art review of les clefs d'une passion (keys to a passion)
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Art review of Les Clefs d'une passion(Keys to a Passion) at Fondation Louis VuittonTRANSCRIPT
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Les Clefs d'une passion
Keys to a PassionFondation Louis Vuitton
April 1 - July 6, 2015
8 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
Bois de Boulogne
Published at Hyperallergic as Modernist Male Art Is Timeless, but Not Timely herehttp://hyperallergic.com/216613/modernist-male-art-is-timeless-but-not-timely/
All installation photos by Martin Argyroglo for Fondation Louis Vuitton
Installation view of Constantin Brancusi & Mark Rothko
The predetermined transcendental apparatus in Modern Art is the irredeemable ideology
of hyper-organized neoliberalism that it sometimes derided. As a result, much of recent
contemporary art has become much more goal-oriented and single-mindedly direct than
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that encountered at the modern Keys to a Passion show, something that paradoxically
strengthens bonds within the domestication of thought. According to Sigmund Freud in
his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, a key that opens a room in a dream is
unmistakably phallic. Keys to a Passion dances on the head of this repugnant patriarchal
pin by delivering jouissance luxury. Much of the work is hypnotically beautiful and
perfect for summertime meditative-dreamland. Its pleasure-over-problem proposition
might even be construed as a prime example of the fetishistic obsession with the past
typical of our political and artistic imagination at present an imagination in desperate
need of reclaiming the specific multifarious ideologies of modern arts past, so to
repossess a better idea of possible futures.
This phallic, less than benevolent, interpretation on my part merely re-places Keys to a
Passion within the tradition of male linearity, made evident by the obviously over-
gender-determined inclusion of five run-of-the-mill self-portraits by the Finnish painter
Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) into the modernist cannon. One that includes Alberto
Giacometti, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Piet Mondrian,
Kazimir Malevich, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Lger, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon
and Otto Dix. Dicks all the way down.
Installation view of Helene Schjerfbecks five self-portraits dating from 1915 to 1944
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Even given that obvious and sad historical fact, Keys to a Passion is something of a
chronological antidote to the recent pessimistic a-historical flop at MoMA, The Forever
Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World where seemingly the condition now
is that everything has been done, and all that is left for todays internet savvy artists to do
is to recycle prior painterly discoveries. According to MoMA curator Laura Hoptmans
words, The obsession with recuperating aspects of the past is the condition of culture in
our time, thus offering no alternative technique or viewpoint capable of registering an
agency of multitudes. Even though the greatest master of the 20th century is missing from
Keys to a Passion, Marcel Duchamp, the implication that everything in the visual arts has
been done by the men now in the basement at Fondation Vuitton, is ridiculously non-
ambitious. If anything, the limitations inherent in their general preference for reductive
abstraction may show young artists that they clearly now are not doomed to merely
recycle their mercilessly singular wares. If that was true (and it is not) the dominant
metaphor for a Keys to a Passion comparison to The Forever Now should not be the
swingers passion key party, but the plush mirrored-ceiling room to which it leads, where
art is dreamily fucking itself to sleep while watching its exuberant pluralistic re-
duplications and dilapidated doublings to infinity in the mirrors (albeit in reverse).
But rather, this, the third phase of the institutions inaugural program, skips theDuchampian bone-dry issue of valid epistemic vigor by taking up the traditional tendencyto hegemonize art within a normative field of painting and sculpture. Yet given thisobvious self-imposed limitation, it is the best thing they have shown so far, a delicatelydetailed curatorial tour de force of enjoyable combinations brought together by SuzannePag and Batrice Parent. It is a very luxuriously installed exhibition of around sixtymodernist chefs-doeuvres that have never been shown together (because they make nospecific theoretical point in combination) and they probably never will again.
So now that the new flashy Frank Gehry curving wrapped haute couture building has
become familiar, timelessness trumps timeliness. The chefs-doeuvres are reached by
taking the escalator to the basement. This route took me past Inside the Horizon (2014),
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the slick minimal commission by Olafur Eliasson of columns of varying widths placed
along a watery walkway with two of the sides covered in mirrors and the third in yellow
glass. A wonderful (not) example of the new sleep that modernist reductive abstraction
offers as interior decoration, for those that follow modern arts tenants a little too
rigorously with regard to its epistemological credentials.
