1

The Right to Indifference: abstraction in the work of

Gego (1912-1994) and Jesús Soto (1923-2005)

DR KARIN KYBURZ

Revised version of a text submitted as Thesis for the Degree of a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) 2008.

Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

London, October 2014

© Karin Kyburz

2

Contents

Abstract 4

List of Illustrations 5

Acknowledgements 11

Chronology Gego 12

Chronology Jesús Soto 15

CHAPTER I

Introduction 18

1.1 Gego in Germany and Exile 27

1.2 Venezuelan History 41

Jesús Soto: Early Biography 44

Post-war Politics in Venezuela 46

1.3 Artistic Production since Independence 47

Carlos Raúl Villanueva 54

Venezuelan Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo 62

1.4 Gego’s Search for Continuity 67

Continuity and the Visual 79

CHAPTER II

Introduction 85

2.1 French Post-war Politics 88

2.2 Abstraction/Figuration 92

2.3 Les Temps Modernes 105

French Bourgeoisie, Religion and Feminism 106

2.4 Philosophical Debates 117

3

Anti-Semitism in the Fourth Republic? 124

2.5 Le Corbusier and the Festival de l’Art d’avant-garde 129

Ambivalence in the Work of Jesús Soto 135

The Object as Obstacle to the Free Flow of Fluids 151

Museo Soto in Ciudad Bolívar 156

CHAPTER III

Introduction 159

3.1 Unreal Returns: A question of Identity 163

Identity as Politics 179

3.2 Gego and the Anonymous 182

Doubling 185

Memory and Denials 189

Differences 195

3.3 Public and Private Works 202

Kantian Structures 210

3.4 German Memories 217

The Exhibition ‘Spielraum-Raumspiele’ 221

The Historikerstreit 232

Dibujos sin papel: Letting it all go 239

Conclusion 221

Appendix 1 246

Appendix 2 251

Bibliography 253

Illustrations 264

4

Abstract

My thesis is an art historical interpretation of the oeuvres of Gego (Gertrud Luise Goldschmidt,

1912-1994) and Jesús Soto (1923-2005). It traces the biographies of both artists and situates their

work within the political and social contexts of France and Venezuela during the period c.1950-

1989. The development, in both sites of artistic production, of abstract art and Cinétisme is

explained in reference to the historical rupture of the Second World War and personal experiences

of emigration and exile. In the case of Gego emigration from Hamburg, Germany to Caracas

occurred in 1939 as the result of the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany. Jesús Rafael Soto

emigrated from Caracas to Paris in 1950, shortly before a military dictatorship came to power in

Venezuela.

Central to my thesis is the discussion of the theoretical implications of exile in the sense

that it affected the historical consciousness and formation of artistic identity of both artists.

Methodologically speaking, I subject Gego’s work - her mimetic appropriation of an abstract

aesthetic derived from the Weimar Bauhaus and its revision – to a historical materialist analysis.

Jesús Soto’s career and the form of his oeuvre are interpreted according to the same principles but

under consideration of the impact of the fifth French Republic from 1958 onwards. French

Cinétisme’s subsequent influence on Venezuelan artistic production, which became paramount

during the seventies, is discussed from a political and economic perspective and Soto’s focus on

l’immatériel contrasted to Gego’s use of an integrated materiality. The key terms of my thesis, exile

and assimilation, are shown to relate directly to individual and historical processes in which

materiality assumes the function of expressive medium. I argue that ultimately, these processes

enable the successful transition from one cultural context into an environment that is defined by a

separate set of cultural significations.

5

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1 Gego with her sister Elisabeth, Hamburg, c.1920. Collection Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 2 Postcard Weissenhofsiedlung, Araberdorf, Stuttgart, 1940. Mies van der Rohe Archive,

Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 3 Ciudad Bolívar, c.1930. Photograph Espinoza y Rebolledo, Collection Marlene Wulff de

Aguirre.

Fig. 4 Alejandro Otero, Lineas inclinadas, 1951. Oil on canvas. 80,7 x 65 cm. Collection The Estate

of Alejandro Otero, Caracas.

Fig. 5 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Museo de Ciencias, Caracas, c.1938. Photograph Luis Felipe Toro,

Collection Alberto Vollmer.

Fig. 6 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, 1953. Photograph Paolo

Gasparini, reproduced in Juan Pedro Posani, (ed.), Carlos Raúl Villanueva: un moderno en

sudamérica, Galería de Arte Nacional, exhibition catalogue, IV Bienale de Arquitectura in São

Paulo and at the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas in 1999-2000.

Fig. 7 Carlos Gonzáles Bogen, staircase mural, Universidad central, c.1953. My photograph.

Fig. 8 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Urbanicación 23 de Enero, Caracas, c.1957. Photograph Paolo

Gasparini. Reproduced in Juan Pedro Posani, (ed.), Carlos Raúl Villanueva: un moderno en

sudamérica, Galería de Arte Nacional, exhibition catalogue, IV Bienale de Arquitectura in São

Paulo and at the Galería de Arte Nacional in Caracas in 1999-2000.

Fig. 9 Gego, Partiendo de un rombo, 1958. Welded iron, painted, 56,8 x 44,5 x 32,7 cm. Collection

Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

Fig. 10 Gego, Vibración en negro, 1957. Painted Aluminium, 75 x 60 x 43 cm. Collection

Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 11 Gego, Escultura, Banco Industrial de Venezuela, 1962. Aluminium and iron, height 10 m.

Collection Banco Industrial de Venezuela, Caracas.

Fig. 12 Gego, Cuerdas, Centro Simón Bolívar, 1972. Nylon and iron, 18 x 17,5 x 22 m. Collection

Centro Simón Bolívar Parque Central, Caracas.

Fig. 13 Gego, Sin título, 1958. Ink and tempera on paper, 36,6 x 29 cm. Collection Fundación Gego,

Caracas.

Fig. 14 Gego, Cinta, 1962. Welded iron, painted, 164 x 161 x 113 cm. Collection Galería de Arte

Nacional ̧Caracas.

Fig. 15 Gego, Untitled, c.1956. Tempera on wood, approximately 20 x 25 cm. Collection of Hans

Meyer, Kent, England.

6

Fig. 16 Gego, Doce círculos concéntricos (Girando Moebius), 1957. Painted Aluminium, 36 x 29 x

24 cm. Collection of Tomás and Cecilia Gunz, Caracas.

Fig. 17 Gego, Mural INCE, 1969. Aluminium, enamelled steel, back wall with crystal mosaic.

Approximate dimensions 6 x 20 m. Collection Instituto Nacional de Cooperación Educativa,

Caracas.

Fig. 18 Paul Citroen, Mazdasnan-Kuren, 1922. Graphite on drawing, 21,5 x 19,3 cm. Bauhaus-

Archiv, Berlin.

Fig. 19 Gego, Ocho cuadrados, 1961. Painted welded iron. 170 x 64 x 40 cm. Collection of Jimmy

Belilty.

Fig. 20 Gego, Sin título, 1959. Ink on paper, 27,9 x 21,5 cm. Collection Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 21 Gego, Espiral sin fin, 1958. Painted stainless steel. 30 x 25 x 25,5 cm. Collection Museo de

Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas.

Fig. 22 Max Bill, Reverse Spiral, 1944-48, Steel wire, 17 x 17 cm. Collection Jakob Bill.

Fig. 23 Max Bill, Doppelfläche mit sechs rechtwinkligen Ecken, 1948-1979. Stone, 164 x 86 x 140

cm and Alejandro Otero, Title unknown, undated. My photograph.

Fig. 24 Gego, Esfera en hexaedro, 1964. Welded iron, painted. 63 x 98 x 98 cm. Collection of

Barbara Gunz, Caracas.

Fig. 24a Jesús Soto, Estructura en hierro UCV, 1957. Painted iron structure, approximate

dimensions 170 x 80 x 50 cm. Collection Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas.

Fig. 25 Gego, Partiendo de un cuadrado, 1958. Aluminium, 90 x 90 x 70 cm. Collection Instituto

Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas, Caracas.

Fig. 25a Pedro Briceño Despliegue Interno-Externo del Prisma, 1958. Painted iron, 109,5 x 24,3 x

47 cm. Collection Dianora Morazzini Besson.

Fig. 26 Gego Cuatro tetraedros, 1966. Painted iron, 57 x 89 x 130 cm. Collection Ignacio and

Valentina Oberto.

Fig. 27 Technical drawing from Keith Critchlow, Order in Space: a design source book, Thames

and Hudson, London, 1969 and Viking Press, New York, 1970.

Fig. 28 Installation view of 'Le Mouvement' exhibition, Paris, 1955. Archive Galerie Denise René,

Paris.

Fig. 29 Victor Vasarely, Vega-Lep, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm. Private collection.

Reproduced in Vasarely, Richard C. Morgan, Naples and New York, 2004.

Fig. 30 Group photograph artists included in the exhibition NUL65, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,

1965. Archive Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Fig. 31 Reims Shopping Mall, Architect: Claude Parent, 1970. L’oeil, June-July, 1970, p. 36.

7

Fig. 32 Jesús Soto, Leño Viejo, 1961. Painted wood, iron wire, metal, 40 x 15 x 24 cm. Private

collection. Reproduced in Soto, exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997.

Fig. 33 Jesús Soto and Narciso Debourg, Paris c.1950. Photograph Archive Jesús Soto, Paris.

Fig. 34 Jesús Soto, Leño, 1961. Painted wood, iron wire, metal. 75 x 25 x 16 cm. Collection Patricia

Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas.

Fig. 35 Jesús Soto, Vibración roja, azul y negra, 1958. Paint on wood and iron wire, 95 x 81 x 25

cm. Collection Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela.

Fig. 36 Jesús Soto, Sans titre, 1959-60. Wood, wire and oil paint, 1959-60. Painted wood, wire,

metal. 90 x 30 x 34 cm. Collection of Madame Marie-Louise Berthodin.

Fig. 37 Jesús Soto, Soto, Leño Vejo, 1960. Painted wood, iron wire, metal, 75 x 25 x 16 cm.

Collection Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

Fig. 38 Jesús Soto, Sans titre, 1960. Paint on Isorel, plaster and metal, 102 x 102 cm. Collection

Alain Gheerbrant.

Fig. 39 Jesús Soto, La scie à metaux, 1960. Paint on Isorel, plaster and metal, 100 x 100 cm. Private

collection. Reproduced in Soto, exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997.

Fig. 40 Jesús Soto, Leno azul y negro, 1960. Paint on Isorel, plaster and metal, 137 x 90 x 11 cm.

Private collection. Reproduced in Soto, exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997.

Fig. 40a Jesús Soto, Leno azul y negro, detail cube, 1960. Paint on Isorel, plaster and metal, 137 x

90 x 11 cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Soto, exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris,

1997.

Fig. 41 Jesús Soto and Jean Tinguely, Mural de Bruxelles, 1961. Photograph collection Vera

Spoerri, Paris.

Fig. 42 ZERO demonstration, Otto Piene, Günter Uecker, Heinz Mack, Rheinwiesen Düsseldorf,

1962. Photograph Zero : internationale Kunstler-Avantgarde der 50er-60er Jahre, exhibition

catalogue, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf and Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-2007.

Fig. 43 Jesús Soto, El ovalo verde y negro, 1969. Saint on Word, metal and nylon, 100 x 100.

Private collection. Reproduced in Soto, exhibition catalogue, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997.

Fig. 44 Jesús Soto, Volume virtuel suspendue, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto, 1977. Soto,

exhibition catalogue, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1997.

Fig. 45 Jesús Soto, Volume virtuel Air France, Roissy, 1989-95. Photograph Béatrice Hatala.

Fig. 46 Jesús Soto, Halle de la Régie Renault Boulogne Billancourt, 1975. Photograph Imago,

Paris/Collection Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela.

Fig. 47 Jean-Baptiste Giraud, Achilles, 1789. Marble, 55 x 80 cm. Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence.

8

Fig. 48 Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791. Oil on canvas, 197 x 261 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 49 Gego at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, 1977. Photograph Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 50 Caracas, Parque Central, under construction, c.1975. Photograph reproduced in Soledad

Mendoza, (ed.), Así es Caracas, Ateneo de Caracas, Ediciones Amón, Caracas, 1980. Photographic

credit unavailable.

Fig. 51 Gego, Torrecilla, 1968. Welded iron, height 39 cm. Private collection.

Fig. 52 Jesús Soto, Estructura en hierro (Pre-penetrable), 1957. Paint on iron structure, 166 x 126,5

x 85,5 cm. Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas.

Fig. 53 Cinco pantellas, 1968-71. Aluminium and iron, height: 3,5 m. Collection Instituto

Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientfícas, Caracas.

Fig. 54 Gego, Reticulárea ‘75, 1975. Steel, 210 x 260 cm. Collection AT&T, New Jersey.

Fig. 55 John Borrego, Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems,

MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1968.

Fig. 56 Gego Dibujo sin papel, 78.15, 1978. Iron and plastic, 50 x 45 x 8,54 cm. Collection Béatriz

Medina.

Fig. 57 Dibujo sin papel, 87.25, 1987. Steel and copper, 36 x 36,5 x 2 cm. Collection Fundación

Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 58 John Borrego, Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems,

MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1968.

Fig. 59 Gego, Dibujo sin papel 76.4, 1976. Iron, iron and Plexiglass 67,5 x 73 x 19,3 cm. Collection

Helly Tineo.

Fig. 60 Gego, Sin título, 1963. Ink on paper, 35 x 28 cm. Collection Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 61 Jesús Soto, Volume suspendue, Cubo Negro, Centro Banaven, Caracas, 1979. Collection

Centro Banaven, Caracas.

Fig. 62 Caracas, c.1978. Photograph reproduced in Soledad Mendoza, (ed.), Así es Caracas, Ateneo

de Caracas, Ediciones Amón, Caracas, 1980. Photographic credit unavailable.

Fig. 63 View of Atrium at Centro Simón Bolívar with Gego, Cuerdas, 1972. Nylon and iron, 18 x

17,5 x 22 m. Collection Centro Simón Bolívar Parque Central, Caracas.

Fig. 64 Gego, Cuadriláteros, 1982-83. Aluminium tubes. Metro station La Hoyoda, Caracas.

Collection C.A. Metro de Carcas.

Fig. 64a Gego, preparatory sketch for Cuadriláteros, 1982. Collection Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 65 Diagram from El arte cinético y sus orígenes, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo, Caracas, 1969

9

Fig. 66 Gego, Chorros, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1971. Steel, various dimensions.

Collection Fundación Gego, Caracas. Photo William Shuttle.

Fig. 66a Gego and Chorros, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1971.

Fig. 67 Gego, Reticulárea cuadrada no 5, 1973. Steel, 200 x 70 x 70 cm. Collection Museo de Arte

Contemporáneo, Caracas.

Fig. 68 Gego, Reticulárea ambientación, 1969. Installation view Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas,

Room 8, June-July 1969. Steel, 5,4 x 3,5 x 5 m. Collection Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas.

Fig. 69 Gego, Sin título, 1977. Steel and iron, 45 x 69 x 69 cm. Collectionm Fundación Gego,

Caracas.

Fig. 70 Gego, Columna, (Reticulárea cuadrada), 1972. Steel, aluminium, iron and nylon, 340 x 90

x 90 cm. Private collection. Reproduced in Gego, Obra completa, Caracas, 2003.

Fig. 71 Gego, Dibujo sin papel 79.9, 1979. Steel and iron, 27,5 x 32 x 17 cm. Private collection.

Reproduced in Gego, Obra completa, Caracas, 2003.

Fig. 72 Anselm Kiefer, Nürnberg, 1981/82. Oil on canvas, 290 x 390 cm. Reproduced in Zeitgeist:

Internationale Kunstaustellung Berlin 1982, exhibition catalogue, Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin,

Frölich & Kaufmann, Berlin, 1982.

Fig. 73 Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main, 2005. Photograph reproduced in the prospectus for the

concert season 2005-2006.

Fig. 74 Christian Megert Spiegelplastik, undated. No details provided. Photograph reproduced in

Spielraum-Raumspiele, exhibition catalogue, Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main, 1982.

Fig. 75 Günter Uecker, Nailed and Fragmented Alte Oper, 1982. Date and dimensions unknown.

Photograph reproduced in Spielraum-Raumspiele, exhibition catalogue, Alte Oper, Frankfurt am

Main, 1982.

Fig. 76 Günter Uecker, Nailed Nail, 1962. Metal, 200 x 40 cm. Private collection. Reproduced in

Honisch, Dieter, Uecker, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1989.

Fig. 77 Günter Uecker and Hans Richter, Occupation of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1968.

Reproduced in Honisch, Dieter, Uecker, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1989.

Fig. 78 Uecker Sand Spirale, 1965. Sand, lead, twine, electric motor with steel arm, diameter 150

cm. Collection of the artist. Reproduced in Honisch, Dieter, Uecker, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Publishers, New York, 1989.

Fig. 79 Otto Piene, Feuerbild, c. 1960. Atelier Hüttenstrasse, Düsseldorf. Reproduced in Zero :

internationale Kunstler-Avantgarde der 50er-60er, exhibition catalogue Museum Kunst Palast,

Düsseldorf and Musée d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-2007. Photograph Marene Heyne,

Düsseldorf.

10

Fig. 80 Günter Uecker, TV auf Tisch, 1963. TV, wood, nails, glue, 118 x 80 x 80 cm. Collection of

the artist. Reproduced in Honisch, Dieter, Uecker, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York,

1989.

Fig. 81 Gego, Installation of Reticulárea, 1982. Spielraum-Raumspiele, Alte Oper Frankfurt.

Photograph Fundación Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 82 Gego, Page from Spielraum-Raumspiele catalogue. Alte Oper, Frankfurt am Main, 1982. No

photographic credit provided.

Fig. 83 Gego looking at the Reticuárea, Liszt Salon, 1982. Alte Oper Frankfurt. Reproduced in

Gego, Obra completa, Caracas, 2003.

Fig. 84 Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 79.19, 1979. Steel and various metals, 37 x 36 x 0,9 cm. Collection

Andrés Zancani.

Fig. 85 Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 85.12, 1985. Steel and iron, 98 x 101 x 2 cm. Collection Fundación

Gego, Caracas.

Fig. 86 Gego, Bicho 87.11, 1987. Steel and painted stone, 40 x 30 x 31 cm. Collection Patricia

Phelps de Cisneros.

11

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my supervisor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Dr Shulamith Behr, for freely

sharing her knowledge of Jewish history and culture and for guiding me with great sensitivity

through my PhD. It was an immensely enriching experience. I am also grateful to Professor Mignon

Nixon for launching me on my project and challenging me, perhaps unconsciously, into taking new

approaches. I am particularly happy to have had the constant encouragement of Professor

Christopher Green who believed at all moments in the feasibility of my project. The list of

professionals who helped me to realise my project is long but I am especially indebted to the library

staff at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

There are of course other institutions on which I have relied during my research. The library

at the Institute of International Visual Art (INIVA) in London was a main resource for writings on

post-colonialism. I was also glad to have its unique collection of books on Venezuelan and Latin

American art at my disposal.

Two grants from the Central Research Fund in London allowed me to undertake journeys to

Caracas, Paris, Stuttgart and Karlsruhe. Clearly, those who made the most invaluable contribution

to my work are far away in Caracas. Many thanks go to Barbara and Tómas Gunz, Josephina

Manrique and all those working at the Fundación Gego. I feel privileged in having had access to the

Fundación’s archives; to a vast number of published texts on Gego and many, at the time, still

unpublished notes and letters. Thanks also to the painters Glenn Sujo and Luisa Richter who kindly

shared their memories of Gego, Gerd Leufert, Miguel Arroyo and life in Caracas in the sixties and

seventies. I am deeply indebted also to Ariel Jiménez of the Fundación Cisneros in Caracas. I much

appreciate his clear analysis of Venezuela’s relation to North America and for invaluable insight

into the past and future of Venezuelan art.

This leaves for me to thank all those who have been close to me and patiently endured my

tempers and melancholy moods over the last six years. Without their love, their ideas and material

support I would have been at a loss. They have actively contributed to this project. I wish to thank

foremost my husband, Michael Le Pelley, who taught me more about Modern Architecture than any

book will ever do. Thanks also to friends and colleagues who, in one way or another, inspired me to

think about Jewish identity and Geometric Abstraction in Venezuela. Thanks also to the members

of my family, who haven’t seen much of me recently. And lastly, this text was written in fond

memory of Philip Oesterreicher (1963-1992).

12

Chronology Gego

1912 Gertrude Luise Goldschmidt was born on August 1 in Hamburg, Germany. She was

the daughter of the German-Jewish banker Eduard Martin Goldschmidt and of

Elisabeth Hanne Adeline Goldschmidt, born Dehn.

