Page 22 - Studio International - March 1973

Marcelin Pleynet, a member of the group.
Pleynet's long essay, `Le système de Matisse',
was subjected to a detailed analysis by Marc
Devade in the most recent number of the
Supports/Surfaces magazine, Peinture 4/5.
Significantly, the collection from which the
essay was taken bears the overall title,
L'enseignement de la peinture — The teaching of
painting.
Pleynet's critique in L'enseignement de la
peinture is worth a great deal of attention on its
own merits, being surely one of the most
rigorous and penetrating analyses of modern
European painting to emerge since the last war.
But it is also fundamental to the understanding
of Supports/Surfaces, which takes its stand
upon Pleynet's distinction between true
historical perspective and the false vision of
modern art as a succession of avant-garde
groups or movements. For Pleynet the
movements of Cubism, Fauvism and Futurism
are: 'so many entities (which) quarrel for the
front of the stage and lay claim to an autonomy
which they cannot view in relative terms. In this
way there arises the revolutionarist "ordinance"
of modern painting . . . which has the tendency
of rendering impossible any total approach to the
pictorial problematic in its operative
complexity . . . this situation lays upon us today
the obligation of taking into consideration any
and every pictorial manifestation only in so far
as it is related to the totality of manifestations in
the history of modern painting.'5
It is difficult to disagree with Pleynet's
conclusion that the avant-garde group, however
productive and necessary in an earlier historical
situation, has engendered a dangerous myth of
perpetual recurrence, with neo-dadaists,
neo-surrealists etc. periodically reviving the
antiquated shock effects. Pleynet's response to
the 'avant-gardist shimmer's of so much post-
war art lies in a historical reappraisal of the role
Detail from house of the 'habitant-paysagiste' M. Isidore (known as of Cezanne, whose 'theoretical reversal' is
`Maison de Pique-Assiette') at Chartres: included by Lassus in his
`schema directeur d'apparence' for the new town in the valley of the Marne treated as an irreversible 'coupure' in the history
of Western art, and a detailed consideration of
seeking to revive a classical style for the modern modern planning. It is no longer a question of the work of Matisse, in Devade's words
world, and in locating the central problem of the the specific roles of architect, engineer and `the most consistent painter of the twentieth
plastic arts in the statement and resolution of landscape gardener, but of an attempt to century'.?
contrasts. But where Leger carried on his confront the problems posed by a conception of English readers may well ask where the
exploration within the bounds of the traditional `total landscape' (paysage global). originality of this particular view lies — how it
Work of art, Lassus has attempted to reaffirm the If Bernard Lassus relates in historical terms diverges, for example, from the estimate of
mechanisms of the classical equilibrium in to Leger and to the French classical tradition, Cezanne contained in the writings of Charles
terms of a problematic. And he has drawn the the members of the Supports/Surfaces group Biederman, or from the American formalist
terms of this problematic not from the study of take their bearings from a historical criticism which concentrates upon the specific
the traditional work of art, but from the development which stretches back through development of the two-dimensional surface.
discovery and review of 'savage' or American post-war painting to Matisse and The answer is, it seems to me, quite clear.
unassimilated realizations. Through the Cezanne. As with Lassus, the group insists on For the purposes of our conventional
formation and continued exercise of this the necessity for setting up a problematic assessments of the art of the modern period,
problematic, he has not only been able to which is prior to the execution or production of the theoretical burden of Modernism can be
animate his urbanistic schemes with working the work itself. To an even more striking extent, expressed in terms of a dichotomy — one that is
principles but has also been able to enshrine they elevate the critical and historical prise de conveniently enshrined in the twin terms 'art
them in didactic form in his courses for the conscience to a position of primary importance. and anti-art'. On the one hand, we have the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and his plans for the It is important to recognize their close development from Cezanne and the cubists
recently founded Centre National d'Etude et de identification, on a theoretical and ideological through to modern American painting, which is
Recherche du Paysage, which sets out to train level, with the work of the French Tel Quel portrayed as a progressive reduction to pictorial
its small group of graduate students in the group. Indeed it is difficult to define their specificity : on the other, the development from
varied functions arising from the demands of position without reference to the critical work of Duchamp's concept of the work as a 'brain-fact'

108