Early fog on the Thames

The summer show at the Hayward Gallery here in London, 'Undercover Surrealism: Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille', touches on the subject of my Ph.D. thesis and book 'Carl Einstein in Documents and his collaboration with Georges Bataille'.

Documents was a Parisian art magazine (1929-1931) and the show's main focus is going to be the magazine. It opens next week.

Some fog can be detected on the Thames, coming from the press relations department of the Hayward which has been doing some advance publicity (For those not familiar with London, the Hayward is located in the South Bank Centre complex which runs, as its name suggests, along the south bank of the river). Not that the fog is the fault of the press department. It must be coming from on higher.

The new Director of the Gallery, Ralph Rugoff, starts this week. What a show to arrive into. Talk about a can of worms!

There have been a number of articles in the newspapers about the show, giving an inflated idea of Bataille's role in Documents.

The biggest trailer piece that I've come across was in Saturday's Guardian 'All becomes clear in anamorphic painting mystery', written by arts correspondent Charlotte Higgins. 'All becomes unclear in anamorphic painting mystery' would be more like it.  Higgins' prose is not the problem. She writes clearly. It is the Hayward fog between her lines.

Higgins' piece is a story i.e. a Guardian exclusive. As a former press officer, I know the score  here.  The way to get a bit of mileage out of a small story - to get a nice bit of space and a pic or two - is to offer it as an exclusive to one newspaper. 

Higgins reports that a lost painting representing St. Anthony of Padua and Jesus that was reproduced juxtaposed to two Salvador Dalí paintings in Documents No. 4, 1929 (the magazine's first year, page 229) has been found late on for the show, where it will hang alongside one of the Dalís with which it appeared in Documents. Good on you, St. Anthony, patron saint of lost things!

I've written to Higgins pointing out a couple of problems with her article, also letting her know that I wrote to her colleague Adrian Searle last week alerting him to a potential problem with the show. It appears to be based on a once current but outdated premise, that Documents was Bataille's magazine. This has been disproven by recent scholarly literature. But two of the main relevant articles, by Klaus Kiefer and Uwe Fleckner, are in German and, unfortunately, they have not been translated^1.

Documents is described in the Guardian article as a a review created by the scholar, philosopher and pornographer Georges Bataille. This is not the case. Bataille was involved in setting up the magazine but many people were, and among them people more centrally involved than he was, notably a German writer and art critic Carl Einstein - on whom I wrote my thesis - and an art dealer Georges Wildenstein.

In describing the historical connections between Salvador Dali's painting 'Bather' and the St. Anthony painting that has just been turned up, The Guardian quotes Dawn Ades, curator of the show and a professor at the University of Essex , as saying that Bataille put the images together. This is unlikely. It is more likely that Carl Einstein put the images together. I will go into that in detail in a further post, or someone else, I imagine, will pick it up.

Among the raft of reasons to attribute that page to Einstein, here is one quick one  before I go to bed. Pointing to the hidden structural similarity between the St Anthony and Dali paintings is the kind of obscure and wonderful point that an art historian is likely to make. Carl Einstein was the only art historian among Documents' editors. Now Bataille was a man of many gifts but an art historian he was not.

The claim could simply be an outgrowth of the flawed premise of the show, that Documents was Bataille's baby.

It sounds like Bataille might in for a bit of canonisation by the Thames this summer, well, a cross between canonisation and some kind of new Mithras cult.

Is England about to finally find its St. George(s)? What will they make of it in Paris or, closer to home, in Vézelay (the small town with the great cathedral in the Department of the Yonne where Bataille had his house in the country and where he is buried)? What will they make of it outre-Rhin? Documents may have appeared in French but was a  Franco-German collaboration.

Here are links to some other of the advance reports:

Mark Hudson in The Observer, 23/4/06
Martin Gayford in The Telegraph, 29/4/06
Morgan Falconer in The Times, 29/04/06
A critic on the Independent whose name I can't remember and can't look up, as its site is temporarily down but hopefully will be up again by the time that you might want to click on this

 

Notes

1. Klaus Kiefer, 'Die Ethnologisierung des kunstkritischen Diskurses – Carl Einsteins Beitrag zu Documents' in Élan Vital oder Das Auge des Eros, exhibition catalogue, Haus der Kunst, Münich, 1994, pp. 70-105.
Uwe Fleckner, 'Der Kampf visueller Erfahrungen. Surrealistische Bildrhetorik und photographischer Essay in Carl Einsteins Zeitschrift »Documents«' in Begierde im Blick. Surrealistische Photographie, Ed. Uwe M. Schneede, exhibition catalogue, Hamburger Kunsthalle 2005, pp. 22-31.

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