Re Inventing Abstraction: 1910 - 1925

Guillaume Apollinaire+

Two features prepared the poet Guillaume Apollinaire to become one of abstraction’s most effective proponents: his savvy command of Paris’s thriving print-media industry of the 1910s and his impressive social skills. He was a prolific critic who contributed to both specialized cultural reviews and mass-circulated dailies. Apollinaire wrote a column that appeared most days in the newspaper L’Itransigeant and another for Paris-Journal. n 1912, he launched a review of his own, Les Soirées de Paris, which published poetry and cultural commentary of all sorts—reviews, feuilletons, and the poet’s polemical pieces on the direction of painting. Apollinaire was so keenly attuned to developments in the visual arts that he often anticipated and even set the agenda for radical shifts in artistic practice. In February of 1912, just as a handful of artists in Europe and the United States began to abandon figurative references in their work, he declared, “Young painters of the extreme schools want to make pure painting, an entirely new art form. It is only at its beginning, and not yet as abstract as it wants to be.”

Apollinaire was much more than an astute critic for the artists he championed. Dubbed “the most social, the most well-known, the most far-reaching man of his time,” by the dancer Gabrielle Buffet, he appeared to be friends with almost everyone in Paris’s buzzing art world, and he was a warm acquaintance of many working beyond France’s borders. The list of activities, hobbies, and feats that put him at the center of international artistic innovation is long: Apollinaire introduced Pablo Picasso to Georges Braque in 1907, for example, launching one of the most fruitful artistic collaborations of the early 20th century. He dropped in on meetings of the Puteaux group, adding his voice to debates among its regular members, including Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Fernand Léger, Gino Severini, and František Kupka. He traveled with Robert Delaunay to Germany and met with Vasily Kandinsky and other Germany Expressionists. He enjoyed long road trips with Picabia, and exchanged magazines with Alfred Stieglitz, who was working in New York.

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Theo Van Doesburg+

Theo van Doesburg wrote to his colleage, the architect J.J.P. Oud, in 1920 to complain, "It is impossible to breathe any new life into Holland. I am therefore focusing particularly on other countries." His comment may have captured a moment of exasperation for the dutch artist, but it hardly betrayed a dramatic re-conception of his ideal audience. Van Doesburg, best known as one of De Stijl's most industrious proponents, started publishing articles on art, architecture, and design as early as 1912, frequently in foreign publications. He habitually adopted pseudonyms to mask his identity and better fit the profile a typical contributor to the jourals he admired. I.K. Bonset became Van Doesburg's go-to moniker in Dada-affiliated magazines, while Aldo Camini provided an easier fit for Italian Futurist publications. As a co-founder and the sole editor of the journal De Stijl after 1917, he maintained a distinctly multinational purview. The magazine's manifesto, published in four languages, pledged to "work for the formation of an international unity in Life, Art and Culture."

Already well equipped with a dense network of professional and social contacts, Van Doesburg moved to Germany in 1921 after a tour through Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. He set up his studio in Weimar, home of the Bauhaus, and began offering controversial but nonetheless influential courses on De Stijl's approach to art making and design. In May 1922 he helped organize the Dusseldorf Congress of International Progressive Artists, and in September of that year he spearheaded efforts behind the congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar. Its attendees included Lucia and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hans Richter, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, Cornelis van Eesteren, and El Lissitzky.

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Sonia Delaunay-Terk +

Sonia Terk, better known by her married name, Delaunay-Terk, moved from Russia to France in 1905, but she remained closely connected to artists and critics back home. In the summer of 1913 the Russian literary scholar Aleksandr Smirnov visited Sonia and her husband, Robert Delaunay, in Paris. Returning to his native St. Petersburg, Smirnov spread the word of the new art he had seen, lecturing at the famous Stray Dog café, an avant-garde gathering place, on the Delaunays’ latest work and their theory of simultaneous contrasts. He brought with him posters, made by Sonia for his presentation, and a copy of the book she had created in collaboration with the poet Blaise Cendrars.