The exhibition is arranged around four themes that have interested the man in command,
Bernard Arnault: subjective expressionism, contemplative, popist and music. These catch
words supposedly absorb all the whacked and scattered ontological and epistemological
shifts Monsieur Arnault encountered when forming the Foundations contemporary
collection. One, from what I have seen so far, remains too much in thrall to an
indefensible set of ontological commitments inherited from 20th century modernism. But
the works here are not only a plunge into his aesthetic tastes psychic formations. They
are not his. They are on loan from prestigious institutions and private collections that
include the State Hermitage Museum and the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, the
Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, the Munchmuseet in Oslo, the Moderna
Museet in Stockholm, the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the MoCA in
Chicago and Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Geementemuseum in
The Hague and the Krller Mller in Otterlo, the National Gallery of Art and the Tate in
London, the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Muse National dArt
Moderne - Centre Pompidou, the Muse dOrsay, and the Muse National Picasso in
Paris, the Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul de Vence, the Nrodn Galerie in Prague, the
Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, and the Kunsthaus in Zurich.
So Keys to a Passion stresses the unique quintessence or specific aura of each piece of art
brought together from around the world in that basement. And it is rewarding, presenting
a conceptual rebuttal to the substitute fetishism by which boundless Instagram-Facebook-
Twitter-Tumblr matrix posts too easily stand in for the ontological art thing. In the
catalogue, one of the curators of the exhibition, Pag, is keen to stress that it is necessary
to formulate an emotional dialogue with these works and that requires time and
concentration. In a way she attempts to re-privilege the power of the art object as cultural
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trophy by reiterating the codified boundaries that assure the functioning of arts
characteristic immediacy. But this European exhibition (only one American is in the
show) of modernist chefs-doeuvres, is guided most by a search for that slippery quality
called quality. Nothing can be mistaken here for a political utterance.
Installation view of Edvard Munch & Helene Schjerfbeck
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Installation view of Edvard Munch, Helene Schjerfbeck & Alberto Giacometti
!E!d!v!a !r !d! !M!u!n!c!h!, The Scream (circa 1893 or 1910) !T!e!m!p!e!r!a and oil on unprimed cardboard, 83.5 x 66 cm,
M!u!n!c!h! !M!u!s!e!u!m! O!s!l!o
The first themed room Subjective Expressionism, opens with a shriek from the M !u!n!c !h!
!M !u !s !e!u !m ! in O !s !l !o, the first version of Edvard Munchs The Scream (circa 1893 or 1910)
here set in black. This throbbing meltdown is placed in dialogue with the five Helene
Schjerfbecks self portraits that exemplify her face as it achieves metamorphosis from
that of a young woman to one painted a few weeks before she died (dating from 1915 to
1944) and Alberto Giacomettis classic Walking Man I (1960). Across from them
hangs Otto Dixs brazen Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (1925), Francis Bacons
Study for Portrait (1949) and also his Study from the Human Body (1949) (Bacons
first known nude) that depicts the rather eerie back of a burly man as he slips behind a
curtain. Watching from across the room is the faceless melancholic man in Kazimir
Malevichs Complex Presentiment (1928). Sharing that stare is Alberto Giacomettis
Portrait of Jean Genet (1954-1955), a feathery painting of the flamboyant and
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provocative Genet that darkly conveys a vibe that I should not hesitate to call something
like a spiritual reverberation of existential loneliness.
Claude Monet, Nymphas (Water Lilies) (1916-1919), 200 x 180 cm, Musee Marmottan & 204 x 200
cm, Musee dOrsay
The second cycle reflects the magnitude of the Contemplative act. It opens first with a
series of paintings focusing on meditation before nature with Claude Monets
Nymphas (Water Lilies) (1916-1919), three of Piet Mondrians seascapes from 1909,
four versions of Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, lake and mountain views by
Ferdinand Hodler, and North Sea paintings by Emil Nolde. Picking up the theme of
nature melancholy is Pierre Bonnards Lt (Summer) (1917) and three Marie-
Threse portraits and a sculpture by Pablo Picasso from the 1930s.
