Avant-garde: this is defined as people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics.
The volume I chose to work with was # 10 in the New Age Magazine No. 5. This volume had numerous contributors with variant discussions, but caught my attention with all the feedback on Pablo Picasso, which is the area I want to focus on exclusively.
Pablo Picasso, without going too great into detail, was one of the primary “founding fathers” of Cubism (the other being Georges Braque). The main component of Cubism that singled it out from other art movements was the placement of objects. For example, rather than viewing subjects form a single fixed angle, the artist would break them up into a multiplicity of facets so that different faces of the subject/object can be seen simultaneously.
This created a problem for many of The New Age readers, when an example of Picasso’s work was reproduced in the magazine for their review. I find it comically ironic that many readers expressed an appreciation for the new, yet were completely lost on how to approach Picasso's work, and were constantly asking the author of the reproductions (Mr. Huntly Carter) for further direction. Here are a few examples of the feedback:
One reader (“Tommy”) praises the new addition of the puzzle picture (as he saw it) to the magazine. He reflects that it has given him much pleasure and remarks that The New Age Magazine is certainly changing its example of humor; he goes on to say that he would like this addition of Picasso's work to be a permanent weekly feature. The next day (the magazine follows his daily reactions), Tommy is still trying to decipher what objects belong where, and by the third day, Tommy says “I withdraw my suggestion of a puzzle–picture every week. Lots of nasty things are coming out of this one…a fat man with one eye…an unpleasant woman…It is only the architect’s benign face that keeps me from pitting the thing in the fire. Do for heaven’s sake give a key next week, so as to put things right again.” (119 italics added)
Another reader asks if the contributor will “please pity the poor blind” and tell him how this piece is supposed to be looked at and from which angle?
Many of the reader’s reaction are similar, and the general feeling was that they appreciate the new form, but just can’t understand how they are to identify with it.
Tommy’s reaction of “putting things right again” in itself speaks volumes about the attitude towards the unconventional. What Picasso and others like him did was to place a series of facets “out of order” for the viewer's personal assessment; there was no key or correct way to identify them, and in a very conservative culture such as the 1900s, stepping out of the black and white portrait for a hint of color was taboo. Avant-garde, then, came to represent the support of change in all areas of the arts, and when social circles disagreed on what makes “good” art, many problems arose. While many embraced the idea of change (and not necessarily change itself), some others, such as Harold Fisher, were less kind. Fisher states in his review of Picasso's work, “What in the name of all that is sane is the meaning of that conglomeration of blobs and scratches presented to your unoffending readers as ‘A study by Picasso’?” (119 illustration below)
This reaction was not at all uncommon, as Picasso's work was often seen as adolescent, uncouth and just plain stupid. As levels of the sub-conscious were yet to be applied to art (this practice came later with surrealism), the idea that art could be interpreted solely as an individual interpretation rather than a collective one was a foreign notion to some. And, this is just one of countless reasons that Art in the Avant-garde movement was crucial to many different schools of thought.
An example of Picasso’s work in The New Age Magazine:
Rayonnism
To begin my analysis of areas relating to Art, I explored the introduction summaries and then systematically narrowed down specific volumes, which talked about various types of art styles. In doing so, I was able to sort out many of the volumes that did not fully address the perception of art as being avant-garde. I was interested in finding the evolution of a specific style of art. In my search, I encountered the art style called “Rayonnism” and felt it represented the avant-garde nature of art. I ended up using issues number 13, 15 & 20 in New Age Magazine volume number 30 which relate art, the evolution of expressionism, and Rayonnism.
The author, R. A. Stephens, a prominent contributor for the magazine, talks about the evolution of artistic expression in his piece entitled “The New Expressionism” (30: 20:263-264). Stephens notes that art in itself is something which evolves over time and that various modes of expression are manifestations of this entity in different styles and formats. He says, “I wish that artists…would realize the fact that art is not like mechanics, where it is enough to patent a new notion to style oneself an inventor.” He attacks the notion that certain artists created specific types of artistic styles, and emphasizes the role of different social conditions in producing different types of art where the artist is able to reuse past ideas and give a new spin on things as they appear in a specific time period and cater to a certain set of social, political, economical, philosophical and religious ideas. He discusses Kandinsky, the artist celebrated for giving rise to the Expressionism movement. However, he pinpoints that Kandinsky’s utilization of abstraction is influenced by an earlier movement in Russia, which was pioneered by Russian artists, Natalia Gontcharova and Mikhail Larionow, who sought to meld the abstract nature of life into their art, ingeniously entitled Rayonnism.