1932-1938 Gego moved to Southern Germany to study engineering and architecture at the

Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. Her principal tutor was Paul Bonatz

and she obtained her degree as Dipl. Ing. Arch. in autumn 1938.

1939 Only months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gego’s parents were

granted visas by the English authorities. Gego received permission to stay in

England only until she found a place for permanent stay elsewhere. In August she

travelled by boat to Caracas in Venezuela.

1940 Marriage to Ernst Gunz, a German business man. Gego’s two children, Tomàs and

Barbara were born in 1942 and 1944, respectively.

1947 Gego visited her parents who had moved from England to Los Angeles. This is

probably the last occasion on which Gego saw her mother.

1948 Coup d'Etat and beginning of a ten-year dictatorship under General Marcos Pérez

Jiménez. An enormous architectural modernisation programme of the capital

Caracas started in 1946 and was promoted most aggressively during the next

decade.

1951 Gego separated from Ernst Gunz. They were officially divorced in 1952.

1953 Gertrud Goldschmidt had met the painter and graphic designer Gert Leufert in

1952. From 1953 onwards they lived together in the relative isolation of the small

village Tarma, about an hour’s drive away from Caracas. There, Gego was able to

create her first works and develop an artistic routine. During the same time she took

on officially, the name Gego.

1955 Gego returned for the first time to Germany. She and Leufert were included in a

group show with the title ‘Venezolanische Impressionen’ at the Gallery Wolfgang

Gurlitt in Munich. Gego showed a series of collages and prints.

1957 Gego made important contacts within Caracas artistic circles, among them

prominently the former Los Disidentes and now emerging Cinetismo artists

13

Alejandro Otero, Mateo Manaure, Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Díez. She

participated in the group show Arte Abstracto in Venezuela. Gego began working

three-dimensionally and in the following years focused on the production of small-

scale welded metal pieces.

1958 End of the Pérez Jimenéz regime. Rómulo Betancourt was elected president and

during the following decade the Socialist Party, Acción Democratica continued to

govern with a democratically elected parliament. Gego began teaching at the

Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Aplicadas in Caracas.

1960 One-year stay in New York where Gego worked in the printing medium and

sculpture. She made important contacts within New York gallery circles and was

included in the group show ‘Recent Sculpture’ at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The

Museum of Modern Art acquired Sphere (1959) for its permanent collection. Gego

met Naum Gabo and Joseph Albers but contacts did not continue.

1961 Gego took on full-time teaching responsibilities as head of the Basic Composition

Workshop, at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

She contributed to the development of a Basics Design course modelled on

Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus Vorkurs.

1962 Gego installed her first large-scale sculpture inside the Banco Industrial de Caracas.

1963 She returned to New York from where she travelled on to Great Britain, Germany

and Switzerland in order to conduct research commissioned by the Universidad

Central de Venezuela. Her brief was to visit design schools in Europe and gain

insight into their pedagogic programme.

1964 Gego began teaching at the newly-founded Instituto de Diseño, Fundación

Neumann-INCE in Caracas.

1965 Sphere was included in the ‘Responsive Eye’ exhibition at the Museum of Modern

Art in New York.

1966 For three months Gego stayed as a fellow at the Tamarind printing workshop near

Los Angeles.

1968 Raphael Caldera, leader of the Christian Democratic Party (COPEI) was elected

Venezuelan president.

14

1969 Creation of the first Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. In the

same year she was invited to install a second version of her Reticulárea at the

Centre for Inter-American Relations in New York.

1970 Gego showed recent works at the gallery Conkright in Caracas and a series of

drawings at the Graphics Gallery in San Francisco. In the same year Gego had an

important solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in which she

showed a highly expressive series of Chorros.

1971 Beginning of construction of an extension to the Galería de Arte Nacional designed

by Carlos Raúl Villanueva.

1973 Founding of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas. Inauguration of the

Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar.

1974 Carlos Andrés Pérez of the socialist Acción Democratica (AD) was elected

president of Venezuela.

1976 Gego began work on her important series Dibujos sin papel. She would continue to

create small-scale objects until the end of her productive life around 1990.

1977 Gego had her major retrospective show at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in

Caracas.

1982 Gego was invited by Dietrich Mahlow to take part in the exhibition ‘Spielraum-

Raumspiele’ held at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany. She installed her largest

ever Reticulárea in the Liszt Salon of the newly restored nineteenth-century opera

house.

1994 Gego died at the age of 82 in Caracas.

15

Chronology Jesús Soto

1923 Jesús Rafael Soto was born in Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela as the son of a

musician and a housewife, both from working class backgrounds. He earns his first

money as a poster painter for the local cinema.

1942 Soto received a small bursary and moved to Caracas to study painting at the

Escuela de Artes Plasticas y Artes Aplicadas. There he makes first contact with the

artists Alejandro Otero and Carlos Cruz-Díez who are among those attending

regular meetings and discussions at the Taller Libre de Arte.

1947 Soto became director of the Escuela de Artes Plasticas, Maracaibo.

1948 Coup d'Etat and beginning of a ten-year dictatorship under General Marcos Pérez

Jiménez. An enormous architectural modernisation programme of the capital

Caracas started in 1946 and was promoted most aggressively during the next

decade.

1949 Soto presents his work for the first time to the public in an exhibition held at the

TallerLibre de Arte

1950 With the help of a small state bursary Soto made the all important move to Paris,

initially with the idea to stay there for one year. He was part of a group of

Venezuelan exile artists and writers, Los Disidentes but soon made contact with

European artists. He encounters the abstract paintings of Piet Mondrian and

Kazimir Malevitch as well as of contemporary artists working in an abstract

manner.

1952 Soto settled permanently in Paris. In Venezuela, Carlos Raúl Villanueva launched

the important Proyectode Integración de las Artes at the Universidad Central de

Caracas. This would include works by Alexander Calder, Antoine Pevsner, Henri

Laurens, Jean Arp, Victor Vasarely and of many of the former Disidentes artists,

now returned to Caracas. Among them are Alejandro Otero, Mateo Manaure,

Pascual Navarro and Carlos Gonzáles Bogen.

1954 Soto met Jean Tinguely at the Salon des Réalites Nouvelles. Denise René and

Victor Vasarely noticed his work for the first time.

1955 Soto’ work was included in the exhibition ‘Le mouvement’ held at the Galerie

Denise René in Paris. This important group show included works by Jean Arp,

16

August Herbin, Sophie Täuber-Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder and those

of a younger generation, Victor Vasarely, Jean Tinguely and Pol Bury.

1956 Soto had his first solo exhibition in Europe at the Galerie Denise René. It officially

launched Soto’s career. The works on show were result of an intense time of

exploration in which Soto observed perceptual problems of abstract-constructivist

systems. Around this time he developed a formal vocabulary focusing on repetition

toward properly kinetic works by making use simultaneously, of morée effects and

movement of the spectator. Soto’s worked in close contact with Victor Vasarely,

Yacoov Agam, Jean Tinguely and Julio Le Parc.

1957 Soto had prepared a model for a sculpture to be integrated into the Proyectode

Integración de las Artes at the Universidad Central de Caracas. However, in

protest against the Jiménez dictatorship, he pulled out of the competition and the

work was not realised.

1958 End of the Pérez Jimenéz regime. Rómulo Betancourt was elected president and

during the following decade the Socialist Party, Acción Democratica continued to

govern with a democratically elected parliament. In France, Général Charles de

Gaulle was elected head of state and the Fifth French Republic founded. Soto

created his first Vibración in a painting of startlingly informel quality.

1959-61 Soto created his series of Leños, sculptural objects in which he combined the raw

materiality of Nouveau Réalisme with the recently discovered Vibración effect.

1961 Soto abandoned his experiments with matière and returned to a radically abstract

vocabulary, integrating however, from now onwards kinetic elements and

Vibración effects into his work. First collaboration with the German artist group

ZERO and close contact to Yves Klein.

1968 During May and June, France was shaken by violent riots and workers’ strikes in

Paris and across the country. De Gaulle and his authoritarian rule were severely

criticised, which led to his resignation in the following year. Soto showed his work

in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Bern, Switzerland. In Venezuela, Raphael

Caldera, leader of the Christian Democratic Party (COPEI) was elected Venezuelan

president.

1969 Soto was able to install a large Penetrable at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville

de Paris, and it became an instant critical success. From this date onwards Soto was

able to widely exhibit his work in Europe, the United States and in Venezuela.

Among the museums staging solo shows of his work were the Museum of

Contemporary Art, Chicago (1971) and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in

New York (1974), and Soto’s prestige and international acclaim continued to grow.

Georges Pompidou was elected French president.

17

1971 Beginning of construction of an extension to the Galería de Arte Nacional designed

by Carlos Raúl Villanueva.

1972 Soto opened a second studio in Caracas and from this point onwards lived and

worked alternating between Paris and Venezuela.

1973 Founding of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas. The Museo de Arte

Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar opens to the public. Founded by a decree of

the Bolívar State Government in 1969, the Museo was designed by Carlos Raúl

Villanueva and inaugurated on August 25, 1973. The Museo de Arte Moderno was

the fulfilment of an idea brought forward by Soto first at the end of the 1950s. The

collection includes works by Jean Arp, Johanes Itten, Kazimir Malevitch, Man Ray,

Serge Poliakoff, Max Bill, Lucio Fontana, Alejandro Otero, Carlos Cruz-Díez,

François Morellet, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, and many more.

1974 Carlos Andrés Pérez of the socialist Acción Democratica (AD) was elected

president of Venezuela. In France, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing was elected French

president. Although, the formal elements of Soto’s artistic concept were now in

place he continued to expand his influence and developed his career until well into

the nineties. During the following three decades his works were integrated, in

uncounted variations, into the architectural spaces of public and private institutions

around the world.

1981 The socialist François Mitterrand was elected French president. He would govern

until 1995 when he was followed by the conservative Jacques Chirac.

1997 Exhibition Soto at the Galerie nationale du jeu de paume in Paris. This event was

accompanied by the publication of the important catalogue Soto with contributions

by Arnauld Pierre, Daniel Abadie, Françoise Bonnefoy, Sarah Clement and Isabelle

Sauvage. The art historian Arnauld Pierre’s chronology, describing in great detail

the development of Soto’s oeuvre, represents today the most exhaustive biography

of the artist.

2005 Soto died, 82 years of age, on January 14 in Paris.

18

CHAPTER I

Introduction

This thesis is an art historical account of the oeuvres of Gego (Gertrud Luise Goldschmidt, 1912-

1994) and Jesús Soto (1923-2005). My research material is collected from two artistic contexts:

Venezuelan Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo and French post-war Geometric Abstraction and

Cinétisme. My historical frame is the period c.1945 to 1990. My narrative unfolds as a more or less

chronological development but does not seek to provide a systematic account of the period as a

whole. My choices are subject to the theoretical aims of this thesis and I consciously exclude

important aesthetic developments unrelated on post-war geometric abstract art.

One of my key aims is to demonstrate the links between European post-war modernism and

Venezuelan abstract art, respectively Cinetismo. In doing this I was conscious of writing from the

perspective of my European formation. It is important to acknowledge that much early writing on

Venezuelan art relies heavily on aesthetic categories and trends defined in Europe, primarily France

and Germany. This cultural colonialism is also evident in Gego’s and Jesús Soto’s oeuvres but not

necessarily in the work of other Venezuelan artists. Thus, my interpretation of their oeuvres has as a

common denominator the artists’ referencing of pre-war European abstraction. I was particularly

interested to demonstrate that in both oeuvres a re-evaluation of pre-war abstract art had taken

place.

I began my study at a point when Gego received little academic and even less mainstream

attention. Although included in two important exhibitions1 she was only about to be rediscovered. I

1 See Rina Carvajal, 'GEGO: Weaving the Margins', Inside the Visible: The Elliptical Traverse of 20th

Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, exhibition catalogue, Catherine M. de Zegher (ed.), MIT Press,

19

was attracted by the surprising closeness of her works, produced during the post-war period in

Venezuela, to the abstract formalism of pre-WW II Germany. I soon found myself immersed in the

problematic of the continuities and discontinuities relating post-war abstract art to art produced

during the Nazi period. My initial focus was to follow closely Gego’s biography and move from the

historical context of her upbringing, Weimar Germany, to Venezuela in the fifties, sixties and

seventies and back again to Germany in the early eighties.

In the first chapter I provide an account of Gego’s early life and first years of exile, for which I

drew strongly from an autobiographical account written in 1987.2 The artist was interesting to me

not least due to the psychological complexity of her artistic identity. However, despite the fact that I

return to Gego at given moments throughout my thesis it is important to note that I never intended

as a monographic text. While Gego remains an important figure in my narrative, Jesús Soto and

other artists take centre stage whenever their example is useful for my theoretical argument. For the

account of Jesús Soto’s background in the same chapter, I rely on the chronology written by the

French art historian Arnauld Pierre in 2001.3

To take into account both artists’ biographies and situation as exiles, is central to my

methodological approach. For this reason, I have given much space to describing the social, cultural

and political contexts of Venezuela and France. All issues that I consider crucial for my thesis

emerged during a period marked by a utopian post-war modernism.4 During this period, Venezuelan

art collections and private galleries generated a modernist taste among the educated elite that also

led to vibrant exchanges between Venezuela and France. Particular to so-called developing

Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996, pp. 341-45. Guy Brett and Teresa Grandas, ‘Force Fields: Phases of the

Kinetic’, Hayward Gallery, London, 2000. 2‘Gedanken über Herkunft+Begegnungen als Entwicklung meines Lebensweges’, María Elena Huizi and

Josephina Manrique, Sabiduras and other texts by Gego, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Fundación

Gego, Caracas, 2005, pp. 240-44. 3 Arnauld Pierre, ‘Chronologie’, Soto, exhibition catalogue, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Le Seuil,

Paris, 1997. pp. 177-224. 4 I have chosen to use the lower case spelling for modernism throughout my text in order to distinguish it

from an aesthetic and purely stylistic application of the term. In those cases, where I wish to tie it directly to

the post-war period and hence distinguish it from this more general application, implying the new or

20

countries, such as Venezuela, was also the expansion of modern abstract art beyond the museum,

into the field of architecture.5 From the early fifties onwards it was primarily French Geometric

Abstraction and Cinétisme that exerted enormous influence on artistic production and art critical

discourses in Caracas.

While focusing on Venezuela in chapter I, I turn in chapter II to France. I took issue

foremost with a widely held popular view that Geometric Abstraction could be read like a language.

I explain why this claim had great appeal in reconstruction Europe, where non-subjective

anonymity became the underpinning of the emerging consumer society. Abstract art was perfectly

suited to counter overly subjectivist trends such as art informel and the abstract expressionism

emerging in the United States. It emerged as a ‘pseudo’ transcendental aesthetic that stood in

opposition to the art promoted by Communist intellectuals, first among them Jean-Paul Sartre,

Simone De Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I introduce in this chapter theoretical problems

of French Existentialism pertaining to the theory of subject-object relations. This is relevant to my

interpretation of Soto’s as well as Gego’s works, where I take for granted that their knowledge of

the world was also consciousness of it. By this I mean to say that, both oeuvres are more than the

material products of their labour and therefore aesthetically significant to us as expressions of

reflective consciousness. The modus of their relation to the world, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words ‘a

situated negativity’, is what matters to us.6

The status of the historical object is crucial for postmodern aesthetic theory. I address these

shifts in modern subjectivity in my description of the continuities between fifties Geometric

progressive or even a social dynamic that took its beginning with the French Revolution, I made this clear by

using the construction post-war modernism. 5 Perhaps still the most comprehensive history of architecture in Latin America is Valerie Fraser’s, Building

the New World, Verso, London, 2000. It is indispensable as an introduction and sourcebook for studies on the

Venezuelan cultural and artistic context. In Europe public art had become fully integrated into modernist

architectural spaces after the Second World War. A law, introduced in most European countries, made it

compulsory for a private or state enterprise to spend 1% of a new building’s total budget on public art. 6 To Satre this negative consciousness is a moment of praxis and a pure relation between objects (choses).

‘Subjectivity’, so he wrote, ‘is neither everything nor nothing; it represents one moment of the objective

process’. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique, Questions de méthode, Gallimard, coll.

Bibliothèque de philosophie, Paris, 1985, p. 31. First published Gallimard, Paris, 1960.

21

Abstraction and the art of the pre-war abstract avant-gardes7 , and the subsequent rejection of their

stark autonomist modernism during the generational conflicts of the late sixties. The deconstruction

of the art object’s autonomy was part of broader revolt against bourgeois society within post-war

French culture. The politics of the French Left and its significance for French abstract art provides

thus a meta-narrative to the standard accounts of the artistic influences of French on Venezuelan

culture.

I show that Soto’s oeuvre gives ample evidence of the anachronistic, of historical

discontinuities and subjective ruptures. At times, splitting is strongly expressed, as in his violent

experiments with matière from the early sixties, but increasingly, it is manifested in a non-

subjective immateriality, a mode that favours the ‘ungrounded’ and ephemeral. Soto’s oeuvre

culminates, and remains arrested for the entire second half of his career, in a purely optical,

synthetic aestheticism. Soto’s Cinétisme combines, problematically, Geometric Abstraction’s

Universalist claims with postmodern rejection of subjective autonomy. In the conclusion to chapter

II I argue that French abstract art excluded subjective expression despite and, paradoxically,

through the influence of contemporary postmodern debates, by proposing an aesthetic self that

ultimately, conformed to a French post-war society that was riven by misogyny, homophobia and

racism.

7 The term avant-garde has acquired in the post-war period a complex meaning referring, both to the historical

avant-gardes of the first half of the century, Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism and Surrealism and post-war

artists working within an avant-garde genealogy. It may imply the idea of ‘most advanced’ or ‘reformist’,

which were meanings used particularly, in the French post-war context until the mid-sixties. Clearly, Nouveau

Réalisme made reference to its other meanings which are ‘anti-traditional’ or ‘anti-bourgeois’. In the German

context it became particularly important during post-war discourses on normative aesthetics. It was there

more likely understood in reaction to a brutal functionalism which assigns to the art object mere exchange

value. In 1970, the German philosopher T. W. Adorno (1903-1969) defended the autonomy and quasi

uselessness of the art object, in which he also recognised its truth value. This in turn came under attack, in

1974, from the German philosopher Peter Bürger (b. 1936), who wrote an important critique of Adorno’s

bourgeois aesthetic. His critique was defining for the theorisation of the neo-avant-garde which sought to fuse

art and life-praxis and thus deprive the art object of its fetishistic character. See Theodor W. Adorno,

Aesthetic Theory, translation C. Lenhart, Routledge & Kegan, London, 1984; Aesthetische Theorie,

Gesammelte Schriften, 2d ed., Vol 7, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972; and Peter Bürger, Theory

of the Avant-Garde, translation Michael Shaw, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984; Theorie der

Avantgarde, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

22

A central claim of my thesis is that post-war Geometric Abstraction, Cinetismo and

Cinétisme are self-conscious reflections on the art of pre-war avant-gardes. In Gego’s career I

emphasis thus the importance, for the artist’s sense of self, of a mnemonic recreation of Weimar

modern culture and the role of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means for Gego to experience continuity

across the rupture experienced through exile. Implicitly, this focus on the past entails an emotional

distance to the visible and sensual world, which is manifest in Gego’s abstract oeuvre from early on.

Emotional distancing from the real is a modality that we now call postmodern, in which irony and

the schizoid prevail.8 One of the questions I raise is whether Gego and Soto became, through their

reflective distance, inauthentic in the sense that they suspended subjective judgement, or only

enacted subjectivity by miming their role as creators, to adapt to an aesthetic representing a given

ideology and morality. While it is true that Gego’s and Soto’s oeuvres develop in very different

directions from c.1970 onwards, the articulation of an aesthetic distance, whether ironic or not is

debatable, to the historical object, is intrinsic to both. This disqualifies interpretations that set their

work in radical opposition to each other.

Interpretations of works of art, regardless of whether these are abstract or figurative, can

focus on the material objects to the exclusion of the socio-historical context of its creation. The

artist’s intentionality will then be located in a more or less autonomous subjectivity located within

the individual. A second approach is to interpret an art object as an intervention within a social and

historical situation. The artist’s subjectivity is in this case in a dialogical relation to a given reality,

more or less able to control his or her response to it. This is my approach in the following study.

8 Two key texts of postmodern theory are, Jean-François Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on

knowledge, translation Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester University Press, Manchester,

1984. Originally published as, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Éditions de Minuit, Paris,

1979; And, Gilles Deleuze, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe (1972). Trans. Anti-Oedipus

(1977) ; and Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux (1980). Trans. A Thousand Plateaus (1987).

