dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Romy Golan
titel: Muralnomad : the paradox of wall painting, Europe 1927-1957
isbn: 978-0-300-14153-5
+: New Haven 2009
«[…] no work registers twenthieth-century doubts about the identity and meaning of art more sensitively than the quasi-mural. Many artists and critics [in the middle decades of the 20th century] still looked to the mural as a possible corrective to the splintering of the picture surface at the hands of Cubism and other avant-garde painting practices; to the commodification of easel painting in the marketplace; to the loss of any sense of art's public destination; to the devolution of aesthetic aura into what Walter Benjamin described as the condition of exhibitionality; to the seductions of cinema; or to the homelessness of a modernist architecture increasingly devoid of psychological resonance. The mural was perceived as an antidote to all these failings, to the alienation of humanity and to the anomie of art in the modern condition. Other artists and critics realized full well that the mural painting was not the solution to any of these problems or did not even recognize them as problems. A return to the mural format, which hat flourished in the premodern world, would be an anachronistic and futile gesture […].
The American and Mexican works and episodes play no role in the discursive crisis of the European mural. Americans seem to have been undisturbed by the anachronism inherent in the mural enterprise. They painted the walls of public buildings, many of them built in late nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts historicist style — town halls, museums, libraries, concert halls, universities — without the acute sense of belatedness felt by many Europeans. As surprising as it may sound, no European seems to have uttered a single word about the murals on the far side of the Atlantic. The United States government commissioned public murals to provide artists with employment. Such programs looked to the mural as a pragmatic and optimistic remedy for the Great Drepression. In Europe, populismm and the potential of the mural and the photomural to build consensus played straight into the hands of totalitarian regimes. […] For such regimes, the mural functioned as a sounding board for both their hopes and grievances. During the 1930s, the mural, or the quasi-mural, survived in Western Europe as a diversionary tactic designed to manage what were perceived as the pathological side effects of an capitalist (read: American) system in crisis, by both the political Left and Right.» (p. 1—2)
«It is in Paris, the city commonly identified with the deluge of easel paintings in its annual Salons from the mid-eighteenth century onward, that artists and the state first began to wage campaigns to revive the mural. This included — starting with Eugène Delacroix's murals for the Palais-Bourbon — those for the Palais du Luxembourg, the Louvre, and the church of Saint Sulpice, those by Hippolyte Flandrin for the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, and by Puvis de Chavannes for the Panthéon, and finally the decoration of Paris's twenty town halls (including its huge Hôtel de Ville), the most extended program undertaken by the Third Republic, which spanned from the eve of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to just before the First World War. Yet it is important to realize that the great majority of mural paintings produced in Europe in the ninetheenth century were what the French call toiles marouflées, that is, not actual murals but mural-size paintings done in the studio on canvas and glued to the walls of their intended location. Some of them were painted in a mixed medium of oil and wax to produce a matte surface to resemble that of a fresco. Only as a response to this semideception can one understand the advocacy of traditional fresco techniques by Pierre Baudouïn, with his manual La Fresque, sa technique et ses applications (1914), and his pupil Ducos de la Haille, both instructors at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Only fresco technique, Robert Rey argued in 1922 in the pages of the conservative journal L'Architecture, gave murals the appearance of not meing merely glued to the wall but rather of emanating from the wall itself. By that date, whether conceived for an existing place or made for a hypothetical location, mural ensemlbes were first exhibited, as it in a showroom, at the Salon to be perused like a commodity by any passerby.
For the Italians the return to the mural in the 1930s signaled not only the emergence of the perfect form of munumental Fascist art but also a forceful comeback after more than a century of dominance by French painting. Unnderlying their animosity toward French art during the ventennio (Mussolini's twenty years in power) was the perception that their 'northern' neighbor's insinuation of easel painting styles into mural painting had derailed Italian art from its putatively native mural tradition. In Italy during the nineteenth century, frescoes made occasional appearances, especially in the wake of the civic élan that accompanied the country's unification during the Risorgimento years of the 1870s and '80s, even in highly visible spaces such as Milan's new railway station and its new Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, and in the Palazzo Madama (the new seat of the Senate of the Republic [sic] of Italy) in Rome, the new nations's capital. These frescoes were, in fact even more than in France, academic in style, painted by second- and third-tier artists […]. Such frescoes […] were in a markedly retardataire style (even compared to that of Paris's town halls), and were undertaken out of habit, because murals were a thing Italians had, supposedly, always done and were thus known for, rather than because of any misgivings about easel painting. Indeed, as any survey of Ottocento painting makes glaringly clear, the Italians, eager to emulate their industrial bourgeois fellow Europeans France, England, and Germany, were embracing those nations' new expositions and new Salons and the dissemination of French-inspired painting with exuberant appetite and without much delay.» (p. 2—3)
«During the 1930s it was Italy and France that had the most at stake in the revival of mural painting. The painted mural had also been a live option at the German Werkbund (with Willi Baumeister's 'wall pictures') as well as at the Bauhaus (where Oskar Schlemmer and Vassily Kandinsky, who became head of the wall painting workshop in 1922, both focused the student's work on large-scale mural paintings). However, after the Nazi prohibition against abstract art, Germany — whose nationalist, revivalist, and racial fabrications of artistic lineages were by far the most pernicious — was left significantly out of the mural debate. The extreme flatness and the machine aesthetic that underlay both Schlemmer's and Baumeister's depictions of human figures in their murals were labeled degenerate and thus works that compounded the degeneracy of modern art and architecture. Indeed, with the exception of a single article in Casabella in 1932, Germany all but disappeared from the mural debate, apart from the photomural, a medium that was gradually purged from the Nazi regime's approved categories of art.» (p. 4)
«What kept the issue of the mural relevant after 1945 was what I consider the attempts by various architects and artists to redeem monumental architectural complexes by a new — humanist rather than populist — postwar rewriting of the concept of the synthesis of the arts, intent on shedding, or one might even say decontaminating itself from, the concept of the total work of art of the one that preceded it. Here the French and the Italians, while they remained the two protagonists and continued to use one another as a foil, actually switched roles. In Italy, artists and architects aimed at deflating the munumental Gesamtkunstwerk in order to move away from the long shadow cast by twenty years of Fascism. They did it with irony by using decoration as an added flourish, thus evoking the Baroque or the neo-baroque frivolity of Stile Liberty (the Italian version of turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau), the style that had been anathema to Mussolini's regime.
[…] In a last-ditch attempt to give new life to the idea of a syntesis of the arts, Le Corbusier and Adré Bloc […] inflated it into what they called the 'synthesis of the major arts'. The concept was sucessfully exported to parts of the so-called Third World, first to South America and then to India, demonstrating the European mildly patronizing, postcolonial humanism typical of the 1950s. It is in the context of this renewed internationalism that Le Corbusier, by revisiting the medium of tapestry as a mural form for the modern era — one that was portable but could serve a functional element in architecture — was able to capture as no one else could both the poetics and the politics of the postwar Zeitgeist. […]» (p. 5)
«The vast number of mural commissions at the [World] exposition [in Paris] — 345 murals by 464 artists selected out of as many as 718 submissions – was an ambitious attempt on the part of the newly elected Socialist government to respond to artists' unemployment after Europe was affected by the Great Depression.» (p. 37)