The works by Delaunay-Terk that Smirnov exhibited revealed her intense interest in the applied arts as well as traditional fine-art mediums. In addition to designing books and posters, she worked as a successful interior decorator and as a textile and fashion designer. Combining brilliant hues and curvilinear abstract shapes, Delaunay-Terk’s signature objects ventured a visual equivalent for the dynamic experience of modern urban life. They gained an international audience through the promotional efforts of supporters like Smirnov and Guillaume Apollinaire and inclusion in multinational exhibitions. The catalogue for the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German autumn salon), held at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1913, lists four paintings, 13 book bindings, a decorated lamp and lampshade, a curtain, two cushions, three bowls, and a simultaneous poster by Delaunay-Terk.

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Francis Picabia +

One evening in late July 1912, Francis Picabia, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and the composer Claude Debussy set out on a road trip. After a night of drinking at the Bar de la Paix in Paris, they packed into one of Picabia’s many expensive cars and drove to Boulogne to catch a boat to England, where the artist’s wife, Gabrielle Buffet, was vacationing. On the return trip to Paris, they got into a heated debate about abstract painting, which they referred to as “pure painting.” Picabia offered a passionate defense, asking, “Are blue and red unintelligible? Are not the circle and the triangle, volumes and colors, as intelligible as this table?” The conversation was transformative: Picabia completed two enormous abstract paintings, La Source (The spring) and Danses à la source (Dances at the spring), in its wake.

Moving between Paris, New York, and Barcelona in the 1910s, Picabia positioned himself as a spokesperson for the international avant-garde. In numerous interviews published in conjunction with New York’s infamous Armory Show of 1913, he promoted abstraction as a means of expressing subjective moods and emotions, often employing musical analogies as justification. On other occasions he couched his argument in formal terms, declaring that abstract painting laid bare “the purest part of the abstract reality of form and color in itself.” Picabia’s own abstract works, however, often issued from far less “pure” sources, such as his abiding fascination with modern spectacle, performance, and eroticism.

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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti +

In late June 1911, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, Carlo Carrà, and Umberto Boccioni set out for an evening at Caffè Giubbe Rosse in Florence. At the tail end of what was no doubt a night of incendiary speeches and provocative proclamations, Boccioni turned a verbal confrontation into a physical one by slapping the artist Ardengo Soffici in the face. The brawl escalated, and both artists ended up at the police station. But by the next day, they were on friendly terms, exchanging ideas about the future of art making in Italy and beyond. All told, it was a typical night out for the Futurists, a rambunctious band of poets and artists who advocated a violent break with past traditions and prophesied a new art for the modern day.

The poet Marinetti, Futurism’s founder and most strident promoter, outlined the group’s aims in its most famous manifesto, “Manifeste de fondation du Futurisme" (Manifesto of the foundation of Futurism), published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in February 1909. Marinetti exalted the speed of modern machinery, the cleansing power of war, and the excitement of great crowds, industry, and technology—passions that his artist colleagues translated into Futurism’s most radically abstract paintings, sculptures, and designs. The poet’s enthusiasm fueled his resolute efforts to spread Futurism’s message, as he delivered seemingly countless polemical speeches on tours that carried him as far as Moscow and London.

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Hans Arp +

The son of a German father and a French-Alsatian mother, Arp was called by both French and German names (Hans Peter Wilhelm and Jean Pierre Guillaume) and grew up speaking both languages. He traveled widely as a young artist and became a founding member of the Moderner Bunde in Lucerne in 1910. Soon thereafter, he joined forces with Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc’s Blaue Reiter group, publishing several works in its Blaue Reiter Almanac in 1912. Arp then moved to Berlin, working as a critic and exhibition organizer at Herwarth Walden’s famous Der Sturm gallery until 1914, when he hopped on a train to Paris after the outbreak of WWI. While in Paris, Arp lived in the artist enclave of Montmartre, but rumors that he might have been involved in espionage led to a move to Switzerland in 1915. It was there that Arp became a pivotal force in Zurich Dada. Over the next decade, he helped spread Dada’s message to Berlin, Cologne, Hannover, and Paris.

