Works of Progression

Who is Katarzyna Kobro? The obscure sculptor, born in Moscow to a German father and a Russian mother in 1898, is today known mostly to a coterie of specialists in a niche field of early 20th century abstract art. By the time of Kobro’s untimely death in Lodz, Poland, in 1951, most of her adventurous sculpture from the 1920s and 1930s had long since been destroyed, some by her own hand and some by the Nazis. What little that remained was soon obscured from the West by the Iron Curtain.

Who is Wladyslaw Strzeminski? Like Kobro, whom he married in 1921, the avant-garde painter today hovers beneath the radar of all but a few historians of Modern art. Strzeminski, in addition to making chromatic abstractions whose radical simplicity articulated the fundamentals of easel painting, published important theoretical texts on art (sometimes written with his wife). In 1931 he also assembled the Collection of Modern Art in Lodz, a sizable group of progressive works that made New York’s fledgling Museum of Modern Art look almost Victorian by comparison.

Kobro and Strzeminski are two of the riveting artists in the beguiling exhibition “Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930,” which opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It is loaded with unfamiliar names. Partly Kobro and Strzeminski draw your eye because they seem so artistically prescient. Their work anticipates features of American Minimalist painting and sculpture by more than 30 years.

Strzeminski’s paintings are visually taut surfaces of textured color. Shifts between crimson and orange or fleshy pink and off-white are crisp and blunt; but the textured application of paint and the balanced scale of the relative color-shapes are such that the broken fields read as flat, seamless surfaces. No illusion of foreground and background breaks their material spell, which has an almost spiritual edge of interconnectedness.

The paintings owe something to the older Russian, Kasimir Malevich, whose Suprematist art pioneered geometric abstraction. But they also put you in mind of Robert Ryman since the 1960s; he’s found endless ways to apply paint to a flat surface in poetic answer to the question: What is a painting?

For her part, Kobro conquered space in a way that feels even more radical. Her earliest sculpture (from 1924) is made from panes of glass, a yellow ball, a metal armature and a sinuous strip of wood whose contour suggests an elongated guitar. It shows her extrapolating Cubist still-life painting into three dimensions, turning recognizable objects into a concise articulation of a unified, transparent field of time and space.

Soon, all recognizable referents disappear. Kobro began to use sheets of painted steel, sometimes curved and often abutted at right angles, to make sculptures she called “Space Compositions.” Forget bronze, wood or stone, ; her industrial objects speak of the construction of new worlds-- without ever mimicking machine forms. Employing white, black and primary colors, the anti-illusionistic sculptures are committed to principles of clarity and organization.

Their compositions are also modular: Mathematical formulas, such as the Pythagorean Golden Section, guide relationships among individual parts, as well as between parts and the whole. (Simply described, the shorter is to the longer as the longer is to the sum of the shorter plus the longer.) They recall the Russian avant-garde sculpture of Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, but they also make you think of contemporary work by Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. The link is pointedly acknowledged by the pedestals LACMA designed for the display of Kobro’s tabletop sculptures, pedestals that recall LeWitt’s 1960s sculptures of open-form cubes.

LACMA curator Timothy O. Benson has brought together some 300 works for “Central European Avant-Gardes.” Not all of them are as invigorating and revelatory as Strzeminski’s paintings and Kobro’s sculptures. More common are curious groupings like a 1912 ash and leather settee designed by Josef Gocar, flanked by contemporaneous paintings by Vaclav Spala and Bohumil Kubista.

All three artists worked in Prague. Spala’s “Brick Factory,” painted in chunky pinks, greens, blues and grays, applies decorative color to an industrial image whose style is derivative of earlier Cubist landscapes by Parisian Georges Braque. Gocar’s settee is designed in zigzag shapes, joining the wood grain to create an illusion of three-dimensional Cubist facets. The crystalline facets in Spala’s landscape and Gocar’s settee take on the specter of hocus-pocus in Kubista’s Cubist painting of a hypnotist and his patient (imagine a crystal swinging in front of your eyes; you are getting sleepy, sleepy). These three works--by turns corny, flat-footed and too clever by half--demonstrate a longing for artistic modernity that far outstrips the available talent.

That longing, though, is among the most appealing aspects of this exhibition. You feel it around every corner. These are artists who wanted desperately to be modern, to escape the shackles and inequity of established society and to participate in the heady construction of a new paradigm. Some, like Kobro and Strzeminski, had the wherewithal to do it. Most didn’t.

Interestingly, some of the most compelling work in the show comes in nontraditional forms. There are editioned multiples like innovative prints (Laszlo Peri’s crisp, 1922-23 linocuts on shaped, die-cut paper look like little Frank Stellas). Mixed media works rely on machine printing, typography and found objects (the collages of Karel Teige and Jindrich Styrsky create pictorial poems). And cross-media experimentation aims for a whole new dimension (the psychology of perception as it relates to color and sound anchors work in music and stage design by Miroslav Ponc, Friedrich Kiesler, Josef Matthias Hauer and Franz Pomassl). The Modernist urge to “make it new” is strong.

And it was likely made even stronger by social circumstances. The exhibition focuses on artists working in 14 central European cities, including Weimar, Ljubljana, Budapest, Warsaw, Belgrade, Bucharest and Berlin. In 1910 these were mostly social and cultural capitals of old agrarian and feudal societies, which hadn’t participated in the century-long build-up of industrialization that characterized Western Europe. But they were not immune to the convulsions of the first industrialized conflict, World War I, which left a redesigned landscape of nation-states throughout Central Europe.

To the east lay Moscow, seat of a Utopian revolution. To the west was Paris, home of art’s established avant-garde. The conflicted territory in between became, in a sense, the site of the internationalization of the avant-garde. Along with the first “world” war came a rush toward the first “world” art. The turbulence of Expressionism was challenged by the clarity of formal relationships in International Constructivism, exemplified by Kobro and Strzeminski.

The exhibition begins to tell its complex story, which can better be unraveled now that the Cold War is over and access to art in the region is less restricted. Think of the episode as the prologue to today’s globalization, which is likewise having profound economic, social and artistic ramifications.

There are a few stumbles in the show. In one gallery, for example, Kobro’s remarkable “Space Compositions” are lined up in a wide alcove. That means you can’t walk around them. The sculptures become frontal, like paintings. The installation defeats the unity of geometric sculpture and fluid space that is Kobro’s distinctive achievement.

Reconstructions of lost works can also be a problem for shows that tackle this period. Between Hitler and Stalin, much avant-garde art in the region has not survived. Kiesler’s 1924 Constructivist display system, erected from two-by-fours and wooden slats painted red, white and black, is identified as a reconstruction, but only if you read the label closely. The same goes for a video projection of “Pharmacy,” a lost photomontage film from the 1930s by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson. They should be more clearly flagged as copies and approximations.

These are small matters, though, for an exceedingly important exhibition. LACMA has made a specialty of this kind of show over the last two decades, beginning with “The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930: New Perspectives,” and continuing with a variety of large exhibitions focused on Modern art in Germany. American museums typically look to France as the big story in Modern art. LACMA has distinguished itself by looking to other pockets of extraordinary activity, and “Central European Avant-Gardes” extends the singular tradition.

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“Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910-1930,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through June 2. Closed Wednesday.