Antenna: The family tree of the avant-garde

I recently came across this fascinating diagram, the Development of Abstract Art, which is in effect the family tree of modern art drawn up by Alfred Barr, the pre-war Director of MoMa. Barr put on the great career-defining Picasso retrospective exhibition in 1939-1940 and introduced Dalí and Surrealism to America in the mid 1930s.  

To my mind, Barr was one of the greatest curators of the 20th century, with an eye as sharp as they come. For the purposes of his diagram, he divided art up into non-geometrical abstract art and geometrical abstract art. Study it carefully for it explains a lot about where the avant-garde derived its inspiration, where it came from in the first half of the 20th century and where it went. 

It is very tempting to extend this family tree to the second half of the century; I think Andy Warhol, for instance, springs from the Dadaists and their descendants the Surrealists; certainly Jeff Koons springs from Duchamp and his found objects. 

Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. (1902-1981), Cover of the exhibition catalogue ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’, MoMA, 1936. Offset, printed in color. © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala

I must admit feeling rather shamed that I had never heard of Florence Henri, the inter-war avant-garde photographer and now the subject of a wonderfully revealing exhaustive exhibition, Miroir des avant-gardes, 1927-1940 at the Jeu de Paume. She was certainly alive to a great many influences Alfred Barr mapped out.

Florence Henri seemed to know and be rated by everyone in the world of the avant-garde in Europe in the teens and twenties of the 20th century.  While she was a student at the Berlin Academy of Arts she moved in circles including Hans Arp, Adrian Ludwig Richter and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy — and her later photographic portraits of these artistic titans are compelling.

Starting as a painter, she took classes with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at the original Bauhaus in Weimar at the beginning of the 1920s. Then, during a 1927 visit to the Bauhaus in Dessau, she abandoned painting in favour of photography, producing the famous series of self-portraits in mirrors, and the still life studies which were experiments in spatial dimensions and the effects of light. 

Left: Florence Henri, Self portrait, 1928. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek. Florence Henri © Galleria Martini & Ronchetti. Right: Florence Henri, Jeanne Lanvin, 1929. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Archives Florence Henri, Gênes. Florence Henri © Galleria Martini & Ronchetti

Working in Paris from about 1924, she opened a studio and a school of photography where Lisette Model (a heroine of mine) and Gisele Freund studied. Until now her work has been largely unknown, this in spite of it being liberally published in many illustrated magazines of the era, and her work being compared with Man Ray and Horst (another alumna of the Bauhaus who were both working in Paris at the same time).

In the inter-war years, however, she was acknowledged as being one of the leaders of the photography avant-garde; Moholy-Nagy wrote a very elegant appreciation in 1928, in which he acknowledged that with ‘Florence Henri’s photos, photographic practice enters a new phase, the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today’. 

I recently received a soon-to-be published illustrated biography, Florence Henri: Mirror of the Avant-Garde, 1927–40 (Aperture), and it became clear that she played an important part at the Bauhaus. In the new book, there is a snap of a fairly riotous group celebrating her birthday during her visit to Dessau in 1927 and a jolly picture of Florence and a group of friends being entertained by Mondrian in his Paris studio in 1929.

I urge you to see the show at the Jeu de Paume, which runs until 17 May 2015, because it is that rare thing: a missing link between early 20th century avant-garde and a whole generation of mid- and late century photographers. Added to that, the catalogue is a revelation.

The ultimate art selfies

Courtesy of the Art In Island museum

I return to the subject of selfies, this time courtesy of a new 3-D museum in Manila. Called Art in Island, it provides unique opportunities for selfie maniacs to take photographs of themselves actually becoming part of a painting. Words almost fail me here but I could not resist with the 3-D rendering of Fragonard’s masterpiece, The Swing (above) in which the selfie subject photographed himself fielding the airborne slipper.  Apparently there are other 3-D museums in Asia of the same ilk, making the burbling of more (shall we say) conventional museums about interactive experiences feel very much like yesterday’s news.

 

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