‘complicated order’ that was intended to create irrational and chaotic moments within the functional organization of the city and thus result in greater engagement, in a more (inter)active relationship between man and his surroundings.”²³ So, on the one hand, Runge’s proposal suggests a possible solution to an overly standardized cityscape of the Soviet period that created fragmentation, alienation, and pollution in the city center, by making it more livable and putting environmental concerns in the forefront of city planning. On the other, her suggestion for a city space offers a democratic vision of a sustainable space for different groups of people equally taking part in and with equal access to the built environment.

Although many of Runge’s visionary ideas could not be implemented at the time they were proposed, which she herself recognized at the time, the issues that she addresses are still relevant today. The problematics of designing an aesthetically exciting city that is environmentally considerate and provides a space for different groups of people with different needs remains at the very heart of the discussions around urban space. Hence, Runge’s vision from the past remains an inspiration for the future.

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In the installation shots of past MoMA exhibitions dedicated to abstract art and the Russian avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White(1918) and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black)(1918), both in the Museum’s collection, are inseparable. The importance of MoMA’s exclusive opportunity to display these two paintings side by side, thus reconstructing “an original installation” from the Tenth State Exhibition: Nonobjective Creation and Suprematism (1919), is accentuated by Aleksandra Shatskikh in her book Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (2012).¹ Yet in the current hanging at MoMA, White on White and Black on Black (which are part of Malevich’s larger White on White series and Rodchenko’s Black on Black series, respectively) are split by Lyubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1917), prompting a reexamination, on the centennial of the Tenth State Exhibition, of the relationship between white and black paintings, including their historical and cultural contexts.

Varvara Stepanova, whose diary is a unique source for this endeavor, assessed the Tenth State Exhibition as “a contest between Anti [Rodchenko’s pseudonym expressing his nonconforming stance] and Malevich. The rest is nonsense.”² In this categorical summation, she dismisses the other participants’ works, including her own, for the sake of the approbation of a black-and-white dialectic. Denying Rodchenko’s black paintings their own meaning, she adds, “Anti wanted to hang . . . his black things next to Malevich . . . so that these blacks do not go to waste.”³

Malevich first used the term “nonobjective” in his brochure “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1916), writing in advance of—but also as though about—his later white paintings: “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to . . . nonobjective creation.” This endorsement of a ground-zero regime of painting amply corresponds to a post-revolutionary atmosphere marked by erasure of the toppled political system, including its cultural institutions. It also explains why the phrase “nonobjective creation” was adopted by avant-garde artists. Under this banner, which synthesized both a worldview and the role of experimentation in nonrepresentational art, they ascertained their identity in the newly established state. 

This broader and more politically potent meaning of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism, which in turn implies that painting was near its exhaustion, was endorsed by Stepanova after the opening of the Tenth State Exhibition. “Nonobjective creation,” Stepanova wrote, minimizing (like Malevich) the use of the word “art,” “is not only a movement or a tendency in painting, but also a new ideology born to destroy philistinism of spirit, and maybe it is not for the social system, but for the anarchic one and an artist’s nonobjective thinking is not limited to his art, it enters his entire life, and under its flag all his needs and tastes proceed.”⁴ Stepanova’s reading of nonobjectivism as a synthesis of formalism and politics promises a means of identifying an alternative subject for post-revolutionary nonobjective practice in general, and for the white and black paintings in particular. 

Malevich and Rodchenko produced their respective series between mid-1918 and the beginning of 1919, a period of violent social and political ruptures in modern Russian history. The October Revolution, World War I, in which Malevich served, and the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, made it impossible for the two artists to remain nonpartisan. Avant-garde literature has routinely positioned the two as supporters of the Bolshevik regime.⁵ However, as Stepanova suggested, the theoretical basis of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism may in fact be rooted in anarchist aspirations, which is indeed confirmed in Rodchenko’s first contribution to the newspaper Anarchy: “We are coming to you, beloved comrades, anarchists, instinctively recognizing in you our hitherto unknown friends . . . The present belongs to artists who are anarchists of art.”⁶ The section “Creation,” established in Anarchy for artists’ writings, avoided old terminology associated with fine art, and in this, went against the newly established Department of Visual Art in Narkompros (under the People’s Commissariat for Education) established on January 29, 1918. The title “Creation” specified that the true objective of contributors Aleksei Gan, Malevich, Aleksei Morgunov, Rodchenko, and Nadezhda Udal’tsova was to defend artists’ rights to freedom of expression, which they felt were equally threatened by the prerevolutionary institutions and the newly established commissariats. Their goal was to achieve unmediated creations that would replace any form of “prostituted”⁷ art. Above all, they thought, artists should pursue their own revolutions against artistic conventions and restrictive institutions. The Soviet government’s later repressive cultural policies proved that this early concern with freedom of expression was prolifically critical. 

