Review of stephen mansbachs modern art in eastern europe

Mansbach’s choices are going to provide the first glimpse most English-speaking art historians will have of the fuller picture of the modernist avant-garde outside Western Europe, and in

Review of S A Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca 1890-1939 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 Xvi + 384 pp.,

384 illus., 48 colorplates, 6 maps ISBN 0-521-45085-3 $65.00

This appeared in: The Art Bulletin 82 no 4 (2000): 781–85 See also “Response [to Anthony Alofsin’s letter regarding the review of Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe],” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 539

Please note: this printout was done from a computer that lacks some Eastern European fonts, so some diacritics are wrong

Modern Art in Eastern Europe is the only study of its kind in any language, and it

is the only recent survey of modernism in a number of the countries it treats In most cases, the next-best books are decades old, and written in the countries’ own languages (Soon there will be several new books on twentieth-century Hungarian art, for example;

but as I write this the most recent is Lajos Németh’s book, Századi magyar Müveszet, first

published in 1964.) Mansbach’s choices are going to provide the first glimpse most English-speaking art historians will have of the fuller picture of the modernist avant-garde outside Western Europe, and in the nature of the discipline his book may well constitute the last look a nonspecialist will ever give to modernism in some of these countries It raises a number of questions of interest beyond central Europe: What is the global nature of modernism? What should be counted as the essential moments of modernism, East or West? What can be ignored, and why? What is regional art, as opposed to art of the center? What was avant-garde at any given moment, and what else beside it counted? I cannot think of more important questions when the subject is twentieth-century painting: they are essential for any firm understanding of the shape of the century Mansbach’s book is clearly one of the places where western scholars of modernism will go to find information and provisional answers

Inevitably, specialists in the countries Mansbach discusses will have their own responses to his accounts; for this forum I thought it might be most appropriate to raise questions of interest to the study of European modernism as a whole For coherence I will

be concentrating on Mansbach’s treatment of Hungarian modernism, though I have also taken examples from Romanian, Czech, and Bulgarian modernism

An introductory example can illuminate the kinds of questions I will be asking In the course of his description of Hungarian modernism, Mansbach mentions the Hungarian modernist Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, and remarks that Csaba was influenced by

Cézanne He reproduces Csaba’s Bathing Youths, saying simply that its composition

“[stems] from the work of Cézanne and Matisse” (p 271) At first glance—and even in front of the original, which is in Budapest—Mansbach seems entirely correct: Csaba’s

painting even has a bit of the truncated pyramidal groupings of Cézanne’s Large Bathers

in the Barnes Foundation and in the National Gallery, London

What concerns me is the form and the economy of this kind of reference Because

Modern Art in Eastern Europe treats so many artists, Mansbach is frequently compelled

to mention a few of the most significant influences, and let those citations stand as provisional entry-points for our understanding of the artists’ styles The problem is that very often such references also make the eastern European painters and sculptors seem like examples of some belated avant-garde entirely dependent on western European predecessors

From this simple quandary grow formidable problems that entangle the very possibility of writing the history of any modernist movement outside of western Europe

If I am writing a history of modern Hungarian painting, for example, and I decide to describe Csaba’s paintings on their own terms, downplaying or omitting their sources, I risk unmooring myself from historical sense I could say, for instance, that Csaba seems unaccountably drawn to a pose in which a slender young man leans far forward, head

down, arms extended The pose is used for fully half the figures in Bathing Youths, and

Csaba goes to some lengths to employ the pose even where it does not make sense (One such figure extends his arms to massage another figure, but it ends up looking like an attack.) If I go on this way I can avoid Cézanne, but I risk giving up historical meaning Instead I would be writing poetic appreciation, or perhaps psychoanalytic criticism On the other hand, if I go ahead and compare Csaba to Cézanne, then I risk losing a sense of Csaba’s individuality He would become a regional artist, belatedly indebted to late Cézanne

I put this choice starkly because it is stark The eight figures of Csaba’s Bathing Youths are so close to the familiar rounded tent of Cézanne’s Bathers that it is not enough

to say, as Mansbach does, that Csaba and his compatriots “[transfigured] the modernist vocabulary” on their return from Paris and Munich: a reader also needs to know exactly how they did so (p 272) In various places in the book Mansbach says artists are

“brilliant,” “unique,” “striking,” or “transformative,” but I wonder what pitch of

eloquence could be enough to erase Cézanne even momentarily from the mind of a

viewer contemplating Bathing Youths At best, a reader takes Mansbach’s word that

Csaba transfigures the western avant-garde; at worst, Csaba is left as a painter of Parisian pastiches

It is entirely inevitable that Mansbach mentions Cézanne when he mentions Csaba: as far as I know, every other art historian who has written about Csaba has done the same So I am not faulting Mansbach for making the reference But in context of a book structured around such references, the simple phrase (“composition stemming from Cézanne and Matisse”) nearly flattens the Hungarian painter, draining him of virtually all his independent interest (And Csaba is lucky, because his picture cannot be mistaken for one of Cézanne’s Others could: I think for example of the Bulgarian painter Vasil Barakov [1902-1991], who painted incrementally close to Cézanne in the mid-1940s In his case, the Cézanne citation would be both unnecessary and wholly disastrous.)

