October
17 ,
2003
Museum
Presents Pontigny Artists
| 
Chagall’s
Fiddler, undated woodcut |
In the face
of Nazi aggression during World War II, many European artists
fled to the United States. Among them were the French painters
André Masson, a prominent Surrealist, and Marc Chagall,
known for his poetic depictions of lovers, fiddlers, fables,
and scenes from Jewish village life and the Hebrew Bible. A selection
of their prints and drawings can be seen through December 14
at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, in the exhibition Mount
Holyoke Encounter: The Artists of Pontigny-in-America.
The exhibition accompanies Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny
Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, a symposium organized by
the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts, which will take place
November 6–8. The symposium celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the
original Pontigny colloquia, which for three consecutive summers brought to the
Mount Holyoke campus leading European and American philosophers, social scientists,
poets, critics, composers, and artists—among them Masson, Chagall, and
the American Robert Motherwell.
The history of modern art underwent a sea change in the years during and after
World War II, as the center of the art world gradually shifted from Paris to
New York and the star of Abstract Expressionism rose. Mount Holyoke Encounter:
The Artists of Pontigny-in-America offers, in miniature, a telling snapshot of
this transitional time.
At one end of the stylistic spectrum are several Surrealist prints by Masson.
In his 1943 etching and aquatint Le Misanthrope, thick, fluid lines create tense
patterns of nervous energy even as they describe the subject’s scowl. At
the other end are the entirely nonrepresentational compositions by Abstract Expressionist
Motherwell. In his colorful Collage of 1947, for example, interest lies not in
figuration but in the lively interplay of patterns and gestural, thickly textured
strokes of color. Among the five works by Motherwell are two small studies for
his series of paintings commemorating the lives lost during the Spanish Civil
War, titled collectively Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Motherwell made more
than 100 Elegies, which are famous for their stark, somber compositions of roughly
painted black ovals and rectangles set against white grounds. (Also currently
on view in the museum lobby is a large wool tapestry from 1965 done after a Motherwell
Elegy by Mount Holyoke alumna Gloria Frankenthaler Ross ’44.)
Nine prints by Chagall are on view, many of which, such as Jacob’s Ladder,
The Dove of the Ark, and The Sacrifice of Abraham, illustrate stories from the
Hebrew Bible. An undated woodcut titled Fiddler is pure Chagall, with its central
figure of a bearded fiddler, his face, overcoat, and boots rendered in a loosely
Cubist style. The fiddler and a tiny onlooker float dreamily in the foreground;
far behind them, puffs of white smoke rise above snow-covered village buildings
into the black night. Not surprisingly, considering the all-pervasive influence
of Cubism on modern art, echoes of Cubism emerge elsewhere in the show, for example
in the harlequin, nude, and guitar appearing in an undated watercolor and gouache
titled Studio Interior by the Russian-born French artist Ossip Zadkine.
Rounding out the exhibition are two figurative terracotta sculptures by Henry
Rox, a professor of art at Mount Holyoke from 1939 to 1964, and three prints
by British Surrealist Stanley William Hayter. For viewers unfamiliar with Hayter’s
work, the exhibition offers a concise introduction to the work of this master
printmaker, who lived in both Paris and New York. Rendered with swirling, threadlike
lines that here and there coalesce into a thumb, a shin, a shoulder blade, the
abstracted, trapped-looking figure in Hayter’s etching and engraving Cronos(1944) evokes complex, tortured emotional states.
A panel discussion, "From Surrealism to Abstraction," will
take place Friday, November 7, at 1:30 pm in the Art Building’s
Gamble Auditorium, as part of Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II. Participants
include Romy Golan, art department, City University of New York; art critic Jed
Perl, the
New Republic; Mary Ann Caws,
comparative literature department, City University of New York; and Robert Herbert,
Professor Emeritus
of Fine Arts, Mount Holyoke.
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