Tweet
Has Modern Art Always Been Torture?
From the New York Times:
By JOHN ROCKWELL
ADOLF HITLER hated Modernist painting. He was convinced it was a Jewish plot (Jewish painters, Jewish dealers, Jewish collectors). But whatever the racial origins of the artists, he thought their works were ugly and perverted.
"It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint men only in a state of decomposition, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, to picture hunch-backed idiots as representatives of manly strength," he orated at a decadent-art exhibition in Dresden in 1935, as quoted in Frederic Spotts's new book, "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics." "There really are men," he went on, "who in principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur-yellow."
Advertisement
Let us now imagine that Hitler did not die in his Berlin bunker in 1945 but was captured by the Allies and imprisoned. And not imprisoned in any ordinary jail cell, but one tricked up in earnest imitation of what were then the latest Modernist and Surrealist paintings. His cell would be a distorted room like those of Kandinsky and Klee, with geometric drawings on the walls to make him sick to his stomach.
It would be 6 feet high and 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, airless and hot, with the sleeping area so angled that he would slide off onto the floor whenever he tried to lie down, and with jutting protuberances to impede free motion. And on one side, an endless loop of the eyeball-slicing scene from Luis Buñuel's 1929 film "Un Chien Andalou."
A sick fantasy? José Milicua, a Spanish art historian, has produced solid evidence that during the Spanish Civil War, the leftist Republicans designed and built just such cells, turning the art of Modernism and Surrealism into overt instruments of torture for their right-wing enemies.
Construction of the cells was begun in May 1938, primarily in Barcelona, the capital of Spanish-Catalan Modernism. Their principal designer, as documented in a book by R. L. Chacon called "Why I Made the Cells in Barcelona," was a shifty character named Alfonso Laurencic.
Laurencic was an Austrian-born Frenchman who apparently defrauded both the Republicans and Francisco Franco's Falangist revolutionaries. He called his cells and queasy-making wall squiggles "psychotechnic torture," thus neatly conflating notions of psychiatry with technocratic modernism. At his trial by Franco's victorious forces in June 1939, he claimed that he had made the cells under duress.
The thought comes to mind, of course, that the very idea of Modernist torture cells was a fantasy, a Falangist extension of Hitler's diatribes. But Mr. Milicua seems to take the evidence seriously, as does Victoria CombalÃa, a noted Catalan art critic, who reported his findings in El PaÃs, the national newspaper published in Madrid.
One has to wonder what the artists who inspired these cells might have thought of this novel use of their art. For while conservatives have long railed at the perverse distortions, as they saw them, of Modernism, they usually assumed — even Hitler assumed — that the artists were simply seeing the world in a new way or expressing their personal feelings or making social commentary or resolving formalist problems.
On the other hand, a subcurrent of shock and provocation has always lurked within avant-garde art, which deliberately sets out to challenge bourgeois convention and to elicit a strong response. My own experience has been that opponents of new art are much too quick to presume provocation, let alone provocation intended literally to torture. Still, there can be no doubt that outrage was and is a goal of some artists, even if they rarely pushed it to the logical extreme that Laurencic took it.
Given the very idea of art torture, the idle among us might start to muse about other options along these lines. Many classical-music concertgoers already regard the 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg as a form of torture. But sticking to the visual, what about a diabolical maze constructed of Mondrian patterns or the tilted arcs of Richard Serra? Seeing the object of your amorous attentions sliced up cubistically? Getting lost in the dream world of a Robert Gober installation? How about having to live among Matthew Barney's weirdly androgynous creatures? The possibilities are endless, creepier as the mind wanders.
Of course, many Modernists and Surrealists may not have regarded their visions as disturbing, let alone as suitable for torture. They may instead have hoped that their works would improve mankind, especially the incarcerated portion thereof.
Salvador Dalà seemed to regard his works as downright therapeutic. We know this from the recent heist of a Dalà painting of the Crucifixion from Rikers Island in New York City. Susan Saulny wrote in The New York Times earlier this month that Dalà dashed off the work in less than two hours in 1965 after a fever had prevented him from a planned visit to the prison.
The visit had been arranged by Anna Moscowitz Kross, then the commissioner of New York's Department of Correction, who, Ms. Saulny wrote, was "passionate about art as a rehabilitative therapy." The Dalà painting looks like cruciform iconography with a splattery Rorschach blot where the head of Jesus should be. Less aggressively distorted than some of DalÃ's earlier work, it hung in the jail's dining room for 16 years; its effect on the prisoners' digestive tracts and states of mind is not known. It was eventually transferred to a display case in the jail lobby, from which it was lifted.
Ultimately, psychotechnic torture can be seen as a tribute to the power of art. If Modernist art wasn't strong and disorienting, Hitler wouldn't have bothered to attack it. Alfonso Laurencic drew the logical conclusion from such revulsion.
Free people can walk out of a gallery or museum they find disturbing. Prisoners cannot walk out of jail, and in his bizarrely ingenious way, Laurencic knew how to take advantage of that better than most.
Has Modern Art Always Been Torture?
