France and the Visual Arts since 1945

Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art

Catherine Dossin, Catherine Dossin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501341533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Taking on the myth of France's creative exhaustion following World War II, this collection of essays brings together an international team of scholars, whose research offers English readers a rich and complex overview of the place of France and French artists in the visual arts since 1945. Addressing a wide range of artistic practices, spanning over seven decades, and using different methodologies, their contributions cover ground charted and unknown. They introduce greater depth and specificity to familiar artists and movements, such as Lettrism, Situationist International or Nouveau Réalisme, while bringing to the fore lesser known artists and groups, including GRAPUS, the Sociological Art Collective, and Nicolas Schöffer. Collectively, they stress the political dimensions and social ambitions of the art produced in France at the time, deconstruct the traditional geography of the French art world, and highlight the multiculturalism of the French art scene that resulted from its colonial past and the constant flux of artistic travels and migrations. Ultimately, the book contributes to a story of postwar art in which France can be inscribed not as a main or sub chapter, but rather as a vector in the wider constellation of modern and contemporary art.

1

Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism

Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni

At the end of the Second World War, the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) played not only a major political but also cultural role in France. Between the end of the war in 1945 and the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the party paid special attention to intellectuals and artists, and attempted to define a specific cultural policy.¹ The PCF intended to determine what kind of relationship it should have with artists—whether the party should support and promote a particular aesthetic line and, if so, how to define it. Socialist Realism,² which starting in 1949 was called Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism),³ was the aesthetic project that the party defined during the first years of the Cold War (1947–1953).

The official history of the PCF’s relationship to the visual arts is based on a totalitarian vision of the party and the Soviet system.⁴ It speaks of the Communist Party as one homogeneous and monolithic entity, and assumes that the party advocated for the clear and coherent aesthetic program that was Socialist Realism.⁵ According to this doxa, the party legislated in a proactive manner toward the creation and development of a discursive arsenal through exhibition reviews, theoretical articles, speeches of political leaders and artists, and the masses’ comments on works of art. The party defined its aesthetic line upstream, in congresses, and then determined the proper content and form, while communist art criticism post-edited the artistic production in order to influence future achievements by promoting certain artists, granting them with recognition, educating the public and guiding its understanding of the works.⁶ According to this official story, the party interfered in all possible ways in the French art scene, commissioned artists and, consequently, was able to dictate artistic themes.

From there, the story splits three ways. The first trend embraces a broader vision of the relationship between art and communism that exceeds the question of Socialist Realism and takes into account the positions of the Surrealists, the existentialists, and those painters who were members of the party but did not follow Socialist Realism, such as Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse.⁷ The second trend considers the art of the communist painters along the main lines of the party’s aesthetic project, and within the broader context of the postwar French art world.⁸ The third approach takes note of the formal diversity within so-called Socialist Realist works, and explains it as the result of two contradictions between the theoretical project of the party and pictorial practice of the artists.⁹ On the one hand, the party simply embraced works whose features disagreed with the party’s vision.¹⁰ On the other hand, the stylistic diversity within Socialist Realism expressed endogenous contradictions within the PCF’s cultural policy. The fact that artists could create both sordid and epic works is thought to reveal a gap between the ideological triumphalism based on the Soviet discourse and the everyday speech of the PCF addressed to the needy.¹¹

This latter trend of research¹² highlights the lack of discourses devoted to stylistic issues and work analysis within the party’s rhetoric, which in turn gave communist artists freedom to follow the legacy of Gustave Courbet and Jacques-Louis David (André Fougeron), the Futurists (Orizi), or the Expressionists (Boris Taslitzky). Yet, it does not question Socialist Realism as a clear aesthetic line.¹³ This chapter thus has a twofold objective: to stress problems, often implicit, that allowed the coexistence of different views among the communists’ group, and to demonstrate the vagueness of the Socialist Realism project in and of itself.

To reconstruct the problematic development of the PCF’s postwar aesthetic program, we reviewed the monthly communist periodical La nouvelle critique (The New Criticism; 1948–1954), and the literary weekly magazine Les Lettres françaises (The French Letters; 1944–1957), which was controlled by the PCF after 1947. Cultural sections of those journals were the main sites of theoretical and critical discussions on communist art. In addition, to explore different voices among French communists, we reviewed a lesser-known but not less important magazine, Le Musée vivant (The Living Museum; 1946–1969), which was edited by the communist art historian Madeleine Rousseau. We considered these French debates in light of the latest research on Soviet Socialist Realism. These new elements led us to read French interpretations on Socialist Realism from a new point of view.

In the following pages, we shall first debunk the apparent simplicity of the debates inside the French Communist Party. We shall then consider the issues that rose from defining artistic references for French Socialist Realism, and finish by taking apart the blurry terminology related to the social function of art.

