False Dawn
Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935
The New York Sun, November, 1, 2007
The disparate, jostling artistic movements grouped together and loosely labeled as "modernist" may have been gathering pace before 1914, but it was the moral, spiritual, and physical devastation left by four years of war that allowed them to play such a prominent role within the cultural avant-garde of what remained of Europe.
"Graphic Modernism From the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910–1935" is a fascinating, striking, and intellectually ambitious exhibition now showing at the New York Public Library. It attempts to demonstrate that the agenda and the aesthetics of modernism had a key part to play in the identity that the nascent states (from Estonia in the north to the future Yugoslavia in the south) that had emerged from the wreckage of the empires destroyed by the war were both trying to create for themselves and, no less critically, project to the outside world. It's an interesting argument, and it gives the library an ideal opportunity to showcase art — in this case, a selection of illustrations and other design work, primarily drawn from periodicals, pamphlets, and other published material — that fully deserves a wider audience.
But while it may be an interesting argument, it's based on a questionable premise. If there was one thing these new countries did not lack, it was a sense of identity. Theirs was frequently focused on a supposed reconnection with their dominant ethnicities' sometimes distant, usually suppressed, and often concocted, past. Its roots lay in the romanticism of the national "revivals" that spread across Europe in the 19th century. Insofar as it found artistic expression in the 1920s and, particularly, the 1930s, it was predominantly backward-looking, a matter more of flaxen-haired peasants and völkisch fantasy than modernist innovation. This is hinted at in only a few pieces, and then only indirectly. These include the pastiche medievalism of a poster produced for a trade fair in Lwów, and two beautifully stylized Bulgarian landscapes by Sirak Skitnik and Dechko Uzunov, who each attempt to reconcile more modern artistic ideas with folk tradition and the imagery of the homeland — attempts typical of this time and these regions.
This ought not come as a surprise, but may. These countries were less of a backwater than half a century of Cold War isolation would later suggest. Modernity did not pass its artists by, but it normally owed more to the playful geometries of Art Deco than to the hectoring Constructivist/Suprematist abstraction that essentially defines this show. Deco was a style with closer links to Hollywood than to Moscow, to commerce than to nation, but it's better representative of this epoch than a modernism more focused on leftist (or, if you prefer, "progressive") ideology. That may explain why, with exceptions (most notably, and most delectably, a sly, characteristically erotic nude by Latvia's Sigismunds Vidbergs), there are so few allusions to Art Deco in this show.
Rather than trying to endow the works on display with a wider political significance than they may actually deserve given the historical realities of their era, it's better to consider them on their own terms, and in all their intriguing artistic (if not ideological) variety. Modernism was a Bauhaus with many mansions. Thus we see outstanding expressionist pyrotechnics, especially two covers, frenetic and fine, designed for the Polish periodical Zdrój, trickster Dadaist typography from Slovenia, some leaden surrealist clichés from Czechoslovakia, and much, much more.
Predictably enough, given the emphasis on Constructivism, El Lissitzky makes several appearances (for some of this period he managed to live a comfortable distance away from the Soviet experiment he was so enthusiastically touting). These include the most directly propagandist item on show, a volume produced for visitors to the USSR's pavilion at the 1928 International Press Exhibition, complete with hammer, sickle, and a willingness to wrap mass murder in the slickest of packages. In other pieces on display, Lissitzky's politics are less overtly signaled, but these works remain what they were always intended to be: undeniably brilliant advertising for an allegedly radiant future.
A similar philosophical subtext — one less concerned with shaping a sense of nationality than in finding new ways to destroy it — can be detected in a good number of the other pieces on view. As it happened, however, old ways of doing this still worked all too well. Within a decade or so, almost all these new nations again found themselves devastated, but in a very traditional manner. They fell prey to rampaging armies, invading from the east, west, or both. Their borders were reduced to abstractions as complete as anything you will see at this show. The consequences were anything but. Until January 27 (42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, 212-593-7730).