Page 21 - Studio International - March 1973

decorative project for the new Gare rendered stale by convention — a too complete
Montparnasse. To take the mannerist analogy a appropriation of nature by culture. Shenstone's
little further, the recent exhibition of works of shift from the ode to the garden can therefore
the Ecole de Fontainebleau at the Grand Palais be seen as an invitation to nature to revitalize the
shares so many of the prime characteristics of cultural sphere, and that it was recognized as
Vasarely's art: in particular, the utilization of such, Lady Luxborough's charming verses to
the pre-existing store of motifs with no concern Shenstone make plain:
for differences of scale, with the result that a How well the Bard obeys, each valley tells,
motif may appear in grand scale on a tapestry These lucid streams, gay meads, and lonely cells,
or in filigree on a sword-pommel without Where modest Art in silence lurks conceal' d,
significant adjustments. A phrase occurring in While nature shines, so gracefully reveal' d,
the exhibited account of Charles IX's entry into That she triumphant claims the total plan,
Rouen (1571), 'Le surplus des beautés And with fresh pride adopts the work of man.4
artificielles', could be taken as the epitome of Lassus Fleurs Artificielles c. 5968 The parallel in Lassus's work to this
Vasarely's exquisite, hyperbolic style. recuperation of the cultural by the natural is the
My judgement on the 'didacticism' of the forms which he intends to create. He has 'Dénominateur commun' exhibited at the
Vasarely is therefore patent. Having simply posed the basic problematic of the Salon de la Jeune Sculpture in 1972, where the
legitimately taken his ideology from the French classical tradition — the opposition 'sculpture' of painted sticks is designed
Bauhaus and developed his morphology from between nature and culture — and reviewed the precisely so that it may be reintegrated into the
the basis of the 'elementarism' of De Stijl, he various means of alleviating the transition from natural ambiance. But this is, of course, little
has allowed the morphology to run its course one sphere to the other. more than a symbolic image of Lassus's method,
from Classicism to Mannerism without From this point of view, it is permissible to In contrast to Vasarely's directly functional use
recognizing the need to extend or modify the see the whole course of Lassus's research into of the 'prototype-depart', which is literally
ideology. We are left with plans for the kinetic and perceptual effects, together with transposed on to whatever scale or material is
'polychrome city' of the future, which have little the series of architectural realizations which required, Lassus employs the small-scale work
more consistency than that of a painter's has been carried out through the Centre de as a means of symbolically stating and resolving
'veduta ideale', and a 'didactic museum' which Recherche d'Ambiances, in terms of the principles which are then brought to bear
can teach nothing but the morphological attempt to discover an appropriate equilibrium upon the problems of the wider environment.
implications of the development of an between natural and constructed form. In What is more, he has experienced the need to
elementarist geometrical vocabulary. contrast to the Bauhaus and functionalist look further afield than the established areas of
Having analysed the work of Vasarely in tradition, which acknowledges the structural culture in order to nourish his research on the
these terms, I should like to turn to two other logic of Classicism but entirely neglects the mechanisms of transition between the cultural
didactic approaches, which are equally based need for a continuum with natural form, (domestic) and natural spheres.
upon a problematic of the artist's role and have Lassus recalls the traditional model of the It is in accordance with this need that Lassus
similarly firm historical roots. At the same time, French classical garden. The work of Le has been impelled to undertake his long and
they would appear to be less paradoxical and Nôtre at Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, painstaking survey of the realizations of
more directly productive than the approach of where an intermediate zone of elaborate water- 'habitants-paysagistes' (lit. 'dweller-
Vasarely, for reasons which will become works, sculpted trees and presiding deities landscapers') throughout France, a survey
apparent. serves to alleviate the contrast between the man- which has now achieved preliminary coherence
It is doubtful whether the name of Bernard made architecture and the disorder of the in two documentary films and is about to
Lassus would be widely known in the natural environment, might be invoked in receive more precise theoretical formulation in a
conventional artistic circuit, either in England or comparison with his 'buissons artificiels' or paper for the Revue d'Ethnologie Française.
in his native country. This might be seen as a artificial bushes, which belong to the man-made Lassus's investigation of these 'naive'
direct consequence of the fact that he has environment as a result of the method and form creations in small gardens throughout France is
devised an artistic strategy which places him of their construction and to nature because of once again reminiscent of the eighteenth century
outside the conventional channels. Director their position and their luxuriant patterns of — the recourse to the 'savage' as a means of
since 1962 of the Centre de Recherche growth. recovering the truly human values of civilization
d'Ambiances,3 he has exhibited only rarely in Yet Lassus has gone further than this. Not But it is an investigation which takes as its mode
the group exhibitions of the past decade, and is content simply with posing the classical the anthropology of the present day rather than
probably better known at present as the problematic, he has transformed its terms that of Rousseau. Starting from the basic
,occupant of a chair of architecture at the through changing the direction of his antinomy between nature and culture, and
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. But this does not theoretical investigation. He has done this in a evolving towards the identification of the two
obviate the fact that he has been concerned way that seems historically quite consistent basic principles of the 'retarded contrast' and
since the 195os with a problematic which is with the tradition of Classicism, which always the 'common denominator', which describe the
central to art as well as to architecture — which possessed this capacity for inversion and mechanisms in operation, Lassus has been able
indeed transcends the opposition between the renewal. Take the example of the English to demonstrate a distinct rationale in a set of
two. Like Vasarely, he is a classicist in the elegiac poet, William Shenstone, who in the unrelated and apparently quite individual
sense that he is searching for general laws which course of a life-time's retirement on a country realizations. From this point — moving always
can be applied to problems of form and estate in Shropshire, The Leasowes, saw his from theory to practice — he has been able to put
construction on any scale. But where Vasarely poetic achievement overshadowed by the fame these mechanisms into effect in numerous
adopts the modern, geometrically based of his small but immensely varied landscape housing schemes, and in particular in his
Classicism of the Bauhaus, Lassus takes his garden, which was recognized by his overall planning documents for the seaside
stand upon a classical tradition which is not so contemporaries as a model of perfect taste. community of La Coudoulière and the
much modern as traditionally French. His It seems reasonable to suggest that the projected new town in the valley of the Marne.
starting point has not been with a set of Augustan elegies and odes of Shenstone's Lassus's theoretical and historical stance
preconceptions — even the apparently neutral poetic work represented, by this middle stage could therefore be defined in the following terms
preconceptions of a geometrical order — about of the eighteenth century, a mode of description A pupil of Léger, he resembles the master in
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