Modernism's Neglected Side

By ROBERT HUGHES

Some art seeks the edge, tries to break the boundary. And other art struggles to refine, integrate, bring the past forward into the present. Who, in the end, can say with assurance which is the more valuable? This is the main question posed by "On Classic Ground," this summer's main show at the Tate Gallery in London.

The show's subtitle, "Picasso, Leger, De Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930," only hints at the size of the field it covers. Its broad subject is the classical revival that spread through South European art -- mainly French, Italian and Spanish -- in the wake of World War I and formed a kind of counterweight to the fragmentation of cubism and feverish alienation of dada, expressionism and surrealism.

Up to now this diffuse movement has been dismissed with the name given it by Jean Cocteau: le rappel a l'ordre, the call to order. The custom has been to see it as a hiatus in the forward drive of modernism -- at best a faltering of energy, and at worst an Arcadian sham, a rehearsal for the coarse, repressive state art of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. This show is the first to take an inquisitive and fair-minded look at it. The curators, Elizabeth Cowling of Edinburgh University and Jennifer Mundy of the Tate, have done an admirably lucid job of presenting the material, sympathetic but without inflated claims.

One of the exhibition's key paintings is a little-known Picasso, Studies, from 1920. It looks like a detail from the wall of his studio on which a number of postcards of his own works have been arranged, in all their diversity of style: cubist still lifes reproduced in miniature, but also a woman's head and two hands done in the rotund "classical" manner he adopted after 1919. The emblems of fragmentation (both cubist and antique) share the same pictorial space, essentially that of a collage, with those of an equally intense longing for stability and wholeness. It is a singularly moving image because it speaks so frankly of multiple desires, declaring how the restless archmodernist was also immersed in Mediterranean antiquity and the fiction of timeless art. And yet its nostalgia is part of its modernity.

If there is a single event in history to which the call to order can be linked, it is World War I. The appalling chaos, the industrialization of death, the grinding of a whole generation into the mud of France by advanced technology -- these spelled an end to positivist fantasies of human progress. And after the carnage of the trenches, who but a cretin or a fascist could echo the futurists' rhetoric about war as the hygiene of civilization? To many artists it must have seemed that picking up the pieces had priority over more fragmentation.

One sees this impulse at its clearest in Giorgio De Chirico, the Italian painter. De Chirico seems to have taken the futurists' calls to trash the museums very much to heart: after 1918 he appointed himself the defender of tradition, making copies of old masters and vehemently rebuking other modernists for their technical ignorance and historical provincialism. Although very little of what De Chirico painted after 1920 can claim the poetic intensity of his early "metaphysical" work, we are a long way from the surrealist prejudice that dismissed everything De Chirico did after his 30th birthday as rubbish. But De Chirico's classicism is never secure. As Cowling and Mundy point out, it is relativistic, deeply Nietzschean in its anxiety and riven by contradictions. The striking thing about a painting like Roman Women, 1926, is its lack of classical poise: the artist invokes the massive bodies of Roman statuary, but only to subvert their solidity with curious, glaring patches of inappropriate color.

Nostalgia for the classical destroyed a good part of De Chirico's reputation, and it did no good to Andre Derain's either. A prejudice against Derain still lingers; one is assured that his real importance to modern art finished with his fauve years. Yet who could look at a Derain like The Bagpiper, 1911, poetic, noble and formally coherent in the highest degree, without sensing that his best work came after fauvism, and that he has been valued for exactly the wrong reasons?

With his contemporaries Matisse, Leger and Braque, of course, this was not a problem. All three were great integrative artists who breathed the air of French classicism throughout their lives. Matisse's prewar paintings, with their naked figures in glades of pure color, their utterly deceptive, agrestic simplicity, are the link between Poussin's world and the modern one. Leger's Three Women, 1921, is as self-consciously a masterpiece as any salon painting up to and including Seurat's Grande Jatte, and its nudes have the perfect dispassionateness of ancient kouroi.

Italy had no modern equivalent to these artists, which may be why its classical reaction against futurism went for a more theatrical imitation of older models. Baroque and rococo were out; painters went back to the roots of the quattrocento, to Bellini's clarity and Mantegna's chiseled line, to the columnar forms and ideal spaces of Piero della Francesca, the primitive tactile grandeur of Masaccio. If one had to pick a single painting that epitomized the movement, it would be Felice Casorati's portrait of Silvana Cenni, 1922, with its silvery tones, excruciating care of drawing, unreal silence and above all its deliberate evocation of Piero's Madonna della Misericordia. Some of the artists admired and worked for Mussolini (though not all: Giorgio Morandi was quite apolitical). But it is absurd to infer from the politics of some of its creators that Italian "new classicism" can be dismissed as art, just as it is naive to think that Ezra Pound's or T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism invalidates the Pisan Cantos or The Waste Land as literature.

The "antiquity" of the 1920s was not simply a rehash of the antiquity venerated by neoclassicists a century before. Provincial antiquity seemed less mined out and more alive than mainstream classicism. Thus in Italy -- Massimo Campigli's painting, for instance, or Marino Marini's sculpture -- the % emphasis shifted from Roman marbles and Greek urns to the rougher, more vital- looking frescoes and terra-cottas of the Etruscans. The idea was to recapture a sense of antiquity that connoted a spirit of place, an Arcadian flavor, more Hesiodic than Augustan.

This comes through very strongly in the work of the Catalan artist Joaquim Sunyer (1874-1956), chief painter in the Noucentista group, a circle of artists and writers who reacted against art nouveau in Barcelona after 1906. Sunyer's Pastoral, 1910-11, was owned by Joan Maragall, Catalonia's finest modernist poet, who wrote about it as a virtual icon of national identity: "Consider the woman in Sunyer's Pastoral -- she is the embodiment of the landscape; she . . . is not there by chance: she is destiny." It was out of that conservatism -- the cult of the parental farmhouse as the model of Catalan society -- that Joan Miro (before he reacted into surrealism) created his detailed and almost fanatically ordered images of life on his father's property at Montroig, whose climax is The Farm, 1921-22. This is the first exhibition to give Catalan Noucentisme its due place in the general pattern of modern art, and for that alone it is a valuable and original show.

But there are larger reasons for seeing it. It reminds us of how ideologically determined the "revolutionary" view of 20th century art has been. One of the pernicious illusions about modernism lies in treating it as a continuous struggle against the past, as though every real artist were his own Oedipus. In fact, the house of inspiration is much larger than avant-gardist rhetoric has ever allowed. The great transformers of art history, like Picasso or Matisse, were also its great conservators. The idea that one tradition was killed stone-dead in 1907, when Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and that another was born from the act, is nonsense. Perhaps there is no such thing as a deep or genuinely important art based solely on innovation.

Certainly no artist before World War I would have thought so. The real issue has always been discovery and use, not dismissal, of the mighty energies of the past -- compared with which the fetish of innovation and the claims of revolution are mostly chatter.