23

The strong connection of Gego’s and Soto’s abstract oeuvres to architecture and the

suppression of subjectivity, at least at certain periods of their careers, produces a nucleus of

complex questions that concern the politics of abstract art and modern architecture. Abstraction can

signify not only individual distance to the historical real but also consent to an existing political

situation. The artist and her audience can enter a quasi-contractual agreement to remain mute.

Clearly, to reduce post-war abstraction to symptom or reaction would be wrong. A nuanced

understanding of the history and politics of the period, as well as of the aesthetic values available to

its actors, is needed.

The massive influence of architectural modernism and town planning after the Second

World War is discussed at length throughout my text. For instance, the often-catastrophic effect of

town planning funded by American investors in collaboration with political and economic elites in

Latin America; or the increasingly bureaucratic and ideologically driven town planning strategies in

France. I have sought to complement economic and political analyses, with interpretations of

Gego’s and of Soto’s oeuvres that take into account psychological mechanisms at play in the

experience of exile.9 To address these issues seemed particularly important in a research project

9 I have chosen this term in order to imply a state of existence in which a radical rupture has occurred from

what is thought of as ‘home’. Neither Gego nor Soto can be described as being part of a Diaspora because

both rejected, to some degree, a nationalistic or ethnically defined belonging. Both artists were essentially

singular figures and foreigners. Probably the best introduction to the theme of exile is Edward W. Said’s essay

‘Reflections on Exile’. The very first lines of this text give an inkling of what will be, among other things, the

subject of this thesis. Said writes, ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is

the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home; its

essential sadness can never be surmounted’, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Reflections on Exile, Granta Books,

London, 2000, p. 173.

There is also a clear distinction to be made between discourses around political exile and émigrés, and Jewish

exile in the Nazi period. As Jutta Vinzent writes, ‘Exile is a topic that plays an important role in the rapidly

expanding field of postcolonial studies. The postcolonial discourse was triggered off historically by the move

of Asians and Africans to Europe and America in the 1960s. These generations of migrants settling in the

West reinforced an active consciousness, resulting in theoretical reflections on migration by scholars such as

Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak […] any comparison of the postcolonial debate on race

24

concerned with the oeuvre of two artists who were both working and living in exile and who

considered themselves sometimes more, sometimes less, as foreigners.

Questions of exile identity and the effects of cultural displacement are important to my

argument. Thus, in chapter III, I attempt to establish a link between pre-war anti-Semitism, enforced

exile and her artistic choices. I consider Gego’s strong tendency to rational abstraction and

introspection from the perspective of her essential foreignness. Gego’s own writings and

testimonies by friends and acquaintances give evidence of a split between her private and public

persona. This trend seems reflected in the development of her art, where architectural

monumentality gave way to intimate structures that capture the imagination with subjective

expression that appears integrated in the object’s materiality. Gego later oeuvre gives evidence of a

pronounced individualism and a more self-reflective artistic practice. In contrast, in chapter II, I

argue that Soto’s response to exile was far more adapted to the transformations within French

society as a whole. I propose that in Europe men of the post-war generation compensated for the

violent nationalism of the previous generation with an emphasis on anonymity and exclusion of the

foreign. Broadly speaking, the exclusion of the ‘other’ is the theme also of chapter III.

Holocaust memorisation in France and Germany is the subject of the last chapter. I propose

that in the 1980s temporal distance from the traumatic events of the Second World War and the

Holocaust created a historical vacuum, in which narcissistic identification with figures and images

of the past became crucial for the redefinition of national identities. Moreover, cultural and political

debates escalated during this period over questions concerning historical revisions of the Holocaust.

I address these issues by focusing on the question of Jewish identity. I have taken recourse to the

writings of two French cultural analysts: The philosopher and cultural commentator Alain

Finkielkraut (b. 1949) and Pierre Birnbaum, professor of political science at the Université Paris I,

and ethnicity with the Nazi construction of race is […] highly problematic’, Jutta Vinzent, Identity and

Image: Refugee artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1946), Schriften der Guernica Gesellschaft,

Weimar, 2006.

25

Pantheon-Sorbonne. I propose, with Pierre Birnbaum, that in French or Francophile societies

national identity is defined by the terms of assimilation. Since the eighteenth century, Jews as well

as non-Jewish foreigners identifying with the ideals of the French Revolution, favouring sameness

over difference, assimilated and acquired citizenship in a strong French state structure.

Republicanism and the ideal of anonymous citizenship became central to French national

discourses. The suppression of the subjective and individualistic in an abstract (state) structure is

defining for the French aesthetic ideal. This leads me to suggest parallels between French post-war

aesthetic identity and the popularity of abstract art and cinétisme. French aesthetic influence on

Venezuelan Cinetismo was paramount. By extension, observations regarding the role of abstract art

in France have validity also in Venezuela.

The final section of chapter III is devoted entirely to an exhibition held in 1982 in Frankfurt

am Main to which both, Gego and Soto, were invited to contribute. ‘Spielraum-Raumspiele’ took

place only a few years before the outbreak of the German Historikerstreit. This debate accompanied

radical political transformations and the articulation of new national identities, leading up to the

German unification in the late eighties. This exhibition unites a flagging artistic avant-garde

responding to a sharp right turn in German politics and culture. In this section I contrast Gego’s

work produced in exile in Venezuela to the artistic production of artists working in an increasingly

conservative climate in Europe.

26

1.1 Gego in Germany and Exile

Gertrud Luise Goldschmidt was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1912. Her family was Jewish and

belonged to the liberal upper middle-class circles of the town, having made their fortune as

merchant bankers since the late nineteenth century. (Fig. 1 Gego with her sister Elisabeth,

Hamburg, c.1920) Jewish religion had, according to Gego, little effect on the family’s everyday

lifestyle10

, which was not unusual during the Wilhelmine era when many Jews were completely

integrated into Protestant German society.11

Gego was the sixth of seven children and in her short

autobiography she gives evidence of her enjoyment of a happy childhood in the folds of the

extended Goldschmidt family12

, which at that time formed part of the social fabric of Hamburg.13

10

‘I had never been in a synagogue or in a Jewish temple and of anti-Semitism I learned only very late.’ (My

translation). In the original, ‘Ich bin nie in einer Synagoge oder Tempel der Jüdischen Gemeinde gewesen +

habe vom Antisemitismus erst sehr spät erfahren.’ Gego made this statement in an autobiographical text

written as a response to an enquiry by Professor Frithjof Trapp of the University in Hamburg. The German

academic had approached Gego with a questionnaire that formed part of a research project entitled ‘Exile and

Emigration of Hamburg Jews’. It was published for the first time and, according to the editors, in its most

complete version in 2005. ‘Gedanken über Herkunft + Begegnungen als Entwicklung meines Lebensweges’,

María Elena Huizi and Josephina Manrique, Sabiduras and other texts by Gego, Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston and Fundación Gego, Caracas, 2005. Spanish and English translations, as well as the original

German version, are reproduced on pages 226-44.

11 ‘Our Jewish origin was a known fact but we fully belonged to the German community: into the tradition of

German and Hamburg culture’ (My translation). In the original, ‘Jüdische Herkunft war als Tatsache bekannt,

aber wir gehörten damit völlig und ganz in die Gemeinschaft Deutschlands: in die Tradition Deutscher +

Hamburgischer Kultur.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 240.

12 Her uncle was the medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt (1863-1944) who had, like his close friend Aby

Warburg (1866-1929) decided to study art history rather than follow the family tradition and become a

banker. In 1911 he followed Heinrich Wölfflin (1831-1903) in his position as professor at the University in

Berlin. After the imposition of the Nuremberg Laws most members of the Goldschmidt family left Germany.

However, not until Jewish academics were denied access to libraries and archives could Adolph Goldschmidt

be convinced to take the same step. Only months before the outbreak of the war, in April 1939, did he

abandon Germany and move to Basel in Switzerland, where he died in an accident in 1944.

13 The Warburgs, parents of Aby Warburg were close friends of the family and their contacts continued after

emigration from Germany to the United States and England.

27

As a young child Gego received private schooling, a decision taken by her parents after she

proved to be too fragile and sensitive to continue attending a state school. Maybe not surprising but

I was told that in later years, she turned into ‘a bit of a rebel’.14

As a teenager she was evidently

very awake to the social and cultural transformations taking place at the time. This included a

certain inversion of traditional gender roles manifested, for instance, in Gego’s refusal to enter a

Mädchenschule, a girl’s college or ‘finishing’ school. Instead, she made the unusual choice to study,

for three years, with a captain of the merchant fleet and instructor at the naval college in order to

become a woman sea captain. She graduated in 1932. ‘Gego’, her artistic name, can be traced back

to around the same period. It came out of a game in which she and her older sister Hanna (1909-

1977) shortened their full names - Gertrude Goldschmidt and Hanna Goldschmidt -to GEGO and

HAGO.15

Fostered by her liberal and highly cultured parents Gego was very awake to the artistic

dynamism of the Weimar period. It is confirmed again in her autobiography where she wrote, ‘My

interest for and the engagement with the fine arts had been developed and encouraged early on. The

interest in architecture came later, in part motivated by sociological ideas on the development,

during this time, of social housing projects.’ (My translation).16

A brief interruption of my account for some explanatory remarks and general historical information

seems appropriate at this point. First, since the late nineteenth and during the euphoric first years of

14

Noted during an interview between the author and Susanne and Hans Meyer, husband of Hanna

Goldschmidt (Kent, England, November, 2004). Gego confirmed this in her autobiographical text, ‘Later, I

was sent to the private school of Margarethe Mittell at the Graumannsweg, where I gradually developed into

an “enfant terrible” with own opinions and a certain tendency to opposition.’ (My translation). In the original,

‘Später wurde ich in die Privatschule von Margarethe Mittell am Graumannsweg geschickt wo ich mich

langsam mit einer Neigung zum “enfant terrible” entwickelt habe, mit eigenem [sic] Meinungen und gewisser

Opposition.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241.

15 I was given this information during the interview with Susanne and Hans Meyer, Kent, November, 2004.

28

the new century leading up to the First World War, an unprecedented number of Jews abandoned

their religion and cultural traditions in the hope to gain easier access to a highly dynamic German

society and economy. Parts of the Jewish community were motivated by a wholehearted patriotism

and wish to be fully acknowledged and integrated as Germans.

Second, many Jews supported Germany’s war effort and only after the defeat in 1919 and

again in the thirties began to loom large the awareness that the reactionary right-wing populism

might eventually turn against them. In the meantime, the social changes that Gego had mentioned in

reference to the development of socialist architecture were part of Weimar culture’s openness and

dynamism supported by many Jewish intellectuals, artists and left-wing politicians.17

While some

writers and artists sent out warning signals against fascism in the twenties and thirties the larger part

16

‘Mein Interesse + Beschäftingung mit bildender Kunst ist früh entwickelt + gefördert worden. Architektur-

Interesse kam später, teilweise angeregt durch soziale Gedanken über die damals sich entwickelnden sozialen

Bauunternehmen.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241.

17 The term Jewish Renaissance, was first introduced by Martin Buber in 1900 describing the ‘resurrection of

the Jewish people from partial life to full life’. Buber and the philosopher Franz Rosenzweig became crucial

for a reawakening of Jewish culture during the twenties and thirties in which Jewishness was defined by way

of cultural belonging rather than ethnicity. The historian of Jewish culture Michel Brenner writes, ‘The

process of establishing a distinct Jewish sphere in various cultural branches was expressed by a discourse

whose basic patterns were taken over from the larger German society and transformed into a distinctly Jewish

context. Those patterns were the quest for community, the synthesis of knowledge, and the search for

authenticity. Based on the contemporary German pursuit of a genuine Gemeinschaft (community) as opposed

to Gesellschaft (society), German Jews believed that they needed to strengthen their sense of community in

order to revitalize Jewish culture. True culture, they asserted, could be created only by men and women who

were deeply anchored in the common ground of the Gemeinschaft. Once such a community was established,

its members had to acquire basic knowledge about its traditions and values. This realisation proved especially

important for German Jews alienated from Judaism. Reflecting the calls of the time for a coherent

presentation of knowledge, they created institutions of learning and publications that would transmit a

comprehensive and all-inclusive knowledge of Jewish matters. The Jewish cultural renaissance was not

content to spread theoretical knowledge but promoted an allegedly authentic Judaism, just as German society

propagated genuine forms of culture, as opposed to what was conceived as the decadent and superficial

civilization of the modern Western world.’ Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar

Germany, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996, p. 6.

29

of the Jewish population held on to blind optimism well into the late thirties, that is, even after

Hitler had been elected Reichskanzler in 1933. Unprecedented technological advancement,

availability of consumer goods and a vibrant cultural atmosphere especially, in cultural centres such

as Berlin, blinded many Jews to the intensifying threats to their community.

Thirdly, German imperialism had been at its height around the turn of the century and

colonialism had its fullest expansion. This is important to note not only in respect to Gego’s place

of exile but also to her eccentric wish, as a teenager, to become a sea captain.18

Although,

Venezuela had never been a German colony it is highly plausible that the Goldschmidt family had

as merchant bankers already established business and even family links with Venezuela. In fact,

during Gego’s youth, a direct shipping line existed between the free-port of Hamburg and La

Guaira, the port nearest to Caracas. Gego’s choice of a Latin American over a United States

location for exile is explicable perhaps also by way of these traditional cultural links. Several

elements with references in Gego’s youth combine here: Hamburg, the exotic, Venezuela, a

masculine role, rebellion, sea-captain. One wonders whether exile in Caracas does not in a highly

complex way realise a dream that already existed in Gego’s childhood fantasy. Later she countered

any suggestions ever to have had the desire to live in Latin America despite the fact that she had

turned down a second offer for a visa from the Australian authorities in favour of Venezuela. ‘I had

never thought of Latin America as a final destination. My French was poor, my Spanish and Italian

nonexistent.’ (My translation).19

However, this sentence written fifty years after the event might

well demonstrate the mechanism of denial whereby a disappointment is retrospectively described in

18

During the late nineteenth century the German colonies acquired an important role, in German literature

and society, as symbols for masculine domination. However, Russel A. Berman argues that it provided

simultaneously the literary spaces for fantasies of gender inversions and therefore, the stage for feminist

critique of Wilhelmine patriarchy. Russel A. Berman, ‘Colonial Literature and the emancipation of Women’,

Enlightenment or Empire, University of Nebraska Press, 1998, pp. 171-203.

19 ‘Lateinamerica war mir nie als Ziel vorgeschwebt. Französisch sprach ich schlecht, Spanisch überhaupt

nicht, auch kein Italienisch.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 243.

30

terms of a rupture in historical continuity. Gego’s sense of estrangement, which she links to her

inability to speak any of the languages spoken in Venezuela, could clearly only develop after her

arrival in exile.

After 1935, following the imposition of the Nürnberger Judengesetze which restricted the life of

Jews to an intolerable degree, many Jewish families left Germany. Gego’s sister Hanna had been

living in the South of England since 1931 but only as late as 1938 did her brother Martin and her

parents finally decide to join her. Gego’s other siblings fled around the same time by different

routes. They had to endure tremendous hardship and even internment in a Concentration Camp and

found eventually new homes as far away as India, the United States and South Africa. Gego was

optimistic enough to continue her training as engineer and architect, begun in 1932 at the

prestigious Stuttgarter Technische Hochschule.20

She excelled in her studies and became the

protégée of Paul Bonatz (1877-1956), then a prominent architect representing the more traditional

modernism of the so-called Stuttgarter Schule. He had made himself a name with the design for the

Stuttgarter Hauptbahnhof, begun in 1914 and completed only in 1927. An impressive monumental

building, the Hauptbahnhof was at the time of completion already outdated and provoked Le

Corbusier (1887-1965) into calling it ‘Wilhelminischer Pomp’21

. In the mid-twenties Bonatz acted

as a traditionalist force, representing Stuttgart’s often anti-Semitic bourgeoisie in the controversy

over the commission of the Stuttgarter Weissenhof Siedlung. The Weissenhof Siedlung, opened to

the public in 1927. It is a model housing estate that had been commissioned by the German

20

The decision to study architecture was taken under the influence of architecture students Gego met in

Hamburg. She wrote, ’During the last years at college I befriended students of architecture, who helped me in

making the decision to take up studies in Stuttgart. Which I did in the winter semester of 32/33.’ (My

translation). ‘In den letzten Schuljahren war ich mit Architekturstudenten befreundet, die mir zum Entschluss,

in Stuttgart zu studieren, halfen. Was ich im Wintersemester 32/33 begann.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras,

p. 241.

31

Werkbund, a socialist organisation that sought to represent the interests, not only of industrialists,

architects and crafts people but also of the modern working class family. It had been agreed early on

that Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) should oversee the project. He was presented with a list of the

architects that should be invited to contribute to the Siedlung and among them was Paul Bonatz.

However, Mies dropped Bonatz from the list preferring instead more radically modernist architects.

It was the beginning of a tedious controversy which provoked Bonatz into describing the Siedlung

project as ‘a heap of flat cubes, arranged in manifold horizontal terraces, [that] push narrowly

uncomfortably up the slope; the whole thing bears more resemblance to a suburb of Jerusalem than

a group of houses in Stuttgart.’22

The caption on a postcard showing the Weissenhof Siedlung

combines its name with the term ‘Araberdorf’ (village of Arabs). This illustrates that Bonatz’

association of the Siedlung with the foreign and outlandish expressed the sentiment of at least part

of Stuttgart’s population. (Fig. 2 Postcard Weissenhofsiedlung, Araberdorf, Stuttgart, 1940) After

months of political quarrels, the Weissenhof Siedlung became the showcase for the most progressive

architects and designers at the time, Walter Gropius (1883-1969), Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe,

Hans Scharoun (1893-1972), Peter Behrens (1868-1940), Bruno Taut (1880-1938), among others.

The exhibition organisers’ aim was to invite architects to demonstrate their latest ideas on modern

21

In a pompous style reminding of the Wilhelmine period. Helmut Heissenbüttel, Stuttgarter Architektur,

Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1979, p. 180.

22 Quoted from Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A critical Biography, University of Chicago Press, 1985,

p. 134. We have no written evidence of Bonatz expressing publicly anti-Semitic views or of pursuing

explicitly anti-Jewish politics within the closely knit Stuttgarter community. Nonetheless, the above remark

permits at least speculation on his negative feelings towards Jewish influences in German culture. The

association of radical modernity with Jerusalem as symbol for the Jewish people goes back in Germany

etymology to the early nineteenth century. It manifested anxieties in part of the Prussian nobility over the

implementation of new laws according Jewish emancipation. The democratization of German society thus

coincided with the emergence of a paranoid projection of a Neumodischer Judenstaat (modern state of Jews)

or new Jerusalem while modern is used here in the sense of modish that is, as a passing trend. See Léon

Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisemitisme, Tome 2, L’âge de la science, Calmann-Lévy, Seuil, Paris, 1981, pp.

154-55.

32

housing, that is, living space that could be fabricated cheaply and built in a minimum of time. The

brief was to propose affordable and highly functional accommodation for a fast growing lower

middle-class. Designs were based on the ideal family unit and many features incorporated

progressive ideas such as the emancipated working mother. For instance, kitchens were often fitted

with modern appliances and modelled on an American lifestyle with a preference for functionality

over tradition. Ornament was reduced to a minimum and the aesthetic applied to the interiors is

referencing the work of avant-garde artists such as Theo Van Doesburgh (1883-1931) or Piet

Mondrian. The Weissenhof Siedlung exhibition was a watershed in the pre-war development of

modernist architecture and design. Its historical significance is in part due to its radical approach,

high quality and originality of the designs. More interesting in this context is that it brought to the

fore fundamental discontinuities between Weimar modernist architects and the older generation

whose ideals went back to the Wilhelmine era.23

During the war, Bonatz worked as an engineer for the Third Reich and was involved in the

construction of the German Autobahn (German motorway) system. To his credit it must be said that

he had helped Gego and other Jews in escaping Nazi persecution. Bonatz, despite his conservative

tastes, harboured moderately socialist and liberal views and eventually courted trouble for

expressing his critical opinion of Hitler’s policies. He was investigated by the police twice and

23

This has been demonstrated wonderfully in an exhibition held first at the Museum of Modern Art in New

York in 2001. ‘Mies in Berlin’ focused on Mies van der Rohe’s pre-war development and career in Germany.

It was shown in several European museums and ended, in 2002, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

Mies in Berlin, exhibition catalogue, Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll (eds.), Museum of Modern Art, New

York, 2001. In a recent exhibition held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2006, the curators had the

ambitious aim to provide an overview of the inter-war period and, within this historical frame, demonstrate a

linear development of early twentieth-century modernism. Its focus clearly was on architecture and applied

arts but its curators very effectively showed the interlacing of artistic production, design and mass

consumption. Modernism, 1914-1939: designing a New World, Christopher Wilk, (ed.), essays by Christopher

Green, Christina Lodder, et al., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2006.