The second piece is by Larinow as he discusses the tenets of Rayonnism. He states that Rayonnism aims to further the “translation of life into pictorial values” (Vol 30, Iss 15, p. 293-294). In his close analysis of pictorial form, he highlights the closeness with which life influences art and thus nature interjects itself in each respective piece of artwork. In a more scientific sense, he talks about rays of light, which illuminate objects and do not leave room for the abstract. Instead, Rayonnism takes all art a step further. Where Stephens talked about the infusion of spirituality and abstraction in Kandinsky’s “The Art of Spiritual Harmony,” Larinow would say that this addition of the abstract in essence retards the growth of Rayonnism since it objectifies art. Simply stated, as nature cannot be objected neither can art, thus art, according to Ryonnism, transcends the past, the present and looks at a sphere of existence devoid of time and space. In this brief analysis of the two pieces, it becomes apparent that art is a manifestation of the avant-garde nature of life. Art breaks boundaries in how it encapsulates life in its “pictorial values” and evolves over time to address changing social conditions, through artistic styles such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism or even Dadaism. The Avant-garde nature of art lies in its evolution over time and thus it mirrors the evolution of life in whichever form one chooses to look at it.
The paintings in Volume 30, issue number 13 of the New Age Magazine, include a self-portrait of Gontcharova and a painting by Larinow.
Art Reviews
We tend to think of movements as unified bodies, but the avant-garde works of the period were not always given a receptive welcome. Volume 15, Issue 2 provides a great starting point into the divisiveness with which many Modernist paintings were greeted. It was not only the general public, but the critics themselves, who were struggling to make sense of this new art. The art critics for The New Age feared that the objective criteria for reviewing art had been replaced by an “Emperor’s New Clothes” approach. This concern is evident in Ludovici's tongue-in-cheek description of "Pure Painting" as the work of a poseur artiste who paints a formless blob and calls it high art:
"The picture to which I refer hangs in the third room on the left
of the center gangway...It is called "Peinture Pure," and consists simply of a formless, practically blank smudge of blue and brown. ...This is indeed pure painting, it is nothing but house painting; and it shows the extent to which form-anarchy will go, if one hesitates to draw the fatal line...Even the most daring innovator can be outdone by some one who declares that the greatest art is the blank sheet of paper" (15:2:44).
While reviewers praised the non-traditional aesthetic, they felt daunted by the task of evaluation, and often reacted with hyperbolic ire. There is a lot of backbiting and resentment in these pages. Nobody was beyond criticism. The critic and painter, Walter Sickert, pronounced definitively, "Cubism is not art." He said that "Picasso's work is half-nursery, half-museum,” and lashed out against "the willful...nonsense-distortion of Matisse and Picasso" and the "colossal nonsense of the Cubist boom" (11:07:167).
To get a sense of why these critics were so riled up, we must look beyond art to the concern that the artistic upheaval might radiate out to society. Ludovici actually feared that anarchy in art forecasted anarchy in society. He attacked Futurism on this basis: "The anarchy of the Futurists...may seem to some less noxious and less threatening than that which gives vent in the open streets, by means of dynamite and nitro-glycerine...But...anarchy in painting and sculpture is only a forecast of what the most disintegrating and dissolvent influences of modern times are accomplishing and will ultimately try to achieve in every other department in life” (14:9:281). He calls on readers to "resist the attack, which one day will be general, upon all the most valued institutions of orderly life.”
These critics were wary of radical change and attacked some of their movement’s best contributors. At a time when the definition of art was expanding to include non-traditional forms, many of these criticisms seem self-contradictory. Sickert, in "Transvaluations," criticizes sculptors who make art out of cigarettes and derides Picasso's use of bits of cloth, tin and glass stuck to the surfaces of his canvases (15:2:35). While at it, he closes with the admonition modern painters learn again to draw a head like Millet's portrait of Theodore Rousseau. What did readers of The New Age make of a reviewer advocating such a regression?