This is the pattern throughout Mansbach’s book, despite his best efforts, and it is even more striking and damaging in any number of other books on the art of individual

nations (Compare, as an elective affinity, John Clark’s Modern Asian Art [Honolulu:

University of Hawai’i Press, 1998], which has an even larger geoegraphic reach.) I am speaking about a methodological problem here, and it is true that Mansbach rescues a

number of other paintings and painters In fact it is infuriatingly difficult not to name

western styles that influence eastern artists, and not to think continuously of Cézanne while studying Csaba But comparisons like these are quicksand In Mansbach’s account, Csaba’s painting is little more than a close copy of Cézanne and Matisse, infused— somehow—with a “transformative” purpose related to Hungarian nationalism

It is necessary to attend to such comparisons to see how insidious they can be, how destructive of the artworks they are trying to bolster The Hungarian art colony at GödöllŒ, Mansbach says, produced work in a “palette of styles” including

“impressionism and postimpressionism in the handling of light and color, pre-Raphaelitism and Jugendstil in the rendering of outline and contour; and symbolism in the representation of theme and figures” (p 270) The phrase, “palette of styles,” is both canny and crucial It implies that the styles were mixed, like colors on a palette, and used

to produce something unified and new: but it also avoids the question of exactly what that new thing was There are many similar instances The artists of the Hungarian group Aktivisták, which emerged between 1913 and 1915 in the wake of the earlier group Nyolcak, “were among the first of Hungary’s avant-garde groups to draw on futurism, cubism, and expressionism as the basis for a new point of view.” Here too, the

perspectival metaphor “point of view” conjures a synthesis that remains just out of sight

in the text The Aktivisták’s “rich blend of modern styles epitomizes” their “inventiveness

in adapting styles from abroad”: that is to say they adapted them and made something rich and inventive—but what was that “inventive” result? (p 278) A painting by Sándor Bortnyik, Mansbach says, epitomizes the Aktivisták’s “belief in drawing on a variety of

modernist sources to compose a singular statement” (p 288): but what statement,

exactly? Transfiguration, palette, point of view, and singular statement are four tropes that hint at more than they say; another is “medley.” As an ex-Aktivisták, the painter Béla Kádár “pursued a highly individualized medley of expressionist, futurist, folk, and ideological paths” (p 303) “Medley” conjures something harmonious, and “highly individual” hints that some medleys are less than successful: but a reader does not know what the medley sounded like

If the artist’s individuality cannot be spelled out except as a formula of ingredients, then the artist’s relation to his or her surrounding society isn not going to be much clearer Mansbach begins each chapter with a review of the region’s history, but there are seldom clear connections between the raw historical facts and the first modernist movements he mentions (The Czech Republic is a counter-example, because the 1867

elevation of Hungary had direct effects on Czech fin-de-siècle art.) Usually the capsule

summaries of each country’s politics go to the more general question of cultural context, rather than to any namable link between individual paintings and political events The Nolycak (“Group of Eight”) painters, Mansbach says, understood themselves,

“romantically, as revolutionaries in the just cause of social reconstruction.” Károly Kernstock, their leader, “demanded that the modern artist assume political responsibilities

to alter the structure and form of visual expression.” To achieve that

“transformation” (another word that works like “palette,” “medley,” and “point of view”) Nyolcak “combined imaginatively the progressive styles of the West (fauvism, cubism, expressionism, and the idiom of Cézanne) with traditional genre types (still lifes, nudes, portraits, and landscapes).” The results, Mansbach says, were immediately “striking,” but the artists were unsystematic, philosophically unsophisticated, nạve, politically disorganized, and too much given to “pontificating about the role of modern art in moving Habsburg Hungary toward a democratic republic” to achieve results (p 275) The passage conjures a typical disorganized artist’s movement, full of sound and fury, and it seems to link the movement with its politics But what precisely is the link between Nyolcak’s politics and its painting? They used an “imaginative combination” of styles, and they had a disorganized combination of idealism and political purpose Could it be

the case that their disorganized but “imaginative” styles are related to their disorganized but assertive politics? It is hard to know what connection is being proposed, or indeed whether the politics is relevant at all, except as a spur to the artists’ eclecticism

