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

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 art’s 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 Léger, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon

and Otto Dix. Dicks all the way down.

Installation view of Helene Schjerfbeck’s five self-portraits dating from 1915 to 1944

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 today’s internet savvy artists to do

is to recycle prior painterly discoveries. According to MoMA curator Laura Hoptman’s

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

swinger’s 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 institution’s inaugural program, skips the

Duchampian bone-dry issue of valid epistemic vigor by taking up the traditional tendency

to hegemonize art within a normative field of painting and sculpture. Yet given this

obvious self-imposed limitation, it is the best thing they have shown so far, a delicately

detailed curatorial tour de force of enjoyable combinations brought together by Suzanne

Pagé and Béatrice Parent. It is a very luxuriously installed exhibition of around sixty

modernist chefs-d’oeuvres that have never been shown together (because they make no

specific 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-d’oeuvres are reached by

taking the escalator to the basement. This route took me past “Inside the Horizon” (2014),

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 art’s 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 Foundation’s 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 taste’s 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 Kröller Müller in Otterlo, the National Gallery of Art and the Tate in

London, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Musée National d’Art

Moderne - Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Musée National Picasso in

Paris, the Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul de Vence, the Národní 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, Pagé, 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

trophy by reiterating the codified boundaries that assure the functioning of art’s

characteristic immediacy. But this European exhibition (only one American is in the

show) of modernist chefs-d’oeuvres, 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

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 Munch’s “The Scream” (circa 1893 or 1910)

here set in black. This throbbing meltdown is placed in dialogue with the five Helene

Schjerfbeck’s 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 Giacometti’s classic “Walking Man I” (1960). Across from them

hangs Otto Dix’s brazen “Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber” (1925), Francis Bacon’s

“Study for Portrait” (1949) and also his “Study from the Human Body” (1949) (Bacon’s

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

Malevich’s “Complex Presentiment” (1928). Sharing that stare is Alberto Giacometti’s

“Portrait of Jean Genet” (1954-1955), a feathery painting of the flamboyant and

provocative Genet that darkly conveys a vibe that I should not hesitate to call something

like a spiritual reverberation of existential loneliness.

Claude Monet, “Nymphéas” (Water Lilies) (1916-1919), 200 x 180 cm, Musee Marmottan & 204 x 200

cm, Musee d’Orsay

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 Monet’s

“Nymphéas” (Water Lilies) (1916-1919), three of Piet Mondrian’s 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 Bonnard’s “L’Été” (Summer) (1917) and three Marie-

Thérese portraits and a sculpture by Pablo Picasso from the 1930s.

Installation view of Pablo Picasso, “Woman with Yellow Hair” (1931) & Pierre Bonnard, “Summer”

(1917)

Installation view of Piet Mondrian & Constantin Brancusi

Installation view of Kazimir Malévitch, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi

The flow continues with the radical abstraction of Kazimir Malevich’s “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 Mondrian’s 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 Rothko’s “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 can’t 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.

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 Delaunay’s “The Cardiff Team” (1912-1913), Fernand Léger’s intensely

machinist “Three Woman” (1921-1922) and Francis Picabia’s five 1940s appropriation-

based paintings that make fun of romantic idealization are all touchstones in post-modern

culture.

Installation view of Francis Picabia & Fernand Léger

Fernand Léger, “Trois femmes (Le Grand Déjeuner)” (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 Léger & Robert Delaunay

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.

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.

Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle, Purchased 1954

Henri Matisse, “La Tristesse du roi (Le Roi triste)” (The Sorrows of the King) (1952) (left) “The Dance”

(1909-1910)

Across the room, Gino Severini’s thundering “Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin”

(1912) captures the swelling vigor of a Parisian dance hall and Frantisek Kupka’s

“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 Polke’s outstanding “Cloud Paintings” (1989) and Nam June

Paik’s “V Rodin (Le Penseur)” (1976-1978). That piece uses a cast of Auguste Rodin’s

“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

entails the jamming of the master’s 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

Nam June Paik, “V Rodin (Le Penseur)” (1976-1978) Photo Fondation Louis Vuitton Marc Domage (c)

The Estate of Nam June Paik

Joseph Nechvatal