Nor should the gentle reader, at this point, accuse us of dogmatizing beyond our depth. In order to understand how certain of the French politicians (observing that the German mark had tobogganed and that Germany had acquitted her internal obligations in depreciated currency and that the mark had been stabilized and that now Germany—despite France’s best efforts—stood upon her feet) decided to turn a similar trick themselves with the franc, we need not possess the mentality of a Maynard Keynes. Nor is it at all probable that we suffer from auditory hallucinations when we hear these shrewd messieurs saying to each other: “Why not divert the attention of the French people in particular and of the world in general from our primary problem, France’s internal debt, to our secondary problem, France’s foreign indebtedness? To accomplish this will not be difficult. Let us promulgate a thoroughly organised newspaper campaign against ‘foreigners’ on the ground that said ‘foreigners’ (whom we shall slowly but surely reveal in their true colours, as our former allies, the English and more particularly the Americans) ‘speculate’ and thereby ruin the franc. Mischief being afoot, let us convert into dollars whatever francs we already possess and can beg or borrow; whereupon the franc will, so to speak, ruin itself. We shall then be able to do as Germany did: pay off our debts to our people in depreciated paper. Like the Germans, we shall be able to demand that our currency be stabilized at a low point. Our peasants will thus be the losers; we ourselves—having dollars, not francs, in our pockets—cannot possibly suffer—and tout va bien qui finit bien.”
Whosoever disapproves of this possibly startling analysis is hereby cordially invited to furnish a better explanation of existing conditions. There is no denying that all is not well. There is also no denying that the xenophobia camouflage has proved singularly unsuccessful. Of course, insults to “foreigners” and demonstrations against Americans do occur. But these insults and demonstrations are not authentic and almost everybody knows it—even the frantically ignorant American newspaper editors who wonderingly state that it is “well-dressed crowds” who are to blame, not honest-to-goodness Hell-bent-for-election mobs. In point of fact, such picturesque crises de nerfs are completely unspontaneous. They are staged by an element whose motto is sauve qui peut, whose political ideals are fascist and whose ability to combine the science of politics with the art of profiteering is well known to anyone even superficially acquainted with la belle France of postbellum days. Reduced to its lowest terms, the supposedly obscure situation becomes, alas, all too obvious. And what, precisely, do we mean by “lowest terms”? We mean this: a certain group of French profiteers, having succeeded in not fighting the war and having partially succeeded in debasing the franc for their own benefit, are now trying to “cover up”—by making, of the erstwhile dearly beloved United States of America, one vast substantial goat.
From Vanity Fair, January 1927.
IVAN NARB: ABSTRACT SCULPTOR OF THE COSMIC
His esoteric aesthetique explained so that even you can understand it
By Gwendolyn Orloff
That the recent exhibition of abstract sculpture by Ivan Narb proved the big aesthetic event of 1926 is far from surprising—given the overwhelming originality of the sculptor’s conceptions and the bewildering variety of the media employed (tin cans, sealing wax, hay wire, candlegrease, birchbark, bottle glass, gingerbread, chewing gum, etc.) as well as the quite preposterous mastery of his materials which Narb displays at every turn.
The surprising thing is that, although no foreigner has ever been more ecstatically taken to the exclusive hearts of New York’s socially elect—no aesthetic more frantically welcomed by the esoteric salons of America’s intelligentsia, no celebrity more frantically discussed, no divinity more inordinately worshipped—the immutable personality of Ivan Narb remains just as simple and sincere, just as straight-forward and unaffected, as when he was hoeing his father’s potatoes on the solitary outskirts of the tiny hamlet of Blurb, in Latvia, and dreaming of the day when each animate or inanimate thing—a rose, a button, a cloud, an eyebrow, a mountain, a particular time of day, nay, even a potato—would flower forth in new and cosmic forms.
No one realizes better than Mrs. Harry Payne Vanderbilt how unspoiled and naif this ultramodern Michelangelo has remained, despite all the honours showered upon him during the past few months. Mrs. Vanderbilt (who numbers among her protégés practically every really well-known artist in America) arrived from Paris to find all tongues wagging with praise of Ivan Narb, whom she had never met nor, until that moment, heard of. Naturally she decided to give a little dinner for this social lion and invite everyone of intellectual prominence, from Otto Kahn to Irving Berlin. The dinner hour drew near and so did the guests, both invited and uninvited—but not Ivan Narb.
