At the Meeting of the Planes

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Guggenheim Museum's landmark sculpture show

The older modern art gets, the further it slides away, the clearer it becomes that the difference between us and the early moderns was not just one of talent. They were obsessed and inspired, as we no longer are, by the promise of the 20th century and a world made new. Because of the general faith in development, the four decades between 1890 and 1930 make up one of the supreme periods in the cultural history of the West--riven, tragic, dissonant, yet as vigorous as the Italian Renaissance: a rewriting of the contract between man and his symbols.

One of the areas in which this happened was sculpture. It was perhaps the last time that a sculptor could imagine, in good faith, that he was history's megaphone. The social power of art was still unquestioned, and to change the language of sculpture was, at least potentially, an act of real cultural and moral significance. In those 40 years, the language of sculpture underwent the most searching revision it had had, perhaps in its whole history, and certainly since the time of Bernini and his followers in the 17th century. It moved, to put it roughly, from the lump to the web: from closed mass to open, constructed form. What happened to it then is set forth in a beautifully chosen, concise exhibition called "The Planar Dimension: Europe, 1912-1932," organized by Curator Margit Rowell, which opened last month at New York's Guggenheim Museum.

The change started with cubism and widely affected the European avantgarde. Its results range from the futurist sculpture of Italian artists like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla to the radical experiments of the Russian constructivists, Tatlin, Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Puni; from Alexander Archipenko's wall reliefs to Julio Gonzalez's iron constructions and Alexander Calder's fluttering mobiles. Artists as unlike as Naum Gabo and David Smith were affected by it. No sculptor interested in either ideal formal systems or new materials was immune to its promises, and its influence persists to this day. Sculpture had been solid since paleolithic man made his fertility dolls, indeed since God made Adam out of clay; it now became a matter of intersecting planes, of wires springing through space, and airy conjunctions of industrial materials--sheet metal, plywood, Celluloid, Bakelite. "Matter is dissolved into pure planes and 3 lines, penetrating each other, devoid of mass and transparent," wrote Author Alexander Dorner in 1931. "Thus instead of a space filled with solid mass . . . a space appears as the crisscrossing of streams of movements and streams of events." Just as the marble hero radiating authority from a pedestal took its place in a geocentric universe ruled by kings, so the new sculpture seemed appropriate to an idea of the world based on relativity and swift social change.

This conquest of the "planar dimension" has not, up till now, been properly explained by a museum show. Rowell has done the job with tonic intelligence, bringing together 114 sculptures done between 1912 and 1932 by 39 artists: French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Italian and American. She has traced sculpture's passage from closed mass to open form with a precision of focus and a variety of little-known works that no earlier effort has matched. This may be the most important show of modernist sculpture in the past ten years.

With its two dimensions, painting can only represent space. But sculpture has three. It can absorb space into its own fabric. One of the key moments in this development came in 1912, when Pablo Picasso, then 31, snipped and bent some sheet metal into the semblance of a guitar. It was a guitar that might have been lifted from one of his own cubist still lifes, an open object defined by thin planes. The folding of the tin imitated the layered, overlapped look of the paintings: it was cubism made literal. This battered-looking object is Exhibit A in the Guggenheim show. In it, space was for the first time declared to be the prime subject of sculpture, but by means traditional to painting: the flat surface, the boundary line. Since tin sheets do not ask to be stroked, as stone or bronze does, the Guitar was wholly visual sculpture, another mark of the new sensibility. If the word revolutionary still means anything in art, this was a revolutionary work. At one stroke it changed the history of its own medium.

It is startling to see how fast and with what authority the Guitar's lessons were absorbed by other artists in Paris, such as Henri Laurens and Archipenko. Laurens's Dish with Grapes (1916-18), with its majestic rotation of painted wood planes around the calm central core of the stemmed fruit dish, is surely one of the masterpieces of the 20th century, and all the fresher for being little known. Jacques Lipchitz's flat, frontal cubist sculptures, like Detachable Figure, Seated Musician (1915), are perhaps less impressive than this; yet they have about them a gaiety and precision of feeling that predicts art deco. Archipenko was a Russian emigre who arrived in Paris to work in 1908. As Rowell shows, he contrived to graft the tradition of the icon--with its deep frame and boxy space, and its applied incrustation in the form of halos, plaques, ex-votos and jewels fixed on the paint surface--to cubist sculpture. A work like Woman with a Fan (1914) combines both; it is almost as hieratic as a Russian saint. Yet nothing could have been more modern than the funnel Archipenko inserted into the design, like a negative breast, a conical hole that goes straight through the canvas at the back, turning painting into sculpture with one gesture.

In Russia, where there was virtually no tradition of sculpture, the planar impulse took two directions. One-as its name, suprematism, indicates--tried to transcend the material world. The painter Kasimir Malevich and his students, like Ilya Chashnik, devised reliefs and models that in their crisscross of small rectangular shapes and larger blocks resemble models for imaginary buildings or cities. They were, in a very rarefied sense, social blueprints, though quite unworkable ones. Perhaps Russia was the only country in which artists could seriously imagine that abstract art might attain the moral compulsion of a holy picture. Chashnik's Large Suprematist Relief (1920-26), finished a few years before he died at 27, lays no stress on its materials; it is a pure proposition of the kind of half religious ideal that was soon to be censored out of Russian art by Stalin. On the other hand, the work of Iwan Puni and Vladimir Tallin was virtually dialectical materialism transferred into art-"real materials," as Tatlin put it, possibly drawing on his own experience as a marine carpenter, "in real space." When Puni stuck a ham mer onto one of his reliefs, and a saw onto another, he did so to praise the world of work and its appropriate tools, to give sculpture a new standing as the product of labor rather than the emblem of luxury or abstract power. As a result, his work-- or what survives of it after decades of neglect in Russia --as a singular freshness about it: plain, optimistic lingo, a kind of sophisticated visual slang.

Such experiments look recondite in the '70s, and they must have looked quite peripheral when they were done. The audience for them was small compared with that for a radical poet like Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the link that planar sculp ture sought between art and technology was often frustrated by shortages of materials and know-how. Still, these works cast a long shadow. The most surprising aspect of the show is the quality of some of the lesser known artists whose work Curator Rowell has ferreted out. One was Katarzyna Kobro, a Russian woman who worked with Malevich and Lissitzky in the years just after the 1917 Revolution, and whose exquisitely organized sculptures of painted sheet steel radiate an un common precision of feeling. Alas, nearly all of Kobro's output has vanished, as has that of Laszlo Peri, a Hungarian sculptor who died in 1967. His concrete wall plaques, so tersely unbeautiful and confident in their "shaped canvas" eccentricity, remind one how many of the concerns of today's nominally advanced sculpture, which presumably seems nov el to those who make it, were threshed over and done better half a century ago.

In that respect, the Guggenheim's show is an interesting rebuke to historical myopia. But it is also, quite simply, a visual delight; and if any one exhibition in the U.S. may be seen as a weathercock, signaling the shift of taste away from romanticism and toward the once unpopular rigors of constructivism, this is it.

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