Art
The Ways Out of Abstraction Ix the years immediately following the War almost all the most sensitive artists in Europe were involved in one kind or another of abstraction. In France the later forms of Cubism, in Central Europe Constructivism held the field. and, outside England, only artists whose minds were dulled by success in the fashionable world could avoid the influence Of these movements. In the last ten years the main problem in European painting has been how these artists would escape from the corner into which they had been forced. Their exits have been various. Some, like Picasso, tried to return to realism, found that they could not keep to it, and ran off into Superrealism. Others, like Gross, took to satirical realism. Many found that the conventions of modernism had publicity value, and made a living out of poster-designing. A very few, like Peri, worked their way back to realism, or rather discovered a new realism.
The exhibition of the works of the Hungarian artist, Moholy-Nagy, at the London Gallery shows another path which can be pursued in the same process. The exhibition covers the artist's development from 1920 to the present day in painting and in metal construction, but not, unfortunately, in photography, the medium in which the artist seems most completely at home. In the years 192(1 to 1925 Moholy- Nagy was absorbed in Constructivism, and in the canvases of this period painting is reduced to its simplest terms of straight lines and flat colours. In the last years of the 'twenties a new tendency appears ; the artist evidently ceased to be satisfied with flat patterning, and aimed at introducing effects of perspective—not merely of small-scale modelling like the later Cubists, but of vast and suggestive vistas, still indicated in the simplest terms (cf. No. 25). In the last few years Moholy-Nagy seems to have tried to combine with this style elements more naturally connected with photography. His aim appears to have been as far as possible to paint not with pigment but with light itself. New materials, such as celluloid and polished copper, are introduced instead of panel and canvas, and on this foundation complex recessions are suggested by means of a few lines and repeated planes.
Such paintings are, of course, still abstract, but they differ from Moholy-Nagy's earlier work in that their abstraction is capable of practical application. The most painful feature of this artist's paintings —and it is one which he admits in a letter printed in the special number which the Czech journal Telehor recently devoted to him —is that they seem to be the work of a man struggling to do in one medium what can only be done in another. Moholy-Nagy thinks in terms of light, and to achieve complete self-expression he would need a vast colour-projecting apparatus which could be combined with a stage of moving parts to form a colour symphony in four dimensions. Inevitably when ideas which require such a mechanism are expressed through the utterly inadequate means of small, flat, stationary surfaces of pigment or sensitivised paper, the result can hardly be completely satisfying.
For a few years in Berlin just before the Revolution Moholy- Nagy was able to give expression to his ideas in the designing of stage-settings. As far as it is possible to judge from photo- graphs this seems to have been in some respects a more satisfactory medium than painting. It is, however, in the film that the artist will probably find the best field, for there, except for the absence of colour, the most serious limitations from which he suffers in painting are removed. From his film Lobsters, recently shown in London, and from the stills reproduced in Telehor, it is evident that though Moholy-Nagy believes that light is the means of expression in the film, he is ready to use this means not only to make patterns and harmonies but alFo to express views and feelings about the world. His work in the last ten years represents the develop- ment of a technique incomparable in subtlety, variety, and range for presenting facts with a new emotional intensity. In the last resort photography is reportage, but new technical processes and new methods of presentation enable the photographer to discover and convey new facts, and to convey them with new intensity. In this way, therefore, discoveries such as Moholy-Nagy's are aids to the new Realism—provided always that they arc properly applied. ANTHONY BLUNT.
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