Page 18 - Studio International - January 1971

for the Leger show, to take a more radically be pessimistic. Soon, inevitably, the more informed and sensitive conflation of the
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critical look at the whole period-one of great positive potential of machinery came to be major photographers with the other signi­
cultural life, but permeated by varying degrees expressed symbolically again, and this is what ficant nineteenth- and twentieth-century
of phoniness. This phoniness was exemplified we see in Leger's The Tugboat (1918), The artists is certainly to be desired, not least
at its most extreme by Gertrude Stein, but is Town (1919), The Mechanic (1920) and similar because of the reassessments of some of the
also present in Metzinger, Gleizes and paintings. In paintings like The Syphon ( 1924) latter that might result. I may as well say in
Apollinaire, and possibly others. there are unmistakable signs of the glori&ca­ all seriousness that if I had to choose
To the memory of Apollinaire, in 1968, no less tion of consumer products that Pop Art was between saving the works of Atget and
than sixty living artists paid homage at the later to take up. But Leger can just as happily those of Picasso from oblivion, I would
ICA. A critical approach to the ethos of the focus a painting round two men and a cow, as without any hesitation choose Atget's.
period covered at the Tate might have helped in his Paysages Animes (1921). Now there is little ground for direct compari­
us understand better the sociology of modern Of course, it is inadequate to analyse Leger son between Atget and Picasso. There is quite
art since then, and in particular the alienation in terms of subject-matter only. In 1913 he a lot of ground for comparison between Atget
of many modern art movements from the wrote that the 'visual, sentimental, repre­ Picasso and Leger.
common man. sentational and popular subject in painting' Atget took hundreds of photographs, with an
Leger's later career shows, whatever one may was made superfluous by the development of old-fashioned plate camera, in Paris and its
think of it (it is not represented in the Tate photography, the cinema, etc. 7 'Each art is neighbourhood between about 1898 and 1914.
exhibition), his concern for connecting with isolating and limiting itself to its own field. He was especially fond of deserted or near­
the lives of ordinary people. His whole work Specialization is a characteristic of modern deserted streets and courtyards; shops; vehi­
shows a comprehensive and unsnobbish life, and pictorial art, like all other manifesta­ cles; parks and public gardens; trees and
acceptance of the twentieth-century environ­ tions of the human mind, must �ubmit to it.' flowers in close-up; domestic interiors; work­
ment -an acceptance totally alien to the Leger goes on to argue that specialization ing people posing in the course of their work;
Purists' prescription of guitars, vases and results in a gain in realism. But Michael Podro and public buildings. Atget, who died in
similar articles for painting. ('Logic', com­ is surely right to insist that 'the radical shift in 1927, apparently caught the eye of the Sur­
ments Mr Green, 'was allowed to get away Cubism was to focus on perceptual exhilara­ realists (with his famous photographs of store­
with a remarkable confidence trick, and still­ tion within the technical procedures of paint­ mannequins), and also of those nostalgic for
life survived even the challenge of the machine, ing and let these have at least equal status the belle epoque, before his more recent
impassive as always'.) 'No more cataloguing with the subject-matter'. Hence, no doubt, posthumous recognition as a great artist
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of beauty into hierarchies ... Beauty is every­ ,the inclination of many artists of this period (largely through the work of Berenice Abbott).
where, in the arrangement of saucepans on the for favourite motifs, like guitars or Delaunay's He presents a detailed and cumulative vision
white wall of your kitchen' -so wrote Leger in Eiffel Tower. of what we might now call an ecology of the
1924.4 And Douglas Cooper praised Leger Many professions other than art..'.most no­ city-being specially interested in the trades,
aptly when he wrote: 'Leger is the only con­ tably science and technology-have been at­ transactions, commodities and energies of city
temporary painter who feels himself capable tacked over recent years on socio-moral life, and in the relationships between natural
of confronting, without compromise, at once grounds for excessive specialization and devo­ and artificial.
the rugosity of trees and the elaborate archi­ tion to technical procedures. At the same time Leger, too, drew his inspiration from the city of
tecture of precision-built machines' . 11 it must be accepted that the specialization of Paris. Most people who see the Tate exhibi­
The Tate catalogue demonstrates how Leger's disciplines has been a necessary condition of tion will surely agree that he is a substantial
feeling for machinery was influenced by the the twentieth century's positive advances in artist. Christopher Green calls Leger's The
Italian Futurists, by De Stijl, and by the knowledge and capability. Could this line of Town 'an all-embracing symbol of modern
Purists (Ozenfant and Le Corbusier). Machin­ argument be used to elucidate both the life'. In symbolism and mood, as 'well as
ery came to be seen by many at this time as achievements and the failings of modern art­ medium, he , is attempting different things
symbolic of progress, the future and social these failings being especially evident in its from Atget. But .Atget-an inheritor, John
emancipation; and with it was associated the social contexts? Fraser argues, through Van Gogh of the Low
symbolism of the city. However, it would be a I am emboldened in these thoughts by a Countries tradition of painting-is surely the
mistake to see this optimistic symbolism as a brilliant article by John Fraser about the superior artist in humanity and imaginative
new development of the early twentieth great French photographer Eugene Atget • grandeur. D
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century. Leger is intelligibly described as Fraser remarks towards the end of his article: JONATHAN BENTHALL
'neo-classical' in this catalogue. Indeed we There are, it is true, grounds for satisfaction
have to go back to the eighteenth century-an that photography is still in the kind of limbo
age of clockwork automata, and of mechanistic that it is with respect to art as a whole. The
psychology and cosmology-to find such an humane tradition of craftsmanship, signifi­ 1 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientifa Revolutions
innocent attitude to machinery: innocent, I cant representation, a strong concern for (Chicago 1970), p 208.
mean, of the industrial revolution. I am human values, and a general absence of 2 Michael Podro, 'Cubism and its Worried Interpreters',
The Listener, August 20 1970.
thinking of paintings like Joseph Wright's An silly egotism, triviality, opportunism, and a Uger and Purist Paris, Tate Galle ry Publication, 1970.
Iron Forge, Viewed from Without (1773), and faking that one sees in such diverse artists as 4 Ibid., pp 87--8.
another by the same artist of Arkwright's [ a list of twelve photographers as well as Ii Douglas Cooper, Femand Uger et le nouvel espace
(Geneva 1949), p 20.
cotton mill, painted as if it were a country Atget, including Stieglitz and Cartier­ 6
Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution
mansion. This was before Chartism, Malthus, Bresson] is still, fortunately, the central one (London 1968, revised edition).
machine-wrecking, Blake's 'dark Satanic mills' in photography; and no one who cares 7 Quoted in Edward F. F ry , Cubism (London 1966),
and Dickens's descriptions of the Black deeply for photography, I take it, would p 126.
Country. The whole transition is admirably welcome seeing the Art News kind of s Michael Podro, /oc. cit.
· outlined by Klingender. 6 reviewer laying his hands on it. On the 9 John Fraser, 'Atget and the City', Cambridge Quarterly
vol. 3, no. 3, Summer 1968. This article is poorly
The nineteenth century was still capable of other hand, it is still regrettably far from a illustrated but contains a comprehensive bibliography.
being exhilarated by machines, especially commonplace that photographs are prints An Atget exhibition, which I have not seen, was held at
those run by steam; but the dominant human and belong equally with the other forms of the Museum of Modem Art, New York, last winter,
and social symbolism of machinery came to prints in galleries and museums. And an and it may come to Europe on tour.

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