Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism

iii Byzantium/Modernism The Byzantine as Method in Modernity Edited by Roland Betancourt Maria Taroutina LEIDEN | BOSTON This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Contents v Contents Acknowledgments IX Preface XI List of Illustrations XV List of Contributors XIX Explanation of the Cover XXIII Part 1 Byzantium and Modernism Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism Maria Taroutina 1 Section 1 The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements 15 1 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism Robert S. Nelson 2 Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37 Myroslava M. Mudrak Section 2 Modernism’s Precursors 75 3 Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection Dimitra Kotoula 4 Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102 Elena N. Boeck Section 3 Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse 5 Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135 Tulay Atak This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV vi 6 Contents Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? Robert Ousterhout 163 Part 2 The Slash as Method Introduction: The Slash as Method 179 Roland Betancourt Section 4 Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects 7 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195 Stratis Papaioannou 8 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory 212 Anthony Cutler Section 5 Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon 9 Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237 Devin Singh 10 Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen Marie-José Mondzain 254 Section 6 Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine at the Ends of Modernity 11 ‘Action-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/ of Recent Russian Art 271 Jane A. Sharp 12 Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311 Rico Franses This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents 13 v vii Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330 Charles Barber CODA 14 We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349 Glenn Peers Select Bibliography Index 367 Contents Contents v Acknowledgments ix Preface: A Mosaic Approach xi List of Illustrations xv List of Contributors xix Explanation of the Cover xxiii part 1 xxv Byzantium and Modernism xxv Introduction to Part 1 1 Introduction: Byzantium and Modernism 1 Maria Taroutina 1 Section 1 13 The Avant-Gardes and Their Counter Movements 13 Chapter 1 15 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 15 Robert S. Nelson 15 Chapter 2 37 Kazimir Malevich and the Liturgical Tradition of Eastern Christianity 37 Myroslava M. Mudrak 37 Section 2 73 Modernism’s Precursors 73 Chapter 3 75 Arts and Crafts and the ‘Byzantine’: The Greek Connection 75 Dimitra Kotoula 75 Chapter 4 102 Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Theodora 102 Elena Boeck 102 Section 3 133 Byzantine Tactics, Modernist Strategies in Architectural Discourse 133 Chapter 5 135 Abstraction’s Economy: Hagia Sophia in the Imaginary of Modern Architecture 135 Tulay Atak 135 Chapter 6 163 Byzantine Architecture: A Moving Target? 163 Robert Ousterhout 163 part 2 177 The Slash as Method 177 Introduction: The Slash as Method 179 Roland Betancourt 179 Section 1 193 Reading across Time: Modern Subjects, Byzantine Objects 193 Chapter 7 195 Byzantium and the Modernist Subject: The Case of Autobiographical Literature 195 Stratis Papaioannou 195 Chapter 8 212 One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish: Byzantine Visual Structures in the Light of Twentieth-Century Practice and Theory Anthony Cutler 212 Section 2 235 Byzantine New Media: The Photographic and Filmic Icon 235 Chapter 9 237 Iconicity of the Photographic Image: Theodore of Stoudios and André Bazin 237 Devin Singh 237 Chapter 10 254 Tarkovsky: Embodying the Screen 254 Marie-José Mondzain 254 Section 3 269 Presence, Representation, and the Gaze: The Byzantine and the Ends of Modernity 269 Chapter 11 271 ‘Аction-Paradise’ and ‘Readymade Reliquaries’: Eccentric Histories in/of Recent Russian Art Jane A. Sharp 271 Chapter 12 311 Lacan and Byzantine Art: In the Beginning was the Image 311 Rico Franses 311 Chapter 13 330 Beyond Representation/The Gift of Sight 330 Charles Barber 330 CODA 347 Chapter 14 349 We Have Never been Byzantine: On Analogy 349 Glenn Peers 349 Select Bibliography 361 Index 367 361 212 271 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Chapter 1 15 Chapter 1 Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism Robert S. Nelson In the winter of 1903, the two painters Gustav Klimt and Maximilian Lenz traveled from Vienna to Italy, stopping first in northern Italy at Udine, Venice, and Padua. Lenz preserved a record of the trip. He remembered the nasty weather in Padua and complained of the rain and illness in Venice, but then they came to Ravenna: “the true goal of the trip… Gustav Klimt’s hour of destiny…. The mosaics made an immense, decisive impression on him. From this comes the resplendence, the stiff decoration of his art.” Klimt bought photographs and picture postcards, and on May 9, he sent a postcard with a view of the interior