"LA PEINTURE APRES L'ABSTRACTION"

MUSEE D'ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

Sometimes a silly idea can lead to a fascinating exhibition--even as the silliness still shows through. When I first heard about "La peinture apres l'abstraction," documenting work done in Paris between 1955 and 1975 by five artists as unlike as Simon Hantai, Jean Degottex, Martin Barre, Raymond Hains, and Jacques de la Villegle, I thought the project utterly crackpot. I still think so; Degottex's inclusion shows how little thought went into the mix. But the beauty is that Degottex's oeuvre inadvertently serves as a repoussoir: The contrast his work provides helps demonstrate what the four others had in common, something the hanging of the exhibition often seemed designed to obscure.

So what did Hains, Villegle, Hantai, and Barre have in common? Call it an attitude, or a peculiar, even eerie encounter with Historical Necessity: All four share a desire to change the terms of what we might refer to as artistic agency. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, it comes as little surprise that young painters would ask: What does it mean to be an artistic subject, an author, at the very moment when the humanity of any individual has been cast in doubt by the massive demonstration of our species's inhumanity? Hains, Villegle, Hantai, and Barre were not alone in thinking about this issue in Paris, but the common goal of our four musketeers was to overthrow the model of agency enacted by the most powerful new artistic tradition of postwar France, a tradition supported both by the state and by the belletristic intelligentsia as a whole--that of what I like to call the JEP.

JEP: The acronym stands for "Jeune Ecole de Paris," an umbrella concept invoked in the '50s to designate the type of abstraction (indifferently labeled "tachisme," "informel," or "abstraction lyrique") initiated by the likes of Pierre Soulages, Jean Bazaine, Alfred Manessier, Viera da Silva, Bram van Velde, and Hans Hartung immediately after the war and later emulated by an army of imitators. The phenomenon is comparable to the mass production of de Kooning epigones on this side of the Atlantic, each dutifully heralded by Tom Hess's Art News and now long forgotten. It may be unfair to lump together the first and the second JEP wave, but it will do as shorthand, with the quintessential JEP painter being Georges Mathieu, whose theatrics of gesturalism and subjectivist pretense represent the apogee of what Hains, Villegle, Hantai, and Barre abhorred.

JEP theory and practice are modeled on that of early Kandinsky, who ponderously made elaborate sketches of so-called improvisations that the spectator was asked to view as faithful portraits of the painter's "inner being." Poseur and composer, the JEP guy is a Cartesian subject who feels secure as the master of his pictorial universe. ("Guy" is appropriate; though less macho than the average AbEx painter, the JEP artist rarely admitted women into the club.) Even if he wears an expressionist cloak, he is a pure product of an artistic education governed by late, classicizing, highly compositional cubism--here, think Andre Lhote rather than Picasso.

Thanks mostly to Benjamin Buchloh's efforts (see his essay in October 56), the work of the decollagistes Hains and Villegle is beginning to register in this country (as is that of Francois Dufrene, who was oddly absent from the exhibition). And while in France their names are intimately linked with Nouveau Realisme (a "group" into which they were momentarily lured by the ebullient critic Pierre Restany when he coined the label in 1960), their recent appearance on the US radar screen has offered them a clean slate. Buchloh has convincingly dissociated Hains and Villegle from Restany's hodgepodge and situated them in the wider sociopolitical context of postwar France (though in dose contact with the Internationale Situationisre, they refused to join, a refusal related to an anarchist reluctance with regard to a form of political militancy they had rightfully diagnosed as imitating the Surrealist model, despite Guy Debord's ranting against Andre Breton's stale officialdom).

This exhibition continues the art-historically healthy dissociation, and Buchloh's catalogue essay, dealing in this case with the pictorial rather than the sociopolitical context, helps map an entirely new genealogy for the anti-JEP camp by finding a counterintuitive common ground between the decollagistes and Hantai. Though virtually unknown in the US, Hantai has been considered, at least since the '7os, as the heir to Matisse on the Parisian scene, and it is indeed this unusual evocation that allows Buchloh to show how determinant the issue of the Matisse legacy was in the stance of the decollagistes vis-a-vis color and drawing. If Nouveau Realisme has long been considered in the US as the only force that had effectively, though ephemerally, opposed JEP in postwar France until Daniel Buren and his acolytes seized the torch in the late '6os, a clearer grasp of the historical situation is now emerging.