The guide at the AGO last Wednesday night was pleasant and chatty, but a bit confused and I didn't understand why. I'd gone to the House that Gehry (re)Built to see the Frans Masereel exhibit. It had been held over, she told me, for a week past its announced closing and she couldn't quite see why. Well, I thought dismissively, she doesn't get it. Lost Generation Paris still continues to excite and mystify us - as it should - almost 80 years after even the hardiest of the Prohibition-escaping, trust fund-spending tourists had caught the last steamer back to New York. (I know Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney and others remained en place, but they weren't playing at art.) Well, I was a little unfair to my guide. She did get it. The Masereel exhibit was a letdown. It was small, with about 15 works (I neglected to count them) all set off in a side room so obscure the first guide I asked for directions hadn't a clue where it was.
Then there were the works themselves, a mixture of water colours and woodcuts Masereel (Belgian 1889-1972) produced over a long career. I'd gone to the AGO in anticipation of some excitement, some devilry, some new way into a decade that has been pored over - and pawed over. After all, Masereel was in Paris in the 1920s: "...We lived in an atmosphere of euphoria, youth and enthusiasm that can hardly be imagined today" is how the famed German-French art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler described it. Well, none of that euphoria, youth and enthusiasm was evident in the works I was most interested in, those from 1920s Paris. They weren't dull, exactly, but stolid, plodding and one - City Lights 14 July, 1925 - was utterly joyless, no small feat if you've ever been to Paris on Bastille Day. City Lights, incidentally, viewed from 10 feet away reminded me for all the world of some painting by Bernard Buffet (gawd.) Another work - The Followers 1926 - was foreboding: Two men, one with porcine features, the other whose face appeared to be carved in wood, follow closely behind two women, in a dark, shuttered street. Their wives? A pair of prostitutes? The reason for such close proximity? I don't know. I wondered about that going home.
The two works that did engage me, no, neither was Ascension 1968, a banal woodcut reflecting the riots of May 1968 in Paris but saying nothing about their causes or effects, were Swannee River 1926 and Having Tea 1925. The former is the curiously static depiction of a Left Bank jazz club featuring black musicians, although an element of excitement does creep in at last! at last! since the head of the Lost Generation's iconic Bad Girl, Kiki de Montparnasse (lover and model for many an artist including Man Ray), is tucked away in the bottom right hand corner. The latter, again curiously static for such a fluid age, shows a young-ish bourgeois couple at rest if not at peace. His fingers are steepled, but on his lap rather than held upright, a sign of lost authority? High over his right shoulder the sun shines weakly. Could the couple be Harry and Caresse Crosby? These gadabout, mad about Lost Generation swells founded and ran Black Sun Press on Harry's family's banking fortune largely to publish Harry's unremarkable poetry and that of others far more talented and better remembered. I'll get over my disappointment, but my visit was a salutary reminder that art is neither an exercise in voyeurism nor a précis of the past. Oh, and Harry Crosby shot his girlfriend in New York in 1929 and then killed himself.
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