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A new look at Europe after the First World War, consoling itself with dreams of antiquity

By Richard Lacayo Monday, Nov. 01, 2010
    • Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Sammlung Moderner Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

    "The Four Elements: Fire, Water and Earth, Air" by Adolf Ziegler, (circa 1937)

    Wars are always disasters. But some of them are more than that. They're hinges on which the whole of history turns. World War I was like that. It left Europe devastated — not just its cities and its people but also its understanding of itself. A moment of insanity that severed the links between Europe and its idealized past, the war seemed afterward to require a sustained period of calm as an antidote.

    This is the cultural episode — sometimes poignant, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes sinister — charted by "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936," a fascinating show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City about the peculiar attempt by a wounded civilization to recuperate by going back to its past. In the shell-shocked postwar climate, the cultural experiments of the years before World War I — the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the radical flatness of Matisse, the freak-show distortions of German Expressionism — seemed to some artists like part of a willful instability that reached its climax in the war's madness and butchery. The French painter Amédée Ozenfant caught the new mood in the manifesto he co-produced for Purism, which attempted to clarify Cubist form for the machine age: "Purism fears the bizarre and the 'original.'"

    More than once, classicism had served Europe, after periods of cultural excess, as a combination palate cleanser and rehab program. So in England, the ornate architecture of the Baroque was followed by an era of chaste neo-Palladianism; in French painting, the spotlit virility of Jacques-Louis David overtook the effete charm of François Boucher. Never mind that ancient Greece had its wild and mystical side. When later centuries went in search of antiquity, it was the balance and proportion of the Parthenon they were after, the ideal beauty of the Apollo Belvedere , the mighty lucidity of the Pantheon in Rome. It was this order and serenity that an influential sector of postwar artists found themselves longing for as well.

    The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, who before the war had painted the unnerving street scenes that foreshadowed Surrealism, became one of the first to announce an about-face. He would soon be producing classical pastiches that would make the Surrealists, once they had assembled themselves into a loose collective in the mid-1920s, hold their collective nose. German art before the war had been a riot of Expressionism. After the war, Otto Dix, one of the foremost Expressionists, adopted the clean draftsmanship and cool palette of the Northern Renaissance. As for Picasso, the man who gave birth to Cubism entered the 1920s painting classically inspired bathers and carving heads modeled after Roman busts.

    Many artists also started looking back to more recent national traditions — painters like Giotto, Masaccio and Piero della Francesca for the Italians; Hans Holbein and the ample women of Lucas Cranach for the Germans. The French had a whole line of classicisms at their disposal, from the 16th century court art of François I at Fontainebleau to the beautifully delineated figures of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was all just a matter of finding a usable past.

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