33

finally emigrated to Turkey in 1942.24

Bonatz’ career is typical of many Germans who had been in

prominent positions before Hitler’s election in 1933. Incapable of fully subscribing to Nazi doctrine

they were nonetheless unable to escape from the social pressures that immediately froze all

individualistic freedom.

Since the early thirties the Technische Hochschule had become increasingly a centre of

conservative nationalism and, from 1933 onwards, the school’s syllabus included a compulsory

course in the doctrines of Nationalsozialismus.25

It was seen as normal that young Nazi supporters

held their meetings on the school grounds. From Gego’s autobiographical notes we know that she

24

Turkey was an attractive destination for Bonatz and many other Germans escaping from the Nazi regime.

Under the influence of the reformer Ataturk, the country had seen, since the early 1920s, the modernisation of

its political and social institutions. German researchers, architects, economists, philosophers and artists made

a strong contribution to the development of a modern Turkish state. The demand for highly qualified

architects allowed Bonatz and Bruno Taut among others, to remain active in exile. However, Bonatz first visit

to Turkey goes back to 1916. In a publication documenting his life in Turkey during and after the war we

learn that, ‘Bonatz came to Turkey for the first time in 1916 to take part in the design competition for the

Turco-German Association Building in Istanbul. He is said to have been saved from arrest under the Third

Reich because of his popularity with the students there. In his book Inside the Third Reich [Albert] Speer

writes that he himself together with Fritz Todt (1891-1942) had protected Bonatz. He came back again in

1942 as a member of the jury for the competition to design the Ataturk Mausoleum as well as others such as

those for the Canakkale Monument and the Istanbul Radio House and Courts of Justice. In 1943 he was

appointed consulting architect to the Ministry of Education in Turkey. He was a lecturer in the Architectural

Faculty at Istanbul Technical University between 1946 and 1955 and took part in the restoration of the

Taskisla building where the Faculty was situated.’ A. Erktin, Paul Bonatz, Eczacibasi Sanat Ansiklopedisi, V.

1, Yapi-Endustri Merkezi-Publishers, Istanbul, 1997, p. 271.

25 Gego stated, ‘The examination officer recommended that I exchange the compulsory indoctrination of

Nationalsozialismus with a course entitled “English for Architects”, which I attended together with a Swiss

student in the private rooms of the English tutor.’ (My translation). In the original, ‘Der Prüfungssekretär riet

mir freundschaftlich, den obligatorischen Kolleg zur Indoktrination des Nationalsozialismus für ein Fach

“Englisch für Architekten” auszuwechseln, was ich mit einem Schweizer Studienkollegen in der

Privatwohnung des Lektors für Englisch absolvierte.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241.

34

consciously distanced herself and that she avoided most social activities.26

The resulting isolation

and outsider position was typical for many assimilated German Jews during the thirties. Most

certainly, Gego and her family followed the political developments with apprehension and

consciously or, perhaps, unconsciously concealed their Jewish identity. It is possible that Gego

maintained an illusory sense of safety for the simple reason that she had never thought of herself as

a Jew but always, first and foremost, as a German. Only in the days immediately after obtaining her

degree as Engineer and Architect, in August 1938, was she able to acknowledge fully the

precariousness of her position. The detailed description of her last meetings with Bonatz give

evidence of the deep trauma caused at this moment. She writes ‘I suddenly realised that the floor

had been taken away from under my feet; + in order to prepare a career path for the future I

followed him [Bonatz] into his office, where we held the most impressive conversation. He didn’t

even know of my 100% Jewish Abstammung27

[…]’28

With his letters of recommendation in her

26

‘During my studies I not once experienced an affront on the part of colleagues or professors although

admittedly, I avoided all extra-curricular activities.’(My translation). In the original, ‘Ich habe während der

der Studienzeit nicht ein einziges Mal einen Affront von seiten der Kollegen oder Proffessoren erlebt, bin

allerdings selber allen ausser akademischen Aktivitäten aus dem Weg gegangen.’ Huizi and Manrique,

Sabiduras, p. 241.

27 The term means origin. Michael Brenner explains, ‘Liberal Jews, though rejecting the concept of a Jewish

nation, also employed such ethnic terms as Abstammungsgemeinschaft (community of common descent) to

express their belonging to a Jewish Gemeinschaft.’ Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in

Weimar Germany, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996, p. 37.

28 The fact that Goldschmidt is obviously a Jewish name renders it implausible that Bonatz was entirely

unaware of her Jewish origins. This casts some doubt also on the accuracy of Gego’s memory or her account

of this scene. I am grateful to Yve-Alain Bois for pointing this out to me in a conversation held in May 2006.

Gego’s description of this scene deserves to be quoted in full. ‘I suddenly realised that the floor had been

taken away from under my feet; + in order to prepare a career path for the future I followed him [Bonatz] into

his office, where we held the most impressive conversation. He didn’t even know of my 100% Jewish origins

and had expected to meet me that same evening at the usual celebrations for new Dipl. Ing. Arch., and I

explained to him that this would hardly be to the liking of the young graduates. He invited me come for tea at

his home that same afternoon, made his secretary write letters of recommendation to committees of

international architecture, of which he was a member and said that he would like to employ me but predicted

35

luggage Gego returned to Hamburg. The following paragraphs of her notes are filled with often

fragmentary memories of the chaotic weeks before her departure. They give evidence of her

mounting fear, the worries for the safety of friends and relatives, the horror when she overheard a

conversation in which allusions were made to the Kristallnacht and the possibility of a war. In

March 1939, Gego’s parents obtained permanent visas to stay in England where they joined Martin

and Hanna Goldschmidt with their families. They went on, after the war, to live near Los Angeles

and San Francisco, respectively. Hanna stayed in England where she died in 1978. Gego obtained

permission to stay in England only on the grounds that she would have to transfer to another

destination. The family’s belongings had already been put in boxes, the family home sold when

Gego, left behind on her own, finally received the all-important phone call. She was told that a

distant cousin’s friend had been able to arrange a visa for her for Venezuela. A building contractor

would provide the necessary contracts but it still took some patience and further assistance from

good contacts in London to get all the paper work done. Finally, after an eventful journey she

sailed, in August 1939, into La Guaira, the port near Caracas.

The account of her youth and the first years in Venezuela Gego wrote in an ironic and gently

humorous tone. With few exceptions, even in her description of the last days in Germany, Gego

restrained her emotions and thus immediately diffused any notion of victimisation or worse,

sentimentality. It is clearly the account of an elderly person who re-tells the story she had told

trouble for himself + recommended to me to emigrate as quickly as possible!!’ (My translation). In the

original the passage reads as follows, ‘Da wurde mir plötzlich klar wie ich in der Luft schwebte; + um

Zukunftswege zu ebnen, ging ich ihm nach in sein Büro, wo ich die eindrucksvollste Unterredung mit ihm

hatte. Er wusste nicht einmal von meiner 100% Abstammung-und meinte mich abends bei der üblichen

Zusammenkunft der frischen Dipl.Ing.Arch. zu treffen, und ich erklährte ihm, das das wohl nicht im Sinne der

jungen Absolventen sei. Da lud er mich zu sich nach Hause zum Nachmittagskaffee ein, liess mir von seiner

Sekretärin Emphfehlungsschreiben aufsetzen an internationale Architekturgremien an denen er Mitglied war

und meinte, er würde mich gerne bei sich anstellen, sah aber voraus, dass er damit Schwierigkeiten haben

würde + riet mir so rasch wie möglich auszuwandern!!’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241-42.

36

herself and others so many times and as such, it was consciously or unconsciously revised, or even

censured. In hindsight, what appears most valuable is that Gego wrote it in German, the language

she reserved throughout her life for very personal matters, for her family and for the particular

purpose of making a link to life before exile. German gave voice to another Gego and involuntarily,

she provided us with important information on her social and cultural status as German citizen. Not

immediately evident in translations, the original German texts reveal Gego’s vocabulary to be

formed by a bourgeois world, many terms now appearing slightly pompous, old-fashioned and her

cultural references occasionally obsolete. Related to her family’s status is an issue that left a trace in

the form of an otherwise little remarkable poem Gego wrote to her mother in the early thirties. At

the time she studied architecture in Stuttgart and she had met her parents for a brief holiday in

nearby Switzerland. Upon returning to Stuttgart Gego found that in all the photographs she had

taken she had missed to capture her parents, - just mountains, lakes and meadows. Nonetheless,

Gego sent the images to her mother accompanied by a poem ending with the following lines:

‘Memory is all that is left, and now and then,

I enjoy much looking at those photographs.

I recommend you to do the same, in peace,

And what they seem lacking, add yourself!’29

More interesting than the melancholy longing, expressed in these lines, of a teenager for her absent

mother is the fact that Gego referred to a trip to Switzerland. On the one hand, this gives evidence

of the Goldschmidt’s high social status but on the other hand, it points to historical facts which

strongly affected the lives of many German Jews. At this point, Switzerland had already acquired its

role as a safe haven for foreign capital. In the thirties a large number of Jews deposited money and

other valuables in Swiss banks in order to protect them from Nazi confiscation. After 1933, such

29

‘Erinnerung bleibt übrig, und dann und wann / Seh ich sehr gerne mir die Bilder an. / Ich rate Dir sehr, tu es

auch mal in Ruh, / Und was ihnen fehlt, das denk Dir dazu!’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 253.

37

transactions became far more difficult or impossible because it was no longer permitted, to Jews

and non-Jews, to export capital from the Third Reich. However, it is conceivable that Gego’s father,

as a banker, had the foresight to move family assets early on to bank accounts abroad for which

purpose he might have travelled to Switzerland.30

Thus, Gego’s little poem serves today, if not as

evidence, then as a reminder of the anxieties and increasingly limited freedom of German Jews

already in the early thirties.

When Gego landed in Caracas in August 1938 she was only 27 years old and couldn’t speak a word

of Spanish. On her journey Gego had seen the first black person in her life. In 1987, she recalled,

‘On a stopover in Barbados I saw for the first time in my life Negroes, who were fishing for coins at

the sides of the ship, took even photographs of it.’ (My translation).31

The culture and climate of

Venezuela could hardly have been more different from what she was familiar with and it is probable

that Gego never again re-found the sense of safety she had enjoyed with her family as part of

30

In 1998, a court settlement was agreed between representatives of two large Swiss banks and of the Jewish

World Congress. The case had concerned the restitution of deposits by Jews in so-called namenlose (without

name) Swiss bank accounts to the relatives of victims of Nazi persecution. For an analysis and very detailed

account of the Bankenvergleich see, Marc-André Charguéraud, La Suisse lynchée par l’Amérique: Lettre

ouverte au juge Korman, Editions Labor et Fides, Genève, 2005. This took place in the wake of a much larger

re-assessment of Switzerland’s role during the Second World War. The most comprehensive and perhaps,

most reliable account of Switzerland’s involvement in Nazi Germany and the issue of its immigration policy

during the time is the Bergier Bericht. (Bergier Report) It is the result of the work of an officially appointed

team of historians and economists, commissioned by the Swiss government to research the country’s

economical and political strategy during the period. Many of their findings have now been integrated into the

official history of the country as it is taught in Swiss schools, in order to encourage critical approaches and

more objective readings of Switzerland’s past. See Jean-François Bergier, La Suisse, le National-Socialisme

et la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Rapport final de la Commission indépendante d’Experts Suisse – Seconde

Guerre Mondiale, Berne, Pendo, 2002.

31 ‘Beim Aufenthalt des Schiffes for Barbados hab ich zum erstenmal Neger gesehen, die neben dem Schiff

nach Münzen tauchten, nahm sogar Fotos davon.’ Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 244.

38

Hamburg’s bourgeoisie. During the difficult first weeks, Walter Salomon, a business man and

distant relative, whom she had never met or spoken to before, was Gego’s only emotional support.

He had helped arranging her visa and communicated now with the immigration authorities in La

Guaira, Caracas’ port. Salomon had reserved a small room for her in a hotel run by German

émigrés who empathised with her situation and, eventually, she was able to exchange the single

room for a proper flat. She quickly picked up a few words of Spanish, however, it took another two

years for her to build a somewhat stable existence and make contact with people she could trust,

mostly German expatriates. In 1940, Gego married the German-Jewish entrepreneur Ernst Gunz

with whom she had two children, Tómas in 1942 and Barbara in 1944. Gego herself designed and

oversaw construction of their rather lavish, colonial-style family home in Los Chorros, a quiet area

situated just above central Caracas. The couple then ran a small workshop manufacturing furniture

and Gego was able to use her skills for designing tables, lamps and welded iron lattices which, in

traditional colonial architecture, often replaced glass windows. In the early forties, they decided to

close down the business, not least because Gego’s second child, Barbara, was already on the way.

In the meantime, Gego’s parents had left Europe, where they had shared a house with Gego’s sister

Hanna (1909-1977) and her husband in Kent, England. They arrived in the United States in 1946

and were reunited with Gego’s brother Martin (1898-1986) and her sisters Marie (1902-1970) and

Elisabeth (1918-1971), who all had taken residence in California. In order to welcome her parents

Gego undertook the boat journey from Caracas to Los Angeles, together with her young son Tomás.

This was probably also the last occasion on which Gego saw her mother. Elisabeth Hanne Adeline

Goldschmidt, born Dehn in Hamburg in 1875, died in Los Angeles in 1947.32

32

Gego’s strong attachment to her mother seems expressed in one of the anecdotes she recorded in 1987. ‘I

failed the external Abitur exams (when I arrived at home with the negative results I formulated it with the

slogan “main thing is we are all in good health” and my mother’s reaction was to say “how nice, it means that

you will stay at home for a little longer.’ ‘Fiel dann durchs externe Abitur (als ich mit dem negativen

Entscheid zu Hause erschien, hab ich es mit dem Slogan: “die Hauptsache ist, dass alle gesund sind”

formuliert, und meine Mutter reagierte darauf: “wie gut, dann bleibst du noch eine Zeit lang zu Hause”).’

39

In the late forties Ernst Gunz began working as an administrator for an American company

with a branch in Venezuela. During this time Gego felt increasingly unhappy in her marriage and in

1951 they separated.33

In the following year Gego met her second partner, the graphic designer and

painter Gerd Leufert (1914-1998). They moved to Tarma, a small village in a hilly region not far

from Caracas. There, in the small and secluded world of a rural village and amidst the fantastic

Venezuelan landscape Gego could feel more at ease and recover her creativity by drawing or

producing her first tentative watercolours. There is good reason to suggest that only when Gego met

Leufert was she able to reconnect fully to her artistic formation and architectural training in

Germany. Gerd Leufert was born in 1914 in Klaipeda in Lithuania, which was at that time of his

birth still called Memel and within German territory. Leufert’s journey took him via Hannover,

where he had studied graphic design until 1933 and Munich, where he completed at the

Kunstgewerbeschule a degree in design in 1935, followed by studies in painting at the

Kunstakademie until 1939. Gerd Leufert left Germany first for the United States, where he taught

briefly at the University of Iowa and the Pratt Institute in New York. He arrived in Caracas in 1951.

Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241. Of Gego’s father, Eduard Martin Goldschmidt, we know little. He

was born in Hamburg in 1868 and died in Los Angeles in 1956.

33 It can be suggested that a first important personal revision of Gego’s German Jewish identity occurred after

her divorce in 1953. It is unclear whether the break-up of Gego’s marriage to Ernst Gunz was related to a

critical revision of German Jewish identity. Gunz was half-Jewish and according to their daughter, Barbara

Gunz, he had left Germany not so much in order to get away from the Nazis but even more so, in order to get

away from the Jews, which would imply a certain degree of Jewish self-hatred. An oscillation between

acceptance and rejection of her German identity most certainly took place during Gego’s strong engagement

and identification with German design.

40

1.2 Venezuelan History

The history of modern Venezuela begins with the War of Independence of the early nineteenth

century. Venezuela had been part of the Spanish Empire since the sixteenth century. In 1821 under

the inspired and passionate leadership of Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), El Libertador, the country

achieved sovereignty and has remained a free state ever since. The wars had been part of Bolívar’s

ambitious dream to create a Gran Colombia, a union of Latin American states much like the United

States of America are today. This exceptionally intelligent and passionate military leader envisioned

a Latin American continent with its own cultures developing in mutual support rather than each one

separately in dependence on a foreign power. This spirit of freedom was not unusual for the

consciousness of the people of this region. Even before liberation became a political fact

Venezuelans had been able to maintain a somewhat loose relation to the Spanish crown and relative

independence from Spanish representatives in the country. The Spanish conquistadores had no

interest and exerted little control in the region because the country had nothing to offer that could be

exploited. Unlike Columbia where gold and minerals had been discovered, Venezuela was primarily

an agricultural country. However, the Venezuelan climate is perfect for the cultivation of sugar cane

and cacao and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most European settlers founded huge

plantations along the coast. This brought with it the importation of black slaves from Africa, which

accounts for the presence of very strong African cultural influences in Venezuela. The plantations

and settler communities laid also the first tracks for trade with European countries, for instance

Germany. The cultural and trade links between Germany and Venezuela existed long before

German Imperialism became the force behind the exploitation of so called ‘primitive’ cultures.

Evidence of a more scientific and humanistic interest in the country is present in the documentation

of a journey undertaken by Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) between 1799 and 1804. His was

of course a scientific project, part of German Enlightenment enthusiasm for the Latin American

continent. During this journey, Humboldt meticulously collected and documented material for

biological and physiological studies and his letters, sent to contacts in Europe, provide us with a

41

fascinating and moving portrait of the beauty of Venezuela at the time.34

The Spanish influence in

Venezuela was at most times limited to the presence of Catholic missionaries, with whom the

Amero-indian and new slave population quite readily accommodated. Religion was assimilated and

fused with a cultural heritage originally from the Amazon region or the Congo and the West Coast

of Africa. To this day, Venezuelans pride themselves of never having enforced racial segregation

and thus having tolerated the mixture of Indian, African, Spanish or German communities,

including the cultural influences that each group brought with them.

I have to bypass Venezuelan history of the nineteenth century and instead, will provide a

brief outline of political and economic developments within the country since the beginning of the

twentieth century. The effect of the radical changes taking place in 1920s and 1930s Venezuela will

be crucial for the emergence, thirty years later, of Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo. The most

important event in the historical consciousness of Venezuelans living in the fifties was not, as for

Europeans, the catastrophe of the Second World War, but the death of Juan Vicente Goméz (1857-

1935). Three decades of a cruel dictatorship were over, yet, it took another ten years and the

overthrow of yet another dictator until dissident centre-left politicians could begin to establish a

more or less democratic state. Between 1945 and 1948, during the first brief presidency of Rómulo

Betancourt (1908-1981) a process was initiated that led to fundamental changes within the legal and

political structure of the country. Basic human rights, such as equality of all citizens, freedom of

speech, the right to vote for all members of society, and this included women, were made part of the

constitution. Unfortunately, Betancourt's first democratic government failed to achieve its ambitious

goals and the democratisation process was halted and reversed, temporarily, between 1949 and

34

The original German and French letters by Alexander von Humboldt have been collected in Alexander von

Humboldt, Briefe aus Amerika 1799-1804, Ulrike Moheit (ed.), Akademie Verlag , Berlin, 1993. A Spanish

translation of the letters has been undertaken by the Argentinean art critique Marta Traba and published in

Caracas. It is evidence of the importance of this German enlightenment figure for Venezuelan’s cultural

identity. Marta Traba, Cartas americanas, Alejandro de Humboldt: compilación, prólogo, notas y cronología,

Charles Minguet, Marta Traba Trans, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas, Venezuela, 1980.

42

1958. From 1952 General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1914-2001) exercised power with a repressive

military regime that sought to realise, on the one hand, the radical modernisation of the country’s

infrastructure and, on the other hand, re-enforced a reactionary ideology which was upheld by

hierarchical social and political structures.35

The single most important event in the modern history of Venezuela was the discovery of

enormous resources of crude oil around 1920.36

These placed the country immediately on an

international political and economic platform and in a position of enormous strategic power in

relation to the United States. However, not until the end of the Second World War did these vast oil

resources take on the full significance that they have to this day. During the European war years,

international trade and Venezuelan oil exports had slowed down, however, in the immediate post-

war period Venezuela became a main supplier of fuel needed for the reconstruction of European

towns. Venezuelan oil companies became important partners for those governments that sought the

quick and successful implementation of the Marshall Plan, administered by the United States. The

fact that the re-instalment of a military regime took place during the Cold war period and at moment

of intense political tensions but also economic dynamism is crucial. Among other factors, it was the

support of foreign, primarily American politicians and businesses, that allowed General Marcos

Pérez Jiménez to come to power and orchestrate the last of Venezuela's military dictatorships.