Manifesto-style texts such as Rodchenko’s “To Artists-Proletarians” and “Be Creators!,” and Malevich’s “Declaration of Artist’s Rights,”⁸ all three of which were written for Anarchy, positioned artists as an oppressed and enslaved class akin to that of the proletariat. Rodchenko’s terminology, including “creator-rebel” and “revolution-creation,” radicalized the creative process and shifted it from an isolationist practice to a socially active one. Malevich’s text is more concerned with practical aspects such as the protection of artists’ work spaces and their right to maintain control over profits from sold art. Malevich preferred public collections to private ownership. 

Equally oppressive for both Malevich and Rodchenko was the view held by some critics at home and abroad that Russian modernists “imitate[ed] the West!”⁹ Malevich’s term “Suprematism,” coined to describe flat geometric painting, encodes an assertion of originality and preeminence over Western movements.¹⁰ Yet some nonobjectivists, including Rodchenko and Stepanova, resisted Malevich’s claim for “supremacy” in nonobjective circles by reason of suspecting him of mysticism,¹¹ and they were unwilling to accept his Black Square (1915) as their trademark. However, Rodchenko’s desire to free himself from the cultural bondage of the West outweighed this kind of issue with Malevich, as he realized that cooperating with him would guarantee the formation of “an entirely original identity in Russia’s art” and position them as “the first inventors of the new, as yet unseen in the West.”¹² Pledging to be Russia’s “own art,” and thus a national style, it asserted a competition with the West and, significantly, declared a position of difference from a Bolshevik internationalism that is embodied in, for instance, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920).

Initially viewing the anarchist groups as allies in the fight against the old regime, by the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks were ready to dissolve them and their critical forum Anarchy.¹³ Shatskikh dates “the emergence of white Suprematism” from this time.¹⁴ This means that Suprematism was conceived when Malevich could no longer write for Anarchy, and when the possibility of a “working anarchism” had dissolved. A retreat to “pure anarchism,” that is, “abstract, utopian, and realized only on paper,”¹⁵ was the only remaining option. White paintings were as pure and nonconventional within the conventions of modernist painting as Malevich could come up with. He succeeded in producing a work “as yet unseen in the West.”¹⁶ He also constructed a visual metaphor of an unmediated, autonomous creativity, which he had defended in Anarchy. But the subject of white paintings is additionally discernable from Malevich’s text “Declaration I,” written on June 15, 1918, around the time Malevich executed them. In this text, he describes the current state of Suprematism as a blend of formal and political concepts—a “Suprematist federation of colors of colorlessness,” and a “new symmetry of social paths;”¹⁷ and he sees “socialism illuminating its freedom to the world,” and “Art falling in the face of Creativity.”¹⁸ The result is a fervent socio-formalist concoction that, mirrored in white Suprematism, once again positions art and creativity as opposing concepts: the former systemic and institutional, the latter unmediated and under artists’ control. 

This new model of post-revolutionary Suprematism—and the creation of White on White—was Malevich’s act of spite toward Black Square, a trademark of pre-revolutionary Suprematism that had begun to alienate him from the Moscow nonobjectivists. In White on White, Malevich bleached Black Square, turning it into a pale shadow hardly distinguishable from its white background. The remaining black outlines around the square function as a referent to the subject of contention. Skewed, and edged closer to the picture frame, White on White upsets the steely stability of Black Square, moving toward new borders that are beyond painting. 

