Word: planar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...certainly since the time of Bernini and his followers in the 17th century. It moved, to put it roughly, from the lump to the web: from closed mass to open, constructed form. What happened to it then is set forth in a beautifully chosen, concise exhibition called "The Planar Dimension: Europe, 1912-1932," organized by Curator Margit Rowell, which opened last month at New York's Guggenheim Museum...
This conquest of the "planar dimension" has not, up till now, been properly explained by a museum show. Rowell has done the job with tonic intelligence, bringing together 114 sculptures done between 1912 and 1932 by 39 artists: French, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Italian and American. She has traced sculpture's passage from closed mass to open form with a precision of focus and a variety of little-known works that no earlier effort has matched. This may be the most important show of modernist sculpture in the past ten years...
...Russia, where there was virtually no tradition of sculpture, the planar impulse took two directions. One-as its name, suprematism, indicates-tried to transcend the material world. The painter Kasimir Malevich and his students, like Ilya Chashnik, devised reliefs and models that in their crisscross of small rectangular shapes and larger blocks resemble models for imaginary buildings or cities. They were, in a very rarefied sense, social blueprints, though quite unworkable ones. Perhaps Russia was the only country in which artists could seriously imagine that abstract art might attain the moral compulsion of a holy picture. Chashnik's Large...
Such experiments look recondite in the '70s, and they must have looked quite peripheral when they were done. The audience for them was small compared with that for a radical poet like Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the link that planar sculp ture sought between art and technology was often frustrated by shortages of materials and know-how. Still, these works cast a long shadow. The most surprising aspect of the show is the quality of some of the lesser known artists whose work Curator Rowell has ferreted out. One was Katarzyna Kobro, a Russian woman who worked with Malevich...
...studies of guitars; Cubist fragments, staccato rhythms in line and space, the illusion of projected sound created by the protruding opening in his "Guitar" sculpture. Blazing color and musical notes, his "Three Musicians" link abstract shape to abstract shape to become the instruments they are holding, while his multi-planar "Harlequin" dances jerkily to the tune of bright diamonds and squares...