The apparent simplicity of the debates

Various studies have, to date, pointed at the difficult establishment of Socialist Realism as the only aesthetic program of the PCF.¹⁴ Looking back at the chronology of events, especially through the lenses of communist journals and magazines as we did, allows the main debates to be highlighted, open or latent, which animated the PCF. Through our systematic reviews, it becomes obvious that the opinions and reactions of painters and critics were numerous and did not conform to a univocal realist aesthetic.

At the end of the war, realism encompassed a variety of formal and theoretical definitions. Within the PCF, the conflicts of the 1930s¹⁵ re-emerged between realists, abstracts, and Surrealists. The main debate took place in 1945, at the 10th party convention. On this occasion, the philosopher Roger Garaudy encouraged communist painters to get closer to the masses by choosing more appropriate subject matters and to avoid abstraction (considered individualistic and aristocratic); thereby he explicitly opposed realism and abstraction.¹⁶

These controversies were widely relayed in both the communist and non-communist press, but it was a false debate in many ways.¹⁷ First, no one would disagree that the leaders of the PCF had confirmed the need for a specific communist aesthetic, and that it was called realism. Next, it should be noted that the realist and abstract groups were far from being homogeneous and that their boundaries were not clearly delineated. Thus, the debate “pro or against abstract art” poorly concealed other oppositions and contradictions concerning mostly the very definition of the concept of “reality”—as vague and omnipresent as it may be, and to which we will return later on.

The years 1947–1948 constitute a turning point in the promotion of Socialist Realism, which was ardently defended by two major figures of the PCF: the head of artistic affairs within the party, Laurent Casanova,¹⁸ and the poet and writer Louis Aragon.¹⁹ The latter, who had been one of the founders of Surrealism, became, after the war, the “poet laureate” of the PCF and his influence on the leaders of the party and its painters would not cease to grow. In 1947, the ideologist and Russian politician Andrej Aleksandrovič Ždanov (Andrei Zhdanov; 1896–1948), a fervent promoter of Socialist Realism, outlined his two camps theory, whereby he formalized the beginning of the Cold War. From that point on, the leaders of the PCF, with its secretary general Maurice Thorez at the forefront, took Zhdanov as a reference point and spared no efforts to impose Socialist Realism as the official aesthetic of the PCF. In 1948, André Fougeron became the leader of French Socialist Realism when his manifesto painting, Parisiennes au marché (1947–1948), was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne. This painting represents in the foreground a stall of fish and behind this anxious housewives. Their empty baskets, the fixity of their bodies, their clasped hands and lowered eyes indicate both their desire and their inability to acquire these products. The direct gaze of the woman in the center takes the spectator as witness. A harsh critique of the expensive life, the image was considered vulgar by mainstream art criticism but praised by communists for its subject matter and figurative treatment.

When Thorez went on recovery leave in 1950, Auguste Lecoeur succeeded him and hardened the cultural policy of the party in an anti-intellectualism way, through a campaign for André Fougeron at the expense of Picasso, who was previously protected by Thorez. With Stalin’s death in 1953, a complete shift occurred in the Soviet Union, which coincided with the disavowal of Auguste Lecoeur’s policy and an attack on André Fougeron. His painting, Civilisation atlantique (1953), which was exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1953, intended to denounce the Americanization of Europe and the colonial wars in Korea and Indochina. In the composition, Fougeron made use of emblematic elements for his critical purposes. He stigmatized capitalism (a Cadillac and a big man in a suit, at the center) and its consequences (families and immigrants living on the streets, on the left). He showed other aspects of American society, such as violence (the electric chair, a soldier pointing his gun), segregation (the African American boy shining shoes), and obscenity (the man reading a pornographic magazine in the center). This painting became the subject of strong criticism from Louis Aragon who judged it schematic, allegorical, and antirealist. According to him, Fougeron juxtaposed too many elements and the spectator was lost in the composition and unable to identify the main idea.²⁰ Furthermore, this painting was considered atypical because it reduced the American brutality in several clichés. Meanwhile, the portrait of Stalin by Picasso published in the pages of Les Lettres françaises (on March 12, 1953), by Aragon, scandalized Lecoeur and the direction of the PCF, and divided the party.²¹ The drawing of a young Stalin was considered incompatible with the image of the leader of the Communist Party, usually associated with that of a wise and benevolent old man.

Those attitudes towards Fougeron and Picasso reveal the complex relationships that the leaders of the PCF had with intellectuals and the fact that opposite theoretical currents coexisted within the party throughout that period.²² Communist advocates of abstract art, Surrealism, as well as painters of the Cobra group did not yield. Despite his communist engagement, the leader of Surrealism André Breton always rejected the Communist Party’s stylistic guidelines. According to him, Socialist Realism was a dogmatic art unable to express the revolution.²³ Similarly, the Cobra group, found...