By the end of 1918, Rodchenko had definitely seen Malevich’s white paintings. He wrote, “Malevich paints without form and color. The ultimate abstracted painting. This is forcing everyone to think long and hard. It’s difficult to surpass Malevich.”¹⁹ Rodchenko’s statement confirms his acceptance of Malevich as a guru of “the new,” and an artist who is hard to outdo—and with whom he himself now wanted to collaborate. “Malevich and I decided to write and publish as much literature as possible,”²⁰ he wrote regarding the content of the catalogue for the Tenth State Exhibition. Rodchenko’s genius lay in realizing that all he had to do was invert Malevich’s new creation: to come up with a concept that, together with Malevich’s series, would construct the dialectical condition rife with overcoming negation. With this in mind, Rodchenko flung himself into hyper production, and by New Year’s Day, 1919, he had done “[a]bout twenty-nine to thirty new pieces.”²¹

Rodchenko painted Black on Black during this marathon, yet he commenced his contest with Malevich with a retort not to White on White, but rather to Black Square. This made White on White a dialogical painting, synthesizing nonobjectivists’ voices of discontent toward this passionately debated canvas as anti-painting, as “nothing,”²² “philosophy of a square,” “a graphic scheme.”²³ Rodchenko ignored Malevich’s defensive warning that it would be impossible to avoid the square’s effect, and “destroys”²⁴ it by swirling its shape, rounding it off, and replacing the Suprematist trademark with a circle. Rodchenko turns Malevich’s “color realism” —“a smooth coloring in one paint”²⁵—into “painterly confusion,”²⁶ destroying the divided positions that the black and white colors have in Black Square. His palette in Black on Black reverberates his excitement about being able to buy “a few tubes of marvelous oil paints, including “black, ocher . . . whites,”²⁷ luckily obtained amid the “constant looking for food”²⁸ that was necessary during the Civil War. The fortunate abundance of painting materials (Rodchenko also obtained fifteen stretchers) resulted in an “exhaustion from painting” that Rodchenko described as “the most pleasurable thing.”²⁹ Black on Black exudes, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, “the pleasure of the painting.”

Yet some sections of this work contradict this kind of painterly sensation; these are covered with an unmodulated, dull black color, at times applied thickly, and like Black Square, full of craquelures. It is this “most unthankful”³⁰ form of the color black at which, to rephrase Rodchenko, color and brushwork die, that he employs in order to create the ultimate color reverses to Malevich’s White on White paintings. These are monochromatic compositions nos. 81, 82, and 84, for which the collective title Abstraction of Color and Discoloration, under which Rodchenko listed his black-on-black series in the Tenth State Exhibition’s catalogue, is particularly apt. Rodchenko describes them as “Black on Black. Elaboration of one color by means of different surface conditions. Destruction of color for the same material treatment of monotonality.”³¹ These canvases lack painterliness and gesticulation, and they offer no visual pleasure. They are not photogenic. The color black is a priori more aggressive than white, and perhaps this is why Rodchenko compensates this cold color with warm forms of “ovals, circles, ellipses”³² (similar shapes, can be found in Malevich’s white paintings now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). 

Black-on-black’s antagonistic aura served “Anti” well in his anti-Western agenda and also in his goal to create an artwork that no one would deem an imitation of Western art. Stepanova affirms Rodchenko’s success, saying that he “gave in the ‘blacks’ what the West has dreamt about, a true easel painting brought to the last point . . . one can now speak about new painterly realism.”³³ “The peculiarly Russian conceptions of faktura [texture],”³⁴ which preoccupied many leading avant-gardists in Russia, played a role in Rodchenko’s achievement. In fact, Malevich’s indifference to the effects of faktura was another reason why nonobjectivists criticized his work. This continued with the White on White series that, to them, lacked textural interest. Instead of painting, they said, Malevich covered works in paint. In contrast, in the black paintings, Rodchenko charted gradations within a single color by rendering it “shining, matt, faded, rough, smooth.”³⁵ This “triumphed”³⁶ faktura, and created a more complex relationship with the viewer. Stepanova observed that during the Tenth State Exhibition, “More serious [viewers] were less resentful of the black [paintings], which they perceived as something particularly abstract or maybe they simply did not see them.”³⁷ Presumably, viewers were not always able to focus on the black paintings due to the lack of familiar pictorial characteristics, in the absence of which, the paintings merged into actual space, revealing the objectness (predmetnost) of nonobjective forms and alluding to the end of painting. 