For these reasons even the very best books on national and regional styles tend not to make good on their initial promises not to lean their descriptions on foreign art

What is national in the art often turns out to be the content of the painting (folk motifs,

depictions of particular places in the country) and what is international turns out to be the style It still seems necessary to tell the country’s history, but the politics will not adhere

to the art any more than it did for Wölfflin

Even if the paintings are compelling, it can be next to impossible to say why Béla

Kádár’s Mother with Child, which Mansbach reproduces (p 303), is actually a strong

painting, though it looks weak in reproduction; and Csaba’s and Kernstock’s paintings are also striking—but to conjure their power for readers who haven’t seen the originals, it is necessary to try to say, with utter exactitude, how they are different from Cézanne et al Kádár’s painting, for example, plays with an odd contrast between the mother and baby, their unexpected geometrical shadow, and the silhouette of a dog done in perfect profile, heraldry-style In the original the dog looks cut-out, the woman carved, and her shadow stamped: why Kádár would have thought to do such a thing, or put the ensemble on a canted street, is hard to say: but at least it is the direction I would go if I were trying to describe what he achieved At some point, though, I would have to mention Picasso, constructivism, and expressionism: how could it be otherwise?

What is to be done about this problem of description, in which every work that is made at a distance from the center becomes a soup pot of styles from other countries? How is it possible to quell the art historical analysis, and stop it from pulling out the ingredients of the soup one by one until nothing is left? Here I will list five possibilities that might improve the situation They are options I am exploring for myself, so they are not polemical and they do not come with the imprimatur of some cultural theory They are each flawed, but they are the best I have found so far

1 Decide on the relation between the center and the margins Hungarian

modernism is extremely complex, arguably more so than Czech or Polish modernism, which at least are articulated by fairly well-defined movements and styles It stands to reason that in such a turbulent period, so rife with evanescent interconnections, there will

be more than one relation with western Europe But that historical commonplace should not obscure the problem of determing what, for the course of a page or a chapter or book,

is to be the model for East-West relations Mansbach uses three principal models, without

naming them as such: that the West and East are equal conspirators in modernism; that they are incomparable; and that the East is inferior

Mansbach starts out on page one claiming that eastern European modernism was a co-equal partner with western European modernism The “character and aims of contemporary art and aesthetics,” he says, “were being fundamentally redrawn by pioneering artists located far distant from the art centers of Paris and Berlin.” In eastern Europe, “scores of painters, sculptors, and designers were redefining the nature of modern visual expression and its social meanings”; in the 1930s they were “forging a new aesthetics,” and publishing avant-garde periodicals which “reciprocated” Western interest by “fostering an appreciation of Western advanced art.” The resulting “cross-fertilization” was “fully international”: the margins “overcame their peripheral location to assume a critical and formative role in the genesis of advanced art” (p 1)

This co-equality is a strong claim, and the stakes are very high In the course of the Introduction, Mansbach supports it in several ways First, he notes that eastern Europe occasionally led the way in modernism: dada began in Romania, constructivism in Russia, and “uniquely creative forms of cubo-expressionism” in Habsburg Bohemia (p 2) But this is a short list, and it is a bit strained even at three items The third term is especially odd, because it seems apparent that an innovation (cubo-expressionism) which needs to be described in terms of two prior innovations (cubism and expressionism) may

be hard to present as an avant-garde Even the initial claim that “dada began in Romania”

is heavily qualified later in the book, when Mansbach gives only two very brief examples

of Tristan Tzara’s activities in Romania in 1915 before he left for Zurich The fourth issue

of the journal Chemarea (“Call”), Mansbach notes, exhorts contemporaries “to replace

pencils with knives,” in order to “bomb bourgeois chimneys (hearths).” That is the

evidence of “an aesthetic stance we can only define as dada avant la lettre” (p 248) Two

pages later, Mansbach calls the Romanian journals “a mild form of proto-dadism”: hardly

as important a precedent as it sounded in the Introduction Naturally these are sliding criteria, and it would be possible to produce a more substantive argument that dada is Romanian; what I want to point out is that in the book, there is little evidence that eastern Europe led the way in modernism

