ARP Museum Rolandseck: Like a Parisian group with abstract art, resistant

By the Second World War, Paris was the world capital of art. Anyone looking for a market as an artist went to the city with its countless galleries and collectors. Anyone looking for contact with like -minded people also went to Paris.

Both motifs flow together in the foundation of the group “Abstraction – Création” in spring 1931.

The group lasted as an organization for six years. Nevertheless, the unfortunate art appeared so compactly and visibly, supported by its own magazine and its own exhibition space.

It was almost fifty years ago that the group was recognized in a museum exhibition, which was in Münster in 1978. This long break now ends the Arp Museum Rolandseck in Remagen with its exhibition “Network Paris”, which combines the artists of the group and their works.

Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber in Paris

No museum would be called, as it bears the name of two founding members, Hans (Jean) Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Both lived in Paris from around 1930 – and stand for the two roots of non -female art. It could be derived from the forms of nature, hence “abstraction”, or completely made of geometric forms, hence “création”.

For the former, Hans Arp, who transfers archetypes from nature into the third dimension of sculptures, stands for the latter Sophie Taeuber-Arp, which builds rhythmic-geometric rooms from lines and surfaces. Both were already co-founders of the Pacific Dada movement in Switzerland around 1915.

There were forerunners in Paris, Piet Mondrian with his right -angled image buildings, and his colleague Theo van Doesburg. Both had emerged as a pioneer of new art and had experience in performing artists. In this respect, “Abstraction – Création”, officially launched on March 16, 1931, was able to build on experiences such as networks.

Disested with style and color

Group life was not without friction. You can guess you, you hike through the beautifully structured exhibition rooms in the ARP Museum. The start deserves “neoplasticism”, as Doesburg called its new, dogmatically cleaned art; The influences from the revolutionary Soviet Russia are clear. Mondrian insisted red, blue and yellow; The Belgian Georges Vantongerloo, who soon played a leading role in the group, also allowed green.

Several group members followed Mondrian, but found independent creations, such as the Frenchman Jean Gorin, who expanded painting into the third dimension, and the Englishwoman Marlow Moss, who, just because of her waiver of color, offers the adjacent Mondrian opus.

© Ville de Grénoble/Musée de Grénoble/N. Pianfetti

Among the overall more than 400 artists from 20 nations, which have been held over the years as members of the group, there were only a manageable number of women. But they stand out through their independence. Barbara Hepworth, the unique sculptor, which is still known in Germany, is to be mentioned, or the Irish Mainie Jellett, from which a composition drunk can be seen. And of course museum patin Sophie Taeuber, who always hit new ways.

Nothing was only allowed to be depicted. In this respect, the painting of the British Paule Vézelay irritates, which shows his title according to a “collection of objects on a blue table”. Then the neighborhood indicates surrealism, the loud direction around 1930. The logical step was to be heard in the long run for “Abstraction – Création” for “Abstraction – Création”. A booklet came out every year until 1936; The group dissolved in the following year. The own exhibition space had to close at the end of 1934.

It was only the time after the Second World War the unrestricted recognition of the “abstraction as a world language”, as the second documenta in 1959 claimed. Many group members no longer lived there. Mondrian died in 1944 in the New York, Kandinsky, also a group member, also in 1944 in Paris, and Robert Delaunay as early as 1941. Otto in kind, represented in Rolandseck with a main work, was murdered in the concentration camp in 1943.

“We put this issue no. 2 under the sign of the total resistance to any form of oppression of whatever kind it is,” the group of its magazine had preliminary.

This exhibition is reminiscent of the fact that the unfortunate art was not an escapism, but a conscious expression of the striving for freedom that leads the modernity from the beginning.