Unlike Malevich’s White on White series that I earlier referred to as an allegory of autonomous practice, the Black on Black paintings were not. This is because they were conceived within the logic of supplementarity in relation to White on White paintings. However, while making many black canvases, Rodchenko also conceived of his own example of pure anarchic creation. These are white sculptural objects, described as Assembled and Disassembled, that originated Rodchenko’s three series of “spatial constructions” and launched the laboratory period of Constructivism. It is conceivable that in his Assembled and Disassembled objects, Rodchenko was reacting to Malevich’s non-geometric and even non-Suprematist forms, which are rendered in a different shade of white (I am again referring to the paintings from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), this time recognizing the sculptural potential he fulfilled before Malevich made his “architectons” (1920). Stepanova describes Rodchenko’s state of joissance from process rather than product: “Anti is constructing sculpture, he loves it . . . it takes nothing for him to break everything and make the most amazing thing again. . . . he is so confident in the power of his creativity.”³⁸ For Rodchenko, the “game”³⁹ (his expression) of the materialization and dematerialization of an aesthetic object raised the degree of creative anarchism that he and Malevich propagated in their writing for Anarchy. Their shared platform of anarchist utopia allowed them to reconcile their differences with regards to nonobjective practice, establishing a dialectical and agonistic relationship. Malevich seemed to agree that the two-color match ended in a draw. “We should appear together,”⁴⁰ he proposed to Rodchenko after the exhibition’s opening.

Rodchenko’s comrade Osip Brik, a formalist critic and editor of the newspaper Art of the Commune, visited the Tenth State Exhibition and, according to Stepanova, the “‘Blacks’ brought [him] into amazement.”⁴¹ Perhaps Brik’s keen, leftist eye (brilliantly conceptualized by Rodchenko in an unpublished cover of LEF in 1924), observed a looming transition from faktura to factography in Rodchenko’s black paintings.⁴² Indeed, his later street photography, such as the series of images of the Building on Miasnitskaia Street (1925), the Brianskii Railway Station (1927), and Pine Trees (1927), filled Rodchenko with an unbounded sense of independence and creative freedom, as he wandered the streets of Moscow, climbed rooftops, and lay on the ground in resistance to photography’s conventional belly-button perspective. On becoming a commissioner of SVOMAS (Free state art studios), where Malevich already had a studio, Brik invited Rodchenko to join. For both artists, the school’s agenda of “maximum freedom for artists,”⁴³ the availability of work space, and the independent teaching curriculum, complemented their model of liberation from institutional constraints, middlemen, and anxiety over the production and distribution of art objects. “Nonobjective painting has left the museums, it is—the street, the square, the city and the entire world,”⁴⁴ asserted Rodchenko in 1920. With this statement, he reaffirms Malevich’s craving for an objectless avant-gardism, which the latter expressed two weeks after the Revolution, when he said: “I decided to declare myself the chairman of space. It makes me at ease, withdraws me, and I breath freely.”⁴⁵ Such a fantasy of nonobjective creation without borders was also invested into the white and black series, making them a symbol of the gap between what Malevich and Rodchenko had imagined and what the Bolshevik apparatus was preparing for them.

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The boundary between Socialist Realism and nonconformist art in the Eastern Bloc is increasingly considered to be fluid, rather than a clear bifurcation of diametrically opposed positions; the career of the East German artist Karl-Heinz Adler is a case in point. On June 8, 2018, the C-MAP Central and Eastern European research group visited Galerie EIGEN+ART in Berlin to view works by the independently minded artist and designer. Adler, born in 1927, lived and worked in the German Democratic Republic (GDR, 1949–90) throughout its existence, and in Germany until his death in 2018. Adler’s work did not fit into the framework of the socialist, realistic art prescribed by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, and so during its rule, he was not able to exhibit his fine art or to make a living as an artist, similar to other nonconformist artists of the period.¹ The official GDR policy toward artistic production was aligned with Socialist Realism as set out in the 1930s by the Russian Comintern: that cultural production should be relevant to the workers, depict scenes of everyday life, be made in a representational style, and support the aims of the Communist Party. In contrast, Adler created works of geometric abstraction and has done so since the 1950s. It fascinates me that the East German state allowed companies to commission works of design by Adler in this abstract geometric style, even while refusing to support his fine art practice, which displays an identical aesthetic. In its contradiction, Adler’s career in the GDR illustrates the uneven enforcement and changing interpretation at a local level of Socialist Realism, a style of art often mistakenly considered to be as static and monolithic as the then-prevalent busts of Lenin.²