35

Jiménez’ military regime was heavily supported by the United States. During his presidency Jiménez

received the U.S. Legion of Merit from the United States government. US capital investment and interference

in the politics of Venezuela was an important arm in United States’ imperialist fight against communism.

36 Crucially, in Latin America, although modernization brought for many an increase in living standards and

promoted bourgeois individualism, it also brought the radical dependence on industrial superpowers. The art

historian Valerie Fraser described the close inter-dependence of the introduction of twentieth-century

modernism in Venezuela and the exploitation of oil resources in her essential study on architecture in Latin

American countries Building the New World. She provides an account of the introduction of European

modernism in Venezuela that sets it within a much wider cultural and historical frame than I am able to do

here. Valerie Fraser, Building the New World, chapter two ‘Venezuela’, Verso, London, 2000, pp. 87-144.

43

Jesús Soto: Early Biography

Let me now turn, only briefly, to the early biography of Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005). It holds

many of the keys to an understanding of his later career and the particular form his large and very

influential oeuvre would take. For the argument of my thesis it seems important to introduce Soto

not only as a figure of French Cinétisme but to provide a background that takes in account his

Venezuelan identity. It simultaneously situates Soto’s work as narcissistically attached to the

country where he had been born and establishes the strong links between his works and those of

Gego. Both artists had to negotiate their ambivalent feelings in relation to places they were forced,

more or less urgently, to leave behind. I am aware that a straight parallel between the two exiles,

one enforced exile the other politically motivated emigration, would be to diminish the gravity of

Jewish exile, of anti-Semitism and indirectly, the Holocaust. However, the effects of displacement

have left in both their oeuvres traces that I am interested to explore. The similarities in their

respective responses seem to me valuable for an art historical discipline that at the moment is

confronted again with the issues arising from an extreme mobility of practitioners of art and from

strong multiculturalism especially in urban areas.

Soto was born in 1923 in Ciudad Bolivár in Venezuela. This small colonial town is situated three

hours flight away from the capital city Caracas along the shores of the Orinoco River and

surrounded by vast expanses of unexplored and sparsely populated jungle. Soto grew up in one of

its poorest areas. (Fig. 3 Ciudad Bolívar, ca. 1930) His father earned the family’s income as a

musician at dances and weddings in the area and music remained important to Soto throughout his

life. The early death of his father figures large in Venezuelan reconstructions of their famous son’s

biography. This is perhaps an indication more of Venezuelan’s reverence towards paternal order

than application of a psychoanalytically-informed art theory. Equally, the claim that the loss of his

father had been the impulse behind Soto’s wish to become an artist is unfounded. While it is true

that Soto, soon after his father’s death, helped earn the family’s income by painting posters for the

44

local cinema this can hardly be considered an emotional reaction to the loss of his parent. Already

as a child Soto had taken great pleasure in copying reproductions of paintings from illustrated

magazines and the more pragmatic interpretation would be to say that Soto was obviously a very

sensitive and highly gifted child. He was also somewhat fragile and for some years suffered from

recurring breathing difficulties. His physical frailty made him naturally cautious and perhaps,

somewhat inhibited in his engagement and play with other children. More important, from an early

age he must have appeared unfit for the harsh life in a barrio of Ciudad Bolivár, where a strong

physical constitution is essential. Leaving his hometown was for Soto very likely also a question of

survival.

His desire to get away was strong enough for him to seek help from grant-giving institutions. In

1942, after winning his first small bursary from the state of Guyana, Soto was able to move to

Caracas and study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts. His formation was very conventional and

informed largely by a realistic French landscape tradition that went back to the late nineteenth

century. The most advanced artist discussed at the time was Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), yet, first

elements of an independent artistic community, holding regular meetings in artists’ studios or

makeshift clubs, appeared at the time. However, the sheer lack of information and direct

connections to an artistic centre, which at that time was Paris, meant that their artistic experiments

bore few interesting results.

The forties were a period of political and economic instability during which several short-

lived governments followed one another. In 1946, after Acción Democratica had won the first

regular election held in Venezuela, the government introduced unheard-of opportunities for the poor

of which one was the establishment of a state bursary for young artists. Many of those who had

gathered in the social clubs in Caracas would soon meet again in Paris. They were to form a group

called Los Disidentes, a sort of experimental ex-pat family unit, not unlike other artists

communities, giving each other moral, and sometimes, financial support. They became part of a

large Latin American community living in the French capital. Soto was among the first to receive a

45

grant, which enabled him to stay in Paris for six months. He travelled in 1950 and never really

returned to Caracas except, during the seventies, in the role of the artist who had made it abroad.

Post-war Politics in Venezuela

Venezuelans had followed the Second World War as outsiders but under the influence of Cold War

rhetoric many and especially the reactionary political elite chose to identify with the winner, the

United States. There were interests on both sides to establish diplomatic and business connections

between the two countries. Venezuelan businesses hoped to activate the somewhat sluggish and

underdeveloped economy and the United States were interested in securing not only control over

the country’s oil resources but also establishing a strategic (military) position on the Latin American

continent. After a military coup in 1949, Rómulo Betancourt’s democratic government had to cede

its place to a reactionary right-wing elite.

In the decade of Pérez Jiménez’ leadership, money that had accumulating during the war

years as a result of import restrictions was invested in the development of a vast new industrial

infrastructure. This enabled the cost efficient exploitation of oil, which was exported via United

States companies, to Europe where it served post-war reconstruction. In addition to the enormous

income from oil exports the sudden presence of foreign companies in Caracas and elsewhere in the

country brought with it a huge increase in tax revenue. Thus, oil became the fuel of a highly

dynamic economy, the State’s main source of income. More importantly, however, it led to

Venezuelan's ideological shift towards and at least temporary, identification with the United States.

Political and cultural values, such as an aggressive economy and a life-style that emphasised the

consumption of goods imported from the United States, were promoted and uncritically adopted

during the fifties and in the following two decades with little resistance from the public. There is,

however, an exemption to be postulated right away, one that is crucial for the development of Arte

Abstracto and of Cinetismo. Unlike the economic and political elite, the artistic community and the

46

cultural circles, be this literary, art critical, museums culture or collectors of art, remained on the

whole attached to French culture and in some cases, to a socialist politics or Communism.

When the dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez had finally collapsed in 1958, Betancourt was able

to return for a second mandate. His party, the socialist Acción Democratica returned to power

taking on the difficult task to complete and amend Pérez Jiménez’ over ambitious modernisation

plans. However, the late fifties and the sixties became the most important time in the establishment

of an artistic scene in Caracas. Thus, the politically and socially unfavourable parameters described

above were, paradoxically, also the precondition for the emergence of a group of artist that sought

the introduction of a liberal aesthetic, a modernism freed of the symbols of the Goméz era. The

emergence of Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo was due to Venezuelan and immigrant artists’ idealism,

however, it evolved in a situation that forced them to realise their art within and against Pérez

Jiménez’ cruel regime.

1.3 Artistic Production since Independence

Venezuelan art before 1920 makes for a rather uneventful art history, one that follows, with some

delay, the developments in Europe. As in most Latin American countries visual culture was first

established in the sixteenth century by Spanish missionaries. They brought baroque influences from

Catholic Spain and Flanders and until the wars of independence artistic production remained

primarily religious. Painters of this period, although they signed with their own names, worked for

the church and usually were black slaves. After the wars of independence around 1830 the tastes of

the Venezuelan elite shifted toward a belated French classicism, and later in the century, toward an

academic landscape painting style. Social Realism and representations of the life of the poor, of

black people and the rural population appear only in the later nineteenth century. Around the same

time, the European artists Ferdinand Bellerman (1814-1889), George Melbye (1826-1896) and

47

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) undertook journeys to Venezuela where they would produce the first

exotic representations of the country’s nature and primitive population. Pissarro, probably because

he had grown up in the Caribbean and hence was more familiar with a tropical vernacular produced

a series of drawings of high documentary value today.37

They are among the earliest visual evidence

we have of the strong Spanish influences in architecture and of the degree of provinciality of its still

primarily agricultural society. However, in the capital Caracas the works of these European artists

would contribute to the development of a bourgeois art market and a demand for painting in the

style of the French and German academies. In 1865 the Academia de Pintura y Escultura was

founded and, simultaneously, the first incentive for artists from a Venezuelan cultural and economic

elite to travel to Paris to study the European masters.

Unfortunately, the visual culture of Venezuela's indigenous population is very hard to trace. Unlike

Mexico or other Latin American countries, Venezuelans in the past seem to have cared far less

about the preservation of the artefacts of the indigenous population. This may be due, in part, to an

entirely different understanding of time and history but it is certainly also the effect of colonisation

which brought with it the overvaluation of goods from European cultures. Today Caracas historical

Museum and other private collections, such as the Colección Cisneros, preserve and display only

relatively few pre-Hispanic figurines, artefacts and ritual objects. They tend to be objects of daily

use produced by nomadic tribes.38

Since the beginning of the systematic exploitation of petrol these

37

For information on Pissarro’s Caribbean origin and journeys to Venezuela see, Richard Soler, Camille

Pissarro au Venezuela, exhibition catalogue, Les Presses Artistiques, Paris, 1978; and Alfredo Boulton,

Camille Pissarro en Venezuela, Caracas, 1966.

38 A wonderful exhibition of these rare objects was held in Germany in 1999-2000. Many of the exhibited

items were from the collection of the Fundación Cisneros in Caracas. The highly informed texts collected in

the catalogue provide an excellent historical account of the indigenous population of the Orinoco river region

of Venezuela. Moreover, the intention of the exhibition organizers was to show how in the design of these

objects ritual significance and everyday use merged. The emphasis on the transient and the ephemeral quality

of these object’s reveal a non-European historical consciousness in which inheritance, that is history, has far

48

communities have rapidly decreased in numbers and the last remaining tribes live far from Caracas

along the Orinoco River or in the vast forests along the border to Brazil.

The ‘lack’ of an original Venezuelan visual tradition has certainly contributed to the

immediate appropriation of a European aesthetic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

However, not only did the country's elite adopt European tastes as a marker of class difference it

also actively repressed, by way of its complete indifference towards the historical and religious

value of Indian artefacts, indigenous cultures. Therefore, to speak of a lack of a visual tradition is

somewhat misleading when in fact it is the result of the cultural elitism that has governed the

country since the beginning of its colonialist period. The art critic Ariel Jiménez uses the term

‘ausencias primeras’ in order to invoke the painful awareness of a lost visual tradition.39

He implies

that the notion of an ‘original’ absence, or absence of original, has become defining for Venezuelan

national identity and experience of the present. They signify an infuriating inability to access an

original and hence materially verifiable past. He also suggests that denigration of the symbols of

indigenous Venezuelan cultures was a crucial element in the ready adoption of modernist

abstraction because its discourses promised infinite renewal and progress. He wrote, ‘The first

issue, already mentioned, is precisely the absence of imposing pre-Colombian monuments and

traditions, to which is added on top, however for different reasons – Venezuelans have always lived

with an architecture that renewed itself permanently – the absence of a colonial architecture worthy

of consideration. These absences seem to have the consequence that Venezuelans are oriented

toward the future, and in consequence, toward the new, the modern which is seen as the sign of

progress. In the eyes of the abstract artists, only the creation of a new world and a new structure

less significance in the formation of social identity. It is the very reason for the rarity of these objects today.

Orinoko - Panima, exhibition catalogue, Wenzel Jacob curator, Indianische Gesellschaft Cisneros, Kunst- und

Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, August 1999 - February 2000.

39 The term could be translated as ‘primary absences’. Ariel Jiménez, Utopías Americanas, Colección Patricia

Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas and Centre for Modern studies, University of Texas, Austin, 2000, p. 31.

49

would enable us all to overcome these primary absences, and only they would concede to us the

authenticity that they refused to acknowledge, en bloque, in their own Latin American culture.’40

Venezuelans’ lack of historical consciousness and sense of continuity, the cultural vacuum

that avant-garde artists felt after Goméz death in 1935, was precondition for the appropriation of a

radically modernist aesthetic after 1945. As I had explained earlier, around 1945 a group of

ambitious yet extremely open-minded and engaged group of Venezuelan artists had travelled to

Paris where they re-united to form the artists group Los Disidentes, the dissidents. This group is of

the greatest importance for the later establishment of Arte Abstracto in Venezuela, not only as a

trend within the fine arts but also as the official aesthetic, a school taught at art institutions and

applied in the public field. Their impetus stemmed from a strong rebellion against what they felt to

be an anachronistic post-impressionism permeating art academia and museum’s culture and thus

prevented the evolution of a modern Venezuelan visual culture. The theoretical basis of their

critique was formulated in five issues of a magazine Los Disidentes published in Paris between

March and September 1950. The last issue contains a statement, which can be regarded as the

group’s manifesto, ‘NO is the tradition that we seek to establish. The Venezuelan NO that we try so

hard to achieve. NO to the false Salons of official art. NO to this anachronistic archive of

anachronisms that is called Museo de Bellas Artes. NO to de Escuela de Bellas Artes and its

promotion of false impressionists. NO to the expositions of national and foreign merchants that one

can count to the hundreds each year in the Museo [de Bellas Artes]. NO to the false critics of art.

NO to the folklore musicians. NO to the false poets and ‘llena-cuartillas’ writers. NO to the

40

‘La primera pista, ya mencionada, es justamente la ausencia de monumentos y tradiciones precolombinas

imponentes, a la cual se sumará también la ausencia, por diversas causas – los venezolanos hemos vivido

siempre en medio de una arquitectura que se renueva continuamente-, de una arquitectura colonial de

consideración. Estas ausencias parecen tener como consecuencia una orientación del venezolano hacia el

futuro y, por consiguiente, hacia lo nuevo, lo moderno, visto como signo de progreso. A los ojos de los

artistas abstractos, sólo la creación de un mundo nuevo y de una estructura nueva podía ayudarnos a superar

50

newspapers that support so much of what is absurd and to the docile public that goes each day to the

slaughterhouse.’41

Many of the names, that by now are part of the accounts on the Parisian art scene

of the immediate post-war period, re-appear in the history of Venezuelan Arte Abstracto and

Constructivism. Often, these artists commuted, over years, between the two locations never quite

settling in either one country. Thus, contemporary developments in the French capital became

simultaneously active components of the newly animated Caracas artistic community. If some

artists remained in permanent transition and lived, in Ariel Jiménez’ words42

, ‘neither here nor

there’, other members of the original Disidentes decided or were forced to return to Venezuela

where they soon became involved in the modernisation projects under way in Caracas. The first to

come back was Mateo Manaure (b. 1926), founder of Cuatros Muros, the first gallery promoting

abstract art in Caracas. His painting style was indebted more to Kandinsky than to a strict French

Geometric Abstraction, which more often took its impulses from Piet Mondrian. Each returning

artist would develop, over the following five or so years, a highly individual interpretation of the

esas ausencias primeras, y sólo ello podía concedernos la autenticidad que le negaban, en bloque, a la cultura

latinoamericano.’ Jiménez, Utopías Americanas, p. 31.

41 ‘NO es la tradición que queremos instaurar. El NO venezolano que nos cuesta tanto desir. NO a los falsos

Salones de Arte Oficial. NO a ese anacrónico archivo de anacronismos que se llama Museo de Bellas Artes.

NO a la Escuela de Bellas Artes y sus promociones de falsos impresionistas. NO a los esposiciones de

mercaderes nacionales y estranjeros que se cuentan por cientos cada año en el Museo. NO a los falsos críticos

de arte. NO a los músicos folkloristas. NO a los falsos poetas y escritores llena-cuartillas. NO a los periódicos

que apoyan tanto absurdo y al publico que va todos los días dócilmente al matadero.’ Published in Los

Disidentes, número 5, Paris, setiembre, 1950. Re-published in Guillermo Meneses, Podemos Pensar, Pintura

Venezolano, 1661-1961, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1961, pp. 1-13.

42 ‘Ni aquí, ni allá’ is the title of Ariel Jiménez’ essay on Venezuelan Cinetismo published first in the

catalogue of an exhibition held in Madrid in 2000. 'Ni Aquí Ni Allá', Heterotopias, medio siglo, sin-lugar,

1918-1968, exhibition catalogue, Mari Carmen Ramírez (ed.) Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina

Sofia, 2000, pp. 237-243. The exhibition was held for a second time in a slightly re-arranged version under

the title ‘Inverted Utopias’ in Houston in 2004. Inverted Utopias avant-garde art in Latin America, Mari

Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, Yale

University Press, 2004.

51

abstract art encountered in Europe. I have chosen to call abstract art produced in Venezuela Arte

Abstracto, to signify that it represents a development rather than an application of a European style.

Los Disidentes, those who had returned from Paris, played very consciously, an important role in

the definition of a new national identity as well as in the establishment of an art scene proper in

Venezuela. The most important names to remember are undoubtedly the art critic and artist

Alejandro Otero (b. 1921), the painters Mateo Manaure , Pascual Navarro (b. 1923), Carlos

Gonzáles Bogen (b. 1920) but also the artists/writers Omar Carreño (b. 1927), Mercedes Pardo (b.

1922) and Perán Erminy. The sheer number of creatively active young people, making up only the

Venezuelan half of an increasingly internationalist art circuit, gives evidence of the vibrancy and

openness of the Caracas art scene at the time. There are several related reasons for this cultural

dynamism, one of which was that during the years of the first socialist government, after 1946, it

was official policy to facilitate foreign immigration. As a result, refugees from Europe, among them

many Jews, moderately left-leaning intellectuals and artists arrived in Venezuela in relatively large

numbers. Many of those would quickly become part of the artistic and intellectual scene of Caracas.

I have already mentioned the graphic designer Gerd Leufert, Gego’s partner from 1952 onwards;

during the same period arrived, among many others, the Italian Nedo (b. 1926), a designer and later

collaborator of Leufert, and the German painter Luisa Richter (b. 1928), who had been a pupil of

Willy Baumeister (1889-1955) in Stuttgart and would become a close friend to Gego. Eventually,

these immigrants would establish a new generation of designers in the academic departments of the

Universidad Central de Caracas or of the Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neuman. Importantly, these

immigrant artists did not reinforce already existing French or Spanish influences but instead, they

introduced a German tradition of abstraction, especially Bauhaus design. This contributed to the

establishment, early on in the development of a Venezuelan post-war art, of a certain tension

between French abstract influences, Geometric Abstraction and informel painting, and Bauhaus-

informed abstraction which found more readily practical application in either graphic design or

architecture. Nonetheless, together with Los Disidentes, these European immigrants would make up

52

the kernel of the Caracas cultural scene of the fifties, sixties and seventies. The dividing lines drawn

by different aesthetic traditions applied also to the more sensitive area of their respective political

orientation. The majority of European immigrants were from bourgeois backgrounds but usually

defended a moderately socialist political orientation. This compromise between bourgeois

individualism and socialism conformed with the ideals promoted by the Weimar Bauhaus. In the

case of Los Disidentes, even if they had spent only a few years in existentialist Paris this had left

strong ideological traces and had formed or confirmed their political convictions. Many had become

committed Communists, which meant that they were, on the one hand, critical of dominant

structures and reactionary politics and, on the other hand, interested in placing art in the service of

politics. Los Disidentes sought to make art an active element of a new Venezuelan society in which

class differences would be abolished. The appeal to those artists of a radical modernism creating a

tabula rasa situation is evident. An entirely abstract formal language, indebted perhaps more to

Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) than to Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), allowed them the almost

seamless fusion with a contemporary discourse that favoured progress, functionality and reason. On

the one hand, it re-enforced their avant-gardist ambition, after all they were Los Disidentes and, on

the other hand, it had the enormous advantage of sanctioning the full integration of their art within

the Venezuelan modernisation projects that were under way. Thus, from the early fifties onwards,

the previous generation's visual vocabulary inherited from French post-impressionism,

impressionism or even bourgeois nineteenth-century portrait and landscape painting was rejected

and replaced with a new abstract vocabulary. Abstraction lent itself to this purpose, precisely

because it made no direct and obvious references to either the objects of the past or those of the

present. As can be imagined, many of the subtleties of their masters Malevich and Mondrian were

lost in the process. Transposing the avant-garde aesthetic of artists working during the Russian

Revolution and in the context of Dutch Protestantism of the early twentieth century into a tropical,

predominantly Catholic country takes considerable skills. Ultimately, the most important aspect of

this implantation of a foreign element into Venezuelan culture, especially for the subsequent

53

evolution of Cinetismo, was its effect on the existing concept and status of the artist. The

Romanticist notion of the creative genius, which had up to this point supported a bourgeois painting

tradition was exchanged for an artistic identity that was guided by an impersonal universal or in its

political and most utopian form, by the demands of a future, classless society. In the latter concept

the bourgeois art object would be replaced with an art that entirely fused with the social,

architectural and political space of post-war Venezuela. Alejandro Otero’s (1921-1990) paintings

produced between 1947 and 1956 may be best suited as illustrations for a process of abstraction that

took place not only within the imagination of Caracas’ artistic circles but across the whole of

Venezuelan society. Cafetera azul, 1947, El pote rojo, 1948, Lineas inclinadas, 1951 and

Coloritmo, 1956 make clear that Arte Abstracto emerged as the result of a reductive process in

which reference to an external world is increasingly excluded from the field of visual

representation. (Fig. 4 Alejandro Otero, Líneas inclinadas, 1951) Perhaps, for this very reason, his

paintings are the best documentation we have of the crucial transformations that were taking place

in Caracas around 1950.