of S. Vitale to his mother.1 At the end of 1903, Klimt returned to northern Italy, again visiting Venice, Padua, and Ravenna. About the latter he wrote, “Lots of miserable things in Ravenna—[but] the mosaics are unbelievably wonderful.”2 Alma Mahler decreed that the work Klimt produced after the Italian trip was Byzantine. Among the finest examples of this period is his first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Fig. 1.1). For some decades the treasure of the Belvedere in Vienna, the painting now hangs in the Neue Gallerie in New York, thanks to Holocaust restitution and resale. The standard comparison made to it is the sixth-century mosaic of the Empress Theodora from the church of S. Vitale in Ravenna, here shown in a detail of the Empress’s retinue (Fig. 1.2). Klimt probably knew the image from reproductions before he saw the original on the north wall of the bema. Of all the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, the Theodora panel attracted the most attention of modern artists and art historians in the early twentieth century. Vasily Kandinsky illustrated the Theodora mosaic from S. Vitale in his manifesto, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerting the Spiritual in Art), of 1911, as did Clive Bell in his Art of 1914.3 While the Theodora 1 Christian M. Nebehay, Gustav Klimt Dokumentation (Vienna, 1969), 495–96. 2 Colin B. Bailey, ed., Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making (New York, 2001), 203. 3 The full-page illustration appears at the end of the second chapter, “The Movement”: Vasily Kandinsky, Ü ber das Geistige in der Kunst: Insbesondere in der Malerie (2nd ed. Munich, 1912), between pp. 16 and 17. I agree with Lisa Florman [Concerning the Spiritual—and the Concrete— in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford, CA, 2014), 13, 182, n. 7] that the placement of the image here is significant and not causal, as it has been claimed. Clive Bell illustrates the same mosaic before his chapter “The Rise of Christian Art,” which recounts the decay of Christian art down to pictures at “the Tate Gallery or the Luxembourg.” “To the sixth century belong the most ma- © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300019_003 This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 16 Nelson Figure 1.1 Gustav Klimt. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Neue Galerie, New York. Photo: Art Resource, NY. panel does not explain everything about the Klimt portrait, it does provide a similar tableau of brilliant color out of which emerge the pale faces and hands, especially in the case of the empress’s female attendants. In the portrait and the mosaic, the women have long, rubbery fingers, and unnatural joints. For medievalists, the differences between the two images are manifold, but Klimt was not a scholar, whose eye had been trained by years of studying Byzantine art, but an avant-garde painter. It is the vision of such artists that is my principal concern in this overview of modernism’s Byzantium and Byzantium’s modernism, and my time frame will be the first three decades of the twentieth century. Looking at the Ravenna mosaic from Klimt’s perspective, it is not hard to see why he would have been attracted to the Theodora panel, and why he went to jestic monuments of Byzantine art…. Since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cezanne.” Clive Bell, Art (London, 1914), 129–30. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 17 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.2 Ravenna. S. Vitale, Attendant of Empress Theodora (6th century). Photo: Robert S. Nelson This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 18 Nelson such effort to view the Ravenna mosaics twice in one year. A year earlier, in 1902, Klimt had completed his Beethoven Frieze, which was displayed in the Secession building in Vienna. One part of it included the famous Kiss for the Whole World, but more relevant is the adjacent double row of standing women, the Chorus of Angels, with their pale faces, arms, and feet emerging from carapaces of richly patterned garments.4 This repetitive group of rigid, frontal figures disproves the contention of Maximilian Lenz, Klimt’s traveling companion, that his “stiff decoration” was inspired by the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna. Instead, I suggest it was Klimt’s interest in such imagery in the first place that drew him to Byzantine mosaics and made Ravenna what Lenz correctly termed “the true goal of the trip.” Once at S. Vitale, Byzantine mosaics had a strong impact on Klimt, because he was already predisposed to value flat, stylized displays of women. Seen with Klimt’s modernist eyes, it is not that the Ravenna mural looks Byzantine, but that the Byzantine looks Jugendstil. A few years later, Klimt collaborated with the architect Josef Hoffman in the decoration of an elegant home for the Belgian industrialist and art collector Adolphe Stoclet and created two mosaic murals for the walls of his dining room. Once more the flat patterned design of resplendent gold recalls the mosaics in the bema of S. Vitale, and in this case the two buildings share the Byzantine love of large grained marbles splayed across the