Adventures in the Print Trade: Hard-edge

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Shapes of colour

The exhibition Vormen van de kleur at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 20.11.1966-15.1.1967 was curated by W. A. L. Beeren. The exhibition title was given in English as New Shapes of Color. The work of 37 artists representing the Hard-edge abstract movement was shown, including Josef Albers, Max Bill, Victor Vasarely, Alexander Liberman, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Robyn Denny, Robert Indiana, and Donald Judd. Four artists - Kelly, Bonies, Pfahler, and Turnbull - contributed original screenprints (serigraphs) to the catalogue, which was printed in an edition of 2200 copies. My copy of this delightful work has one further interest, in that it comes from the library of the American artists Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn.

The ownership stamp of Ben Shahn and Bernarda Bryson Shahn

Ellsworth Kelly has long been a hero of mine, and I like the deceptive simplicity of this print. Apparently this was the second screenprint he made, and I'm sorry my wonky photograph doesn't do its crisp lines justice. Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, Kelly is still alive and creating art. From June 5 to September 3 this year the Metropolitan Museum in New York will be exhibiting Ellsworth Kelly Plant Drawings. For those who think of him only as a severely minimalist painter and sculptor, the plant drawings will come as an amazing revelation. They show how closely he looks at the natural world, and how he extrapolates the shapes, curves, and divided spaces of his abstract art from that close observation. I was bowled over by the joint exhibition of plant drawings by Kelly and Matisse at the Pompidou Centre a few years ago, and this one will be unmissable, for those who can get to it.

Ellsworth Kelly, Untitled

Screenprint, 1966

The Dutch artist Bob Bonies was born in the Hague in 1937. He studied art in The Hague and Stockholm. His art looks back to Mondrian, Albers, and the group de Stijl as well as sideways to contemporaries such as Ellsworth Kelly and Olle Baertling (with whom he was closely associated in the 1960s). Bob Bonies has restricted himself to just four colours plus white: the primary colours red, yellow, and blue, and green as the complementary colour of red. The de Stijl motto "Less is more" is equally applicable to the pared-down yet perfectly balanced art of Bonies.

Bob Bonies, Untitled

Screenprint, 1966

Georg-Karl Pfahler was born in Emetzheim in 1926. Pfahler studied at the Fine Art Academies of Nuremberg and Stuttgart. Initially influenced by Action Painting and Art Informel, in the 1960s Georg-Karl Pfahler turned to Hard-Edge Abstraction, influenced by artists such as Josef Albers. Georg-Karl Pfahler was the only German Hard-Edge painter. He also worked in three dimensions, and was involved in numerous architectural projects. He died in Emetzheim in 2002.

Georg-Karl Pfahler, Untitled

Screenprint, 1966

The Scottish minimalist sculptor and painter William Turnbull was born in Dundee in 1922. After WWII, in which he served in the RAF, Turnbull attended the Slade. Being out of sympathy with the Neo-Romanticism of the painting department at that time, Turnbull changed over to sculpture, where he befriended Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson. In 1950 Turnbull and Paolozzi had a joint show at the Hanover Gallery in London. In New York in 1957 William Turnbull met Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who became a close friend.

William Turnbull, Untitled

Screenprint, 1966

The text of the catalogue consists of a short introduction by Edy de Wilde, the director of the Stedelijk Museum, an essay by W. A. L. Beeren, the four screenprints, and individual pages on each of the featured artists. A nice touch at the end is a list of the artists' addresses - almost all of them give their home addresses rather than a dealer or gallery.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The world as non-objectivity

Olle Baertling (1911-1981)
Rimi
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1961

From the moment Kazimir Malevich, just before the Russian Revolution, revolutionised art itself with his painting Black Square, the story of art has been bound up with the search for ways in which to communicate human emotions, ideas, and beliefs, in terms of pure line, geometry, and colour planes. Malevich’s new abstract art was called by him Suprematism, though it is more usually known to us by a name Malevich himself introduced as a term of abuse, Constructivism. It is concerned with “The world as non-objectivity”, as the title of Malevich’s treatise of 1926 put it.