Carlos Raúl Villanueva

Most exemplary of this transformation are the enormous architectural projects of Carlos Raúl

Villanueva (1900-1975). The architect had studied in Europe and had brought with him a

Francophile taste and familiarity with the concepts and designs of French classicism and the pre-

modernist architecture of the Art Deco period. His figure is of such paramount importance to

Venezuelan architectural and art history that it is worth introducing some biographical details about

him.43

He was born in London in 1900 as the son of the Venezuelan diplomat Carlos Antonio

43

I consider two books essential to the study of Carlos Raúl Villanuvea’s work. The first was written by Sibyl

Moholy-Nagy the wife of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Carlos Raúl Villanueva and the

Architecture of Venezuela, Alec Tiranti, London, 1964. Translation Marta Traba, Calos Raúl Villanueva y la

arquitectura de Venezuela, Editorial Lectura, Caracas, 1964. The second is Valerie Fraser’s, Building the New

54

Villanueva and a French mother, Paulina Astoul. Between 1912 and 1928 he lived in Paris, earned

his Baccalauréat and then studies architecture, last at the École des Beaux-Arts. Judging from the

style of his designs realised immediately after graduation one would question whether he was

interested in or even knew Le Corbusier’s avant-garde architecture.44

It is true that in the period

before Villanueva’s move to Caracas in 1929, fewer modernist projects were realised in France than

in the German context. And Villanueva had a conservative taste. Certainly at the beginning of his

career he was oriented toward a French academic tradition of a previous generation rather than the

dynamic modernism that was promoted by Le Corbusier or the social architecture of German

architects Mies van der Rohe, Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, to name only a few.45

After

graduation and brief employment in Paris, Villanueva decided to move to Venezuela and almost

immediately began to work as an architect, first in Maracay then in Caracas. Among his first

projects was the design, in 1931 of an enormous bull-fighting arena which he executed in rather

traditionalist, yet somewhat eclectic neo-colonial style, clearly responding to the nature of the

World, Verso, London, 2000. Further source of information is the large catalogue of an exhibition dedicated

to Villanueva and held in the context of the IV Bienale de Arquitectura in São Paulo and at the Galería de

Arte Nacional in Caracas in 1999-2000. Juan Pedro Posani, Carlos Raúl Villanueva: un moderno en

sudamérica, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas, 2000.

44 Le Corbusier became an influence in Venezuela via the work of another architect, Cipriano Domínguez.

Valerie Fraser notes, ‘In January 1936 Cipriano Domínguez – who, as a postgraduate student of architecture

in Paris in the early 1930s, had worked in Le Corbusier’s studio – lectured to the Venezuelan College of

Engineers on Le Corbusier and his ‘Five Points towards a New Architecture’. Domínguez was not alone,

however: all of the younger generation of architects who had been trained in Paris had come across Le

Corbusier and his ideas. […] In Caracas, one of the first projects to make use of the new style was a school by

Le Corbusier’s disciple Cipriano Domínguez, the Liceo Fermín Toro (1936), which –although it does not

make use of the ‘Five Points’ – accords with Le Corbusier’s general ethos.’ Valerie Fraser, Building the New

World, p. 100.

45 Once more I wish to emphasis the radical avant-gardism of the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart. There was

little in France that could compare in audacity and broadmindedness of concept to this German Werkbund

project built in 1927. It is also important to remember that Gego had been a witness to these exciting

developments in German architecture.

55

building’s function. In 1935, Villanueva was commissioned by the dictator Juan Vicente Goméz’,

only weeks before his death, to create two of the most significant pre-war buildings in Caracas, the

Museo de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Ciencias.46

Both buildings, particularly within their exotic

setting, impress first with the severity of their neo-classical facades but once entered give a prime

example of the effectiveness of a combination of Art Deco elegance with airy classicist order and

calm. (Fig. 5 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Museo de Ciencias, Caracas, c. 1938)

In 1939, stylistic changes became more apparent and they informed also Villanueva’s

designs for a public school, the first in Venezuela. The Escuela Gran Colombia in Caracas is

rendered in a style that does still contain strong elements of an Art Deco manner but is combined

with the influences of a more reductive Le Corbusian functionalism. With these three public

buildings Villanueva had taken the first steps into a career that would make him one of the most

important influences on the architectural and artistic tastes of Venezuelans. His strong political

position within the Caracas cultural elite is evident also in the commission of one of his major post-

war project, the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV). The project was launched during the

military regime of General Isaías Medina Angarita (1897-1953) in 1944, developed under

Betancourt’s first presidency from 1946 to 1947 but was built in several phases, mainly during the

decade of Peréz Jiménez’ dictatorship, between 1949 and 1962. Today the entire university

complex is an UNESCO world heritage site. In the design of the Universidad Central, Villanueva’s

thoroughly humanist ideals as architect, his fantastic sense of good form and attention to detail and,

perhaps, his idealism as Venezuelan citizen found their fullest expression. A visitor going around

the beautifully laid out campus cannot avoid feeling a sense of physical ease, comfort and

46

The designs of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Science Museum are expression of changes within

Venezuelans’ architectural tastes. More importantly they highlight the new stylistic differences between

religious and secular buildings. Valerie Fraser writes, ‘But Venezuelan taste remained fundamentally eclectic.

While neo-colonial was popular for religious architecture, in the last years of his life Gómez rather suddenly

commissioned some major new public buildings, and for this the favoured style was Art Deco.’ Valerie

Fraser, Building the New World, p. 92-3.

56

intellectual freedom. (Fig. 6 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas,

1953) Despite the political structures that supported its construction the design of Universidad

Central de Venezuela stood for liberalism. Built for providing the space for education, basis of all

cultures, it sought to convey freedom and self-consciousness to a new generation of a people who

were still excluded from a contemporary modern world. Beyond its symbolic meaning the

Universidad Central was crucial for the introduction of modernist art in Caracas. From the very

start of its planning Villanueva incorporated the works of European artists among them Jean Arp

(1886-1996), Fernand Léger (1881-1955), Henri Laurens (1885-1954), Anton Pevsner (1884-1962),

Victor Vasarely (1908-1997), Baltasar Lobo (1910-1993) plus the American Alexander Calder

(1898-1976) in the layout of the public spaces of the central University complex. Spread across the

campus these sculptures by modernist masters, post-war innovators and Venezuelan Disidentes

represented side by side, the crème de la crème of the French and the Venezuelan art scene at the

time. However, it is important to emphasise that Villanueva gave in to his taste for already

established modernists. Many of the ‘old masters’ from Europe were of a previous generation,

linking Villanueva’s project to the modernism of the interwar years rather than the emerging post-

war modernity. Some artists, notably Fernand Léger and Henri Laurens, were effectively at the end

of their careers. Only the Venezuelan Constructivists and Cinetismo artists plus Victor Vasarely can

properly speaking be called emerging post-war artists. Arte Abstracto is strongly represented with

works by Carlos Gonzales Bogen, Victor Valera (b. 1927), Alejandro Otero, Mateo Manaure and

Pascual Navarro. (Fig. 7 Carlos Gonzáles Bogen, staircase mural, Universidad Central de

Venezuela, c.1953) The rupture that opens up, inevitably, between the works of the European

masters and those of the young Venezuelan avant-garde is most explicit in the integration, or lack of

integration, of the works within their architectural setting. Arp’s Shepherd of the Clouds (a copy of

a previous work), Leger’s abstract murals and vitrail and even Calder’s beautifully poetic whirling

snow flakes seem self-contained objects not quite dialogue with the design of the building. They

could be exhibited anywhere, while Carlos Gonzáles Bogen’s wall decoration, Mateo Manaure’s

57

abstractions, Victor Valera’s ornamental mural or Gego’s Chorro, a late addition to the department

of architecture, appear to be part of the building. They fuse seamlessly with the atmosphere of the

space, the artists renouncing all subjectivity, seeking no more than to be part of a whole.

The art of the modernist masters had a quasi after-life in Venezuela and was introduced at a

moment when, in Europe, caused by the rupture of the Second World War its significance had

already changed, when it had become the art of a previous generation. This had the effect that the

lessons of the modern artists were never fully integrated into the consciousness of the Constructivist

artists who felt, nonetheless to be their inheritors. This idea was confirmed in 1979 by the art

historian Bélgica Ródriguez. She proposed that the artists adopting an abstract vocabulary, chiefly

Los Disidentes, were forced to reject, because they were in opposition to the established academic

painting tradition, the pictorial logic that had been the basis of the development of abstract art in

Europe. She writes, ‘First we have to consider the formation those artists had received in the

Escuela de Artes Plásticas in Caracas, from their tutors and from the existing Venezuelan painting

tradition, […] which they now rejected. Their teaching had reached [only just] the moment [in

history] of the emergence of cubism and the paintings of Cézanne. Precisely the way by which the

European artists had [in the meantime] arrived at abstraction’.47

Abstraction then, was arrived at by

way of a shortcut, an incomplete process, which positioned Constructivismo, at the very moment of

its inception, as expression of rupture and historical discontinuity. The differences that would

emerge between Venezuelan interpretations of abstract art and those of their European post-war

peers would have radical effects on the subsequent development of the plastic arts in Venezuela.

47

‘Primeros debemos considerar la formación que estos artistas habían adquerido en la Escuela de Artes

Plásticas de Caracas, de sus maestros y de la misma pintura venezolana, […] aunque después fue negada. La

enseñanza llegaba hasta el cubismo y de la pintura de Cézanne. Precisamente la vía por la que los artistas

europeos llegan a la abstracción.’ Bélgica Ródriguez, ‘Arte Geométrico-Arte Constructivo Venezuela

1945/1965’, Arte Constructivo Venezolano 1945-1965’, exhibition catalogue, Galería de Arte Nacional,

Caracas, 1979, p. 15.

58

After 1946 Villanueva oversaw also the planning and the construction of some of the

largest housing developments in Caracas.48

An early project, Unidad de habitación El Paraiso,

realised in 1952 can be said to have been successful in its synthesis of design and function. Le

Corbusier's pre-war architectural programme was clearly an inspiration however, Villanueva

deviated from the European model in some important ways. By using a prismatic ground plan rather

than rigid axial orientation and by introducing terraced garden city landscaping, Villanueva clearly

emphasised the spaces for social interaction. This does respond to the tropical climate where much

time is spent out doors but also to the specific needs of a poor class in which social interaction has

the function of giving mutual support and is thus important for sustaining the sense of community.

A later project, Urbanización 2 diciembre (today Urbanicación 23 de Enero), built between 1954

and 1957 for a maximum of 23’400 inhabitants could stand, however, as a memorial to a failed

utopia.49

(Fig. 8 Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Urbanicación 23 de Enero, Caracas, c.1957) The project

failed because the sheer monumentality of its design crushed any sense of human scale. The estate

soon turned into one of the many problem areas of the city with high crime and poverty rates. Like

El Silencio (1941) and El Paraiso (1952) it was financed largely with money from the Banco

48

His influence as urban planner was crucial and already during the thirties he was engaged in the first

attempts at restructuring Caracas town plans. After his return to Venezuela he became chief architect and

adviser to the Banco Obrero, the workers’ bank, which had initially supported private construction only but,

from 1941 onwards, funded public housing projects and the redesign of Caracas’ town plans. For a detailed

account on Villanueva’s role as town-planner see Valerie Fraser, Building the New World, pp. 104-10

49 Valerie Fraser writes, ‘The Banco Obrero solutions to the housing problems of Caracas in the 1950s were

fundamentally architectural, based on utopian architecturaland urban theory with very little regard to the real

needs and conditions of the inhabitants. The government wanted quick, visible results, not protracted,

expensive research into social and economic issues. Once the schemes were under way, funds often ran out

before the social infrastructure incorporated into the architect’s plans – the schools, health centres, social and

sports facilities, and transport systems – could be completed. In some ways this is not dissimilar to the

resettlement schemes of the sixteenth-century colonizing Spaniards who imposed a new spatial and social

order on the indigenous population.’ Valerie Fraser, Building the New World, p. 121.

59

Obrero. The 23 de Enero superblocks50

were part of the Plan Nacional de la Vivienda (National

Housing Plan), which had been devised under the liberal governments of Betancourt and Rómulo

Gallegos before 1950, it sought to accommodate for the unprecedented influx of a work force

originating from the surrounding country. Between the twenties and the fifties Caracas' population

had increased from 200,000 to six million inhabitants, which had created not only an enormous

shortage in accommodation but also social problems for which the government was not prepared.

With a post-modern sense of resignation Venezuelans face, again today, the almost insurmountable

problems created by rapid technological progress and modernisation. The projects of the early

fifties seem irrational in their ambition and misguided by their functionalist focus. They failed to

take into account the physical and psychological problems of a people who had been forced to

develop from a nineteenth-century rural population into a modern, or rather post-modern, society

within thirty years. It is evident that no architectural programme, especially not one that imagined

as its ideal inhabitant a middle-class European, could erase the authoritarianism and the sense of

dependency most Venezuelan’s had been brought up with. In Venezuela, the failure to integrate the

social structures and habits of a people that still lived like their ancestors, often as devout Catholic

communities, into a purely functionalist modernist system had catastrophic effects. In the late

sixties the radical failure of a liberal government to co-ordinate the massive modernisation project

became evident. Mismanagement, corruption and sheer lack of interest had made the realisation of

the original Plan Nacional de la Vivienda impossible. The breakdown of the town's infrastructure,

rising violence and crime rates, the lack of adequate education for the poor are just some of the

almost insurmountable problems manifesting themselves with increasing urgency during those

years. The existence of a huge Lumpenproletariat51

became an undeniable fact. Caracas was a

50

I am borrowing this term from Valerie Fraser’s description in Building the New World, p. 113.

51 The term Lumpenproletariat was defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology

(1845) in which they analyse the devastating effects on German society of capitalism and rapid

industrialisation. Members of the Lumpenproletariat are no longer part of the economy but are the large group

60

disaster. It had grown on the basis of sheer speculation, huge highways were cutting across the

centre of town, high rise buildings had been erected on previous recreation grounds and public

space had been sold to the highest bidding American investor. Acción Democratica’s promise to

bring about a significant raise in living standards for everybody became true only for the privileged

few and this contributed to AD’s defeat by the Christian democratic COPEI in 1968.

During the sixties Villanueva had take on a diplomatic function beyond the immediate

context of the Venezuelan post-war modernisation program as a member of the board of governors

of the Museo de Bellas Artes. He would become an important mediator between North American or

European cultural institutions, the Museum and the Venezuelan artists. Between 1971 and 1973

Villanueva oversaw the design and construction of the extension to the existing Museo de Bellas

Artes, the Galería de Arte Nacional and in the international art context he modelled the

representation of a new Venezuelan visual identity. In 1967 he had designed the Venezuelan

pavilion for the World Fair in Montréal for which he commissioned Jesús Soto to create a large-

scale installation. The very predominance of Cinétisme in the seventies and the huge number of

public commissions for artworks by Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez (b. 1922) would be

unthinkable without his influence.52

Villanueva’s last project, the Museo Jesús Soto in Ciudad

Bolívar, inaugurated in 1974 one year before his death, seems the appropriate culmination of a

radical modernist’s career. Carlos Raúl Villanueva died in Caracas in August 1975.

Villanueva’s influence went far beyond his role as eminent architect of the post-war period

and reached deep into the very fabric of Caracas’s social and political establishment. In his role as

mediator between the various cultural institutions and the governments controlling the country

of those excluded from bourgeois society, the ruined, vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged prisoners,

pickpockets, brothel keepers, prostitutes, rag-pickers, beggars and the homeless.

52 In addition, the unprecedented rise of international oil prices, as an effect of the military conflicts in the

Middle East, led to a veritable oil bonanza in Venezuela. Many artists but especially Jesús Soto and Carlos

Cruz-Díez profited from the sudden riches not only of state institutions but also of an upper middle-class elite.

61

between 1945 and the mid-seventies, he became crucial for the definition of a specifically

Venezuelan cultural identity.

Venezuelan Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo

In the previous sections I have sought to convey the particular dynamic that governed Venezuelan

politics since the end of the Goméz era. Evidently, this was a closely-knit society with a few

powerful figures competing for and controlling key political positions. The new modern Venezuela

was a society in the making that nonetheless, was developing within structures established in the

thirties. Often it was only the name of a ministry or state organisation that changed while the

personnel, in fact, remained the same. The world Gego had escaped to from Nazi Germany was one

that was moved and controlled, during the fifties, by ambitious and sometimes scrupulous men. The

favouritism that then still sustained Caracas’ cultural elite was the very reason for the emergence of

Venezuelan Arte Abstracto.

As we have seen, abstract art was introduced into Venezuela around 1950 by artists who,

like Soto, had encountered French Geometric Abstraction and informel painting on their sojourns to

Paris, undertaken immediately after the Second World War. Henceforth, Venezuelan abstract art

would develop parallel to and in dialogue with the abstract trends that dominated French painting

until the late fifties. However, Cinetismo does not represent a direct development of Venezuelan

Arte Abstracto53

, as it is the case with France where Cinétisme grew directly out of Geometric

Abstraction of the pre-and post-war period. Instead, it was introduced in Caracas via the work of

Jesús Soto, Victor Vasarely and Carlos Cruz-Díez, artists based in Paris and active, at the time,

primarily in Europe. Cinetismo must be distinguished from Venezuelan Constructivism and Arte

Abstracto in three ways. First, Cinetismo made clearly sole reference to a European painting

tradition and to contemporary aesthetic trends in Paris. Second, it was never engaged in the critical

62

discourses on ornamentation or the primitive as had been the case with Venezuelan Arte Abstracto.

Cinetismo never identified with traditionalist voices that sought in the ornamentation of the

indigenous people of Venezuela a raison d’être for their art.54

Thirdly, Cinetismo emerged in clear

opposition to Constructivist painting and sculpture. Its main aim was to render visible optical

illusions, which result from interference in normal perception caused by the repetition of modular

elements, by surface reflectivity and mobility of parts of the art object. Unlike constructivism,

which sought an integrated materiality, Cinetismo sought to create optical effects understood as

manifesting an absolute and temporality by way of de-materialisation or trans-substantiation.

These trends toward abstraction, established at the beginning of the fifties by Venezuelan artists

who sought to translate European culture into a Latin American modality, became for Gego and

Gerd Leufert a welcome opportunity not only to use their skills and their knowledge but also to

promote their own artistic careers. They were very lucky that during the forties foreign immigration

had been encouraged by the Venezuelan government, not least due to pressure from the United

States. The officially stated intention had been to attract European labour, in order to boost the

flagging agricultural sector. However, many European immigrants had far higher qualifications than

the local population and were placed, with the approval of the ruling class, which was supported by

the United States, instead in the business sector, higher education or politics. After the general

uprising of 1958 and Jimenez left the country, Venezuelan government reversed its strategy again

and limited immigration. Many émigrés, like Gego and Gerd Leufert, were knowledgeable in the

arts or design and they established themselves in key positions in university departments, art

institutions and galleries in Caracas. On the whole, this created an enormously inspiring,

53

I have chosen to use the term Arte Abstracto in order to distinguish abstract art produced in Venezuela after

1950 from French geometric abstraction.

63

multicultural and internationalist context. It was not unusual that Venezuelan artists and

intellectuals, among them Jesús Soto, Alejandro Otero and Miguel Arroyo (b. 1920) would spend

their evenings as guests in Gego and Leufert’s idyllic enclave in Tarma. When the couple decided,

in 1956, to rejoin Caracas they were able to draw strong artistic impulses and encouragement from

their Venezuelan friends. In turn, Los Disidentes after a brief encounter with French art and culture

were happy to welcome among their midst immigrant artists familiar with European culture and a

modernist aesthetic. Yet, the fact that immigrants were sometimes better placed to get access to

academic or art institutions is an indication also of the class divisions that ran deep within Caracas

society. Los Disidentes, almost without exception, were from poor families and often were born in

rural areas. When they returned from Paris in response to Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s invitation to

take part in the University project, it was certainly with ambivalent feelings. Los Disidentes

manifestos and artists’ texts written in Paris give ample evidence of their sense of frustration and

impatience with the structures they were forced to conform to.55

Upon the urging of Alejandro Otero, Gego began creating, around 1957, three-dimensional

welded objects. Clearly, for Gego, this was a time of renewal, liberation and formal

experimentation. Drawing and printing gave way to a more solid sculptural practice which she

continued to develop over the next decade. In this first phase she produced only small to medium

sized objects made of black welded iron, a technique she had encountered when designing the iron

54

As an example of modernist painting that made reference to Latin American folk art one can mention the

work of the painter Gonzales Torres-Garcia. Although an internationalist artist, he nonetheless remained

attached to a Latin American tradition of abstraction.

