Cercle et Carré
The
exhibition organised by the group Cercle et Carré (Circle and
Square) took place at the Galerie 23, Paris, between 18th April and
1st May 1930. It included roughly 140 works by 50 artists including Piet
Mondrian, Georges Vantongerloo, Luigi Russolo, Jean (Hans) and Sophie Taeuber
Arp, Otto and Adya Can Rees, Joaquín Torres-García, Wassily Kandinsky, Louis Moholy-Nagy,
Kurt Schwitters, Henry Stazewski, Joseph Stella, Vordemberge-Gildewart, Domela,
Ferdinand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Antoine Pevsner and was
co-ordinated by Michel Seuphor.
Some of the events
leading to this group forming were:
1921 Michel Seuphor and Josef Peeters in
Antwerp founded the magazine Het Overzicht which published a review of
international modern art.
1923 Seuphor met Mondrian in Paris.
1927 Seuphor and Paul Dermée founded the
magazine Les Documents Internationaux de L’Esprit Nouveau.
In 1929 the group was formed which became known as Cercle
et Carré to further abstract art and to oppose the Surrealists’ regression
to academicism.
They published a magazine which reached three issues and had a
circulation of around 1200 copies. There was no precise editorial policy. It
was a loose aggregate of the aforementioned artists who contributed articles on
whatever they pleased. The movements represented by the artists were diverse
and no longer on the cutting edge of the avant-garde. They represented de Stijl
and neo-plasticism, Purism, Futurism and Constructivism. What united the
contributors was, of necessity, fairly vague, internationalist and sometimes mystical.
It is probably best expressed by Seuphor’s Pour la Défense d’une
Architecture in Cercle et Carré 1. He agreed with the Futurists that
artists must express and even accelerate time. He mentions such Purist concerns
as logical construction, rationality and mathematics. It also aligns well with Constructivism
but the ultimate aim of art in this non-manifesto is the De Stijl and Kandinsky
priority which is expressing the spiritual quintessence of universal reality,
beauty and truth.
To summarise, in Seuphor’s words, the role of the artist is ‘to
establish upon the basis of a severe structure, simple and unadorned in all its
parts, and according to a principle of close unity with this undisguised structure,
an architecture that , by the technical and physical methods peculiar to the
age, expresses in a clear language the imminent and immutable truth and
reflects in its particular organisation the magnificent order of the universe.’
It is, then, something of a ragbag of styles and ideas which had
been separately and more clearly enunciated earlier. It failed to sufficiently revitalise
the ideas and ideals of the abstract tendency in those artists. It merely, like
its birthplace Paris, offered a meeting ground for contemporary trends and bore
witness to the fluctuations of past and future fashion.
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