Around Abstraction Création

The artistic influence of Paris at the turn of the 1930s, the massive installation of foreign artists and the holding of international exhibitions made the French capital the main center of expression of geometric abstraction. This great international movement was organized with the creation of groups defending non-figurative art, including Cercle et Carré (1929), founded by Michel Seuphor and Joaquin Torres Garcia, Art Concret (1930), around Theo van Doesburg (with Jean Hélion, Otto Carlsund, Léon Tutundjian and Marcel Wantz), then, above all, the Abstraction-Création association (1931-1936) chaired by Auguste Herbin and Georges Vantongerloo: Abstraction for “the progressive abstraction of the forms of nature”; Creation for a “purely geometric design or the exclusive use of elements commonly called abstract such as circles, planes, bars, lines. »

If the dominant trend is that of geometric abstract art, the cosmopolitan dimension of the group, the strong personality of its promoters and the context of economic, cultural and political crisis that the artists are experiencing bring to the surface differences which are as much of individual expressions drawing at the same time from the foundations of a strict and rigorous abstraction and escaping from it to explore new plastic solutions.
The five annual publications called “Cahiers abstraction creation art non figuratif”, published between 1932 and 1936, and the permanent exhibition of the association rue Wagram during the year 1934, promote the works and theories of the members who, in their adherence to the main principles of abstraction, do not all exclude renewing the dialogue with nature. The works of the French Marcelle Cahn (1895-1981), Jean Gorin (1899-1981), Jean Hélion (1904-1987), Auguste Herbin (1882-1960) and Jacques Villon (1875-1963), the Dutch César Domela (1900 -1992), the Germans Josef Albers (1888-1976) and Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), the Czech František Kupka (1871-1957), the Hungarian Etienne Béothy (1897-1961), the Italian Alberto Magnelli (1888 -1971) or the American Alexander Calder (1898-1976) that the Lahumière gallery brings together today, bear witness to the great creativity that emanates from this period of transition and necessary renewal.

The quest for rhythm, already evident before the war in the Orphic tendency of Cubism as defined by Guillaume Apollinaire to designate the works of painters as diverse as Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay, flourished during the 1930s in the paintings and reliefs of Auguste Herbin: by combining circular, curved, oblique motifs and purity of line, the leading figure of the movement developed a complex vocabulary of simple and colorful geometric shapes which would lead in the 1940s to the creation of a universal “plastic alphabet”.

The use of curves and oblique lines modulates the geometric rigor of Otto Freundlich’s mosaic compositions; convinced of the need to express light and dark through elementary planes, the painter explores a new palette enriched with bright colors. Etienne Béothy, painter, sculptor and architect, Josef Albers and his tectonic drawings, or Jean Gorin, through relief, experiment with the confines of abstraction beyond the limits of the easel, in search of a possible reconciliation of art with arts and crafts, architecture, and its extension to the scale of the city. Made from a variety of materials (here, copper, oxidized brass, plexiglass and wood), César Domela’s refined and artisanal reliefs create contrasts of rhythm, material and color, when Alexander Calder’s first mobiles are deployed in the field of abstract and kinetic sculpture: inspired by nature, the small cut and painted sheet metal plates, connected by thin metal rods, are suspended and subjected to the movement of air or activated by a mechanical system.
While inflecting his painting to new strict formal rules - "new spirit, new technique", wrote the painter in Cahier No. 1 -, Kupka punctuates the geometric grid with color like a musical score. Jean Hélion’s airy compositions are organized by planes of primary colors and are exempt from any straightness thanks to the introduction of curves and the repetition of short parallel straight lines, while Jacques Villon superimposes a network of broken lines on his geometric compositions to create a new dynamic balance.

Returning to abstraction, Alberto Magnelli draws architectural compositions whose precise and austere line derives from the series undertaken around Carrara stones. Having passed through the Académie moderne of Fernand Léger and Amédée Ozenfant, and representing the purist trend, Marcelle Cahn reconnects at the turn of the 1930s with the motif, the nude more precisely, the memory of which is translated by a lasso of serpentine and sexual lines that extend and contradict a play of straight lines drawn with a line. The interest that the surrealist movement arouses at the time and the importance that it gives to the subject leads Marcelle Cahn to refuse Freundlich’s proposal to participate in Cahier n°2, not recognizing herself, as well as other members who left the association in 1934 such as Sophie Taeuber, Jean Arp and the Delaunays, in the dogmas decreed by the steering committee which claims an exclusively non-figurative language. The tensions generated between founding members and financial difficulties put an end to the adventure in 1936, but not to the appetite to rethink abstraction in its great principles, between the quest for rhythm and spatiality, the aspiration to reconnect with a reality anchored in nature, social and collective utopia; so many paths and responses to a world in crisis, which the artists will pursue in complete freedom after the war around the Salon des Réalités nouvelles.

Cécile Godefroy, September 2024