Constructivist Adler

I begin with the format. The format is partitioned on the edges in height and width. One, two, three, four horizontally, one, two, three, four vertically, and then the points are connected. If I want, I apply a grey-white palette in advance and retain the characteristic style. I then take two colors and layer them: one time, two times, three times, four times, five times, six times, seven times. And then work in the opposite direction: one, two, three, four, five. I’ve then achieved my goal: nuancing the color field. The color spaces obtained in this way are divided up according to the rules, based on the network, and then reshaped through my joining the structural components into fascinating, object-like images of organic regularity that differ in shape and color, like we are familiar with in an analogue way from natural phenomena.“³ —Karl-Heinz Adler

Adler approaches the building of form with simple shapes that can be layered and rotated. He ascribes this analytic and constructive approach to his apprenticeship as a textile designer at a carpet factory.⁴ Exploring the variations and rhythms that can be achieved with a single form, Adler cuts shapes out of paper that he then arranges serially on the page in what he calls Schichtungen (layerings). The artist has said of this process, “I wanted to point out the wide range of different possibilities there are in the original form on which these spaces are based.”⁵ A reduced color palette, often consisting of only two colors, focuses the viewer’s attention on the dimensionality, depth, and movement that can be created with an economy of means. Adler began to create constructive collages in 1957 and 1958, a little less than a decade after the foundation of the new GDR. To me, this recalls the Russian Constructivist artists who, amid the turmoil of the Russian Revolution of 1917, visually broke down the world to start anew, with a goal of using art to help build a new society. However, in Adler’s case, his works, from their very beginning, existed in tension with the official policy of supported art.

Adler’s early explorations of geometric abstraction occurred in parallel with Minimalism, Op art, and Concrete art, abstract movements that were emerging in the West. Yet he was isolated from these developments to a great degree. While artists whose work was supported by the East German state had some freedom to travel or exhibit in Western Europe, Adler did not. His travel in these years was limited to countries that were politically aligned with the GDR, such as Poland. For Adler, knowledge of Constructivism or its legacy in Europe, such as at the German-based Bauhaus, came more from a limited supply of books and word of mouth.⁶ Adler has, nevertheless, worked with geometric abstract forms throughout his career. In addition to his early training in textile design, he cites nature as an influence on his forms: “In our developments, we always used a simple grid as a starting point. It then developed and grew organically, as also occurs in nature.”⁷ Though Adler was working in a place that limited his exposure to international art trends, it seems that observation of the natural world helped him to pursue abstract and serial forms.

Architectural Decoration

I wanted to make the elements in such a way that they result in new aesthetic design possibilities again and again.⁸ —Karl-Heinz Adler

In parallel to his fine art, Adler created systems of architectural decoration that, strongly connected to his abstract, constructivist explorations on paper, were used for public buildings and spaces throughout East Germany. Adler has said that concentrating on environmental design and building-related art “was the easiest way to be able to do something” within the narrow definition of supported art in East Germany.⁹ In this way, he contributed to the building of a new society in East Germany—even while choosing an abstract visual language more closely resembling Constructivism than the style of Socialist Realism associated with the Communist revolution in the GDR.