As time passed Mrs. Vanderbilt was on the verge of relinquishing all hope. But, suddenly, a tumult soared above the din of cerebral conversation and Ivan Narb himself, pursued by a round dozen of hysterical domestics, burst into view, wearing (to the disappointment of many present, including Mrs. Cornelius Astor and more especially Mr. William Wrigley, Jr.) a pair of B.V.D.s, and brandishing in one hand a red apple which he immediately presented to Dr. Frank Crane, murmuring, “Poo-ur twaw!” (for thee alone). This little incident is only one out of a thousand which we might quote to prove how lightly Ivan Narb takes pomp and circumstance.
BADLY BENT PIN. Here the Lettish sculptor has, in a strange medium, captured the hypnotic je ne sais quoi of sex—and captured it for eternity.
HATLESSNESS. In this arresting sculpture, Narb has successfully battled with the problems of a fatally plastic ambiguity.
But to return to sculpture. By “new and cosmic forms” we are, of course, hinting at something indescribable since mere words cannot possibly do justice to the intrinsically spiritual elasticity and the fundamentally plastic wistfulness of these perpetually astonishing creations. Glance, for example, at the two miracles of modelling exclusively reproduced on this page by kind permission of the artist and then allow the eye to dwell on their titles. To be sure, “Hatlessness,” “A Badly Bent Pin,” not to mention his other sculptures, “Coughing Birds,” “Y Minus Z,” “Portrait of Mlle. Enciente,” and “The Geranium’s Dream,” are arresting phrases. But they scarcely begin to suggest the rhythmically, almost fatally, throbbing ambiguity of Ivan Narb’s cosmically concocted abstractions. Language has no terms sufficiently subtle to ensnare that elusive and mystical quid pro quo which constitutes the hypnotic je ne sais quoi of this grand maître’s unique achievement. The very best critics can only throw up their hands and exclaim, as Mr. Henry MacBride of the Dial did, after viewing for the first time that chef d’oeuvre in pink sealing wax called “Twin Beds at Play”: “Honour to Ivan Narb! Thanks to his intuitive Lettish intellect, sculpture has at last torn asunder the bonds of naturalism and rushed forth barefooted and breathless into the starry domain of cerebral purity!”
We are willing to wager that, confronted by “X Minus Y,” Mr. MacBride would break down and weep for twenty-five minutes, as Babe Ruth did when the school children of Greater New York put their hard-earned pennies together and purchased for their hard-hitting idol a colossal, abstract composition modelled from life by Ivan Narb and entitled (by no less an authority on sporting matters than Mr. Gilbert Seldes) “Swat Triumphant!”
From every point of view, the influence which Ivan Narb has exerted on his contemporaries is well-nigh unbelievable. All over these United States, sculptors who formerly found marble and bronze sufficient for their needs are now turning to less inhibitory substances such as cement, rubber and glue, in order adequately to express their newly aroused cosmic yearnings; while vast multitudes of men, women and children, who never before realized their aesthetic endowment, are now eagerly rushing into the radiant realm of abstract sculpture. In a few years, at this rate, we may expect to see the tasteless and wasteful statuary of our public parks supplanted by vital and nearly costless forms, executed in the manner of Ivan Narb and portraying, not such o
utworn clichés as Victory, Grief, Admiral Farragut, etc., but the irrepressible and unrecognizable élan vital of modern civilization.
Already it is bruited abroad that the waterproof summit of a new Detroit superskyscraper is to be embellished with non-representational motifs, carved direct in the hard rubber by Ivan Narb and so gigantic that their least details will be visible to the naked eye of a nearsighted spectator situated a quarter of a mile below. This makes us wonder how the illustrious adorner of the Sistine ceiling would feel, could he behold his much touted achievement paling to complete insignificance before the heaven-flouting rubber raptures of Ivan Narb.
