dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Anita Brenner
titel: Muralist Lucienne Bloch – Product of the WPA. Something About a Painter Who Paradoxically Is Both a Primitive and a Classicist – The Theory and Practice of the Mural
+: Brooklyn Eagle, Feb. 2, 1936, pp. 12–13C
«For a good many weeks this department has been nursing an article on the muralist Lucienne Bloch. During 1935 she became such important art news that she was promptly ushered into sundry halls of fame, and now constitutes the first triumphant argument in New York for government subsidy of large-scale public art. This is all because of one mural, painted under WPA at the Women's House of Detention.
As is true of most of our vigorous younger artists, Lucienne Bloch had no trouble at all getting recognition from critics. But – and this is also typical – she is a 'Success' in every way except economically and she has no assurance that she will be able to develop, by the simple process of having work to do, what is potentially a very serious contribution to modern art in America. Thus she is very closely representative of her craft and her generation.
Precisely this fact is what stands out in her work. It is the first Crystallization, in our idiom, of a widespread new approach to painting, learned from the Mexican muralists. Article I of this philosophy is that the artist is a creature of social responsibilities. Article II says, that since the artist is as a rule economically one of the masses, his work should be directed toward their enjoyment, instruction and benefit. This implies repudiation of the intellectual and social snobbery that determines much of the character of 'modernist' work. In fact, it requires so complete a revision of the role of the artist that it creates a new school and new style – as also new forms and even new instruments and new techniques and materials.
One of the first results of this revolution in attitude is the revival of mural painting. As the Mexicans argued, the decoration of public buildings is one obvious way to make … for the benefit and enjoyment of the masses. Mural painting, in turn, brings about a revival of fresco and the discovery of a great many new problems of technique and esthetic, shich are now leading into much experimentation. Because of scale, materials, light conditions and the fact that murals are generally looked at by people in the act of walking past them, pictures on walls force the artists who attempt them to develop ideas and capacities not exercised in more intimate media. And, though it springs from a social idea, the movement coincides with the moment's architectural problem of discovering suitable decoration for large public buildings. It corresponds to modern needs and conditions and moods so closely that it has spread very rapidly. Now it is in the process of growing an indigenous art, shedding its earlier Mexican and Rennaissance and archeological skin, so to speak, by developing its own materials and forms.
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In the making of this new art Lucienne Bloch belongs among the first 'primitives'. As distinguished from the moderns from Cezanne to Dali, the moderns of America, beginning with the Mexicans, signify the rebirth of a classic esthetic. This does not mean, of course, imitation of Greeks or Rennaissance Italians. It has in common with the Greeks and the Italians, and many of the arts of antiquity, such as the Chaldean and the Aztec, a fundamental emphasis. Painting or sculpture that is intended to form part of an architectural ensemble must proceed on the principle that the whole is more important than any one of its parts.
A number of French theorists, and with them Havelock Ellis, distinguish this as the underlying principle of classicism. 'In each case,' says Ellis, 'the earlier and classic manner – for the classic manner, being more closely related to the ends of utility, must always be earlier – subordinates the parts to the whole, and strives after those virtues which the whole may best express; the later manner depreciates the importance ot the whole for the benefit of its parts and strives after the virtues of individualism.' More specifically, the classic manner tends toward lucidity and simplicity, seeks ensemble rhythms, and in portraying human beings shapes them in group forms. The individualist manner of course emphasizes that in which each part differs from the other parts, and thus tends toward complexity and the elaboration of detail.
Translated into even a single mural, the classic manner produces 'architectural' esthetic. It emphasizes from and rhythm of forms, as against detailed subtleties of pattern, texture and color which are the prime values in modern oil and water-color painting. Even the favorite material for murals, fresco, imposes this esthetic. It is used to cover large surfaces and dies too quickly to allow for detail elaboration, which, moreover, is completely lost at the distances from which murals are customarily seen. And the same qualities carry over into subject matter. It must be simple, immediately meaningful to any average person, and it cannot successfully carry a complicated burden of ideas. Rivera, who has done more than any one else to popularize the mural medium in its modern applications, is recognized as a great painter on the basis of his earlier, more architectural or more 'classic' work, but his later manner is esthetically very disturbing on walls because of its decadent obsession with detail.
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Bloch's first panel, done in collaboration with Stephen Dimitroff at Madison House, was painted immediately after both artists had served apprenticeships under Rivera and shows only a little Bloch and Dimitroff and quite a lot of decadent Rivera. Its great strenght is in detail; its great weakness in the architectural organization of the painting as a whole. Her second mural, at the Women's House of Detention, is completely free of confusion and therefore completely different from the first. Moreover, a step forward in the development of modern mural decoration in the United States. The word 'classic' fits not only its esthetic but also the logical manner in which subject derives from function and composition and color from both. The subject is simply women and children at a public playground. Its implications are: freedom and health and friendliness, human warmth strong in simple people in spite of the menacing factory horizon. These are the people, says the artist, who are the sinew of the earth. The idea is worked out in terms. Some black and some white children share an apple; there is a flower pushcart man and some of the children have flowers; a black mother and a white chat over some sewing; a very pretty teacher sweeps some children along in the curve of her arm. It is, nevertheless, not sentimental. The girls in the House of Detention like to argue about which New York Playground this is; they are all sure they recognize it.
Since the House of Detention interiors are all gray and white and slick and angular, like a hospital, the artist in a flash of wisdom was convinced that the mural must provide relief in rhythms of curves; relief, also, with warm color, and relief in ideas, without, however, introducing any sanctimonious lies. The ideas for the picture came prom prolonged consultations with the inmates, woh therefore enjoy toe finished product very much. Mentally, says the artist, they are mostly innocent and childlike, so they are enchanted with the swings and the flowers and especially the little dog.
The wall on which the fresco is painted is the back part of the recreation room of the Negro girl inmates. (Incidentally the segregation, according to the institution's authorities, is made for medical reasons.) It faces an open wall that gives out on the roof and shows, through gray-wire netting, a gray manhattan skyline. The two enclosing walls are red brick. The mural is predominantly hot yellows with bright blues, knit with white and earth colors. Even in the dreariest light it explodes full of warmth like a firecracker. It is composed around an oval 'horizon' – to which, by the way, Jonas Lie objected for some sort of an academic reason – that almost literally expands the room and makes the hard walls yield. It is, nevertheless, an architectural integer of the room, first by its complementary composition and, second, by the simple device of extending the brick to walls in the picture itself.
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There are certain qualities in the artist's personality which, perhaps, guaranteed the unassuming and solid results. They are, first, honesty; second, painstaking industriousness; third, genuine identification with the working class; fourth, youth and hopefulness. Furthermore, her training enables her to grasp quickly the principles of composition with mass which are essential fo fine mural painting. She originally intended to work in sculpture and studied in Paris with Bourdelle. Later she worked in sculpture with glass, at a factory in Holland, which makes a practise of taking work by Americans only when it is passed upon by Frank Lloyd Wright. Hers was duly approved and she still gets small royalties from it. Later she worked with Rivera in Detroit and after that was so determined to do mural work that she and Dimitroff raised the money for it among friends and through lectures, getting just about enough for costs and subsistence living expenses. Her House of Detention mural was done under WPA, with particular encouragement from Commissioner of Correction McCormick. On account of its location you have to get special permission to see it. But it is worth the trouble.»