Bringing it all back home

The regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny has forged substantial links with Europe, resulting in the staging of highly ambitious shows in the town, writes AIDAN DUNNE

IT IS SURPRISING, in a good way, to come across an exhibition with the distinctive title Modernisme Activisme Bauhaus: Constructive Tendencies in Hungarian Art 1910-1930at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny. It wouldn't be at all surprising if it were on at the National Gallery of Ireland, say, or at IMMA, but it seems somehow unlikely for Donegal. How did a regional centre come to deliver such a show, and to follow it through with a title that lays it on the line to such an extent? If you climb the hill towards the cultural centre you won't be labouring under the misapprehension that you're in for some light entertainment courtesy of the French Impressionists, that's for sure.

In fact, the centre has forged substantial links with Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe, via Paris, over the last few years, resulting in last year’s Victor Vasarely Retrospective, in a Benoit Mandelbrot exhibition, and now in the present, highly ambitious show. It is drawn from the extensive collection of the Janus Pannonius Museum in Paris, and it focuses chiefly on the years immediately prior to and following on the Constructivists’ heyday, which can be loosely identified as the four or five years following the Russian Revolution in October 1917. Following the revolution, a small number of avant- garde artists occupied powerful official positions in the Soviet administration.

It’s impossible to mention Hungarian Constructivism without sketching in the wider background of pre- and post-revolutionary Russian art. For a number of years early in the 20th century, roughly from about 1915 to sometime in the 1920s, it seemed as if the boundaries between art, design, politics and technology had disappeared in Russia, as the artistic avant-garde became caught up in revolutionary fervour. The Russian Constructivists and those associated with them believed that the invention of a radically new art went hand in hand with the invention of a radically new society and, more, art should be instrumental in shaping that society and should, in turn, be shaped by it. Traditional aesthetic values, a product of the decadent bourgeoisie, were out the door. Social utility was in, with fine artists harnessed to all manner of practical tasks.

The result was an extraordinary flowering of creativity across a wide range of disciplines, as artists, architects and designers applied their minds to communications, propaganda, celebratory spectacles, housing, education and myriad other areas, coming up with radical ideas of vaunting ambition. Of course, it all ended badly, in various ways. Predictably, the leading lights were highly opinionated and fractious individuals who developed mutually exclusive visions and theories. Rows brewed, blows were exchanged. The Supremacists set themselves up in ideological opposition to the Constructivists. Vladimir Tatlin came out in favour of the complete abolition of art. Wassily Kandinsky went on to pursue the spiritual dimensions of Abstraction.

THERE WERE more practical problems as well. The Soviet Union was technologically backward to an unimaginable degree, in no way equipped to deliver on utopian schemes heavily dependent on industrial sophistication, so the vast majority of the projects proposed by the artists never saw the light of day and were strictly theoretical, surviving only in the form of maquettes, proposals and preparatory sketches and notes. If they survived at all, that is, for as they fell out of fav- our many of the avant-garde were forced underground and much material simply disappeared.

Radical aesthetics did not necessarily sit well with the notional audience, the proletariat, or for that matter with the political elite. Trotsky backed the Constructivists, but his influence had begun to wane even before Lenin’s illness and eventual death in 1924, and Stalin’s priorities were rather different. As the avant-garde abandoned traditional forms, conservative painters reasserted their position, to the extent that a stultifying Socialist Realism became the official artistic style of the state.

Not that the efforts of the Constructivists were fruitless. Many of the artists went on, individually, to achieve extraordinary things. The mixed discipline art schools initiated in post-revolutionary Russia, substantially shaped by Kandinsky, led on to the Bauhaus and the template for much contemporary third level art and design education. In many ways the challenge the Constructivists made to fine artists, that their work should be socially useful in the most concrete manner imaginable, still stands today.

Intriguingly, given that social utility was the cornerstone of Constructivism, its roots are discernible in works devoid of any particular political intentions: that is, Cubism as developed in Paris by Picasso, Braque and their contemporaries. Picasso was particularly important. Artists from Russia and Eastern Europe, as from elsewhere, flocked to Paris. Art historian József Sárkány, writing in the catalogue of the Letterkenny show, points to expressionism, and to the work of Cezanne and the Cubists as being crucial, infused with the spirit of the times and adapted by the politically engaged, left-leaning Hungarian artists’ groups. They worked in parallel with and were hugely influenced by the core of the Russian avant-garde, and they were closely involved in the development of the Bauhaus.

There is a vigour and immediacy to the work in Letterkenny. The term deconstruction is at least as apt as constructivist. Even the earlier pieces, from 1910 onwards, reflect a determination to take old forms and ideas apart, to move beyond pictorial decoration as an aim. Thus far, the artists latch onto and set about exploring the freedoms bestowed by Cubism but, as with the first phase of Cubism in Paris, there is a rawness to their efforts, with no concessions made to formal niceties at all.

Many works are individually outstanding. Denes Valeria’s 1912 juxtaposition of elements of a still life composition and Parisian rooftops is expansive and liberating. Move on a few years and Sándor Galimberti’s circular, panoramic view of Amsterdam is a brilliant, more pictorially cohesive but still quite uncompromising. In terms of their political fortunes, however, the Hungarian artists associated with left-wing movements fared considerably less well than their Russian counterpart. A seizure of power by the communist party early in 1919 was short lived and violent, and subsequent events do not reflect well on any of the protagonists. The failure of the communist government meant that most of the artists had no option but exile.

AS THE WORK from the 1920s on view in Letterkenny amply demonstrates, for the most part they thrived in exile, settling into the radical aesthetic life of Berlin. László Moholy-Nagy lectured at the Bauhaus. Like Farkas Molnár, Alfred Forbat worked as an architect in the studio of Walter Gropius and, historian Krisztina Passuth writes, encouraged many Hungarian artists to study at the Bauhaus, perpetuating Constructivist ideas. András Weininger became an important Bauhaus figure. All were productive, highly capable artists in their own right as well in the fields of painting and the graphic arts.

Modernisme Activisme Bauhaus provides a fascinating insight into a turbulent, exciting moment in modernity, when art, politics and technology fused as never before. Its usefully supplemented by an exhibition of architectural models of the work of Eileen Grey, in the County Museum, and by a very good show, The Abstract Eye, drawn substantially from private collections, of the work of two other pioneers of Irish modernism, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, in the Glebe Gallery in Church Hill, which also hosts an exhibition of photographs by the Hungarian-born György Kepes whose long career in art and education perfectly embodies the ideals of the early Constructivists.

Modernism, Activism, Bauhaus: Constructive Tendencies in Hungary 1910-1930. Featuring leading avant-garde artists of the period. Plus in Workshop 1: László Moholy-Nagy – A Lightplay Black White Gray. Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny. Until Sep 26; Eileen Gray – Maquettes. The work of the Irish designer. The County Museum, Letterkenny. Until Aug 29; The Abstract Eye. Abstract works by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. Plus Photographs by György Kepes (1906-2002). Glebe Gallery, Church Hill. Until Sep 26.