In the 1950s, Adler began working with Friedrich Kracht, an artist who had also trained in the applied arts.¹⁰ Adler wanted to create productive systems that could be applied to architecture and environmental design. Together, he and Kracht developed modular systems whose parts could be combined by workers and builders in different ways to generate varied abstract surface patterns. This idea of serial systems could be—and was—applied to everyday objects including walls, fountains, and playgrounds. Adler recalls the popularity of the modular construction sets for playgrounds, for example: “The children loved that equipment. It stood in nearly every daycare center and on almost every playground.”¹¹

In 1960, Adler and Kracht joined a production cooperative of visual artists called Kunst am Bau (Art in Architecture) in Dresden.¹² As part of this group, in 1968, the pair developed a concrete breeze-block construction kit called a “Fassadenformsteinsystem” (Façade-form-stone system), which consisted of twelve modular forms.¹³ This system was used to produce ornamental concrete surfaces for partitions in public space, facade elements, and decorative columns, among other things. The Berlin-based construction company VEB Stuck und Naturstein put the model into production in 1970, and it soon shaped the appearance of new urban building in East Germany. A 1973 catalogue disseminated information about this façade-form system throughout the GDR, resulting in a burgeoning of concrete walls throughout the country. An example of the Fassadenformsteinsystem appears to this day on the side of the undulating Pullman Hotel Newa in Dresden, a project dating to 1970.

To understand why Adler’s geometric abstraction might seem radical, one could cite examples that the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group saw in the state–planned industrial town of Eisenhüttenstadt, such as a stained-glass window in a former kindergarten and the ceramic mural on the facade of a state–planned apartment building.¹⁴ Both examples correspond to Socialist Realist principles of legible, recognizable forms. One example of abstract architectural decoration that the group encountered during its research trip is Hermann Glöckner’s 1957 color pillar at the Technical University of Dresden. But Glöckner’s nonconformist experiment in geometric building decoration is a single example within a university building, and less visible than the mass-produced designs created through Adler and Kracht’s Fassadenformsteinsystem.

Career Since Reunification

It was only in 1982 that Adler exhibited his works on paper in the GDR. Galerie Mitte, a small gallery in Dresden, displayed Adler’s collages and serial line drawings in a show titled Grafik und entwurfe zur baubezogenen kunst (Artwork and Design for Construction-Related Art), and subsequently featured Adler in a exhibition with Hermann Glöckner in 1984. Even this limited exhibition history reflects the loosening of restrictions since the strict party control of the 1950s.¹⁵ Works on paper by Adler were also exhibited in Malmö in 1984¹⁶; in this and other cases, the artist would smuggle work out of the GDR either by mail or in a suitcase that he carried to Poland.¹⁷ Since the reunification of Germany, Adler’s career as a fine artist has changed significantly. He was appointed guest professor at the highly regarded Dusseldorfer Art Academy in 1990. Prior to his death in November 2018, Adler exhibited more and more widely, including in the 2017 exhibition Karl-Heinz Adler. Ganz Konkret (Karl-Heinz Adler: Very Concrete) at the Albertinuum in Dresden and the 2018 exhibition Karl-Heinz Adler és a magyar absztrakció (Karl-Heinz Adler and Hungarian Abstraction) shown concurrently at two venues in Budapest, the Kassák and Kiscelli Museums.¹⁸

A similar approach—the productive building of form through geometric shape—guided Adler’s fine art practice and his design work. The GDR’s decision to allow only the architectural design to operate in the public realm speaks to the limits of what was permissible in the interpretation of Socialist Realism for the building of the East German state. Given the state’s resistance to alternative aesthetics, it is all the more remarkably that Adler impacted everyday life in East Germany through his innovative technical and design products.

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To stay alive—psychologically, creatively—the black South African sculptor and painter Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) managed to leave home.¹ On September 2, 1938, he boarded the SS Balmoral Castle in Cape Town, destined for Southampton, England.² Mancoba’s berth on the steamship, and his concomitant personal and artistic rebirth, resulted from protracted negotiations with liberal patrons who finally agreed to fund a year of study in Paris.³ Many South African artists had already traveled to Paris and other European capitals since the nineteenth century,⁴ but Mancoba was the first black artist to do so. He would not revisit South Africa until after the end of apartheid, and would never live there again.⁵

Arriving in Southampton on September 19, Mancoba went directly to London, where he spent a week before continuing on to Paris.⁶ Aside from meeting a few contacts,⁷ he made use of his time in London by visiting the African collections at the British Museum. Some two years earlier, Mancoba had first encountered canonical West and Central African sculpture in a library in Cape Town, in the pages of a lavishly illustrated book entitled Primitive Negro Sculpture.⁸ Despite its unfortunate title, the book’s discovery in Cape Town marked a turning point for the young artist because it catalyzed his embrace of modernism, which to him meant a rough geometric aesthetic modeled on African sculpture.⁹ Mancoba would see a full African art collection for the first time in London.

