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Salvation Through Art: A Major Show From the Politically Repressed of Eastern Europe
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14575 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1988 |
2,279 Words |
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Derek Guthrie
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Since the end of World War II and the descent of the Iron Curtain, the cultural life of Eastern Europe has been cut off from that of Western nations. The close ties that once existed between Prague and Paris, for example, or Budapest and Vienna, have been decisively severed.
Yet Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and many other Eastern European cities now under Soviet hegemony were once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and lay within the Roman Catholic cultural sphere of its Hapsburg rulers. This is the historical background of Expressiv: Central European Art since 1960. Including works by thirty artists from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia, the innovative exhibition opened in the Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, and was shown through April 17 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. It afforded a welcome opportunity for Western viewers to see art that has long been hidden from the West, but which forms an important part of our European heritage.
While glasnost may have helped cocurators Meta Mladek and Dieter Ronte deliver the show, the current thaw was neither the source nor the inspiration for it. Mladek, a Czech resident in the United States since 1960, has worked tirelessly and obsessively for decades to keep in contact with Czech and other Eastern European artists. She has visited them in their studios, bought their work, arranged for scholarships and visits to the United States, organized shows, and encouraged publications about them.
Ronte, director of the Vienna Museum of contemporary Art, has also long been interested in bridging the gap between East and West. It was mutual indignation at the exclusion of Czech, Polish, and Hungarian artists from WEST-KUNST (Westart), the huge 1981 exhibition mounted in Cologne, West Germany, that brought Mladek and Ronte together.
Significant Contribution
Both agreed that a show of Central European contemporary art would be a significant contribution to world art. The problem the curators faced was how to present a coherent view of Central European art without being insensitive to the particular artistic traditions of each country--traditions that naturally have diverged because of the present political situation.
Expressiv does not attempt to represent a cross section of all the various tendencies and strains of Modernist expression that have taken root in Central Europe. Rather, the curators' thesis is that Central Europeans share certain attitudes and ways of working, which the catalogue describes as "highly psychologizing and emotionalizing... often an outcry in reflection, a rejection of that which is artificially constructed and an expression of man's involvement in social relationships." While this summation is adequate as an introduction to the show, it seems an excessively polite way of saying that many of the artists represented have had to cope with a volatile and capricious political system that, at times, has censored and repressed their creativity, causing them to retreat to inward-turned and painful lives.
On the whole the show is melancholic. The products and artifices of the mass-media and consumer culture that pervade so much Western art are absent from Expressiv. The exhibition lacks the bold, high-colored, shiny
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