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拍品专文
Together, the pair of paintings by Fritz Glarner in Mica Ertegun’s collection offer a powerful illustration of the artist’s unique approach to abstraction, their delicately balanced surfaces and carefully composed studies of space and color revealing the artist’s restrained, measured language of form. By the time Swiss-born Glarner arrived in New York in 1936, he had spent almost a decade living and working in Paris, absorbing the revolutionary ideas and visual styles championed by the city’s artistic avant-garde, from Futurism to Cubism, Purism to Surrealism. However, it was the language of De Stijl, and in particular the elegant purity of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings, which left an indelible mark on Glarner’s imagination. Though Glarner and Mondrian had met on occasion in Paris during the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was only after the Dutch artist’s arrival in New York in 1940 that their friendship truly blossomed. A rich exchange of ideas between the two émigrés ensued, with the pair meeting regularly both at Glarner's home and in Mondrian’s studio on 59th Street. While Glarner was still working towards his mature style at this time, constantly testing and refining his artistic theories as he hovered on the edge of a breakthrough, Mondrian had entered a period of intensive experimentation in his painting, influenced by the dynamic energy of the modern metropolis of New York.
Following Mondrian’s untimely death at the beginning of 1944, Glarner stepped away from painting for almost a year, focusing instead on drawing, as he sought to clarify his artistic ideas and assimilate all that he had learned from Mondrian during their time together. Through their lively conversations and exchanges, the two comrades had fueled one another’s artistic developments, leading Glarner to proclaim: “[Mondrian] was my friend; he was my master” (quoted in J.R. Lane and S.C. Larsen, eds., Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1927-1944, exh. cat., Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, New York, 1983, p. 148). The canvases which emerged in the aftermath of this short break illustrate the originality and nuance with which Glarner approached the Neo-Plastic aesthetic, while also revealing the primary artistic challenges that would occupy the painter for the rest of his career.
For Glarner, the careful ordering of form stood at the very core of his art, as he focused on the similarities and dissonances conjured between each geometric shape and its neighbor as they interacted with one another. Expanding upon the restricted vocabulary of forms and colors that had marked Mondrian’s canvases, the artist began to introduce diagonal lines to his work, creating acute and obtuse angles and converting rectangles into trapezoids which expand and recede in opposing directions, generating a lively pattern of overlapping forms. During a lecture in New York in February 1949, Glarner expressed how important this liberation from rectangularity had been to him: “The diagonal or the incline, which I have introduced into my paintings, creates a stronger dynamic movement. The diagonal establishes the structure, which determines the space and liberates the form” (quoted in Fritz Glarner, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bern, 1972, n.p.). Indeed, due to the slant of their shared edges, these wedges appear to pulsate back and forth within his paintings, creating an intense rhythmic energy that seems to push against the very limits of the canvas. He also began to explore the possibilities of different shaped canvases, using unorthodox, circular tondo supports, superimposing the system of intersecting geometric forms on a round picture surface to achieve an effect he termed the “squaring of the circle.”
In contrast to Mondrian, whose classic grids and flat planes seem fixed in place, Glarner’s forms slip and shift, resulting in an effect which the artist called “pumping planes,” whereby shape and ground appear to alternate upon the canvas. This connection between form and space, foreground and background, is so intimate in his paintings that they become of equal importance within the compositional structure, blending and shifting before our eyes. “When the form area and the space area are of the same structure, a new aspect arises in which pure means can reveal their intrinsic expression,” the artist explained. “It is my belief that the truth will manifest itself more clearly through this new condition” (quoted in K.E. Willers, Between Mondrian and Minimalism, Neo-Plasticism in America, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991, n.p.). Color was an important tool in achieving this sensation, with the artist assigning each form a distinct hue from a strictly limited palette of primary colors and removing any demarcating lines between them, to allow a more direct interaction between each pigment. Whereas the shades of black, white, red, yellow and blue were all standardized within his compositions, gray appeared in a diversity of tones, subtly modulated to enhance or reduce the pictorial rhythm in different areas of the composition.