To the fortuitous benefit of art history, Mancoba happened to tour the British Museum with an inquisitive writer who published an anonymously bylined article the next month (as “Our Special Representative”) relating the following: 

The rest of the story of Ernest Mancoba’s work was told me [sic] in the African room of the British Museum. For a time he was what I can only call passionately absorbed in the primitive art of his people, the carved stools, the figures of fighters, of great tribe-leaders, of women and children. “Look,” he said to me, “they are all serene. Do you know why? My carvings are made to show Africa to the white man. That is why they are sad. These primitive artists were working for the preservation of the group-life. The artists, with the chiefs and priests, are the great leaders of the world. In Africa they carved figures strong and beautiful and free because they wished to lead the people of their tribe to strength, to beauty and to freedom. ¹⁰

As recounted by the writer, Mancoba remembered his earlier “carvings” as compromised products of the colonial order. Conceived under church and liberal patronage, those sculptures were “sad”; they aimed only “to show Africa to the white man.” The “sad” designation probably did not apply to Mancoba’s recent modernism, but rather to his early production commissioned through the Diocesan Training College at Grace Dieu, an Anglican training college for black schoolteachers in the northern Transvaal Province (now Limpopo), where he had learned wood carving starting around 1925.¹¹

On first glance, Mancoba’s early sculptures do not seem so despairing as he later believed. Future Africa (1934), for example, is ostensibly cheery, figuring two African youths as torchbearers for the continent’s bright future. The sculpture’s reassuring representation of Africans garnered endorsements from liberal critics and patrons.¹² It is nonetheless pertinent that Future Africabecame “sad” once Mancoba stood appreciating African art in the British Museum in 1938. Quitting South Africa must have yielded a new perspective, and Future Africa betrays desolation upon closer inspection: the boys’ heads are bowed, their eyes downcast, their postures resigned. On a formal level, too, Future Africa arguably undermines its own emancipatory message by failing to break free of colonially imposed academicism.¹³

Mancoba’s contrasting, redemptive reading of African art at the British Museum—“all serene,” “strong and beautiful and free”—suggests a certain penchant for idealism and dreamed-up nostalgia. Still, the artist’s oeuvre would come nowhere close to replicating the romantic “primitivism” of, say, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) in the South Pacific, or Irma Stern (1894–1966) in Southern Africa.¹⁴ Soon after arriving in Paris on September 27, Mancoba began attending classes at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, where he befriended several artists associated with the Danish Abstract Surrealist group Linien: Christian Poulsen (1911–1991), Ejler Bille (1910–2004), and Sonja Ferlov (1911–1984).¹⁵ Communicating in English, Mancoba and the Danes shared an outsider status in Paris, as well as common interests in modernism and African sculpture.

Although canonical African sculpture had initially informed Mancoba’s modernism, and would inform it subsequently, his practice took a different turn in 1939 after his experience in London and at the start of his relationship with the Danes. Not only did he stop making three-dimensional work, but he also jettisoned any ambition toward representation. To cease production of “sad” images, the artist fully—if momentarily—embraced abstraction. Two surviving watercolors from this period adopt an elementary visual grammar: straight lines and pure color. In one composition, pale swaths of blue, red, and orange-brown make up a shallow plane overlaid with black rosettes. The other composition suggests a spherical space, with crosshatched grids permeating a cloud of soft hues. Given the artist’s particular trajectory, his abstractions hint at something personal and political mapped onto a new formal horizon. Abstraction, for Mancoba, meant turning his back on South African patrons’ demands for sanguine images of “native” life.

