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2002-11-10 22:08
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When something of the attitude of a Delaunay becomes fused with a machine-aesthetic emphasis upon physical substance and stiffened by a certain enthusiasm for simple planar structures, then literal transparency becomes complete; and it can perhaps be most appropriately illustrated by the work of Moholy-Nagy. In his Abstract of an Artist Moholy-Nagy tells us that around 1921 his "transparent paintings" become completely freed from all elements reminiscent of nature, and to quote him directly: "I see today that this was the logical result of the cubist paintings I had admiringly studied".6 Now whether a freedom from all elements reminiscent of nature may be considered a logical continuation of cubism is not relevant to this present discussion; but whether Moholy indeed succeed in emptying his work of all naturalistic content is of some importance, and his seeming belief that cubism had pointed the way toward a freeing of forms may justify the analysis of one of his subsequent works and its comparison with another postcubist painting. Moholy's La Sarraz of 1930 (Fig. 6) might reasonably be compared with a Fernand L6ger of 1926: The Three Faces (Fig. 7). In La San'az five circles comlected by an S-shaped band, two sets of trapezoidal planes of translucent color, a number of near horizontal and vertical bars, a liberal splattering of light and dark flecks, and a number of slightly convergent dashes are all imposed upon a black background. In Three Faces three major areas displaying organic forms, abstracted artifacts, and purely geometric shapes are tied together by horizontal banding and common contour, in contrast to Moholy, Leger aligns his pictorial objects at right angles to each other and to the edges of his picture plane; he provides these objects with a fiat, opaque coloring; and he sets up a figure-ground reading through the compressed disposition of these highly contrasted surfaces. While Moholy seems to have flung open a window on to some private version of outer space, Leger, working within an almost two dimensional scheme, achieves a maximum clarity of both "negative" and "positive" forms. By means of restriction, Leger's picture becomes charged with an equivocal depth reading, with a value singularly reminiscent of that to which Moholy was so sensitive in the writings of Joyce, and which, in spite of the positive physical transparency of his paint, Moholy himself has been unable to achieve. For in spite of its modernity of motif, Moholy's picture still shows the conventional precubist foreground, middleground, and background; and in spite of a rather casual interweaving of surface and the elements introduced to destroy the logic of this deep space, Moholy's picture can be submitted to only one reading. On the other hand, through the refined virtuosity with which he assembles post-cubist constituents, Fernand Leger makes completely plain the multifunctioned behavior of clearly defined form. Through fiat planes, through an absence of volume suggesting its presence, through the implication rather than the fact of a grid, through an interrupted checkerboard pattern stimulated by color, proximity, and discrete superimposition, L6ger leads the eye to experience an inexhaustible series of larger and smaller organizations within the whole. Leger's concern is with the structure of form. Moholy's with materials and light. Moholy has accepted the cubist figure but has lifted it out of its spatial matrix; L6ger has preserved and even intensified the typically cubist tension between figure and space.
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