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I thought I’d finished with the arts documentaries until I remembered this four-part series from 1995. Hidden Hands<\/em> was based on researches by Frances Stonor Saunders who also co-produced. As the subtitle suggests, the programmes examined aspects of Modernist art and architecture that weren’t exactly unknown but were often downplayed (sometimes deliberately ignored) by the art establishment. The episodes were as follows:<\/p>\n 1: Is Anybody There?<\/strong><\/a> The occult roots of abstract painting, especially the influence of Theosophy on Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Kazimir Malevich and Franti\u0161ek Kupka are also mentioned at the beginning of the programme but we don’t hear anything more about them.<\/p>\n 2: Art and the CIA<\/a>.<\/strong> A history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA front for channelling money to avant-garde exhibitions and literary magazines during the Cold War.<\/p>\n 3: A Clean White World<\/a>.<\/strong> Modernist architecture as a reaction to, and proposed solution for, the squalor of 19th-century city life. Also the similarity between the impulses that drove the Modernist architectural ideal, and the later health and purity obsessions of European fascist states.<\/p>\n 4: Painting with the Enemy<\/a>.<\/strong> The inadvertent way in which the animus towards “degenerate art” shared by the Nazis and the Vichy regime in occupied France helped sustain Modernism during the war years.<\/p>\n This is a very good series on the whole, informative and with a roster of authoritative interviewees. The narration overstates the contrarian angle in places but that’s television for you. Much of the history under investigation wasn’t necessarily hidden, more sidestepped by general discussions of 20th-century art. Even so, fifteen years earlier in the architecture episode of The Shock of the New<\/em>, Robert Hughes covered similar territory and with similar criticisms, following the development of what would become known as the International Style while noting Mussolini’s adoption of a Modernist idiom for the architecture of Fascist Italy.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, when Hughes reviewed a major Kandinsky retrospective he paid sufficient attention to Kandinsky’s Theosophical beliefs; this was in 1982 for TIME<\/em> magazine, not exactly an obscure publication. Theosophy’s ectoplasmic tentacles are all over the art of the late 19th century so you’d expect some crossover into the art of the new century, as there was in the careers of the artists themselves. (Matisse was a pupil of Gustave Moreau, for example, an inconvenient detail that often irritated critics<\/a>.) Given the amount of artists swayed by Madame Blavatsky’s writings, a more interesting argument might have been to propose Theosophy as the prime cause<\/em> of early abstraction rather than another inconvenient factor in its development. Hilma af Klint’s pioneering abstract paintings were as much products of her Theosophical studies as were those of Kandinsky but in the 1990s nobody was paying her very much attention.<\/p>\n Mondrian’s mysticism: Evolution (1910\u20131911).<\/em><\/p>\n As for the CIA, the agency’s clandestine cultural adventures were exposed by a leak in the late 1960s\u2014Stephen Spender famously resigned in shame from his editorship of Encounter<\/em> magazine\u2014so this could almost be classed as old news. What you wouldn’t have had in the past, however, is the agents involved in the scheme openly discussing their activities.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n These are minor quibbles. More objectionable\u2014and I’d forgotten all about this\u2014is the treatment of Henri Matisse in the final episode, in which the painter’s life in the south of France during the Second World War is contrasted with that of Picasso who deliberately spent the war years in Paris. Both artists had been condemned by the Nazis in the notorious “Entartete Kunst” (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937; both artists continued to paint during the occupation, but Matisse, who was never a political artist, gets criticised for working as before, while the creator of Guernica<\/em> produced a succession of sombre (but unpolitical) canvases. Matisse was 70 years old when the Nazis invaded France so it would have been surprising if his painting turned suddenly to social commentary. The comparison makes little sense when the Surrealists are held up as somehow challenging the Vichy regime by playing “Exquisite Corpse” in their Marseilles hotel rooms. But the argument seems downright perverse when the previous episode in the series had Philip Johnson, of all people, as an interviewee. Johnson turned up in many documentaries about architecture in the 1980s and 90s\u2014he’s in that same episode of The Shock of the New<\/em>\u2014so it’s no surprise to see him here. He’d been present at the birth of Modernist architecture, working with Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe, and became a major architect himself in later years. But controversy about his youthful fascist sympathies<\/a> dogged his career. Johnson defends the collaborations of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius by saying “architects like to work” but we hear nothing about his own activities.<\/p>\n The final episode is the weakest one, in other words, but the series as a whole is still worth watching, especially the CIA episode which is more fact than opinion. (Frances Stonor Saunders went on to explore this in depth in a book that I wouldn’t mind reading, The Cultural Cold War<\/em><\/a>.) I’m amused that the CIA needed a front organisation for two reasons: first, and most obviously, they had to conceal the source of their funding from artists and organisers with left-wing views or even outright Soviet sympathies. But they also couldn’t afford to attract the attention of those US senators and congressmen who agreed with the two Josephs (Stalin and Goebbels) that all this modern painting and sculpture wasn’t art at all. Had the politicians known, the response would have resembled the NEA funding scandal thirty years later when America got its own very public discussion of what is or isn’t “degenerate” art. But that’s another story.<\/p>\n Previously on { feuilleton } I thought I’d finished with the arts documentaries until I remembered this four-part series from 1995. Hidden Hands was based on researches by Frances Stonor Saunders who also co-produced. As the subtitle suggests, the programmes examined aspects of Modernist art and architecture that weren’t exactly unknown but were often downplayed (sometimes deliberately ignored) by the … Continue reading “Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Hidden Hands: A Different History of Modernism","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,2,16,44,14,19],"tags":[5884,1049,347,12147,4961,6818,2435,2701,12218,12217,165,533,233,12216,12214,12215,12219],"class_list":["post-21544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-art","category-occult","category-painting","category-politics","category-television","tag-frances-stonor-saunders","tag-frantisek-kupka","tag-gustave-moreau","tag-henri-matisse","tag-hilma-af-klint","tag-kazimir-malevich","tag-le-corbusier","tag-madame-blavatsky","tag-mies-van-de-rohe","tag-philip-johnson","tag-picasso","tag-piet-mondrian","tag-robert-hughes","tag-stephen-spender","tag-theosophy","tag-vasily-kandinsky","tag-walter-gropius"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5Bu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"hh2.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/hh2.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 Televisual art<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"