Prescient views of a new world

Masters of Modern Art from The HermitageArt Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until March 3.

Paul Cezanne 'Fruit' 1879/80 oil on canvas. Picture: The State Hermitage Museum

As we approach the end of a four-year cycle of commemorating the most terrible war the world had known up until that time, this exhibition takes us back to the decade or two preceding that conflict, a period of unprecedented dynamism in the history of modernism. Within a short time, and while impres­sionism and post-impressionism in their various guises were still active, an extraordinary range of new movements and styles sprang up, including fauvism, intimism, analytical cubism, expres­sionism, abstraction and futurism.

Partly because the various ideologies of modernism emphasised originality and hostility to tradition and convention, and partly because of the objectifying and neutralising effect of the art market, this work often has been emptied of its real meaning and treated, in misleading terms, as though it were of interest ­mainly because it ­allegedly broke with previous conventions; this ­indeed still remains one of the laziest ways of ­expressing admiration for new work, that it “breaks boundaries” or “defies conventions”. These things are of no interest in themselves: if a serious artist jumps over a fence, it is not for its own sake but because there is something important and urgent to be found on the other side.

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky Landscape near Dünaberg 1913. Picture: The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

To talk about modernism as though it were all a matter of bold experimentation, new languages of painting or liberation from the constraints of the real world is to turn art into a commodity that can be discussed in the same terms as furniture. But art is not furniture, any more than ­novels, poems or films are. Style is not just a matter of design; style, in all periods, whether ­baroque, neoclassical, impressionist or cubist, is always about meaning. Painters paint in a certain way, just as writers write, because they are trying to capture some quality of experience that cannot be conveyed in any other manner.

The truth is that the decade or two leading up to the Great War was one of great tensions ­developing beneath what seemed, on the surface, the greatest period of prosperity, of technological and social progress the world had ever seen. There were increasing political tensions between the great powers, as the fatal pattern of alliances was built up that would sud­denly trigger the chain reaction of declarations of war in 1914; there were social and political tensions too within the multiethnic empires of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans, and ­social and economic tensions within the vast but backward Russian Empire.

At the same time, the most advanced civilisation of the world, that of western Europe, was beset by the collapse of traditional beliefs and doubt about many of its central values. ­Religious belief had been shaken by modern science and particularly by Darwinism; modern economics, and above all Marxism, had raised doubts about whether human beings were in command of their own destiny or at the mercy of long-term and impersonal economic and technological developments; modern psychology and especially the work of Freud had revealed a gulf of dark unconscious drives ­beneath what we thought of as a reasonable and moral self; and various other strands of philosophy, including the writings of Nietzsche, as well as linguistics and anthropology, had unsettled formerly axiomatic principles of identity as well as of morality.

Pablo Picasso 'Table in a café (Bottle of Pernod)' 1912. Picture: The State Hermitage Museum

Art, in all its forms, was so often the ­canary in the mine, and the paintings in this exhibition speak eloquently, and in many different ways, of the confusion and loss of orientation of this period. To recognise this, however, we need to look at the paintings themselves. We are often distracted by what we are told about art, about the alleged “intention” of the artist, or by contemporary or subsequent interpretations; but in the art of painting, the picture itself is the text. It is the same as if you were reading a poem: the poem itself is the ultimate repository of meaning, not what anyone else says about it.

If we look then at the pictures, trying to ­imagine seeing them for the first time a century ago, and ask ourselves why the artist would choose to represent the world in this way, why he would take such shortcuts, adopt such distortions or ­impose such arbitrary colour schemes, we will have a chance to understand what real meanings they convey, or — which is not quite the same thing — what confusions they unwittingly betray.

If we start with Cezanne, we may notice a still life with a bowl that is not correctly rendered in perspective, or more exactly not consistently with the perspective of the rest of the picture. This is one of the most characteristic traits of the artist’s still lifes, and what it reveals is that he has begun to abandon the principle of spatial coherence that had underpinned Western painting since the Renaissance, and which at the deepest level represented a faith in the rationality of the world. What we see here, in a period that otherwise seemed to represent the triumph of scientific and technological progress, is the beginning of doubt, of loss of faith in the axioms of reason.

