Concrete art was an art movement with a strong emphasis on geometrical abstraction. The term was first formulated by Theo van Doesburg and was then used by him in 1930 to define the difference between his vision of art and that of other abstract artists of the time. After his death in 1931, the term was further defined and popularized by Max Bill, who organized the first international exhibition in 1944 and went on to help promote the style in Latin America. The term was taken up widely after World War 2 and promoted through a number of international exhibitions and art movements.
Following this, van Doesburg proceeded to propose a rival group, Art Concret, championing a geometrical abstract art closely related to the aesthetics of Neo-plasticism. In his opinion, the term 'abstract' as applied to art had negative connotations; in its place he preferred the more positive term ‘concrete’.Jean Luc Daval, "Avant Garde Art 1914-1939", Skira, Geneva 1980, p.171 Van Doesburg was eventually joined by Otto G. Carlsund, Léon Arthur Tutundjian, Jean Hélion and his fellow lodger, the typographer Marcel Wantz (1911–79), who soon left to take up a political career.Jean Hélion, "Art Concret 1930: Four Painters and a Magazine", in Double Rhythm: Writings About Painting, Skyhorse Publishing 2014 In May 1930 they published a single issue of their own French-language magazine, Revue Art Concret, which featured a joint manifesto, positioning them as the more radical group of abstractionists.
" BASIS OF CONCRETE PAINTING
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The group was short lived and only exhibited together on three occasions in 1930 as part of larger group exhibitions, the first being at the Salon des Surindépendents in June, followed by Production Paris 1930 in Zürich, and in August the exhibition AC: Internationell utställning av postkubistisk konst (International exhibition of post-cubist art) in Stockholm, curated by Carlsund. In the catalog to the latter, Carlsund states that the group's "programme is clear: absolute Purism. Neo-Plasticism, Purism and Constructivism combined". AC: Internationell utställning av postkubistisk konst, Stockholm, 1930, p.3 Shortly before van Doesburg's death in 1931, the members of the Art Concret group still active in Paris united with the larger association Abstraction-Création.
As van Doesburg had pointed out in his manifesto, in order to be universal, art must abandon subjectivity and find impersonal inspiration purely in the elements of which it is constructed: line, plane and color. Some later artists associated with this tendency, such as Victor Vasarély, Jean Dewasne, Mario Negro and Richard Mortensen, only came to painting after first studying science.Haftmann p.340 Nevertheless, all theoretical advances seek justification in past practice, and in this case the mathematical proportions expressed in abstract form are to be identified in various art forms over millennia. Thus, argued Haftmann, "the elimination of representational images and the overt use of pure geometry do not imply a radical and definitive rejection of the great art of the past, but rather a reassertion of its eternal values stripped of their historical and social disguises."Haftmann p.341
Abstraction, which had been quietly gathering momentum in Italy between the world wars, emerged officially in the Movimento d'arte concreta (MAC) in 1948, whose foremost exponent, Alberto Magnelli, was another past member of Abstraction-Création and had been living in France for many years. However, some seventy native painters were represented in the Arte astratta e concreta in Italia exhibition held three years later at the National Gallery in Rome.Haftmann, p.340 In Paris recognition of this approach resulted in several exhibitions of which the first was titled Art Concret and held at the Gallerie René Drouin during the summer of 1945. Described as "the first major post-World War 2 exhibition of abstract art",Ann Lee Morgan, Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Art, Rowman & Littlefield 2016 the artists exhibited there included the older generation of abstractionists: Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Sonia Delaunay, César Domela, Otto Freundlich, Jean Gorin, Auguste Herbin, Wassily Kandinsky, Alberto Magnelli, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner and van Doesburg. In the following year a series of annual exhibitions began in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, which included some of these artists and were devoted, according to its articles of association, to "works of art commonly called: concrete art, non-figurative or abstract art".Georges Folmer, "Le Salon des Réalités Nouvelles : pour et contre l’art concret", p.2
