France and the Visual Arts Since 1945 by Catherine Dossin

Author:Catherine Dossin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Against Le Mouvement (1955) and for an emancipation from Denise René Gallery

At the start of 1959, Marc Callewaert, art critic for Gazet van Antwerpen (Antwerp Gazette) and chairman of G58, along with abstract artist and member of the same association, Paul Van Hoeydonck, considered organizing an exhibition on mouvement.11 They sought assistance from Pol Bury, whose kinetic works had just been displayed in a solo exhibition at the Hessenhuis (January 17 to February 5, 1959). The planned event temporarily borrowed its title from the show Le Mouvement at Denise René Gallery in April 1955, a trailblazer in which Bury had taken part together with Jean Tinguely, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Robert Breer, all of whom would contribute to Vision in Motion—Motion in Vision.12 For the organization of the Hessenhuis event, Pol Bury got support from Jean Tinguely. They worked together from remote locations, the first in La Louvière (a village about 50 km away from Brussels), the second in Gelsenkirchen, in the German Ruhr region, where he was commissioned on the realization of two Mechanical Reliefs in the Musiktheater built by Werner Ruhnau.13 It is likely that the distance lead to misunderstandings between the local team and the other artists, which would result in a memorable fight between Tinguely and Van Hoeydonck during the opening of the exhibition, and Van Hoeydonck’s dismissal from the show.14 According to Van Hoeydonck he was derided for his leniency toward informal painting because he had attended the opening of Bert de Leeuw, an Antwerp painter and G58 member, that same evening. In response to this public shaming, Van Hoeydonck laughed at Tinguely and his consorts and belittled them as “ordinary and unoriginal neo-dadaists”:15 “It is useless to reinvent ‘Dada.’ Dada is dead and will stay buried. Our research should be serious.”16 After his brutal exclusion from the show, Van Hoeydonck received support from Henryk Berlewi, a founding figure of Polish avant-garde of the 1920s who had returned to the front stage since the important exhibition Forerunners of Abstract Art (Précurseurs de l’art abstrait).17

Quickly seen to epitomize a head-on confrontation between serious Modernism and jaunty Neo-Dadaism,18 this dissension certainly opposed incompatible approaches to movement, but the ins and outs of such an argument should not be underestimated. Admittedly Tinguely fundamentally disagreed with Van Hoeydonck’s abstract art. In the short text devoted to Van Hoeydonck and published in the catalog, Maurits Bilcke, writer and defender of geometrical abstract art, tackled the issue of movement with particular regard to the changing nature of Van Hoeydonck’s white monochromatic paintings, whose surfaces change in response to the movements of spectators and the incidence of light:

This monochrome and motionless painting causes in the viewer the urge to move. The painting remains unchanged in its statics but changes appearance under the action of light and depending on the angle of view. It is accordingly a flat plane which irresistibly induces movement in these works of art.19

Right after this analysis, Bilcke made a mistake and championed Van Hoeydonck as a forerunner in

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