By JOHN ROCKWELL
ADOLF HITLER hated Modernist painting. He was convinced it was a Jewish plot (Jewish painters, Jewish dealers, Jewish collectors). But whatever the racial origins of the artists, he thought their works were ugly and perverted.
"It is not the function of art to wallow in dirt for dirt's sake, never its task to paint men only in a state of decomposition, to draw cretins as symbols of motherhood, to picture hunch-backed idiots as representatives of manly strength," he orated at a decadent-art exhibition in Dresden in 1935, as quoted in Frederic Spotts's new book, "Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics." "There really are men," he went on, "who in principle feel meadows to be blue, the heavens green, clouds sulphur-yellow."
Advertisement
Let us now imagine that Hitler did not die in his Berlin bunker in 1945 but was captured by the Allies and imprisoned. And not imprisoned in any ordinary jail cell, but one tricked up in earnest imitation of what were then the latest Modernist and Surrealist paintings. His cell would be a distorted room like those of Kandinsky and Klee, with geometric drawings on the walls to make him sick to his stomach.
It would be 6 feet high and 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, airless and hot, with the sleeping area so angled that he would slide off onto the floor whenever he tried to lie down, and with jutting protuberances to impede free motion. And on one side, an endless loop of the eyeball-slicing scene from Luis Buñuel's 1929 film "Un Chien Andalou."
A sick fantasy? José Milicua, a Spanish art historian, has produced solid evidence that during the Spanish Civil War, the leftist Republicans designed and built just such cells, turning the art of Modernism and Surrealism into overt instruments of torture for their right-wing enemies.
Construction of the cells was begun in May 1938, primarily in Barcelona, the capital of Spanish-Catalan Modernism. Their principal designer, as documented in a book by R. L. Chacon called "Why I Made the Cells in Barcelona," was a shifty character named Alfonso Laurencic.
Laurencic was an Austrian-born Frenchman who apparently defrauded both the Republicans and Francisco Franco's Falangist revolutionaries. He called his cells and queasy-making wall squiggles "psychotechnic torture," thus neatly conflating notions of psychiatry with technocratic modernism. At his trial by Franco's victorious forces in June 1939, he claimed that he had made the cells under duress.
The thought comes to mind, of course, that the very idea of Modernist torture cells was a fantasy, a Falangist extension of Hitler's diatribes. But Mr. Milicua seems to take the evidence seriously, as does Victoria CombalÃa, a noted Catalan art critic, who reported his findings in El PaÃs, the national newspaper published in Madrid.
One has to wonder what the artists who inspired these cells might have thought of this novel use of their art. For while conservatives have long railed at the perverse distortions, as they saw them, of Modernism, they usually assumed — even Hitler assumed — that the artists were simply seeing the world in a new way or expressing their personal feelings or making social commentary or resolving formalist problems.
On the other hand, a subcurrent of shock and provocation has always lurked within avant-garde art, which deliberately sets out to challenge bourgeois convention and to elicit a strong response. My own experience has been that opponents of new art are much too quick to presume provocation, let alone provocation intended literally to torture. Still, there can be no doubt that outrage was and is a goal of some artists, even if they rarely pushed it to the logical extreme that Laurencic took it.
Given the very idea of art torture, the idle among us might start to muse about other options along these lines. Many classical-music concertgoers already regard the 12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg as a form of torture. But sticking to the visual, what about a diabolical maze constructed of Mondrian patterns or the tilted arcs of Richard Serra? Seeing the object of your amorous attentions sliced up cubistically? Getting lost in the dream world of a Robert Gober installation? How about having to live among Matthew Barney's weirdly androgynous creatures? The possibilities are endless, creepier as the mind wanders.
Of course, many Modernists and Surrealists may not have regarded their visions as disturbing, let alone as suitable for torture. They may instead have hoped that their works would improve mankind, especially the incarcerated portion thereof.
Salvador Dalà seemed to regard his works as downright therapeutic. We know this from the recent heist of a Dalà painting of the Crucifixion from Rikers Island in New York City. Susan Saulny wrote in The New York Times earlier this month that Dalà dashed off the work in less than two hours in 1965 after a fever had prevented him from a planned visit to the prison.
The visit had been arranged by Anna Moscowitz Kross, then the commissioner of New York's Department of Correction, who, Ms. Saulny wrote, was "passionate about art as a rehabilitative therapy." The Dalà painting looks like cruciform iconography with a splattery Rorschach blot where the head of Jesus should be. Less aggressively distorted than some of DalÃ's earlier work, it hung in the jail's dining room for 16 years; its effect on the prisoners' digestive tracts and states of mind is not known. It was eventually transferred to a display case in the jail lobby, from which it was lifted.
Ultimately, psychotechnic torture can be seen as a tribute to the power of art. If Modernist art wasn't strong and disorienting, Hitler wouldn't have bothered to attack it. Alfonso Laurencic drew the logical conclusion from such revulsion.
Free people can walk out of a gallery or museum they find disturbing. Prisoners cannot walk out of jail, and in his bizarrely ingenious way, Laurencic knew how to take advantage of that better than most.
Comment