The idea that East and West can be partners in “forging a new aesthetics” (p 1) is

supported inter alia by these arguments But then, when a reader might think that the

book will turn out to be a massive substantiation of the idea of equal “cross-fertilization,” Mansbach says several things that suggest eastern European art is fundamentally different from western European art, so that the two cannot really be compared, much less treated

as equals “From Estonia to Slovenia,” he writes, “the makers of modern art most often emphasized national individuality rather than universality.” Professions of national identity were “as widespread in the East” as they were rare in the West, because

“political, economic, and spiritual constraints” left “cultural expression” as the only means of preserving “national self-consciousness.” In that atmosphere “legions of modern artists rushed to enlist their talents in service to their respective nations” (p 4) The “small cadres of dedicated modernists in the East” were not primarily interested in the international avant-garde, and especially not in what their eastern neightbors were doing They preferred “to picture themselves as unique representatives” of their emerging nations, “and as arbiters of progressive thinking” (p 7) And again, eastern Europe’s

“reconciliation of literary reference and abstraction, narrative context and nonobjective styles… departed fundamentally from the absolutist purity demanded by many western modernist artists and critics” (p 5) Together such passages point toward a different model of East-West relations, where it doesn not really make sense to think of the two sides as partners in the creation of modernism Emphasizing fundamental differences between East and West insulates eastern modernism, so it cannot be assimilated into the western avant-garde According to this argument the East was fundamentally different: neither better nor worse, neither equal or unequal

That is two possible positions for eastern European modernism: indispensable partner, and incommensurate term On the very last page of the Introduction, Mansbach describes a third possibility, the one that is latent in the majority of textbooks on modernism written in America and western Europe: the East might be less important that the West Eastern modernism, Mansbach says, might be a source of historical “richness,” but not a crucial term; it might contribute to the “full significance” of modernism, but not

as one of its basic building blocks (p 8)

The majority of Modern Art in Eastern Europe ends up working with forms of the

second model, where East and West are (somehow) incommensurate But it helps, I think,

to be clear about the seductiveness of the first claim (the equal West and East), which launches the book; and to be honest about the depressing reality of the third claim (the inferior East), which drags at the reader’s heels until the book’s final page Every good multiculturalist wants something resembling the second model, but it cannot make sense

of history because it will not allow the comparisons that help produce historical narratives Many publishers and specialists want something like the first model, because

it promotes the interest of regional art And every guilty reader recognizes something of herself when she reads about artists who seem very interesting—even compelling,

amazing, and unique—and yet ultimately less important than Cézanne Thinking about these three options, and the slide from the first and second to the third, can help shore up narratives about negional and national art, even if it cannot protect them from the magnetic pull of the third option

2 Distinguish species of regionalism If I believe, following the first model of

East-West relations, that Csaba and Cézanne are equally important examples of modernist paintings of bathers, then I will not slight Csaba by mentioning Cézanne (It would be as much of a slight to omit Csaba in a book on Cézanne.) But if I think the eastern and western painters are fundamentally incommensurate (the second model) or that the eastern painting is basically less important (the third model) then it is treacherous to mention Cézanne when I am trying to get a sense of Csaba The tricky thing is to know when and how to intoduce the western precedent It also helps, I think, to refine the concept of regionalism so that it comprehends three slightly but crucially different options

The word “regionalism” can be applied specifically to cases in which an artist knows what is happening in some other region, but decides to continue making art that is particular to her own culture Thus Mansbach points out that “artists in Riga were cognizant of progressive developments in Belgrade or Budapest” through the exchange of journals: an example of regionalism in this sense

“Parochialism” would be a better word to describe the case of an artist who knows something is happening in some other region, but is afraid to find out too much Mansbach notes that some eastern European groups avoided outside contact “for fear of compromising their perception of their own unique contribution” to their nations’ art: a cautious parochial attitude

A “provincial” artist, then, would be one who wants to know about art that is taking place in some other region, but is prevented for political and economic reasons Mansbach notes the difficulty Polish artists had in forming contacts “across the lines of partition separating Russian, Austrian, and Prussian (German) provinces”: a good example of provincialism (p 7)

I have found this simple classification (regional, parochial, provincial) tremendously useful It can help distinguish artists who really should be described as sums of influences from those who should not: Sándor Bortnyik and Károly Kernstock are regionalists, well aware of what they took, and what they altered, from cubo-futurism, constructivism, expressionism, and other movements Béla Kádár is different: he knew what was happening outside the Hungarian avant-garde, but he chose not to look too

closely—his work is more parochial, and it would not be well described as a response to some mixture of western styles Many eastern European painters were compelled to become provincial during Communism In Romania, for example, Cézanne could only be mentioned openly in art instruction beginning in the mid-1950s, and much recent art was discovered only after the revolution in 1989 In Bulgaria, Detchko Uzunov might be a provincialist or a parochialist, but he surely was not a regionalist (The late twentieth-century painter Pamukchiev has something of the parochialist about him.) Mansbach always notes examples of provincialism, where artists just did not know what was happening outside the borders of their country But he does not distinguish between regionalists who sought knowledge of western art, and parochialists who tried to insulate themselves from it The difference is crucial for deciding whether or not to mention western influences

