dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
künstler: Hans Hofmann
titel: Bell Tower Mural. Pavement design
jahr: 1950
adresse: Chimbote, Peru
+: Mosaics on concrete slab, 50 x 24 ft. Draft, not realised
«The Hofmann-Sert project reflects the convergence of Modernism's general aim to establish a synthesis of the arts and Sert's particular idea that public spaces offer ideal possibilities for such a synthesis. This constituted a significant shift from Modernist designs that concentrated on quantifying and objectifying city planning, to an emphasis on articulating a new, secular monumentality.» (Costa et al. 2004, p. 10)
«In 1950, two European émigrés living in New York, the architect Josep Luis Seit (1901–1983) and the artist Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) worked together on the design for a church bell tower for the civic center of Chimbote, a new town in Peru. Although never constructed, their collaboration marks a key point of intersection between two modern traditions. On Sert's side, the Chimbote project, designed in 1948–1950 with Paul Lester Wiener, his partner in Town Planning Associates, was a clear demonstration of his idea of the modern pedestrian «core,» a place of public interaction inspired by traditional Latin American town squares. Sert and Wiener had begun to explore this concept in 1944, with their design for the Brazilian Motor City, and for Sert it would remain the central element of his apporach to urban design through a series of other projects in Latin America, in his work as President of CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) from 1947 to 1956, and in his role as Dean and founder of the Urban Design program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1953 to 1969. Through its promotion in CIAM the concept would eventually influence projects ranging from Le Corbusier's governmental core at Chandigarh, to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's Lever House, to the shopping malls of Victor Gruen and many other postwar projects. For Hofmann, an influential teacher of other artists, the bell tower collaboration occurred as American artists were rethinking the nature of abstract painting, and as Hofmann, an American exponent of Cubist principles in the 1930s, was beginning, like Jackson Pollock, to assimilate the influence of Surrealism and its valorization of unconscious processes of artistic creation as a member of the New York School in the 1940s.
The occasion of their collaboration was an exhibition in the fall of 1950 organized by the art dealer Samuel M. Kootz , whose gallery had represented Hofmann since 1947. The exhibition, The Muralist and the Modern Architect, featured four other collaborations between architects and artists : Walter Gropius and his firm TAC (The Architects Collaborative) with Robert Motherwell, for the main stair of a junior high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts; Marcel Breuer and Adolph Gottlieb for a screen wall in a lounge at a Vassar College dormitory; Philip Johnson and William Baziotes, for a mural in a 'Glass House' ; and Frederick Kiesler and the sculptor David Hare, for a free form staircase element in a version of the 'Endless House.' According to the text provided at the exhibition, the Sert and Hofmann design called for a 'free-standing concrete slab with a surface wall the size of about 50 x 24 feet for the mural' to be situated in the center of the main pedestrian core of Chimbote. The stated intention was to 'dominate the plaza' with the tower, which would be adjacent to a plaza mosaic also
designed by Hofmann. This mosaic was to be made of 'natural stone of different colors, following the tradition developed in many Latin American countries .' At some point in the design process Hofmann reduced the size of the bell tower to 24 x 8 feet, and subdivided it into three parts, with the top and bottom sections seven feet in height and the middle section fourteen feet!
The s ubject of muralism was in the forefront of art and architectural discussions in the late 1940s . New Yor/c Times critic Aline Louchheim (who later married Eero Saarinen) found Sert and Hofmann's collaboration to be the best in the show, saying 'the painter's audacity matches the boldness of the enormous, unrelieved white area …a joyous visual obbligato.' Louchheim also mentioned two similar exhibitions that had taken place at the Levitt Gallery, the latest in 1949, and reported that the issue of whether modern architects were 'giving painters and sculptors the opportunities for collaboration they deserved' was being widely discussed at the Architectural league and 'wherever painters , sculptors and architects met.'
In the prewar decades muralism had been invested with political significance in widely diverging contexts, ranging from those of Diego Rivera and the other Mexican muralists to American Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects for public buildings to works in Fascist Italy and Stalinist Russia. In all of these, muralists attempted to extend and transform the classical tradition to mobilize mass emotion in favor of specific
and widely varying nationalistic and political agendas. New York artists, however, began to quest ion this approach in favor of abstraction and Surrealism in the late 1930s, shortly before Stalin's mass political executions began to be known and doubts emerged about the validity of the Soviet Communist party line . The Surrealist idea that the painting should be a risk-taking event in itself, and therefore productive of new and revolutionary states of consciousness, began to take hold and alter the Cubist- and Mondrian-inspired directions of New York abstract artists in the late 1930s.
Picasso's Guernica, commissioned for Sert and Lacasa's Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Fair, was exhibited with great success in New York in 1939. While most Federally-sponsored WPA murals of the Depression years were in a realistic American Scene style, an exception was Arshile Gorky's 1937 mural panels for the Newark Airport adm inistration building . These were commissioned by Burgoyne Diller, a Hofmann student , who was the director of the New York mural division of the Federal Art Project and a member of the American Abstract Artists group.
Gorky's mural showed the clear influence of Fernand Léger, who had called for 'an agreement among the wall – the architect – and the painter' in several lectures in 1933. Critical of modern architects' efforts to 'cleanse through emptiness,' Léger argued that as a result, a 'dangerous empty space' was developing in modern architecture, and that architects should work with painters and sculptors to address it. For him, color was the essential element in this effort, as he told the modern architects, including Sert, assembled in Athens for the Fourth CIAM Congress in 1933. As the 1930s unfolded, Léger's Purist and populist position became an important element in the muralism of leftist coalition politics of the rest of the decade. He argued that artists must compete with large advertising signs, as he demonstrated with several large photomontages and painted murals at the 1937 Paris World Fair and at a large stadium used for trade union events.»
(Eric Mumford, in Costa et al., 2004, pp. 52ff.)