André
Masson, Battle of Fishes 1926
Sand, gesso, oil, pencil, and charcoal on canvas
(36.2 x 73 cm) MOMA
Wölfflin’s marginalization
of Mannerism has a parallel in Barr and Greenberg, namely the marginalization
of Surrealism in favor of abstract expressionism. In
Barr’s case, working under the influence of Greenberg, this was reflected in
the narrative structure of the hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, which
seemed to lead inevitably from Cezanne’s Bather
(1885) to Pollock’s Lavender Mist (1950). Surrealism
was represented in two small rooms by a couple of Duchamps, two outstanding
early Giacomettis and Masson’s Battle of
the Fishes (1926). One irony here is that Duchamp was in
not a Surrealist, but that it was Masson, as well as Duchamp, who was a Surrealist,
who pioneered the automatism that climaxed in Pollock. It’s
also true that even though Jean Arp was associated with the Surrealists, he
could easily be located within the tradition of abstract, organic modern
sculpture that includes Brancusi, Alexander Calder, and Henry Moore. It
took the likes of Kirk Varnedoe, nearly 30 years after Barr, to experiment with
an alternate program structured by themes instead of historical narrative, and
it was ironically the Met, not MOMA, that finally displayed Pollock as a
terminus of Surrealist automatism in the Desire Unbound exhibition in
2001. The
point is that once a theory or narrative is adopted, the evidence may be made
to fall into place by the rhetoric of museum display. The
historical marginalization of Surrealism is reflected and reinforced by its
physical marginalization. The parallel to the treatment of
Mannerism is striking, as we’ll see later.
Schapiro concludes his
discussion of the relationship between philosophy and painting by demanding a
high level of detail in establishing that a particular worldview is reflected
in painting at a given time, and a warning about overgeneralizing the particular
mode of that reflection: The equation of the philosophy and painting requires
specification of the traits, details, et cetera, of both the work and the
worldview or philosophy. However, the
constructability of links between them, whether historical or intellectual, is
relevant only for a theory of the unity of philosophy and painting of a time
and place, but not for a general theory of unified worldview in art and
philosophy (Schapiro, 1958-68:71).
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