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Installation view of Pablo Picasso, Woman with Yellow Hair (1931) & Pierre Bonnard, Summer
(1917)
Installation view of Piet Mondrian & Constantin Brancusi
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Installation view of Kazimir Malvitch, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi
The flow continues with the radical abstraction of Kazimir Malevichs Black Square,
Black Circle, Black Cross (1923). They are objects charged with psychic energies,
saturated with memories and laden with significance but they also have a certain
redundancy that characterizes matter-of-fact scientism. Next is Piet Mondrians majestic
Composition X in Black and White (1915) and Composition with Lines, Second
State (1916-1917) that hangs next to a totem pole by Constantin Brancusi, his Endless
Column, Version 1 (1918). Holding a wall of its own is Mark Rothkos No. 46 [Black,
Ochre, Red over Red] (1957), a large painting that plunged me into a presentational
immediacy that had also the impenetrable mists of oblivion. This room was the most
powerful to sit with and invites a theorization that is unabashedly speculative. How it
does this probably cant be convincingly described analytically. I can only proceed by
descending into the pulsations of Malevich, the whirrs of piezoelectrics in Mondrian, the
loose bumpy rhythms of Brancusi and the ominous gritty flatlands of Rothko. The
groundlessness of being I felt in the Rothko was entered through its yawning chasms of
emptiness. Its immersive misty color is very effective at this scale, and unflaggingly
converted earlier modes of contemplative thought to the sublime.
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The third sequence, entitled Popist (is that even a word?), pitches against avant-garde
elitism by capturing consumption practices in the media, in sport, and in advertising.
Robert Delaunays The Cardiff Team (1912-1913), Fernand Lgers intensely
machinist Three Woman (1921-1922) and Francis Picabias five 1940s appropriation-
based paintings that make fun of romantic idealization are all touchstones in post-modern
culture.
Installation view of Francis Picabia & Fernand Lger
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Fernand Lger, Trois femmes (Le Grand Djeuner) (Three Women) (1921-1922) Oil on canvas, 183 x
251 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1942
Installation view of Fernand Lger & Robert Delaunay
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Installation view of Francis Picabia
The fourth sequence concerns Music with two consummate hedonistic works by Henri
Matisse, The Dance (1909-1910) from St Petersburg, painted when youthful, and
another from his glorious final period, The Sorrows of the King (1952). I have rarely
seen a better, more rarefied brand of whimsy engagement than here.
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Henri Matisse, La Tristesse du roi (Le Roi triste) (The Sorrows of the King) (1952)Gouache-painted paper cut-outs mounted on canvas, 292 x 386 cm, Centre Pompidou.
Muse national dart moderne - Centre de cration industrielle, Purchased 1954
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Henri Matisse, La Tristesse du roi (Le Roi triste) (The Sorrows of the King) (1952) (left) The Dance
(1909-1910)
Across the room, Gino Severinis thundering Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin
(1912) captures the swelling vigor of a Parisian dance hall and Frantisek Kupkas
Localization of Graphic Motifs II (1912-1913) play off against the stylish Panels For
Edwin R Campbell (1914) by Wasily Kandinsky.
That is the show, but be sure to take the elevator to the fourth floor to discover the
terraces and galleries, which temporarily house some of the private contemporary
collection, such as Sigmar Polkes outstanding Cloud Paintings (1989) and Nam June
Paiks V Rodin (Le Penseur) (1976-1978). That piece uses a cast of Auguste Rodins
The Thinker (1904) so that we can see a naked thinking man studying himself in a
video monitor via closed circuit television.
That closed circuit piece sums up a great deal learnt here in accordance with the
exhaustion of futuristic thought as indicated in The Forever Now. It shows that what we
need is to love and enjoy the transcendental tools of the great masters of the 20th century
in a time specific fashion. The circuitry also suggests a need now for an anti-
transcendental, anti-modern art of cryptology. Something like a cloudy noise art that
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entails the jamming of the masters methods of transcribing signs. As that system
obviously furnishes too well our cultural-social-political values.
How about after maniacally absorbing all these master emissions, we insist on art as
comprehensive circuit breaking? One based in a dissonant aestheticity specific to the
digital moment, where art is again a competent conductor of delinquent transmission
from beyond.
Sigmar Polke. Cloud Paintings (1992) Photo Fondation Louis Vuitton Martin Argyroglo (c) The Estate of
Sigmar Polke, Cologne et ADAGP, Paris 2014
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Nam June Paik, V Rodin (Le Penseur) (1976-1978) Photo Fondation Louis Vuitton Marc Domage (c)
The Estate of Nam June Paik
Joseph Nechvatal