Instead of subordinating everything to the coherence of a rational vision, in other words, Cezanne is beginning to look at each object ­individually. And this incidentally explains why we often feel that each piece of fruit in such compositions has such character, because it is ultimately a unique thing. Compensating for the lack of objective and coherent order in the world, Cezanne begins to look for an artificial order in the structure of the picture plane, in its grid of horizontals and verticals, its diagonals and intersections: and this is why he ­returns to the classical tradition and to a ­painter such as Poussin, a master of the artifice of painterly composition.

Pablo Picasso ‘Woman’s head' (Portrait of Geneviève) 1902/03 oil on canvas. Picture: The State Hermitage Museum

The same breakdown of rational whole into disconnected parts can be seen in Picasso’s little painting of a youth, in which details everywhere recall his academic training in life drawing, but overall coherence has visibly broken down. Here the artist maintains a tenuous balance between articulacy and inarticulacy, but where this breakdown of perspectival logic finds its culmination, and where it becomes truly articulate, is in analytical cubism, which represents a world in which the rational vision is fractured, in which no single viewpoint is valid and even the distinction between figure and ground dissolves.

This deconstruction of reason is developed in the last years before the outbreak of World War I and, like the other modernist movements, ceases or is radically transformed by the objective collapse of rational and orderly society represented by the war.

One of the virtues of this exhibition, in contrast to the rambling Museum of Modern Art exhibition that recently ended at the National Gallery of Victoria, is that it deals with a relatively small number of artists and that the most important individuals and movements are represented by several pieces. This allows us to form some idea of their development, as in the cases just mentioned, and reminds us that by no means all of these works are masterpieces.

Paul Signac 'Leaving the Port of Marseille' 1906/7. Picture: The State Hermitage Museum

A great deal is voluntarily sacrificed or involuntarily lost in this explosion of stylistic diversity. Considered with the distance of a century, and leaving aside the rhetoric, or the sales pitch, about genius and thrilling innovation, what we see in this period is the fragmentation of a culture, and specifically of a painterly tradition, under enormous stress. In the chaos, different artistic movements are groping for some way to find meaning, and some are more successful than others.

Apart from a couple of works by Monet and Cezanne, one of the high points of the exhibition is the wall devoted to Bonnard, Denis and Vuillard. The latter in particular stands out, ­despite his radically reduced window onto the world — a world shrunk to intimate interiors with a severely limited range of subject matter as well as of colour and tone — because even with these constraints he still conveys a ­patient and refined attention to a reality ­beyond his own mind. The Fauves, on the other hand, are the least convincing because of the clumsy way they ­impose arbitrary colour and form on to the ­environments they paint, with little attention to their intrinsic qualities.

We find here the beginning of a tendency that has persisted as one strand of modernist art even to the present, grounded in the ­implicit conviction that the artist can rely on a process of creation by inspiration or intoxication, without the need to master any technical skills or, even more seriously, to look carefully at the world outside the turbid whirlpool of his own feelings and instincts. On the other hand, there are a couple of ­examples here of a more conceptual process, this time based on the assumption that art can be made from ideas, whose subsequent imitators also have been responsible for a great deal of bad art, for art operates at a more subtle level of thinking than ideology. The most ­notable example is Malevich’s black square, a statement of nihilism that the artist thought worth repeating on several occasions.

The early Morandi painting, from his metaphysical period, expresses an intensely neurotic self-enclosure and alienation, like an extreme reflex of retreat from a world in chaos. The world did not become much saner in later decades, but Morandi broke free of this straitjacket and found, like Vuillard in his own way, an outlet for the expression of thought and feeling within the quietistic but exquisitely attentive practice of austere and minimalist still-life painting.

Masters of Modern Art from The Hermitage

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until March 3.