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Japonisme and the Fifties: Two Major Paris Exhibitions
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15779 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
3,250 Words |
| Author
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Michael Gibson
Michael Gibson, author of a number of books on art, is the
Paris art critic for the International Herald Tribune and a
frequent contributor to publications in Europe and the United
States. |
Les Annees 50
This fall Parisians had the unusual opportunity of discovering--or rediscovering--two artistic worlds: Japonisme and the 1950s. At the Centre Pompidou, Les Annees 50 explored the decade of traumatic rebirth following the war, and at the Grand Palais, Le Japonisme investigated the impact of Japanese art on late nineteenth-century Europe.
Both shows were impressively large and far-ranging. The Centre Pompidou became an enormous time machine: Not only was there a splendidly hung display of first-rate work by artists who had emerged, asserted, or renewed themselves during the fifties, but a brilliantly conceived show of period design including furniture, appliances, and other everyday items, in conjunction with other exhibitions and events, saturated the viewer with the milieu of the era.
The twenty-seven-room presentation of painting and sculpture made the extreme diversity that marked the decade apparent to even the most casual visitor, and at the same time infused the era with coherence and order. One could sense a sort of classical, indeed stately, progression as one moved from room to room through the works of close to eighty artists, and one finally emerged with the conviction that this had been a decade or great artistic wealth and accomplishment on both sides of the Atlantic. The fifties were, among other things, the decade in which American artists finally asserted their singular quality and were no longer content to confess, as one of them had in the forties, "I am not as good as Bonnard."
Yet, despite the impression of order and coherence conveyed by the exhibition, the period was, in fact, neither coherent nor orderly. The extraordinary diversity that harmonizes so well in retrospect was actually the expression of an anxious searching, and often reflected a tyrannical conviction, held by many, that only one solution was acceptable--their own. This was also part of a ploy for intellectual or commercial power.
Diverse Abstracts
The show opened with some black-and-white paintings by Matisse and Picasso, which stood at the door, so to speak, like hospitable father figures, encouraging the public into a room devoted to black-and-white abstractions by such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Pierre Soulages, and Georges Mathieu--who at the time was still considered one of the more
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