The penchant for collaboration Arp developed during his peripatetic early career became a guiding imperative in his work after 1916 and a major factor in his embrace of abstraction. Without question, his most important collaborator was Sophie Taeuber, whom he met in 1915 and married in 1922. A student of applied art and textile design, Taeuber introduced Arp to unconventional materials and techniques that favored geometric patterning over naturalistic representation. Deliberately confounding the notion of singular artistic genius, they made collages and textiles together based on abstract configurations of geometric shapes. Arp further challenged the privileged status of artistic authorship by embracing chance procedures and the fortuitous effects of accident in his collages of the late 1910s. Around the same time, he also turned to nature, often sketching during walks on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Switzerland and then translating his biomorphic designs into three-dimensional abstract reliefs.

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Vasily Kandinsky+

Kandinsky became a central force in the development and promotion of abstraction through his intrepid efforts as a painter, theorist, publisher, exhibition organizer, teacher, and as a generous host to the dozens of artists and writers who trekked, often from great distances, to meet him. It's no surprise then that a major breakthrough in Kandinsky's own work came after a night out with friends. On January 2, 1911, the Russian artist, who was living in Munich, went to an Arnold Schoenberg concert with his partner Gabrielle Münter, Franz Marc, Aleksei Jawlensky, and Marianne Werefkin. They were dazzled by Schoenberg’s music, which set aside existing rules of harmony in favor of a new atonal compositional method. Later, over drinks, the artists discussed the congruence between his theories and Kandinsky's attempts to break from traditional figurative modes of painting. Kandinsky also grasped the connection: within days of the concert he made sketches of the performance and then distilled the figures within until only traces of the original subject remained. In the coming months, he gradually evacuated all referential content from his work.

Between 1910 and 1925, Kandinsky authored hugely influential theoretical tracts, most notably Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the spiritual in art, 1910), and co-founded the Blaue Reiter group and exhibition society in Munich. He held prominent teaching posts at state-sponsored art and design programs in the Soviet Union, and later at the Bauhaus in Germany. His message about abstraction’s potential transcended distinctions between mediums, and his impact was felt from New York to Moscow.

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Pablo Picasso +

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s invention of Cubism was a key precipitating factor in the development of abstract art, but the Spanish artist hesitated to make the leap himself. After a period of intense flirtation with abstraction in the summer of 1910 he took a step back, later declaring that abstract art was for him an impossibility. But while Picasso insisted that works of art be bound, however tenuously, to the world of things, many painters and critics viewed Cubism as a welcome launching pad for pure abstraction. In a letter to Franz Marc of October 1911, Vasily Kandinsky excitedly described Picasso’s 1910 paintings as a “sign of the enormous struggle toward the immaterial.” After studying Cubist works in London in 1912, the British critic Roger Fry anticipated the lessons to be learned from them: “The logical extreme of such a method would undoubtedly be the attempt to give up all resemblance to natural form and to create a purely abstract language of form.” Piet Mondrian qualified his praise of Picasso, recalling that he realized “Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries.” The Dutch artist then took it upon himself to develop abstraction toward its “ultimate goal: the expression of pure reality.” For Kazimir Malevich, Picasso’s work likewise revealed a path forward. He described Cubism as “the brilliant solution to our problems” and cheered that after absorbing its lessons, “we move into space, color, and time. It is with these three worlds that we will explore our new tasks.”

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Natalia Goncharova +

Stone babas, Rayism, face painting, stage design

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Tristan Tzara +

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Fernand Leger +

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Mikhail Larionov +

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Robert Delaunay +

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Alfred Stieglitz +

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Marcel Duchamp +

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Gino Severini +

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Constantin Brancusi +

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Edgar Varese +

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El Lissitzky +

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Hans Richter +

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Vladimir Tatlin +

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Fortunato Depero +

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Kazimir Malevich +

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Carlo Carra +

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Paul Klee +

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Anton Giulio Bragaglia +

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Leopold Survage +

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Ardengo Soffici +

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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy +

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Blaise Cendrars +

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Kurt Schwitters +

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Aleksandr Rodchenko +

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