55 One of those who clearly refused to give their support to Pérez Jiménez was Jesús Soto. Asked by art critic

Ariel Jiménez why he hadn’t realised the model he had created for Villanueva’s Universidad Central project

Soto replied, ‘Well, for political reasons, to oppose the military dictatorship. My artists friends told me that

we couldn’t cooperate with a military regime and I decided not to make it…but in the end, you see, they made

theirs and the only one that wasn’t made was mine.’ Ariel Jiménez, Conversations with Jesús Soto, translation

Evelyn Rosenthal, Fundación Cisneros, Caracas, 2005, p. 158. First published as Conversaciones con Jesús

Soto, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas, 2001.

64

lattices of her family home. (Fig. 9 Gego, Partiendo de un rombo, 1958) Later, she introduced

highly reflective stainless steel wire in several series of untitled objects which, on occasion, were

arranged under the title Lineas. These small pieces in particular can appear like the painful

expression of contents that resist full articulation. Many of these objects exhibit a desire to

transgress, to intrude or break into new space. I suggest that here aggression was made part of a

creative process which allowed Gego to explore emotional limits and boundaries. Simultaneously, it

was a mirror of the violent transformation and re-construction of a modern architectural landscape

in Caracas, which Gego recorded with an almost photographic sensibility.

Gego’s interest in optical effects would bring her temporarily, very close to the Cinétisme

artists Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Díez. In 1959, Cruz-Díez made Gego’s sculpture Vibración en

negra of 1957 (Fig. 10 Gego, Vibración en negra, 1957) the subject of a film. Movement and

Vibration in Space: A sculpture by Gego was recorded at the architecture department of the

Universidad Central de Caracas. 56

In the first frames of the film we see Gego’s piece suspended

from the ceiling within a minimal theatrical setting. Then, Gego emerges from the background

walking now gingerly toward the work, grabbing it with both hands and setting it in motion around

its own axis. A close-up shot on the rotating object then highlights the movement of the parallel

metal bands, which form the body of this piece, and thus creates optical effects which temporarily

suspend a clear sense of direction. The similarity with the effects observable in Soto’s plexiglas

objects shown at the gallery Denise René only three years earlier is evident. The editing of the film

had taken place at Iowa State University57

where, in the same year, Richard Raynor recorded a

56

Cruz-Díez’ film was on view in the Gego exhibition organised by Peter Weibel and Nadja Rottner at the

Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlruhe, Germany in 2005. A copy of it is held in the

collection of the Fundación Gego in Caracas

57 At this point, Venezuelan Cinetismo’s geographic orientation and cultural affiliation still included the

United States. Only ten years later it would have been unthinkable for Carlos Cruz-Díez to work in a US

university and it was only Alejandro Otero who remained most persistently attached to US technology

departments such as the one at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

65

second film inspired this time by Gego’s Esfera of 1959. Metal Alive Sphere: A sculpture by Gego

emphasised, by way of its tight framing, abstract optical effects resulting from the animation of the

object itself.

Thus, in the early sixties Gego held a prominent place within a highly motivated group of

Venezuelan designers and artists. Moreover, her artistic production was at this point in direct

dialogue with the development of Caracas’ modern architecture. The Constructivist ambition of the

full integration of art into life was then guiding her thought. Between 1962 and 1972 Gego was able

to realise, sometimes in collaboration with her partner, several large-scale architectural installations.

Prominent among them are Escultura, for the Banco Industrial de Venezuela of 1962 (Fig. 11 Gego,

Escultura, Banco Industrial de Venezuela, 1962) and Cuerdas created for the monumental housing

complex of the Parque central in 1972. (Fig. 12 Gego, Cuerdas, Centro Simón Bolívar, 1972)

However, this strong engagement with contemporary Caracas should not be taken as a sign of her

complete assimilation into Venezuelan culture.58

Her thinking remained also linked to an aesthetic

going back to German pre-war culture, which she remembered and re-discovered at the same time.59

The synthesis of the two so dissimilar cultures was a means for Gego to overcome the rupture

caused by exile. One of her best friends, Miguel Arroyo states that Gego did not consider the idea of

progress and the rational European model a necessarily evil, ‘Here [in Venezuela] she forgot

everything that was forgettable about Europe, but not what she could not forget: her education. And

58

One of the earliest commentators on Gego was the Argentinean art critic Marta Traba. In the seventies, she

resided in Caracas and became highly critical of social developments, especially of the role graphic design

assumed within the definition of new cultural values. Mirar en Caracas is a collection of her criticism in

which she discussed many then important figures, especially of the immigrant community, such as Gego,

Leufert, Nedo and others. It is an excellent introduction to seventies culture in Caracas. For a comment on

Gego see, ‘Gego: Caracas Tres Mil’, Mirar en Caracas, Monte Ávila Editores, Caracas, 1974.

59 Admittedly, her interests were not limited to Germany but nonetheless, they remained focused on a

Northern European cultural context. For instance the exhibition of works by Henry Moore at the MBA in

1964 most certainly inspired Gego to reading Herbert Read’s art theory. Her library contains Herbert Read,

66

this enabled her to assimilate everything that was related to it, including Abstractionism,

Constructivism and the ideas about progress that were part of her background.’60

However, a second

and crucial part of her artistic practice was far more intimate and highly individualistic. The issue of

Gego’s strong individualism, her continued attachment to European, especially, German culture and

the resulting strained relation to Cinetismo will be discussed in chapter III. The art historian Iris

Peruga confirms that ‘Gego was extremely free-spirited, and her artistic pursuits reflected her need

to find new creative possibilities on her own. Consequently, she never quite identified with the

Venezuelan Geometric Abstractionists, but worked, methodologically in isolation, somewhat

withdrawn from the newest trends and trusting only herself and her own skills.’61

1.4 Gego’s Search for Continuity

In this section I establish the links between Gego’s work and the concepts developed at the early

Weimar Bauhaus. Later I will propose that Gego was engaged in the recuperation of a field of

knowledge that was tied firmly into the German-Jewish culture of the Weimar Republic. Here my

concern is to show that Gego’s revision of this socialist project had the aim of translating and

adapting it to the specific needs of a young Venezuelan society.

Throughout the fifties and sixties, we can ascertain that Gego was guided by a strong

impulse to find expression for emotional contents that may include the recovery of forgotten

knowledge. As noted earlier, this seems particularly evident in small three-dimensional objects, first

versions of which appear in the late fifties, where we find a dominantly expressionistic mode. (Fig.

The Form of Things Unknown, An Essay on the Impact of the Technological Revolution on the Creative Arts,

Meridian Books, 1963.

60 Miguel Arroyo quoted by Iris Peruga from an unpublished note of 1999, ‘Gego: the Prodigious Game of

Creating’, Obra Completa, 1955-1990, Fundación Cisneros, 2004, p. 379.

67

13 Gego, Sin título, 1958) They suggest a strong subjectivity and emotional engagement with

material and thus invite associations of forceful transgression, intrusion and distorting violence.

(Fig. 14 Gego, Cinta, 1962) Such expressivity remains, however, sporadic and does not recur until

the early seventies in the important series of Chorros. These clearly are a development of the formal

concerns articulated in the smaller works of the fifties and early sixties and indicate a pattern of

revision of earlier articulated ideas.

On a more objective level, in her teaching practice, Gego demonstrated a similar revisionist

impulse. Here, however, it allowed her to revisit the architectural training she had received in

Stuttgart and, at the same time, allowed her to shift emphasis away from this traditionalist to a more

progressive functionalist approach. With great tenacity Gego developed a theoretical and practical

teaching programme that was loosely based on the Bauhaus Vorkurs. This pedagogic course had

been outlined by Johannes Itten (1888-1967) during the earliest phase of the Bauhaus, around 1920,

then still in Weimar.62

As we have seen earlier, Gego’s foundation at the Technische Hochschule

under Paul Bonatz was conservative and anti-modernist at a moment when traditionalist thinking

was already exploited by Nazi propaganda for its racist ideology of ‘Blood and Soil’ (Blut und

Boden). It is for this reason that we have to take very seriously Gego’s turn toward a reformist

modernism that emphasised experimental openness and subjectivity, while retaining universal

values of geometry. Itten’s highly esoteric pedagogy is clearly indebted to Protestant asceticism as

61

Iris Peruga, ‘Gego: the Prodigious Game of Creating’, p. 379.

62 An outline of the Vorkurs appeared in book form only in the post-war period, first in 1963, but was

transmitted to Gego as verbal knowledge almost certainly by Gerd Leufert, who had been trained as a

designer in Germany. First German publication, Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltung und

Formenlehre, Otto Maier Verlag, Ravensburg, 1963. I also attach significance to an object in Gego’s personal

collection of jewellery, a piece designed by Naum Slutzky (1984-1965), who was part of the circle around

Itten. In a photo taken by her brother-in-law Hans Meyer, Gego is wearing a Slutzky necklace. This particular

piece seem to merge Gego’s ‘fixation’ on the use of reflective material with an interest in temporal continuity

which is evident in the reference to a Möbius strip.

68

well as Eastern mysticism and its adoption most certainly prevented Gego from fully embracing a

post-war modernism that rejected ornament and subjectivity for mass-producible simplicity.63

Among the few works that were preserved from the time when Gego worked in the

secluded retreat in Tarma is a small panel painting. Today, it is in the possession of Gego’s brother-

in-law Hans Meyer who lives in Kent, England, where I had the opportunity to examine and

photograph the work. (Fig. 15 Gego, Untitled, c.1956) It is a startlingly abstract work, a kind of

cosmology, typical also of works by Paul Klee (1879-1940) or the Czech painter Frantisek Kupka

(1871-1957), and reminiscent of the particular type of drawing children produce when they begin to

think conceptually. The play with overlapping circles and ovals, seemingly transparent, create a

vague sensation of infinite space. This interest in spatial extension and wholeness she developed

further in a number of medium sized welded objects. (Fig. 16 Gego, Doce círculos concéntricos

(Girando Moebius), 1957 and Fig. 12 Gego, Vibración en negro, 1957) Vibración en negro

especially, conveys temporal continuity very strongly by the fact that it is hung from the ceiling and

thus seems to rotate around an invisible axis.64

63

In Europe Bauhaus pedagogy had similarly been re-installed and adapted to a post-war society by designers

and architects, for instance Max Bill (1908-1994). Indeed, during the sixties Gego found several opportunities

to visit German and Swiss design schools and observe these latest developments.

64 It is unlikely but not impossible that Gego knew at this point the work of the Swiss artist Max Bill (1908-

1994). He had been a student at the Dessau Bauhaus of, among others, Paul Klee and there are startling

similarities between Gego’s early sculptures and Bill’s various versions of the Möbius strip, which are all

based on a particular mathematical formula. For instance Kontinuität, a sculpture Bill created over a very long

period of time, from 1946 until 1982, does seem to convey a similar longing for permanence. Indeed, the very

first version of Kontinuität, exhibited in 1936 at the Triennale in Milan, was suspended from the ceiling! In

1979 Bill’s work was shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes and the museum purchased, probably at this

occasion, a large carved stone sculpture, which today is part of the permanent collection. In the original

exhibition catalogue we find the transcript of a speech given by Max Bill to the members of A.I.C.A.

(Association Internationale de Critiques d’Art) which was and still is a European institution, based in Paris,

with strongly humanistic aims. Bill was an outspoken supporter of a post-war socialism that rested on

Protestant ethics. See Axel Stein Nuñez-Ricardo, Max Bill, Esculturas, graficas, Museo de Bellas Artes, 1979.

In 1955 Bill became the co-founder of the Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung, an institution that saw itself in

69

The idea of permanence fuses with a second strand of interest evident at this point of

Gego’s development, which ties her work more firmly into the Venezuelan context. In the late

fifties she clearly adopted some of the ideas of Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Díez and Alejandro Otero.

The obvious formal similarities are the crossing and animating of bands of parallel lines in order to

create optical effects, which is a clear reference to works Soto produced since 1954 in the context of

French Cinétisme. Also, Gego quite consciously subscribed to Cinetismo by choosing the title

Vibración en negro, a term that Soto would employ regularly from 1958 onwards. Gego’s interest

in these effects was never completely silenced, although, from the early sixties onwards she

increasingly gave emphasis to surface reflectivity by using almost exclusively galvanised iron and

aluminium in her work.

In 1957, Alejandro Otero encouraged Gego to take up teaching at the Escuela de Artes

Aplicadas Cristóbal Rojas, where she first instructed fine art students in elementary sculptural

practice. Her course programme was pioneering because of its highly experimental and workshop-

oriented approach. According to Ruth Auerbach, one of Gego’s students,65

‘Gego addressed issues

related to building models out of different materials in order to observe the elements of form

(space), texture (light) and arrangement of mass (proportion).’66

By the beginning of the sixties,

Gego had developed this basic course into a more sophisticated pedagogic programme by which she

sought to convey the fusion of individual expression with rational mathematical thinking, artistic

invention with industrial modes of production. This practical application of her knowledge also had

an effect on her artistic development and, temporarily, subjective expression was halted by a more

the tradition of the design theory developed at the Bauhaus. See Max Bill, Maler, Bildhauer, Architect,

Designer, Thomas Buchsteiner (ed.), Hatje Cantz, 2005.

65 Auerbach completed Gego’s ‘Spatial Relations Seminar’ the Instituto de Diseño, Findación Neumann

during the year 1972. Today she is an artist and writer and she described Gego’s teaching methods in detail in

a recently published essay. Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, in Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-

1990, Fundación Cisneros, Fundación Gego, Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, pp. 407-12.

66 Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 407.

70

rational and structural approach. Gego’s fantasies took on monumental dimensions which she

realised in several large-scale installations. These pieces were, properly speaking, architectural

projects, which involved a long planning phase and the help of several assistants and often they

were co-designed with her partner Gerd Leufert. (Fig. 17 Gego, Mural INCE, 1969)

Her activity as architectural designer coincided with Gego’s engagement as professor at the

Universidad Central de Caracas and at the Instituto de Diseño, Fundación Neumann. These

professional successes compensated Gego for the frustrations she had experienced during her first

years of exile. During the forties, all attempts to launch a career as professional architect had failed

dismally and had left her very dissatisfied with herself. Significantly, her engagement as teacher

allowed her also to establish links to her training in Germany. Gego acknowledges in her writings

that her interest in architectural technology, modernism and more socially oriented design

programmes were initially stirred during the inter-war years. ‘My inclination towards architecture

came later and was influenced by social issues related to the social construction projects that

developed at the time.’67

Gego was by no means alone with her focus on Bauhaus design.

Auerbach’s detailed description of the syllabus at the Universidad Central de Venezuela provides

evidence of a great consensus among the faculty. Gego fitted in well with a group of ambitious and

progressive teachers who sought to provide a solid technical training, which at the same time

conveyed ethical values and fostered a strong spirit of collaboration. This was clearly a socially

dynamic period and Gego felt inspired by the exchange with students, fellow academics and with

artists who worked in the field of urbanism and public sculpture. Auerbach confirmed, ‘In

Venezuela, the most interesting time for the Bauhaus method begins in the late 1950s and lasts

throughout the 1960s. It coincides with the inauguration of the Facultad de Arquitectura’s new

building in 1957, where professors and students alike revolved around the philosophy of the

67

‘Architektur-Interesse kam später, teilweise angeregt durch soziale Gedanken über die damals sich

entwickelnden Bauunternehmen’. Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and

Fundación Gego, Caracas, 2005, p. 240.

71

Composition Workshop.’68

Gego’s theoretical approach conformed to the Constructivist ideal of a

fusion of art with life. Nonetheless, her insistence on individualism, typical also for Itten’s

pedagogy, is a significant deviation from the theoretical approach of Arte Abstracto and Cinetismo.

Auerbach wrote, ‘From a spatial, temporal and academic point of view, it would seem that Gego did

bond with or become influenced by the artistic theories of the Bauhaus. [But] Only after abandoning

her homeland would any link to Bauhaus methods develop. Her academic heritage, founded on the

rigor of constructive and technical methods, would evolve slowly into a poetic interpretation of

space with a stronger artistic sensibility.’69

Gego’s knowledge of pre-war German design and her obvious familiarity with Weimar

culture raised suspicion in the minds of her fellow Venezuelans. Auerbach felt obliged to open her

essay with a short paragraph on Gego’s relation to Paul Bonatz and on his role in the controversy

around the Weissenhof Siedlung. Auerbach defended Bonatz’s socialist orientation and argued for

his political innocence in the conflict around the nomination of contributors to the project. This

view clearly runs against the opinion of many European historians writing about this crucial

Werkbund project.70

Further, she seemed intent on deflecting attention away from any possible

associations between Gego’s years as a student of architecture and accounts of Nazi gatherings or

even open anti-Semitic hostility. By this she is contradicting the Technische Hochschule’s own

website which confirms that Hitlerjugend meetings were held on the school’s grounds during the

time of Gego’s studies. Auerbach’s aim was to neutralise a scenario which possibly, has given rise

in the past, to speculations of a xenophobic or anti-Semitic environment. Gego herself was

68

She adds in a footnote that ‘Design became a category applied [only] after the sociologistic [sic] renovation

of the seventies, directed toward mass culture.’ She seems to imply that during the sixties, the motivation for

adopting Bauhaus theory was social idealism rather than the search for an already established aesthetic

program. Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 407.

69 Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 407.

72

consistent in her defence of Bonatz not least because he had been supporting and protective of her

during her very last months in Germany. Auerbach quoted Bonatz for saying that ‘Once the

nationalist rhetoric took root “a grey shadow fell over all of those who loved freedom. Our

department [at the Technische Hochschule] did not suffer flagrant interventions; they have not

uniformed our thought, […]’71

Nonetheless, to make the pre-war situation appear more harmless

than it was prevents also comprehension of the real menace to Gego’s life at the time. Auerbach

simply ignored the anti-Semitism that was part of Gego’s experience at the Technische Hochschule,

including her relationship to Paul Bonatz.72

This amounts to a denial of the complexity of Gego’s relationship to the pre-war period. In

my view, it would be wrong to interpret Gego’s work of the sixties only in terms of neurotic anxiety

formation after the traumatic experience of enforced exile. However, Auerbach’s account

encouraged this view by neutralising a ‘tainted’ past and thus denying Gego the capacity to

critically and constructively engage with history. By suppressing the discussion of Gego’s relation

toward the culture and place from where she had to flee under threat of extinction Auerbach, in fact,

invites psychologically simplistic interpretations that identify formal abstraction with a

displacement of unresolved contents. Yet, it cannot automatically be implied that Gego, by

establishing continuity with Bauhaus aesthetics, sought to deflect from issues that she avoided

addressing. I suggest that her projection of a positive self-image, which prevails throughout the

sixties, needs to be seen as one stage within a much larger process. If disappointment and a sense of

70

See for instance Helmut Heissenbüttel, Stuttgarter Architektur, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1979;

Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A critical Biography, University of Chicago Press, 1985; Jürgen Joedicke,

Stuttgarter Architekturschule, Kramer Press, Stuttgart, 1995.

71 Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 407. The quote is taken from Jürgen Joedicke, Internet

article published online as ‘Stuttgarter Architekturschule’. First published in Architektur und Stadtplanung,

Kramer Press, Stuttgart, 1995.

72 As we have seen in the first part, Bonatz was known for his anti-Semitic remarks in connection with the

Weissenhof controversy and his reaction to her disclosure that she was Jewish seems to have left an extremely

strong, possibly traumatic, impression on Gego.

73

betrayal were part of Gego’s feelings toward pre-war German culture she necessarily had to

embrace first an alternative social reality. And, if she sought to defend herself against debilitating

depression, but also against anger, by constructing a narcissistic self-image this must not be seen as

a negative strategy. Ambivalent feelings in relation to the past can be considered as a driving force

for the creation of an optimistic persona. The ‘work of repair’ by means of which the damaged self

– one that is fragmented - can recover a sense of wholeness and loving attachment to the world may

well have been at the centre of Gego’s creativity.

Precisely such therapeutic self-healing forms the basis of Johannes Itten’s pedagogy.