Instantiating those demands—and setting the stage for the abstract turn—was a job offer Mancoba received from the South African government’s Department of Native Affairs in the spring of 1936.¹⁶ Dr. N. J. van Warmelo, a Native Affairs ethnologist, hoped to hire Mancoba to craft saleable souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg, scheduled for that fall.¹⁷ Echoing Warmelo’s aims, press coverage from this period reinforced common colonialist conceptions of black artists as instinct-driven traditionalists and representatives of their “race.”¹⁸ Mancoba initially accepted the offer, which carried a certain privilege and would guarantee steady work. But he subsequently reconsidered the position and refused it, pivoting instead toward Paris.¹⁹

Mancoba’s challenge to art history partly involves learning to interpret his circa 1939 abstraction—and “black” abstraction more broadly. Whereas Euro-American art genealogies tend to be discussed in terms of ideas and imagination, tout court, art from outside that realm still often gets pegged to artists’ identities, and framed as the product of experiences marked as “other.” Some black artists historically have responded to such formulas by seeking to evade them, notably by way of abstraction. In noting that Mancoba’s 1939 watercolors anticipated abstract art among African-descended modernists elsewhere, the lesson is not one of establishing precedence but rather of seeing parallels across contexts—including a perennial insistence on pigeonholing artists of color, irrespective of the nature of their work. Wherever the artist seeks to escape compartmentalization, the critic or scholar works at cross-purposes by qualifying his/her abstraction as “African” or “black.”

Art historian Darby English, researching the painter Ed Clark (born 1926) and other postwar African-American abstractionists, has found “the urge for symmetry between biography and picture-effects [to be] so strong in black art history that the turbulent color work in the art is impotent next to the sureness that it, or something in the picture, reflects back all the unassailable epistemological stability of [. . .] racial blackness.”²⁰ Surveying the South African context, historian Daniel Magaziner has similarly charged that art history may “share with the apartheid state the conviction that as black artists, individual creators approached their canvas, wood, or stone with a set of predictable concerns born of their supposed racial identity—to be political or not, to be ‘modern’ or ‘traditional.’ Who they were thought to be determines how we understand their work.”²¹ These statements, and the important recent studies from which they are drawn, grapple with complications and difficulties involved in reconciling “black” and “art.” Racial and political dimensions to art-making cannot be expunged with the will to abstraction. But neither can they be taken as all determining. As Mancoba’s work reveals, abstraction could itself be a form of retaliation against racialist orthodoxies, executed with freedom in mind. Such moves are nuanced and complex even as they relate back to a basic question: how might it look to be simply human, yet extraordinarily alive?

In the event, Mancoba’s signature style required one more decisive move. Rather than stay with nonobjective painting, the artist reintegrated the human form in a radically new configuration devised by appropriating figural and design elements from the African canon.²² Mancoba’s Composition (1940)—his first effort in this vein and his first-ever painting on canvas—imaginatively “modernizes” a Congolese Kuba mask (as art historian Elza Miles has convincingly proposed)²³ by integrating flat chevrons, geometric shapes, and grids. Did Mancoba stray from nonobjectivity for the reason that hypothetically, once emptied of all signs of identity, his art could appear to have been made by anyone? Since authors of abstract art around this time were presumptively European descended, the resultant confusion would hardly suit an African modernist intent on overturning assimilationist doctrines underpinning imperial “civilizing missions.” For Mancoba and others of his generation, complete abstraction carried a danger of signaling alienation, in the sense of posing or passing as something foreign. Perhaps to preempt any such misreading while retaining key lessons from abstraction, Mancoba reintroduced elements from African material culture and abstracted them, resulting in a deep amalgamation of indigenous African and modernist European formal aesthetics. This tactic would continue to animate Mancoba’s production in the decades to come.

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This theme was developed to share information about works and artists that are part of the Cisneros gift. The original content items in this theme are listed below.

To read more about the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America click here.

A Trove of (Latin American) Art

Jerónimo Duarte Riascos

Hélio Oiticica’s Painting 9

Starr Figura

Mira Schendel’s Graphic Object

Sarah Suzuki

Raúl Lozza’s Invention no. 150

Laura Hoptman

Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Physichromie 21

Anne Umland

Hércules Barsotti’s Ink Drawings

Christophe Cherix

Alejandro Otero’s Colorhythms

Luis Pérez-Oramas

Gego’s Stream No. 7

Luis Pérez-Oramas

Willys de Castro’s Active Object (Yellow)

Samantha Friedman

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