Victor Vasarely
OB
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1956

Abstract art so quickly swallowed up critical attention that whole areas of figurative art still remain unexplored. Women artists, for instance, barely had time to get accepted before it was unacceptable for them to explore pictorially the female domestic world. Even an artist as devoted to the everyday beauties of the home as Winifred Nicholson found herself painting constructivist abstracts in the 1930s, under the influence of her friend Piet Mondrian and the artists of the group Abstraction-Création.

Hans Arp (1886-1966)
Placé selon les lois de hazard
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting (or collage?) of 1951

I’ve been tipped into thinking about the geometry of feeling by a new acquisition, the catalogue to an important group exhibition at the Galerie Denise René, Paris, in 1964. The title of both catalogue and exhibition is Hard-edge.

Richard Paul Lohse (1902-1988)
Farbenenergien in vier richtungen
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1950

As Josef Albers writes in his written contribution:

Hard-edge
so far a suspected noun
of fashionable art terminology
but changing fast to an adjective
of decidedness
and thus on the way
to signal something more.

Josef Albers (1888-1976)
Homage to the square
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1963

The exhibition gathered work by nine artists: Albers, Hans (Jean) Arp, Olle Baertling, Auguste Herbin, Alexander Liberman, Richard Paul Lohse, Richard Mortensen, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Victor Vasarely.

Richard Mortensen (1910-1933)
Tavignano
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1964

The catalogue contains statements by each of them (apart from Sophie Tauber-Arp, who died in 1943, who is given a heartfelt memorial by her widower, Hans). Hans Arp dates Sophie’s first pure abstract works to 1915 and 1916, subtly arguing for her as co-creator with Malevich and Kandinsky of the non-objective world. “Already in 1916 Sophie Taeuber was dividing the surface of her watercolours in squares and rectangles which she juxtaposed horizontally and vertically.”

Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943)
Intervalles
Silkscreen (by Hans Arp?) of 1964 after a painting of 1934
The catalogue also contains nine silkscreen prints (or serigraphs), one by each artist. The one by Taeuber-Arp is after a work from 1934; it was presumably supervised, or executed, by Hans Arp, though no details are given for this or the other works.

Looking at the sheer visual richness of these nine silkscreens got me thinking about the way that abstract art managed both to insist that everything that was happening on the picture plane only existed in two dimensions, and simultaneously that the picture plane was a window into a previously unrealised dimension (what Malevich himself called "the fourth dimension"). As Lawrence Alloway writes in his brief introduction to the cataloque, in hard-edge painting, “What you see is precisely what there is. Yet what you see is usually optically ambiguous. Positive and negative forms interact as shapes in hard-edge, united in a single plane.”

Auguste Herbin (1882-1960)
Nue
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1960

I love this kind of work. Mondrian, Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sean Scully are among my favourite artists. But I haven’t gone out of my way to collect abstract prints, and within my abstract holdings there are more exuberantly expressionist works by artists such as Walasse Ting or Sam Francis than there are severely geometric ones. Yet the provocative simplicities of the hard-edge silkscreens remind me how potent such work can be. As Alexander Liberman writes in the catalogue, “In order for sensation to act upon us with the greatest intensity we have to cleanse our minds of the accumulated deposits of art memories. A painting should by its apparent simplicity act with such immediacy that the innermost centers of the mind can be reached without hesitation and time for reference to our memory or doubt centers.”

Alexander Liberman (1912-1999)
Socrate
Silkscreen of 1964 after a painting of 1962

Much of my other work in this vein comes from a single source, the book Témoignages pour l’art abstrait (Testimonies for Abstract Art), published in 1952 in an edition of 1500 copies. In this, major artists of the day put forward their theories of abstraction, and each contributed an original pochoir plate, the pochoir colours being stencilled by Renson. Among the artists were Arp, Herbin, Mortensen, and Vasarely, overlapping with Hard-edge, but also Bloc, Dewasne, Deyrolles, Dias, Domela, Pillet, Reth, and many others. A few related images from this work follow, without any attempt at description.