Further, its esoteric and symbolist73

aspects are part of Gego’s recovery of the fragments of German

culture. Itten’s curious Bauhaus universe was sustained by a quasi metaphysical belief in human

creativity and the regenerative forces of nature. Its idealism stood in stark contrast to the

functionalism promoted at the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius and later by the Swiss architect Hannes

Meyer (1889-1954). It appears that Gego chose quite intuitively a ‘philosophy’ that matched her

own liberal thinking but would also be of benefit to, what she thought of as, an underdeveloped

society. Devised between 1919 and 1923, the Vorkurs applied a neo-liberal pedagogy which was

inspired, among others, by the writings of the Swiss pedagogue Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827),

the German philosopher and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1961-1925) and the Italian

pedagogue Maria Montessori (1870-1952). Itten’s liberating artistic practice clearly has sources in

turn-of-the-century idealism which often combined Enlightenment thought with the aesthetic and

religious rituals of Eastern mysticism. This latter aspect is of significance with respect to Gego’s

German Jewish identity. Eastern mysticism was part of the Bauhaus environment and pointed back

to the Wilhelmine period and German Romanticism. In the early nineteenth century theories

73

Important to note in this context is that Gego kept in her library a copy of C.G. Jung’s last book, Der

Mensch und seine Symbole in a German edition of 1968. Jung, C.G., Der Mensch und seine Symbole, Patmos

Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Walter-Verlag, Olten, 1968. Originally published in English as, Man and his

Symbols, after Jung’s death edited by M.-L. von Franz and John Freeman, Aldus, London, 1964.

74

emerged which argued for the links between and superiority of Indo-Germanic languages. It formed

the basis for the idea that Germans had their ancient roots outside European soil in a quasi

transcendental world. It was used later by the Nazis to argue the purity and a supposed superiority

of the Aryan race.74

Indeed, Itten’s subscription to a German racist ideology can be deduced from

remarks such as ‘To find unity within the self was the great discovery of the white race. […] Only

within the white race was the unification and balancing out of the three temperaments achieved.’75

Many pseudo-religious practices introduced by Itten at the Bauhaus give evidence of his fixation on

‘purging’ and ‘inner cleansing’. (Fig. 18 Paul Citroen, Mazdasnan-Kuren, 1922) Followers of

Mazdaism, a sect founded in the late nineteenth century on the basis of the Persian Zarathustran

cult, understood the body as the ‘temple of the living god’.76

Itten’s non-cooperation, his self-

aggrandising theatricality and his inability to adapt to the new ethos of a fast changing Bauhaus led

to his expulsion in 1923.

Cultural baggage often re-emerges in the unconscious searching of an artist and among the

texts collected in the recently published anthology of Gego’s writings we find a section entitled

Tantra. In this short text, Gego described geometric shapes as imbued with a symbolic or mystical

meaning and attempted to use geometric shapes in order to explain her own concept of human

sexuality. More precisely, she clarified the relation between male and female, which she set in clear

opposition and defined by way of the conventional attributes as active-male, passive-female, and

within the dualistic cosmology of Eastern mysticism. In the text anthology, the authors introduce

this section with, ‘One of the most surprising discoveries in the Sabiduras bundle was the text

74

For an account on the construction of the Aryan myth at the beginning of the nineteenth century see, Léon

Polikov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, Tome 2, L’âge de la science, Calmann-Lévy, Seuil, Paris, 1981, pp. 163-

68.

75 ‘Die Einheit in sich selbst zu finden war die grosse Entdeckung der weissen Rasse. […] Erst in der weissen

Rasse kam die Vereinigung und der Ausgleich der drei Temperamente zustande.’Johannes Itten, ‘Rassenlehre

und Kunstentwicklung’, Masdasnan, Jahrgang 16, 1923, H. 5, S. 91, Hanish, 1933. Reference taken from Das

Frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten, exhibition catalogue, Kunstsammlung zu Weimar, 1994, p. 88.

75

entitled Tantra, since there was no previous evidence–written or oral-to suggest that Gego was

interested in or had studied Eastern philosophies or religions. […] This text may date from the early

1970s, coinciding with Tantra. Arte de la India, an exhibition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century

Indian watercolors that was held in December 1971 at the Galería Conkright in Caracas.’77

We cannot say conclusively what motivated Gego to adopt Itten’s pedagogy but I propose

an interpretation that gives less importance to its esoteric aspects but instead highlights its social

idealism. For Gego it had educational value mainly because it encouraged students to free

themselves from inhibitions and develop highly individualistic forms of expression. It was used in

order to develop self-critical thinking and confident aesthetic judgement. Gego found here the

idealism of the European Enlightenment that had sought to free and at the same time tame the

subjective drives. In fact, Itten had spent his formative years in Bern and Geneva, which are both

towns historically and culturally oriented towards Paris. Certainly since the French Revolution, this

part of Switzerland was strongly influenced by the French Lumières rather than German thought.78

Itten’s free interpretation of French Enlightenment philosophy has retained the strong

interdependence between abstract thought and phenomenological nature. This seems to have

attracted Gego instantly. In Ruth Auerbach’s description we are impressed first by the flexibility

and the playfulness of Gego’s pedagogic concept, ‘Gego’s introductory course of architecture

76

Wick, Rainer K., Teaching at the Bauhaus, chapter 5: Johannes Itten, Hatje Cantz, London, 1999, p. 120.

77 Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 91.

78 Itten was familiar with French Enlightenment philosophy and especially with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s

(1712-1778) moral pedagogy developed in Émile, his educational novel of 1762, which was confiscated

immediately after publication and forced Rousseau to flee from French prosecution to Yverdon in

Switzerland. Rousseau’s pre-revolutionary philosophy assumed that a subject at birth is essentially good but

becomes bad, in today’s terminology, neurotic, under the corrupting influence of culture. Thus, the liberation

that Rousseau sought had not the purpose of returning the individual to a state of innocence, as many of his

interpreters wrongly claim, but to allow the subject to develop consciousness and sensitivity for his negative

as well as positive drives. Education has, according to Rousseau precisely this aim, namely to allow an

individual to develop his own intellectual and emotional tools for self-mastery. Only then will he or she be

capable of meaningful social interaction and is given the chance to become a responsible citizen.

76

proposes an abstract organization of space, independent from the reductive learning of the

functions, creating positive, virtual and continuous volumes, using dots and lines. To accomplish

this she uses the simplest materials: thread, straw, balsa wood, wire, etc. combined with planes

made of construction paper, paper cardboard, wood, fabric, tin plates, plastic sheets, etc.’79

Auerbach remembered Gego as instructing her students that, ‘These works are research-oriented.

Much more than straws and pieces of wood, these materials represent elements of structures; and,

while composing you work as nature herself does, looking for relations among (the) lines and

creating given spaces, but learning all the while that you are far from being on the same level as that

genius called Nature, because your structures are imperfect.’80

Gego taught an artistic practice in

which personal experience had great value but, nonetheless, always remained inferior to the far

more superior laws that lay beyond subjectivity. According to Auerbach Gego defined her goals as

‘to stimulate and to train creative skills and visual sensibilities, as well as to uncover the reasons

behind man’s sensitive reaction to visual perception.’81

Here, I wish to introduce a last important reference point to pre-war German culture, which

has figured large in the literature on Gego; the impact of Paul Klee. His influence has been

suggested by several Latin-American critics among them Iris Peruga and before her by Eliseo

Sierra. Their observations were based on the superficial resemblance between the Klee’s and

Gego’s use of finely drawn parallel lines in prints and drawings. Peruga wrote, ‘the relationship

79

Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 408.

80 Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 408.

81 Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 408. This raises a problematic that is central to all

discussions on the legacy of the European Enlightenment and concerns specifically the position of Jews and

of women within ‘enlightened’ societies. The relation between creativity and visual perception deserves here

particular attention because in visual experience, pleasure and the projection of prejudice often merge. Thus

liberation, pleasure in looking and (negative) aesthetic judgement form a nucleus of contradictions of which

Gego was well aware. Visual perception as normative judgement were the elements of Nazi ideology that

allowed for the categorisation of Jews according to their physiognomy, arbitrarily defined visual

characteristics that led to their systematic exclusion and finally to extermination.

77

between Gego’s work and Paul Klee’s is unmistakable, not only in formal terms - as evinced in

some of her drawings - but above all, in the refined and humanist spirit common to both.’82

Interesting is the second part of the sentence in which Peruga emphasised a cultural rather than

formal similitude between the two oeuvres. Her intuition that both artists stood for an old world

‘refinement’ highlights the social positioning that had taken place in the process of Gego’s

integration into Venezuelan society. However, her interest in Paul Klee is confirmed by the fact that

she held Will Grohmann’s biography83

of the artist in her personal library. Grohmann wrote a very

moving interpretation of Klee’s late oeuvre and account of the last years of his life. Thus, positive

identification with another victim of Nazism, more than aesthetic concerns, might have attracted

Gego to Klee.The subject of death, which features so strongly in Klee’s late oeuvre coincided with

her own symbolic death when she was forced into exile. Indeed, in aesthetic terms, the differences

between Gego’s and Klee’s oeuvre outnumber their similarities. While Klee’s oeuvre is

characterized by a strong figurative and narrative impulse, by way of which he articulated his

pantheistic concerns with highly symbolic and spiritual meaning, Gego remained attached to logos

and refused figuration. The sometimes brutal tone of Gego’s abstract works seems in strong contrast

to the melancholy timelessness, the gentleness and lyricism of Klee’s painterly oeuvre. I suggest

that it was precisely Klee’s difference, his ability to articulate complex emotions in a narrative form

that had attracted Gego, and perhaps, allowed her expression of her own sadness.

82

Iris Peruga, ‘Gego: The Prodigious Game of Creating’, Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-1990, Fundación

Cisneros, Fundación Gego, Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, p. 380.

83 Will Grohmann, Paul Klee 1879-1940, Lund Humphries, London, 1954.

78

Continuity and the Visual

The following short statement sheds further light on Gego’s thinking, ‘I work without breaking or

opposing architecture. The space determines the work and the latter, once it is completed, can

change the effect of the former.’84

Such acceptance of existing structures, of explicit non-resistance

and even scorning of subjectivity, would certainly have been laudable in sixties and seventies

Venezuela. Gego’s remark on the integration of her art into architectural spaces suggests that

pressures to conform, or resist, modernist trends were high. The second half of her statement

acknowledges an influence that is exerted on the object rather then by the object. To Gego, a non-

specific anonymity does seem to have promised a freedom beyond the values and forms of a

specific society. Gego suggested a dialogue between her structures and the existing space which, so

she implied, creates in the viewer the very consciousness of it as space. Gego thus proposed two

distinct ways of experiencing her work. In the first half of her statement, Gego suggested a passive

absorption of influence and in the second an active response to it. Further, this dialogue is taking

place within an imaginary space in which the art object literally acquires magical powers. Perhaps,

Gego thought this interaction in terms of a critique or commentary on a Venezuelan reality. It is

evident, for instance in the Escultura for the Banco Industrial de Venezuela (Fig. 11 Gego

Escultura, Banco Industrial de Venezuela, 1962) that from the early sixties onwards, her

structuralist thinking was superseded by a shift toward surface reflectivity. The article from which

the above is quoted is entitled ‘Gego: “Vengo de doblar superficies”’. This suggests that she was

very conscious of an impulse to doubling by means of which she created a quasi copy of an already

existing surface (superficie). Re-presentation is represented again in a reflection on it. The sculpture

designed for the Banco Industrial de Venezuela in 1962 allows me to demonstrate this strategy and

show that Gego’s critique was tied to a strongly visual that is, fetishistic sensibility.

84

Quoted from Teresa Alvagenga, ‘Gego: Vengo de doblar superficies’, El Nacional, September 23, Caracas,

1977.

79

Ruth Auerbach described Gego’s first public sculpture in the following terms, ‘The

sculpture, comprised of surfaces of parallel lines arising from the intersection of their transparent

planes, is articulated in a tower-like spiral that rises and ascends into space.’85

Her interpretation

emphasises a central axis around which the sculpture is erected in space. This disregards, precisely,

what Gego confirmed in her own words, namely the ambition to integrate her art into the

architectural space. In Gego’s logic the subjective is consciously decentred in the ‘spectacular’

interaction with the existing structure. Auerbach did not mention the intense reflectivity of the

surfaces, the quasi mirroring effect of the metal tubes.86

This is so explicitly important to Gego’s

design that it is hard to understand how Auerbach could neglect to point it out in her text. Her

constructivist reading conveys an imagined author positioned at the centre of the work, while Gego,

so I suggest, envisioned a mobile external viewer. I propose that the theme of this work is the

interaction of subjects in public spaces, the fetishistic engagement with each other. To observe or be

seen by the other is the very game of the modern city and as an architect Gego was most certainly

conscious of this everyday drama. In this particular piece the viewer is stimulated, via a visual

effect, into changing his or her position in relation to the object on display as well as in relation to

other viewers. This is further highlighted by Gego’s clever use of the space which allows a view on

the object from different levels of the staircase. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the

Escultura of 1962 was an enlargement of an earlier piece, (Fig. 19 Gego, Ocho cuadrados, 1961)

based in turn on an idea announced in a drawing already in 1959. (Fig. 20 Gego, Sin título, 1959)

Thus, Gego used in 1962 formal strategies that have been part of her vocabulary since the late

fifties, a time when she was engaged primarily with Cinetismo, and hence optical effects. The

moirée effect was somewhat lost in the enlargement, nonetheless, it is visuality, that is, surface

85

Ruth Auerbach, ‘Gego: Constructing a Didactics’, p. 408. 86

Surface reflectivity is very strong of course in photographic reproductions of work because of the use of

flash light. Yet, I have had the opportunity to see this specific work in person and I can confirm that the effect

is authentic.

80

reflectivity that physically animates the viewer and stirs his or her curiosity. 87

A multiplicity of

possible points of view creates a quasi baroque spectacle and cinematic experience dependent on

the viewer’s own movement.

A very different reflectivity seems at play in Gego’s Espiral sin fin of 1958 which forms

part of the collection of the Museo de arte contemporáneo. (Fig. 21 Gego, Espiral sin fin, 1958)

Again, parallels to a work by Max Bill seem plausible to suggest (Fig. 22 Max Bill, Reverse Spiral,

1944-48) with the important difference that Espiral consists of a metal band turning around an

invisible axis and thus implying an inside and an outside space. In contrast, Bill had developed,

since 1936, the idea of a simultaneous inside and outside in sculptures based on the geometric

figure of the Möbius strip. He would employ it, as a symbol for continuity, throughout the post-war

period. In this case however, it is the simultaneity of a centring and a decentring pull, typical of the

spiral, that creates a dynamic that can be said to symbolise eternity or the infinite. It is perhaps

characteristic of the optimism of a particular class and generation.88

Continuity is also the theme of

one of Bill’s works now held in the sculpture garden of the Museo de Bellas Artes (Fig. 23 Max

Bill, Doppelfläche mit sechs rechtwinkligen Ecken, 1948-1979 and Alejandro Otero, Title unknown,

undated). In Bill’s oeuvre surface reflectivity functions simultaneously as a mirror to the external as

well as projection of an internal world. Returning the gaze of the other and reflecting on the self are

indistinguishable. The similarity between Gego’s and Bill’s employment of reflective surfaces

seems, at least to me, beyond doubt and I will demonstrate its importance for Gego’s work in the

last chapter.

87

Gego might play here with a profound human desire to see what lies behind the visible surfaces of an object

within a specific spatial situation. This was taken up as a philosophical problem by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s

(1908-1961) in Phénomeneologie de la perception published by Gallimard, Paris in 1945.

88 This is interesting seeming that Gego and Bill are of the same generation, born 1912 and 1908 respectively,

both died in 1994. They consciously sought the reformulation of a per-war Bauhaus aesthetic and both applied

Geometry as a metaphor for universal values capable of healing the rupture and bridging the abyss opened up

by the Second World War.

81

Lastly, I want to introduce Gego’s application of mimetic strategies, for instance, in her

borrowing of moirée effects from her fellow Cinetismo artist Jesús Soto. (Fig. 24 Gego, Esfera en

hexaedro, 1964 and Fig. 24a Jesús Soto, Estructura en hierro UCV, 1957) Similarly, Partiendo de

un cuadrado of 1958 is very close in style to works by Pedro Briceño. (Fig. 25 Gego, Partiendo de

un cuadrado, 1958 and Fig. 25a Pedro Briceño, Despliegue Interno-Externo del Prisma, 1958)

Gego’s uninhibited copying of techniques and forms, invented by fellow artists, deserves mention

because of its important role in acculturation processes and I will return to the issue of Gego’s

mimetic appropriation in chapter III. For the moment, I want to note only that until 1969 Gego

made use of any material or idea that inspired her, even if it was the idea of another artist.

Apparently, it did not matter to her whether she produced an original or simply a copy. In some

instances she even made use of technical drawings straight out of textbooks. (Fig. 26 Gego, Cuatro

tetraedros, 1966 and Fig. 27 Keith Critchlow, Order in Space, technical drawing, 1965) It is

conceivable that Gego thought of these objects as mere experiments rather than accomplished

works of art. However, this spirit of appropriation and collaboration between artists seems to have

evaporated by the late sixties and Gego’s friendship with many former Disidentes, notably with

Jesús Soto and Carlos Cruz-Díez, cooled down considerably.89

To some extent, the break with Cinetismo and its exclusive concern with visuality freed

Gego to develop a more independent formal vocabulary. With the installation of the first

Reticulárea in 1969 a new phase of her career began.90

With this work Gego enacted a turn toward

89

Although, they have exhibited together in group shows and even collaborated on film projects, I found not

the slightest mention of Gego in any of the accounts on Soto’s or Cruz-Díez’ careers. Not in the exhibition

catalogue of Soto’s 1997 show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris or in the catalogue of the recent exhibition of

kinetic art, ‘L’oeil moteur’ in Strasbourg. Both catalogues have been co-written by Arnauld Pierre, who

claims to be an expert not only on French Geometric Abstraction and Cinétisme but also on Soto and the

Venezuelan Cinetismo context. The absolute silence imposed within the French art historical literature on

Gego and on her relation to Soto or Cruz-Díez is startling, in fact, a taboo.

90 The title Reticulárea was suggested by Gego’s close friend the art critic Roberto Guevara. The word

Retícula refers to a network of lines or net thus, Reticulárea implies an area of nets. Guevara continued to

82

an imaginary space or more intimate internal landscape. In chapter III, I will explore how this might

be related to the notions of a Protestant self-reflexivity and moral self-effacement. At this point it

must suffice to describe Gego’s inward turn in terms of an exploration of the self (Selbstfindung),

which implied also a certain degree of emancipation from the social space. While acknowledging

geometry’s universal value, thus confirming her idealism, Gego appears to have become

increasingly conscious of her own engagement as individual in the artistic process. The

conventionality of geometry, and her consciousness of it, freed Gego to explore the psychological

or, at least, more individual aspects of her art praxis. The question, which might arise at this point,

of where to locate, within the material object, Gego’s experience of her intentionality is to me the

false question to ask. The effects of intentionality cannot be identified in an art object itself because

intentionality is linked to a consciousness of the object and hence, situated within the thinking

subject. It is logical that objects do not have consciousness and in turn, the author’s consciousness

cannot be manifest in an object’s material presence, except through my interpretation.

Consciousness of a person is then the object of my interpretation, that is, my subjectivity. Or, to say

it a different way, to locate traces of the artist’s subjectivity within the art object is an act of

interpretation and its findings are not verifiable as truth. It is for this reason that I chose to ask

instead the question of what knowledge was available to Gego and Soto at the time and allowed

them to form consciousness of the historical conditions of their existence as individuals. The

question of what these two artists’ relation to historical objects was is at the heart of my thesis

precisely because, in my view, it is in the dialectic between material attachment and separation that

promote her work in essays and as a curator. See his ‘Reticulárea de Gego, Ver todos las Días, Monte Ávila

Editores, Caracas, 1981, pp. 49-53; ‘Para Estar con Gego’, Ver todos las Días, Monte Ávila Editores,

Caracas, 1981, pp. 54-56; 'GEGO. Doing and Undoing Space', Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo, 23,

Catalogo das salas especiais, Sao Paulo, 1996, pp. 150-69. For the reference of the title Reticulárea to

Roberto Guevara see, Mónica Amor, ’Between Spaces: The Reticulárea and its place in History’, Gego. Obra

Completa, 1955-1990, Fundación Cisneros, Fundación Gego, Fundación Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas,

2003, p. 400.

83

consciousness and subjectivity emerge. However, before I can address the question of Gego’s

individualism and how it affected her career I wish to explore in more detail how Soto managed to

mediate between his intentionality and highly abstract systems. For this purpose, I will need to turn

first to issues related to the political, social and philosophical discourses of post-war France.