Les fleurs américaines
The ousting of Paris by New York as the centre of the art world sparked an intense debate that persists today. For many critics, the shift was due to the formal superiority of Abstract Expressionism. For Serge Guilbaut, author of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983), on the other hand, the reasons were more political and historical than artistic. The exhibition ‘Les fleurs américaines’ (American Flowers) adopted a comparable approach: eliding formal and aesthetic breakthroughs, it instead emphasized America’s domineering role vis-à-vis Europe in the art milieu of the time. More than just a look back at the past, it also contested the ideals of modern art as seen from the vantage point of the present: by choosing to display only unsigned, amateurish reproductions of Modern masterpieces, it distanced itself from the notions of uniqueness, authenticity and artistic genius still associated with these works. These copies undermined the credibility of the artist, the art work and art history itself, enacting the appropriationist strategies of Postmodernism.
Devised by Le Plateau guest curators Élodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel, in collaboration with the Salon de Fleurus, New York, and the Museum of American Art (MoAA), Berlin, ‘Les fleurs américaines’ revolved around the achievements of three Americans: collector Gertrude Stein, MoMA founding director Alfred Barr Jr. and curator Dorothy Miller. Eschewing art-historical accuracy, it comprised approximate reconstructions of their key exhibitions or methods of display, linked together by a semi-fictional story whose episodes unfolded over several wall texts. The first section consisted of an evocation of Stein’s salon at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris, where works by Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso – so the nearby wall text informed us – were exhibited together in a single room for the first time. The text then jumps to Barr, who, inspired by Stein’s collection, broke with the prevalent mode of museological display based on national schools: his highly influential diagram, published on the cover of the catalogue for his exhibition ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ (1936), was organized around international movements beginning with Cézanne, followed by Picasso and Cubism to the left and Matisse and Fauvism to the right. At the same time, however, the exhibition leaflet called these statements into question, pointing out that reproductions do not have the same meaning as originals, and consequently may generate narratives that diverge from the received history of art. Ostensibly an inquiry into the genesis of modern art, this compelling, albeit disorientating, exhibition turned out to be a meditation on the nature of truth: by casting doubt on its own allegations, it questioned the veracity of art history as a whole.
Barr’s epoch-defining layout opened the second section of ‘Les fleurs américaines’, which reconstituted two of his exhibitions at MoMA from 1936: ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’. Copied from photographs rather than direct observation, paintings of works by Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, René Magritte and Kurt Schwitters jostled with each other on the walls. These imitations without originals eschewed mechanical reproduction in favour of inaccuracy and individuality, thereby confounding the viewer’s memories and experiences of the original works. Also featured was a miniature museum containing painted 1:10 reproductions of these works, which demonstrated that a small copy is equivalent to a full-size one in terms of its mnemonic function and symbolic power. Whereas these miniatures mocked the notion of magnitude, the full-size copies on the walls derided the concepts of attribution, style and chronology: unsigned and figurative – insofar as they represented other paintings – they were dated 100 years later than the originals they stood in for. With its expanded take on the reproduction’s subversive power, ‘Les fleurs américaines’ offered a thought-provoking answer to the question Rosalind Krauss asked in her 1981 essay ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’: ‘What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy?’
Whereas the first two sections of ‘Les fleurs américaines’ focused on European art as seen through American eyes, the final part looked at how MoMA began to incorporate American artists into its account of modern art. An evocation of Miller’s 1955 travelling exhibition ‘50 Ans d’art aux États-Unis’ (50 Years of Art in the United States), it featured pallid copies of reproductions of works by Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, among others. These self-evident fakes not only lent an aura of unreality to the genuine catalogues of the period displayed in vitrines nearby, but also contested the catalogues’ superior status – for the images they contain are but reproductions too. By deconstructing the concept of singularity, the curators of ‘Les fleurs américaines’ exposed the artifices on which artistic production is based. Perspicacious and far-sighted though it may have been, its elision of art’s formal and aesthetic qualities ultimately backfired on itself: in a strange reversal, the insubstantial works on display reinforced rather than detracted from modern art’s appeal.