Incidentally, Ivan Narb’s triumphs are not confined to sculpture alone. As a writer, he has astonished his most ardent admirers. We refer to the only-just-published 969-page monograph (copiously illustrated with remarkable photographs by Edward Stieglitz of Ivan Narb’s sculpture, including every possible phase of the latter’s portentous personality) entitled: America’s Future Is Which? wherein, apparently, a multitude of new aesthetic principles are vividly formulated and impetuously developed to their startling, if logical, conclusion. What these principles or this conclusion may be, it is of course impossible to say; for Ivan Narb’s writing, like his sculpture, escapes all the vulgar limitations of ordinary meaning. But there can be no reasonable doubt that the writer visualizes America as poised upon the brink of an esoteric epoch, the inhabitants of which will consider our own era more ridiculously obsolete than we of today consider the stone age of our primeval ancestors.
At least, some such idea would seem to underlie the following dicta, which we snatch from a characteristically mystical chapter called: Pooh!
“What is to come? What? Who? Which? Cosmic Ascendancy? Scrapersky? Spirit of Looking? Spirit of Yes? Spirit of men and women? Manthing? Girlthing? You say Thingthing. They say Girlthing. Maybe yes. Knows nobody all. Knows nobody Future. Future? Pooh. Pooh is everything. Everything is pooh. Me, you; all is pooh. But also everything are we, you, they, me and Future. How come? H’m, dunt esk. Maybe Future equal to Lillian Russell hat on Javanese bellydancer.”
However we may care to interpret this significant passage, one thing remains indisputable—Ivan Narb’s prose style has brought to literature a new idiom; which fact strikes us as all the more extraordinary when we remember that he has just acquired a knowledge of English.
So much for Ivan Narb’s achievement. Now, in closing, the present writer begs to apologize for the incompleteness of this little essay. Her only hope is that she has at least avoided the pitfall of analysis into which many would-be critics of this new, unrecognizable sculpture have humiliatingly tumbled. As previously stated, the very essence of Ivan Narb’s art is its perfect unanalysability. Once analysis is applied, all is lost. Either you instinctively feel the beauty inherent in these occult forms, wrought by the mysterious hand of genius from lowly materials, from humble substances which have never before been called upon to bear the lofty message of aesthetic emotion, or—to put it bluntly—you do not. In the former case, you participate in a kind of religious experience, a new world opens its iridescent portals to your enraptured senses and your soul basks in the eternal sunshine of cosmic existence; whereas, in the latter case, you are a doomed spirit, forever suffering the trivial torments of ordinary humdrum, common or garden life.
For example: to the privileged man or woman or child who perceives the secret locked in Ivan Narb’s sculpture, a certain vaguely ellipsoidal form of which I am now clearly thinking, is a source of irrevocable bliss, of ceaseless revelation, of unending joy. To someone whose eyes are sealed by materialistic considerations, this same form is merely a potato.
Here, as elsewhere, it is our duty and our privilege to choose.
From Vanity Fair, March 1927.
THE AGONY OF THE ARTIST (WITH A CAPITAL A)
Variations upon the justly celebrated old Greek theme: know yourself
There appear to be three kinds of artists in America today. First we have the ultrasuccessful artist, comprising two equally insincere groups: “commercial artists,” who concoct almost priceless pictures for advertising purposes and “fashionable portrait painters,” who receive incredible sums for making unbeautifully rich women look richly beautiful. Very few people, of course, can attain the heights of commercial and fashionable art. Next we have the thousands upon thousands of “academicians”—patient, plodding, platitudinous persons, whose loftiest aim is to do something which “looks just like” something else and who are quite content so long as this undangerous privilege is vouchsafed them. Finally there exists a species, properly designated as the Artist (with a capital A) which differs radically from the ultrasuccessful type and the academic type. On the one hand, your Artist has nothing to do with success, his ultimate function being neither to perpetuate the jewelled neck of Mrs. O. Howe Thingumbob nor yet to assassinate dandruff. On the other hand he bears no likeness to the tranquil academician—for your Artist is not tranquil; he is in agony.
Most people merely accept this agony of the Artist, as they accept evolution. The rest move their minds to the extent of supposing that anybody with Art school training, plus “temperament”—or a flair for agony—may become an Artist. In other words, the Artist is thought to be an unsublimated academician; a noncommercial, anti-fashionable painter who, instead of taking things easily, suffers from a tendency to set the world on fire and an extreme sensibility to injustice. Can this be true? If not, what makes an Artist and in what does an Artist’s agony consist?
