Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, Ca. 1890-1939. - Review - book review

s A. MANSBACH

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 1998 384 pp 384 ills.; 48 colorplates, 6 maps. $65

present Art in Eastern Europe is the sole study of its kind in any language, and it is the alone recent survey of modernism in a number of the countries it treats. [1] In greatest in quantity cases, the next-best books are decades of advanced age and written in the countries' be in possession of languages. (Soon there will be several fresh books on twentieth-century Hungarian art, for example; on the other hand as I write this the greatest in quantity recent is Lajos Nemeth's work Szazadi magyar Muveszet, first published in 1964) Mansbach's choices are going to provide the first glimpse greatest in quantity English-speaking art historians will have of the fuller picture of the modernist avant-garde outside Western Europe and in the nature of the discipline, his volume may well constitute the last gaze a nonspecialist will ever earn of modernism in some of these countries. It raises a number of questions of interest beyond Central Europe: What is the global nature of modernism? What should be enumerateed as the essential moments of modernism, East or West? What can be ignored, and why? What is regional ar t as oppos to art of the center? What was avant-garde at any given flash and what else beside it counted? I cannot think of more important questions when the control is twentieth-century painting: they are essential for any firm understanding of the shape of the hundred Mansbach's book is clearly individual of the places where Western scholars of modernism will go on to find information and provisional answers.

Inevitably, specialists in the countries Mansbach discusses will have their be in possession of responses to his accounts; for this forum I thinking it might be most appropriate to raise questions of interest to the close attention of European modernism as a whole. For coherence, I will be concentrating upon Mansbach's treatment of Hungarian modernism, although I have also taken examples from Romanian, Czech and Bulgarian modernism.

An introductory example can illuminate the kinds of questions I will be asking. In the course of his description of Hungarian modernism, Mansbach mentions the Hungarian modernist Vilmos Perlrott Csaba, and remarks that Csaba was influenced by dint of Cezanne. He reproduces Csaba's Bathing Youths, saying simply that its composition "[stems] from the work of Cezanne and Matisse" (p 271) At first glance--and plane in front of the original, which is in Budapest--Mansbach present the appearances entirely correct: Csaba's painting smooth has a bit of the truncated pyramidal groupings of Cezanne's Large Bathers in the Barnes Foundation and in the National Gallery, London.

What regards me is the form and the economy of this kind of concern Because Modern Art in Eastern Europe treats thus many artists, Mansbach is many times compelled to mention a hardly any of the most significant influences, and give leave to those citations stand as provisional entry-points for our understanding of the artists' dictions The problem is that true often such references also make the Eastern European painters and sculptors appear to be like examples of some belated avant-garde entirely hanging on Western European predecessors.

From this simple quandary be augmented formidable problems that entangle the real possibility of writing the history of any modernist move outside of Western Europe. If I am writing a history of novel Hungarian painting, for example, and I decide to describe Csaba's paintings upon their own terms, downplaying or omitting their sources, I risk unmooring myself from historical faculty of perception I could say, for instance, that Csaba have the appearances unaccountably drawn to a artificial position in which a slender young man leans far forward, head down, arms reach outed The pose is used for completely half the figures in Bathing Youths, and Csaba goe to a certain number of lengths to employ the posture even where it does not make faculty of perception (One such figure extends his arms to massage another figure, on the other hand it ends up looking like an attack.) If I move on this way, I can avoid Cezanne, on the contrary I risk giving up historical meaning. Instead I would be writing poetic appreciation, or perhaps psychoanalytic criticism. upon the other hand, if I move ahead and compare Csaba to Cezanne, then I risk sees ing a sense of Csaba's individuality. He would become a regional artist, belatedly indebted to late Cezanne.

I place this choice starkly because it is stark. The eight figures of Csaba's Bathing Youths are thus close to the familiar circulared tent of Cezanne's Bathers that it is not enough to say, as Mansbach does, that Csaba and his compatriots "[transfigured] the modernist vocabulary" upon their return from Paris and Munich: a reader also wants to know exactly how they did for a like reason (p. 272). In various places in the volume Mansbach says artists are "brilliant," "unique," "striking," or "transformative," on the other hand I wonder what pitch of art of speaking well could be enough to erase Cezanne flat momentarily from the mind of a viewer contemplating Bathing Youths. At best, a reader takes Mansbach's word that Csaba transfigures the Western avant-garde; at worst, Csaba is left as a painter of Parisian pastiches.