In 1951 Groupe Espace was founded in France to harmonize painting, sculpture and architecture as a single discipline. This grouped sculptors and architects with old established artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Jean Gorin and the newly emergent Jean Dewasne and Victor Vasarély. Its manifesto was published in L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui that year and placarded on the streets of Paris, championing the fundamental presence of the plastic arts in all aspects of life for the harmonious development of all human activities. It extended beside into practical politics, having elected as its honorary president the Minister for Reconstruction and Urban Development, Eugène Claudius-Petit.Eve Roy, "La présence fondamentale de la plastique, L’exposition du Groupe Espace à Biot en 1954: un essai de synthèse des arts", 2013
As time progressed, a distinction began to be made between 'cold abstraction', which was identified with geometric Concrete Art, and 'warm abstraction', which, as it moved towards the various kinds of Lyrical abstraction, reintroduced personality into art.Anna Moszynska, Abstract Art, Thames & Hudson, London 1990, p.120 The former eventually fed into international movements building on technological aspects championed by the pioneers of Concrete Art, emerging as optical art, kinetic art and programmatic art.Alessandro Del Puppo, L'arte contemporanea: Il secondo novecento, Einaudi, 2013, table 3 page 238. The term Concrete also began to be extended to other disciplines than painting, including sculpture, photography and poetry. Justification for this was theorized in South America in the 1959 Neo-Concrete Manifesto, written by a group of artists in Rio de Janeiro who included Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape.Stiles
Zurich | Die Zürcher Schule der Konkreten | 1944 | Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, Hans Coray, Johannes Itten, Leo Leuppi, Anton Stankowski, Carlo Vivarelli, André Evard | |
Buenos Aires | Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención | 1945 | Tomás Maldonado, Lidy Prati, Alfredo Hlito, Raúl Lozza, Enio Lommi, Manuel Espinoza, Juan Melé | |
Buenos Aires | Movimento Madi | 1946 | Carmelo Arden Quin, Gyula Kosice, Rhod Rothfuss, Martín Blaszko, Diyi Laañ, Elizabeth Steiner, Juan Bay | |
Copenhagen | Linien II | 1947 | Ib Geertsen, Bamse Kragh-Jacobsen, Niels Macholm, Albert Mertz, Richard Winther, Helge Jacobsen | |
Milan | Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC) | 1948 | Atanasio Soldati, Gillo Dorfles, Bruno Munari, Gianni Monnet, Augusto Garau, Ettore Sottsass, Regina Cassolo Bracchi | |
Zagreb | Group Exat 51 | 1951 | Ivan Picelj, Vjenceslav Richter, Vlado Kristl, Aleksandar Srnec, Bernardo Bernardi | |
Paris | Group Espace | 1951 | ||
Montevideo | Grupo de Arte No Figurativo | 1952 | José Pedro Costigliolo, María Freire, Antonio Llorens | |
Rio de Janeiro | Grupo Frente | 1952 | Aluísio Carvão, Carlos Val, Décio Vieira, Ivan Serpa, João José da Silva Costa, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Vicent Ibberson | |
São Paulo | Grupo Ruptura | 1952 | Waldemar Cordeiro, Geraldo de Barros, Luis Sacilotto, Lothar Charroux, Kazmer Fejer, Anatol Wladslaw, Leopoldo Haar | |
Ulm | Hochschule für Gestaltung | 1953 | ||
Cordoba | Equipo 57 | 1957 | Jorge Oteiza, Luis Aguilera, Ángel Duarte, José Duarte, Juan Serrano, Agustín Ibarrola | |
Havana | Los Diez Pintores Concretos | 1957-1961 | Pedro de Oraá, Loló Soldevilla, Sandú Darié, Pedro Carmelo Álvarez López, Wifredo Arrcay Ochandarena, Salvador Zacarías Corratgé Ferrera, Luis Darío Martínez Pedro, José María Mijares, Rafael Soriano López, and José Ángel Rosabal Fajardo | |
Padua | Gruppo N | 1959 | Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi. | |
Milan | Gruppo T | 1959 | Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi, Gianni Colombo, Grazia Varisco | |
Paris | Motus/GRAV | 1960 | Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Yvaral (Jean Pierre Vasarely), Joël Stein, and at the beginning also Hugo Demarco, Francisco García Miranda, Vera Molnàr, François Molnàr, Sergio Moyano Servanes, Béatrice Gross, Stephen Hoban: François Morellet, Yale University Press, 2019, p. 59. | |
Cleveland | Anonima Group | 1960 | ||
Rome | Gruppo Uno | 1962 | Gastone Biggi, Nicola Carrino, Nato Frascà, Achille Pace, Pasquale Santoro, Giuseppe Uncini | |
Prague | 1967 | Eduard Antal, Juraj Bartusz, Václav Cigler, František Dörfl, Jiří Hampl, Radoslav Kratina, František Kyncl, Jaroslav Malina, Eduard Ovčáček, Arsén Pohribný, Lubomír Přibyl, Tomáš Rajlich, Vladimíra Sedláková, Zdeněk Šplíchal, Karel Trinkewitz, Jiří Valoch, Miroslav Vystrčil |
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