Let us assume that you and I, gentle reader, have decided to become Artists. Of course, such a decision does not necessarily imply artistic inclinations on our part. Quite the contrary. You may have always secretly admired poor Uncle Henry who, after suddenly threatening to become an Artist with a capital A, inadvertently drank himself to death with a small d instead; or someone whom I peculiarly dislike may have patted my baby curls and prophesied that I would grow up to be a bank president; or both you and I may have previously decided to become everything except Artists, without actually having become anything whatever. Briefly, a person may decide to become an Artist for innumerable reasons of great psychological importance; but what interests us is the consequences, not the causes, of our decision to become Artists.
Having made this momentous decision, how shall we proceed? Obviously, we shall go to Art school. Must not people learn Art, just as people learn electricity or plumbing or anything else, for that matter? Of course, Art is different from electricity and plumbing, in that anybody can become an electrician or a plumber, whereas only people with temperament may become Artists. Nevertheless, there are some things which even people with temperament must know before they become Artists and these are the secrets which are revealed at Art school (how to paint a landscape correctly, how to make a face look like someone, what colours to mix with other colours, which way to sharpen pencils, etc.). Only when a person with temperament has thoroughly mastered all this invaluable information can he begin to create on his own hook. If you and I didn’t absorb these fundamentals, reader, we could never become Artists, no matter how temperamental we were. I might try and try to paint Mt. Monadnock in the distance and you might try and try to draw Aunt Lucy fullface with her nose looking as if it stuck out and we couldn’t, because we were ignorant of the eternal laws of value and perspective. So to Art school let us go immediately.
At Art school, we proceed to learn all there is to know about Art (and then some) from the renowned Mr. Z, who was formerly a pupil of the great Y. But this does not mean that Mr. Z paints exactly like the great Y. No indeed. In the first place, Mr. Z couldn’t if he tried. In the second place, Mr. Z has developed an original style of his own, as every Artist must do if he is to be worthy of the name. Take, for instance, the great Y himself. He studied at various times under X, W and V and only came into the full possession of his own great powers shortly before his untimely death. Furthermore, X, W and V, before becoming the famous masters which they were
, served humble apprenticeships with U, T and S, who taught them the techniques of those prodigious geniuses R and Q, the former of whom was P’s favorite pupil, while the latter surpassed even his master O. Our statement that we are studying with Mr. Z at Art school is therefore violently erroneous. We are not really studying with Mr. Z at all. We are really studying, through Mr. Z, with the great Y and through him with the illustrious X, W and V and through them with the glorious U, T and S and through them with the mighty R and Q and through them with those unbridled giants of the neo-Renaissance, P and O. It seems almost too wonderful to be true, doesn’t it?
Thanks to all these great techniques, our own technique improves amazingly. Mt. Monadnock and Aunt Lucy’s nose lose all their terrors. The former, with two or three of my expert brushstrokes, obediently inherits a subjective distance of five miles. The latter, with several enlightened touches of your pencil, magnificently bounds into high relief. Mr. Z is beside himself with pleasure and we are graduated summa cum laude from Art school. If you and I didn’t have temperament, we should now become ordinary humdrum academicians. But, being temperamental, we scorn all forms of academic guidance and throw ourselves on the world, eager to suffer—eager to become, through agony, Artists with a capital A. Our next problem is to find the necessary agony. Where is it, gentle reader?
You answer: the agony lies in the fact that we stand no chance of being appreciated—although America talks Art night and day and American millionaires buy more Art every year than all the rest of mankind put together—because, to our Oil Oligarchs, Peanut Princes, Soap Sultans and other Medicis, “jenyouwine” Art means foreign Art. The Art which is the most “jenyouwine” and which brings the most dollars is dead as well as imported; but (and here we have a diabolic refinement of agony) certain more elastic American multimillionaires are beginning to purchase work by living European painters. A Chewing Gum King, for example, who formerly liked nothing but Rembrandts and Velasquez, can now be induced to fall for a Segonzac or two, or perhaps a Matisse, a Picasso, or even a Derain. Meanwhile American patrons of Art (or rather the connoisseurs who do the selecting for these patrons and the galleries which do the selling to them) boycott l’Art américain. Not only is there a complete absence of taste anent the domestic product, but once an Artist is found guilty of being a native of the richest country on earth he must choose between spiritual prostitution and physical starvation. What monstrous injustice!
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