walls. The white-veined marble sheeting and marble intarsia decoration on the wall of S. Vitale date to the sixth century and to the early twentieth restoration that began in 1903.5 Indeed, the marble revetments in the apse of S. Vitale were beginning to be restored when Klimt visited the church, so that he probably observed the Italian craftsmen at work. A few years later, he would spend many hours supervising the marble cutters who prepared the tree and spiraling branches for his design of the great gilded frieze of the Stoclet dining room (Fig. 1.3).6 Stoclet’s opulent house was built in part to house his avant-garde art collection. He also acquired those arts that were just then becoming fashionable at the turn of the century and that were not then exhibited in fine art museums, such as objects from Africa, the Pre-Columbian Americas, Egypt, early China, the early Middle Ages, and Byzantium.7 Among Stoclet’s Byzantine holdings 4 Illustrated in Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and modern Life, ed. Tobias G. Natter and Christoph Grunenberg (New York, 2008), 96–97. 5 Fabio Bertelli, “Metodo storico alla prova nella ricostruzione del paramento lapideo dell’abside di San Vitale,” OPD Restauro 4 (1992), 216–29. I thank Fabio Barry for this reference. 6 Alfred Weidinger, “100 Years of Palais Stoclet,” in Gustav Klimt–Josef Hoffmann: Pioneers of Modernism, ed. Agnes Husslein-Arco and Alfred Weidinger (New York, 2011), 225–28. 7 On the collection generally, see J. P. van Goidsenhoven, Adolphe Stoclet Collection (Brussels, 1956). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 19 Figure 1.3 Gustav Klimt. Sketch for mural. Palais Stoclet, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 20 Nelson Figure 1.4 Center of Byzantine paten. Louvre, formerly Stoclet collection. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY. was a beautiful Eucharistic paten made of a precious colored stone. At its center was a cloisonné enamel of the Last Supper (Fig. 1.4), composed of a series of flat color planes, if seen with modernist eyes. The cells of the enamel resemble the patchwork quilt garment of the figure of the Dancer in Klimt’s mural (Fig. 1.3), and the black segments of the apostles’ hair compare well with the Dancer’s jet-black hair. Even the enamel’s gold lines simulating hanging fabric below the table and the overall pattern of swirls in the background of the dining room frieze have a certain kinship. Whether Klimt’s mural came first or Stoclet’s acquisition of the paten is not the issue.8 In comparing the paten and Klimt’s murals, I do not wish to make an argument as to cause and effect, but of a common aesthetic. If Klimt did not see something like this Byzantine enamel before he created the cartoon for the mural, did Stoclet buy the paten because it looked so modern, so Jugendstillike, so appropriate for his house? Were the flat, patterned colors, the gold lines 8 See ibid., pt. 1, p. 144 for the provenance. It was earlier in Madrid. The earliest publication of the object and its first attestation in the Stoclet collection is an exhibition in Paris: Exposition international d’art byzantine 28 Mai–9 Juillet 1931 (Paris, 1931), 144. Stoclet also had other Byzantine enamels: ibid., 143, 148, 149. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 21 of this dining scene ideal for display in or near his dining room with the Klimt mural? If the latter applies, I suggest we have an example of Byzantium’s modernism, the second notion in my title. Byzantine art was attractive, because it was old and modern at the same time. That was surely part of the appeal of the Ravenna mosaics for Klimt and why he found them “unbelievably wonderful.” Klimt’s aesthetic appreciation of Byzantine mosaics was shared by other modernists. The art critic and historian Julius Meier-Graefe championed Art Nouveau, Post-Impressionism, and Van Gogh, and he wrote approvingly of Byzantine mosaics in his influential book, Die Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst of 1904. It was soon translated into English as Modern Art, Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics. The apogee of that system was Post-Impressionism, and Byzantine mosaics were a highly valued precursor: Who will find words ... to describe the absolutely divine emotion that thrills the quiet tourist in a mosaic interior like that of the Baptistery of the Orthodox Church at Ravenna? Who could suggest the splendour of the gem-like purples, the rhythmic harmony of the simple, earnest faces of the Apostles?” Where may we dream more sweetly of the lovely legends of our faith than in the chapel of Galla Placidia, before the artless poetry of the representation of the Good Shepherd? What can be more magnificent than San Vitale?9 Meier-Graefe became yet more hyperbolic about the mosaics of the church of San Marco in Venice: In the interior of St. Mark’s, criticism is dumb; so, too, is what we call artistic perception. We no longer deliberate; the hand that holds the guide-book closes convulsively, and the brain … thinks no more. We can form no idea of such splendour till we see it, and then we seem to be in the presence of something abnormal, impossible, gigantic, terrible. We do not see this golden magnificence—we hear it, feel it, and breathe it. In an instant, a new sense is created—a sense of space. We cease to be individuals, and become atoms, silent particles among other such.10 He contrasted a modern room filled with the finest pictures “of our century” and the mosaics at S. Marco. The modern room remains “a gallery, a space 9 10 Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal (reprinted New York, 1968), 15–16. Ibid., 17. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 22 Nelson devoted to art, something isolated and remote that could never intoxicate the soul as do this barbaric gold and these barbaric symbols of the discredited Byzantines.”11 That last comment refers to the general nineteenth-century notion of the inferiority of the Byzantines and the barbaric nature of their art.12 Venice and Ravenna were modern as they had been Romantic for John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement. Byzantine art continued to be known primarily through such Italian monuments well into the twentieth century, because Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire’s core provinces were less accessible. Many of today’s canonical monuments of Byzantine art had not yet been restored or excavated, and important Byzantine art in Greece and the Balkans much less Mt. Sinai would not be published for decades to come. Moreover, Byzantium itself, that is, the city of Constantinople or Istanbul, was a distant place that few had visited. In contrast, Byzantium’s Italian surrogates were readily accessible to mass tourism, once a rail link was established to Venice in the mid-nineteenth century. Tourists then began flocking to that city and traveling down the coast to Ravenna, willing customers of a tourist industry that “needed shrines for its secular pilgrims to visit and relics for them to venerate”; Venice was well stocked with both.13 By 1900, the monuments of Ravenna and Venice had been photographed by the Alinari brothers and other Italian photographers, and the images distributed throughout Europe and America, first through high-quality photographs and then by means of picture postcards, which first became popular in Germany and Austria and then spread elsewhere on the Continent in the late nineteenth century. America lagged behind Europe in this practice. Thus by the turn of the century, Klimt was acting as a typical European tourist in sending his mother a view of the interior of S. Vitale.14 Because of those same advances in printing technology, authors could embed illustrations in their texts with much less cost, and Byzantine art makes its appearance in surprising places at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like Meier-Graefe, Clive Bell in his Art of 1914 included a discussion of the mosaics of Ravenna in his account of modern art, continuing an association of Byzantine mosaics with Post-Impressionism that Roger Fry had begun in England.15 11 12 13 14 15 Ibid. Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument (Chicago, 2004), 24–28. John Pemble, Venice Rediscoved (Oxford, 1995), 175. On picture postcards and tourism, see Frank Staff, The Picture Postcard and Its Origins (London, 1966), 58–63. J.B. Bullen, “Byzantinism and Modernism 1900–14,” The Burlington Magazine 141, no. 1160 (November 1999): 665–75. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 23 After Ravenna, according to Bell, it was a long decline until the later nineteenth century, or as he puts it: “since the Byzantine primitives set their mosaics at Ravenna no artist in Europe has created forms of greater significance unless it be Cézanne.”16 This concern for Byzantine mosaics by modernist painters and critics at the beginning of the twentieth century should not be seen in a vacuum, for it may well be that high art had appropriated a popular taste for mosaics that had existed for several decades previously. As Elena Boeck has discussed elsewhere in this volume, Byzantium was a fashionable setting for the French plays of Victorien Sardou. The sets of his Theodora were based upon Ravennate churches. Appearing in the lead role was Sarah Bernhardt, the most popular actress in Europe at the time. She also took the lead in Gismonda, another Byzantine drama by Sardou. Set in medieval Athens, its sets depicted the Byzantine church of Daphni, which French archaeologists were then studying. Gabriel Millet’s monograph on the church would appear a few years later in 1899.17 To advertise the play, Alphonse Mucha created a poster of Sarah Bernhardt as an Art Nouveau Byzantine Empress posed against a mosaic ground. This was his first poster, and it was a great success.18 Mucha would go on to use Byzantine devices to advertise all sorts of other people and products. Actual mosaics had many uses at the turn of the century. For example, they document dynastic lineage at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, erected by the Kaiser in honor of his grandfather Kaiser Wilhelm I.19 Severely bombed during World War II, the church today preserves a fragment of a stately procession of Hohenzollern princes converging on a jeweled cross set beneath a medallion of Christ. The German nobles in contemporary dress inhabit an environment straight out of late