Through his painterly experiments, Glarner expanded the limits of the Neo-Plastic style in unexpected ways, developing an abstract language that would prove highly influential for generations of young American artists through the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, as with Mondrian’s compositions from the early 1940s, there is a dynamic spirit to Glarner’s work, suggesting an inspiration beyond just pure, abstract form. As Dorothy C. Miller explained: “His work is severely non-objective but it always has its roots in nature, or, as he would say, life. This ‘life’ is that of the modern city, specifically the city of New York. It is a life perceived and felt, not filtered through subject matter, casual observation or conventional associations” (“Fritz Glarner,” in L. Goodrich, New Art in America: Fifty Painters of the 20th Century, Greenwich, 1957, p. 225).
Following Mondrian’s untimely death at the beginning of 1944, Glarner stepped away from painting for almost a year, focusing instead on drawing, as he sought to clarify his artistic ideas and assimilate all that he had learned from Mondrian during their time together. Through their lively conversations and exchanges, the two comrades had fueled one another’s artistic developments, leading Glarner to proclaim: “[Mondrian] was my friend; he was my master” (quoted in J.R. Lane and S.C. Larsen, eds., Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America 1927-1944, exh. cat., Carnegie Institute Museum of Art, New York, 1983, p. 148). The canvases which emerged in the aftermath of this short break illustrate the originality and nuance with which Glarner approached the Neo-Plastic aesthetic, while also revealing the primary artistic challenges that would occupy the painter for the rest of his career.
For Glarner, the careful ordering of form stood at the very core of his art, as he focused on the similarities and dissonances conjured between each geometric shape and its neighbor as they interacted with one another. Expanding upon the restricted vocabulary of forms and colors that had marked Mondrian’s canvases, the artist began to introduce diagonal lines to his work, creating acute and obtuse angles and converting rectangles into trapezoids which expand and recede in opposing directions, generating a lively pattern of overlapping forms. During a lecture in New York in February 1949, Glarner expressed how important this liberation from rectangularity had been to him: “The diagonal or the incline, which I have introduced into my paintings, creates a stronger dynamic movement. The diagonal establishes the structure, which determines the space and liberates the form” (quoted in Fritz Glarner, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bern, 1972, n.p.). Indeed, due to the slant of their shared edges, these wedges appear to pulsate back and forth within his paintings, creating an intense rhythmic energy that seems to push against the very limits of the canvas. He also began to explore the possibilities of different shaped canvases, using unorthodox, circular tondo supports, superimposing the system of intersecting geometric forms on a round picture surface to achieve an effect he termed the “squaring of the circle.”
In contrast to Mondrian, whose classic grids and flat planes seem fixed in place, Glarner’s forms slip and shift, resulting in an effect which the artist called “pumping planes,” whereby shape and ground appear to alternate upon the canvas. This connection between form and space, foreground and background, is so intimate in his paintings that they become of equal importance within the compositional structure, blending and shifting before our eyes. “When the form area and the space area are of the same structure, a new aspect arises in which pure means can reveal their intrinsic expression,” the artist explained. “It is my belief that the truth will manifest itself more clearly through this new condition” (quoted in K.E. Willers, Between Mondrian and Minimalism, Neo-Plasticism in America, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991, n.p.). Color was an important tool in achieving this sensation, with the artist assigning each form a distinct hue from a strictly limited palette of primary colors and removing any demarcating lines between them, to allow a more direct interaction between each pigment. Whereas the shades of black, white, red, yellow and blue were all standardized within his compositions, gray appeared in a diversity of tones, subtly modulated to enhance or reduce the pictorial rhythm in different areas of the composition.
Through his painterly experiments, Glarner expanded the limits of the Neo-Plastic style in unexpected ways, developing an abstract language that would prove highly influential for generations of young American artists through the middle decades of the twentieth century. However, as with Mondrian’s compositions from the early 1940s, there is a dynamic spirit to Glarner’s work, suggesting an inspiration beyond just pure, abstract form. As Dorothy C. Miller explained: “His work is severely non-objective but it always has its roots in nature, or, as he would say, life. This ‘life’ is that of the modern city, specifically the city of New York. It is a life perceived and felt, not filtered through subject matter, casual observation or conventional associations” (“Fritz Glarner,” in L. Goodrich, New Art in America: Fifty Painters of the 20th Century, Greenwich, 1957, p. 225).