Guggenheim: Treasures of the "Toilet Bowl"

Flush with art: New York's Guggenheim Museum

Despite being a Frank Lloyd Wright architectural masterpiece and a famous landmark, New Yorkers often compare the squat, cylindrical rotunda and boxy rectangular tower of the Guggenheim Museum to a toilet bowl backed by a water tank. This, if anything, is a clear indication of the degree to which the heroic storyline of 20th century modernism has been stood on its head, revealing public cynicism about the once hallowed status of modern art.

This should serve as a warning to any museum putting on a comprehensive exhibition of modern art – as the Bunkamura is now doing with "Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection" – to beware of the old familiar, linear narrative that presents modern art progressing towards some great truth or revelation. This is doubly true when the art on display comes from a source like the Guggenheim.

Such concerns influenced the recently-ended rival exhibition of modern art at the Mori Art Museum. Instead of presenting a linear narrative in which each successive development inevitably led to the next, the Mori employed several non-chronological themes, reflecting the notion of history and culture as a kind of matrix in which many different links can be made across time and space.

"Woman with Parrot" by Renoir

But while a more open, multifaceted, or post-modernist approach may be suitable overseas, the hushed, reverence with which Japanese audiences still approach modern art suggests they retain faith in the great progressive narrative.

Instead of the free-to-roam-and-make-connections matrix of the Mori, the Bunkamura keeps to the typical chronological walk through beloved by Japanese museums, something curator, Masao Miyazawa is not apologetic about.

"The Guggenheim actually wanted us to have separate, unconnected rooms," he observes, "but Japanese audiences are more passive so we suggested a route system would work better."

The chronological route approach is even signposted in the exhibitions subtitle, "From Renoir to Warhol." Accordingly, we are greeted at the entrance by the French Impressionist Woman with Parrot (1871), a picture of a trussed-up lady in an over-furnished interior. This creates an image of stuffy Victorian conservatism that the rest of the exhibition gradually strips away, until we end in a room dedicated to the glib and often bleak iconography of Andy Warhol.

The problem with a strong chronological framework is that it makes it difficult to view the paintings directly, without intervening notions of artistic movement and wider social and political history. For example, its difficult to see Henri Rousseau’s Artillerymen (1893-5), as unconnected to the relentless militarization of Europe in the decades before World War One; especially as Rousseau's Sunday painter style seems to highlight the naivete of these gunners, as yet unacquainted with the horrors of war.

"This is perhaps true of the early part of the exhibition," Miyazawa admits. "But from Kandinsky on, the paintings start to break free of direct social and historical context, reflecting the growing elitism of art consumers."

"Various Actions" by Kandinsky

Kandinsky’s work is the perfect example of this. In Landscape with Rain (1913), there is still a trace of the lush, vibrant Fauvist-influenced landscapes that mark the sensual high point of his art. The later works on display, however, show the arid, geometric abstraction into which his art degenerated. The prissily painted petty shapes of Various Actions (1941), painted by Kandinsky in occupied France as his homeland was being invaded by the Germans, doesn’t reveal even the faintest ripple of outside events.

Kandinsky was one of the first real intellectuals of art, developing complex theories and spiritual notions that made the dull, geometric doodlings of such later works seem profound to a small group of collectors, like Solomon Guggenheim.

Just as intellectually pretentious as Kandinsky, but a whole lot more fun are the Surrealist works. Beneath the spin constantly put on the movement by its leader, poet and writer, Andre Breton, Surrealist artists were interested in accessing the subconscious mind using startling dream-like juxtapositions or random processes that bypassed conscious image making.

"Voice of Space" by Rene Magritte

An example of the first approach is Rene Magritte’s Voice of Space (1931), which shows three otherworldly silver orbs hovering over idyllic countryside, foreshadowing the first UFO sightings by decades. Max Ernst’s work shows the second approach. Using grattage, a technique where prepared canvases were laid on uneven surfaces and the paint partially scraped off, Ernst captured random images, which he then interpreted, allowing texture to suggest composition in a spontaneous fashion. In The Forest (1927-8) the traces of what appear to be floorboards have been elaborated into a dark, claustrophobic forest that uncovers the artists fascination with the German forests of his childhood.

The paradox of 20th century art is that the more it escapes from issues of the external and social, and delves into the internal and personal, the more it succeeds in reflecting the great historical trend of the century, namely the triumph of individualism.

Building on Surrealist techniques like drip painting, picked up from Max Ernst while he was in wartime exile in New York, and automatism, inspired by the free-flowing lines of Joan Miro – represented here by a couple of works – postwar American painters, like Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis developed abstract expressionism, the perfect embodiment of the freedom of the individual and, indeed, an art movement that sent out a convenient Cold War message of the supposedly limitless freedom available in America.

"Girl With a Tear I" by Lichtenstein

Pollock’s Circumcision (1946) predates his true abstract expressionism, but shows the artist breaking away from Cubist structures into a more fluid style; while Francis’s Shining Back (1958) is the proverbial mess of arbitrary colors that could just as well have been painted by a chimp. Works like this and the limp scribbles of Cy Twombly – represented here by the aptly titled Untitled (1960) – provide cause enough to be suspicious of any attempt to surround modern art with a halo of reverence. Indeed, a more relaxed and flippant attitude to art helped create Pop Art, a welcome antidote to serious art. Roy Lichtenstein's refreshing Girl With a Tear, I (1977) pays tribute to surrealism by applying his blown-up comic book painting technique to motifs from Magritte.

With so many isms and brand name artists jostling for attention, the exhibition can seem like a visual cacophony. But, Miyazawa contends, the exhibition has a clear rhythm in the constant shifts backwards and forwards between figurative and abstract styles.

While some artists were either abstract or figurative, the most successful were those like Pablo Picasso, who managed to be both. In Woman with Yellow Hair (1931), he paints his lover, Marie-Therese Walter. But instead of a portrait, he uses sinuous free-flowing lines to create an abstract homage to his young muse.

C.B.Liddell
20th August, 2004
The Asahi Shimbun