antique Ravenna. The use of blue grounds, the slow procession, and especially the architectural backgrounds recall the dome of the Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna. The church of S. Apollinare Nuovo supplied the motif of the shell niche with flanking birds. At the turn of the century, Byzantium, therefore, can be found not only in the distant past, but also in popular and elite contexts of the present day. A broader survey of these phenomena in the first two decades of the twentieth century in the German-speaking world requires looking into German Expressionism and possible Byzantine connections. For example, Franz Marc’s 16 17 18 19 Clive Bell, Art (New York, 1914), 130. Gabriel Millet, Le monast̀re de Daphni: Histoire, architecture, mosaïques (Paris, 1899). Brian Reade, Art Nouveau and Alphonse Mucha (London, 1967), 3–4. Vera Frowein-Ziroff, Die Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche: Entstehung und Bedeutung (Berlin, 1982). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 24 Nelson brother Paul was a Byzantinist. In 1906, Paul made a research trip to the monasteries of Mt. Athos and took his younger brother along as a research assistant.20 The next year, the Expressionistic painter Max Pechstein traveled to Italy and was especially enthusiastic about Ravenna and the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo,21 and Wilhelm Worringer in his book, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (first edition 1908) wrote sympathetically about the abstract properties of Byzantine art.22 But rather than developing this material, I want to turn to France and the art of Henri Matisse. Abstraction also attracted Matisse to Byzantine art under the tutelage of Matthew Stewart Prichard, that passionate, if peculiar, English aesthete, who inspired and befriended a number of key players in the study and appreciation of Byzantine art in the early twentieth century in America, England, and France. Today, Prichard is best known through the exquisite letters that he wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner, letters that were both beautifully phrased and calligraphically inscribed in a handsome Italic hand. Prichard had known Matisse since 1909, and from that time, he became increasingly involved with his art. Prichard left a record of a relevant conversation that he had with the painter on March 26, 1913. At this meeting, they discussed Byzantine coins, which Prichard collected. He remembered Matisse saying, Byzantine coins have influenced me; I have had one in my mind ([a gold one] of John Tzimiskes [Fig. 1.5]) in doing the picture of the Riffian [Figs. 1.6, 1.7]. We look at them and we see what is there but we cannot explain it as composition or sculpture. If an artist is very simple he can convey his sentiments by his expression but no one can say how. Such work as this [indicating a Byzantine design] means a very elevated mind in the artist.23 In comparing the obverse of a coin of the tenth-century emperor (Fig. 1.5), I want to suggest some of the qualities that Matisse saw and took from it: the gold color and the similarity of the gold turban of the Riffian (Fig. 1.6) with the gold hair of the figure of Christ on the coin, but also the way that the light reflects off the planes of the metallic relief as one turns it slightly to look at this or that detail more closely and scatters into broad areas of color. Matisse captures that effect in the expanses of gold on the man’s face. The darker 20 21 22 23 Rosel Gollek, “Franz Marc Daten und Dokumente zur Biographie,” Franz Marc, 1880–1916 (Munich, 1980), 20. Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, 1991), 52. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (New York, 1980), 93–105. Rémi Labrusse, Matisse: La condition de l’image (Paris, 1999), 106, 280. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 25 Figure 1.5 Image of Christ on gold coin of Emperor John I Tzimiskes. Photo: Collection of Wriston Art Galleries, Lawrence University, Appleton, WI. All Rights Reserved. troughs of the garment and the jagged edges of the shadows of the Riffian have their parallels in the arm and shoulder of the figure of Christ on the coin. According to Prichard, Matisse stated in January 1914 that “Byzantine expression and his have the same aim, and that he likes Byzantine coins without any reservation. He looks at them and seizes their meaning without any interruption.”24 This is modernism’s Byzantium once again. In the same year, 1914, Prichard gave Matisse four Byzantine coins, including two of silver. He was especially delighted by the latter, because he had never seen Byzantine silver coins.25 In June of that year, Prichard reported to Mrs. Gardner that Matisse had made a “little etching” of him, and gave him 11 or 12 copies of it, one of which he intended to send to Mrs. Gardner.26 Theirs was 24 25 26 Letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, January 1914, Matthew Stewart Prichard Papers, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, also Archives of American Art. The effects of changing light on Byzantine metalwork have been explored by Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park, 2010), 132–37. Labrusse, Matisse, 280, n. 188. Letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, June 26, 1914, Prichard Papers. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 26 Nelson Figure 1.6 Figure 1.6 Matisse. Riffian, detail. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo: © 2014 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Figure 1.7 Figure 1.7 Matisse. Riffian. Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo: © 2014 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 27 thus a close friendship, and Byzantine art was something important that they shared. In May of 1914, Prichard travelled to Sicily, where the Byzantine mosaics in Palermo made a strong impression, which he conveyed in a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner. At the Cappella Palatina, you are inside a honeycomb which is dripping gold on to you … I had the sense not only that it is great but that my observations have taught me also why it is great. The combination there of Byzantine and Arabic methods makes it unique. It is a locus-classicus of justification of the Byzantine-Matisse attitude over the Greek-Renaissance-Academic position… . To die in the Cappella Palatina would be an ecstasy.27 Prichard did not take his Byzantine art casually. This Byzantine-Matisse attitude is an example of what I am calling Byzantium’s modernism, that is, Byzantine art read through the aesthetics of modernism, which in Prichard’s case were also deeply imbued with the philosophy of Henri Bergson. While Matthew Prichard is known to specialists on Matisse and early twentieth-century art, few Byzantinists have encountered his work, or so they think. I showed in my book on Hagia Sophia, however, that Prichard had a strong impact on Thomas Whittemore’s restoration of its mosaics. Drafts by Prichard in the archives of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum indicate that Prichard wrote parts of the archaeological reports on the mosaics that Whittemore issued in his own name.28 Whittemore, who may have been initially introduced to Matisse through Prichard, offered courses on the painter at New York University in the late 1920s. These appear to be the first or among the first taught on the artist in this country.29 Matisse and Byzantine art went together, as the French curator Georges Salles affirmed in 1931 when he reviewed an exhibition on Matisse and also drew attention to the first international exhibition of Byzantine art then at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs.30 Salles’s review appeared in the general art magazine Cahiers d’Art, which also devoted a richly illustrated article to the Byzantine exhibit.31 Matisse and Byzantine art were associated as well in the person of his son-in-law, Georges Duthuit, who was one of the curators of the Byzantine exhibition and a modern art critic. Whittemore kept 27 28 29 30 31 Letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner, April 24, 1913. Prichard Papers. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 177–79. Ibid., 171. Georges Salles, “Henri-Matisse,” Cahiers d’art 60 (1931): 281. Royall Tyler, “Exposition international d’Art Byzantin,” Cahiers d’Art 60 (1931): 173–92. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 28 Nelson Matisse informed of his work restoring the mosaics of Hagia Sophia in the 1930s, and that friendship resulted in Matisse making a portrait of him similar to the one he had make of Prichard two decades before.32 As a building, Hagia Sophia had long fascinated the French, from Felix Marie Charles Texier in the early nineteenth century to Auguste Choisy at the century’s end, and continued with architects of the early twentieth century.33 The Prix de Rome winner Henri Prost spent a portion of his five-year fellowship in Istanbul, measuring and sketching Hagia Sophia in 1905–6. One result was a spectacular drawing of the building at night, its gold mosaics resplendent against a deep blue sky.34 He also made reconstructions of the nearby Byzantine imperial palace and Hippodrome, demonstrating as well his early interest in questions of urbanism that was to form his career. After his Prix d’Architecture, Prost worked on urbanism projects in North Africa and then became the chief town planner for Istanbul from 1936 to 1951, literally bringing modernism to Byzantium. His design for a Plaza for the Republic would have given Istanbul a needed public space to celebrate the new Turkish Republic on the site of the ancient Hippodrome, itself the most important arena for civic events in the Byzantine city. That plaza was never built, and neither was Prost’s laudatory proposal for a large archaeological park that would have stretched around the east end of the peninsula. The latter would have made possible the excavation of the Byzantine imperial palace and saved Istanbul from the morass of kitsch architecture that strangles this area today.35 Until 1968, Prost’s magnificent drawing of Hagia Sophia hung in the faculty room of the École des Beaux-Arts reminding all, in the words of the architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, that Prost derived “a vision of urbanism that combined the modernity of traffic with the heritage of geography and culture.”36 It must have been seen