3 Note when it is right, and when it is wrong, to mention precedents The most

difficult of the triad regionalist-parochialist-provincialist is the second term, because that

is where it may or may not be right to describe the artist in terms of western influences A regionalist knows and tries to keep her independence, so mentioning outside influences is entirely appropriate A provincialist does not know the “relevant” outside influences, and

so an historian might well try to steer clear of them But a parochial painter is entangled

in denial, so it can be unclear how outside influences should be introduced In that case, it

is useful to distinguish when references to western influences are adequate, inadequate, or misleading

The great majority of the time Mansbach finds it is adequate to name the style an

artist depends on He mentions Cézanne and Matisse in Csaba’s case, because that is all

he has time to do It is nearly enough to name Cézanne in the case of other Hungarian

modernists: Károly Patkó’s Washerwomen (1930) is a big, diffuse, and very easy version

of mid-career Cézanne In certain contexts, it would not be necessary to say much more

But there are cases where such an explanation is inadequate Speaking of

iconography, Mansbach says the “wholesale application” of western concepts “may be inadequate” to describe eastern artworks “Despite shared formal attributes,” for example,

“cubist still-life paintings… by Picasso did not carry the intellectual and often political meanings that Czech modernists vested in their unique form of cubo-futurism” (p 3) In that sense it would be inadequate—necessary but not sufficient—to name the western precedents for someone like Emil Filla or Václav Spála The challenge would be to provide enough additional information to ensure that Filla or Spala look independent In the case of Czech cubism, work by Tomas Vlcek and others has provided such

information, but it needs to be presented in detail and made persuasive The Hungarian group “A Nolycak” is an especially interesting example: Mansbach says that they

“[synthesized] the subjectivism of the East and the objectivism of the West” into a new kind of art (“Synthesize” is another word like “palette”: it is a gesture in the direction of something new, which does not quite say what the new thing is.) Nolycak did that

“despite a somewhat willful misreading of [Cézanne’s] intentions” (p 271) This is almost the only passage in the book in which Mansbach allows artists may have intentionally misinterpreted western art, and it opens the way to much more reflective accounts of Róbert Berény, Béla Czóbel, and others In regard to Berény, for example,

Mansbach might have noted how Berény’s still lifes neaten Cézanne, replacing lost

swatches of color, bridging broken outlines, scouring the compositions until they are

almost too clean Interior (c 1930) is very trim: a teapot tilts slightly to one side, as if it

wee bewitched, and two cups cant a little in response That certainly looks like a meditated misuse, and it is no surprise to learn—as Andras Zwickl informs me—that

Berény owned Fritz Burgler’s book called Cézanne and Hodler: Einführung in die Probleme der Malerei der Gegenwart (1916) But if we were to say Berény was intending to “willfully misread” Cézanne for his own purposes (and what purposes were

they, exactly?), it would still be difficult to account for pictures like Idyll (Composition) (1911), which is the psychological carbon copy of Cézanne’s Picnic: in it a doughy white

nude with hair fallen over her eyes is watched by a crudely distorted man who sprawls down in front of her, the both of them on a curved ground planted with clammy-looking

grass and trees bent to the point of falling Idyll (Composition) does not look like Picnic,

but the mood and the dramatis personae are uncannily similar Is that “willful misreading”?

It may also happen that it is misleading to name the style an artist depends on

That is the case when the artists did not imagine themselves as working in anyone else’s styles: in Czech cubism, that sometimes applies even to Bohumil Kubista, who worked along very different lines from Picasso; and in Hungarian modernism, I would try applying it to Kádár, Kernstock, and idiosyncratic artists like Bertalan Pór I do not think there is any way to write an art historical account of these artists without mentioning their obvious precedents, but it is possible to mention the influences with such circumspection

—heaping the references with qualifications, hedging and qualifying and continuously

retreating—that their misleading nature is manifest For example, Kubista’s Hurdle

(1913, National Gallery, Prague) starts out looking like a tossed-off Picasso done about two years earlier But as Vojtech Lahoda has pointed out, the fragmented head in the