there by the architect Paul Tournon, who taught at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1925 and sought to introduce into the curriculum modernist materials and techniques. Among his commissions were spa- 32 33 34 35 36 Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 157. Ibid., 47–50, for part of this history. L’Oeuvre de Henri Prost (Paris, 1960), illustration after p. 26. Pierre Pinon, “The Archaeological Park,” Imparatorluk Başkentinden Cumhuriyet’in Modern Kentine: Henri Prost’un Istanbul Planlaması (1936–1951) (From the Imperial Capital to the Republican Modern City: Henri Prost’s Planning of Istanbul [1936–1951]) (Istanbul, 2010), 289–302. Jean-Louis Cohen, “From Grand Landscapes to Metropolises: Henri Prost,” Imparatorluk Başkentinden Cumhuriyet’in, 66. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 29 tially audacious reinforced concrete churches in France and Morocco.37 One, in particular, Saint-Ésprit in Paris (Figs. 1.8, 1.10), deserves special attention, because it is a copy of the Hagia Sophia. Squeezed into an available plot of land in the twelfth arrondissement, the church had only a narrow footprint on Avenue Daumesnil, so the architect called attention to the building by means of a single tall Art Deco tower constructed of pure forms with a few Gothic touches. The church itself lies inside a city block of apartments and shops, and thus, like Hagia Sophia, Saint-Ésprit is also an architecture of the interior. Due to the exigencies of the available land, Tournon could not replicate all of the ancillary domes of the model, but he did fashion an over-sailing central dome that spans twenty-two meters in diameter (Fig. 1.8). Thanks to the modern technology of ferroconcrete versus traditional masonry, the dome of Saint-Ésprit was completed in only twenty-seven days.38 The bare, grey concrete walls of the modern church, however, give the whole a cold sobriety that contrasts with the Byzantine building, an effect that is only partly relieved by later decoration. Yet the ring of windows of the dome, as in the Constantinopolitan model (Fig. 1.9), bathes the upper zones in warm light. Taken as a whole, Saint-Ésprit (Fig. 1.10) is almost a doll-house church next to the vastness of its prototype (Fig. 1.11). Miniaturized, the semi-domes of the apse and flanking apsidals become excessive detail that disrupt the interior unity. The thin bare concrete columns without bases or capitals are no match for those majestic green marble shafts of the sixth century with their Ionic capitals covered with acanthus leaves supporting more delicate carvings above, unless one is a dyed-in-the-wool modernist for whom less is once and for always more. The dome of Saint-Ésprit, however, is a different matter. It is something that both the court historian Procopius in the sixth and Le Corbusier in the twentieth century might appreciate, although for different reasons. Its gold mosaic lines simulate the ribbing of Hagia Sophia and reflect light back up to the summit of the dome. At Hagia Sophia, a Koranic inscription replaced the former Byzantine Christ Pantocrator at the center of the dome. In the same position at Saint-Ésprit, a different abstraction interprets the church’s dedication. (Fig. 1.12). The dove of the Holy Spirit emerges from the center of the Burning Bush 37 38 Most recently on Tournon, there was an exhibition at the Archives Nationales, Site de Fontainebleau: Le Don de l’architecture : Paul Tournon (1881–1964), Marion Tournon-Branly (1924), Archives nationales, site de Fontainebleau (14 September – 18 December 2013). I thank Pierre Serie for this reference. Giorgio Pigafetta and Antonella Mastrorilli, Paul Tournon architecte (1881–1964): Le “Moderniste sage” (Sprimont, 2004), 140–41. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 30 Nelson Figure 1.8 Paul Tournon. Saint-Esprit, Paris, dome. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. Figure 1.9 Figure 1.9 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, dome. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 31 Figure 1.10 Paul Tournon. Saint-Esprit, Paris. View to altar. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. Figure 1.11 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. View to altar. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 32 Nelson Figure 1.12 Marcel Imbs. Saint-Esprit, Paris. Burning Bush with Holy Spirit at summit of dome. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. that serves as the source of tongues of fire, radiating outward to the outer edges of the dome (Fig. 1.8). Also interwoven into this central composition is a cross, whose horizontal bars are held from behind by the hands of God the Father, as if he is above and beyond the church. On the vertical shafts are the letters A and Ω. In the four pendentives are symbols of the evangelists (Fig. 1.14), executed in gold and red by Venetian mosaicists after designs by Marcel Imbs, the creator of the entire dome program.39 These splendid Art Deco murals are in the style of Fernand Léger, as seen, for example, in a slightly early earlier and wholly secular painting now at the Guggenheim Museum (Fig. 1.13). Common to both are the abstract treatment of the faces, the eyebrows and nose formed of a single line, the large staring eyes, firm outlines, and stark contrast of color. In 39 Micheline Tissot-Gaucher, “Byzance ̀ Paris”: L’́glise du Saint-Esprit et les quelque 70 artistes qui l’ont d́coŕe (Paris, 2005), 52–53. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 33 Figure 1.13 Figure 1.13 Fernand Leger. Woman Holding a Vase (1927). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY. Figure 1.14 Marcel Imbs. Saint-Esprit, Paris. Symbol of Matthew. Photo: Robert S. Nelson. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 34 Nelson subject matter, the pendentive figures at Saint-Ésprit were inspired by the cherubim at Hagia Sophia, as they were known in the 1930s. Then their faces were covered by metal bosses from when the building had served as a mosque. Thus while the general idea of winged figures is Byzantine, the style is modern or perhaps Byzantine modern. In the foregoing, I have tried to look at Byzantine art through the eyes of modernist painters and architects in the first three decades of the twentieth century and to understand how they regarded it as simple and abstract. For Matisse, such work indicated the elevated mind of the Byzantine artist. For others, these qualities led in yet further directions. As William Butler Yeats put it: Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enameling… .40 A long historiographic excursus could follow here about historians of Byzantine art, who subscribed to the tenets of modernism and saw and interpreted Byzantine art as abstract, according to the aesthetics of the day.41 Instead I will offer an example of Byzantium’s modernism from a prominent book on Byzantine art by David Talbot Rice of 1935 at the end of the period that I have been considering. Aesthetic developments reach art history only after some delay: Some explanation of the author’s attitude should perhaps be given, for this book deals with Byzantine art, and an attempt has been made throughout to treat it as art. The approach is that of the art-historian, not that of the archaeologist. And it is moreover that of an art-historian who is interested in the modern movement, of one who sees in Byzantine art something which links it, as far as its aims and methods are concerned, with the art of to-day. More than one instance of similarity in aim and content has been alluded to in the text. The similarities are due to 40 41 “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928). What Yeats saw as a “deliberate artificiality” characterized Byzantine art, according to Sara Cornell, Art, A History of Changing Style (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983), 54. For endorsements of the Yeats’s view of Byzantium by Byzantinists, see Nelson, Hagia Sophia, p. 148 and notes. I made more comments on this matter in “To Say and To See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert S. Nelson (New York, 2000), 160–61. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV Modernism’s Byzantium Byzantium’s Modernism 35 Figure 1.15 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. Seraph in northeast pendentive (14th century). Photo: Robert S. Nelson. kindred feeling and to the abstract quality at the back of both, and it is the author’s belief that a study of the one may well help towards an understanding of the other.42 In recent years, Turkish archaeologists, working on the pendentives of Hagia Sophia, have removed the bosses and restored the cherubim, revealing one well preserved winged creature in the northeast pendentive (Fig. 1.15).43 The result is something that no one in the 1930s ever saw and something that breaks out of the chiastic trap of my title, which the quotation from Talbot Rice well exemplifies. I submit that the fourteenth- and the twentieth-century mosaics do not look alike. The modernist mosaic in Paris (Fig. 1.14) is indeed abstract, flat, non-naturalistic, stylized, something out of bodily nature. In contrast, the Byzantine mosaic (Fig. 1.15) is individualized, and corporeal, more the face of 42 43 D. Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1935), v–vi. Natalia B. Teteriatnikov, “The Mosaics of the Eastern Arch of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: Program and Liturgy,” Gesta 52 (2013): 65–66, fig. 6. This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV 36 Nelson an actual person than a heavenly being. It is an art of significance to be sure, but not of Roger Fry’s significant form. The complex task of defining the aesthetics of Byzantine art inevitably begins from the aesthetics of the present but cannot stop there.44 The study of historiography helps us appreciate the values and the motivations of prior generations—Byzantium’s modernism— and offers a more nuanced interpretation of modernism itself. Rather than being the utter rupture with the past its adherents sometimes proclaimed, the modern movement taught us to see the past through the eyes of its major artists. Byzantine art would never be the same again. 44 An important book for Byzantine attitudes to nature is Henry Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (New York, 2012). This is a digital offprint for restricted use only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV