Summaries issue 3 volume 19 2003  

Kogan  | de Koning | dilettantism



Moissey Kogan 1879-1943
Sculptor without a home
Ype Koopmans

Between the wars, the Russian-Jewish sculptor Moissey Kogan was famed among Dutch sculptors and other knowledgeable art-lovers, not only for his work, but also for his doings and dealings. And in Holland at least he still has quite a reputation. His name appears in almost every survey of Dutch sculpture since the thirties. Indeed, the one fairly extensive publication devoted to Kogan during his lifetime was by a Dutch writer, the poet and art critic Jan Engelman (1900-1972). Kogan's pupils included young Amsterdam sculptors Frits van Hall (1899-1945), Jan Havermans (1892-1964) and Jan Meefout (1915-1993), and this was reflected in more than just their work alone. Other artists who admired Kogan were the painter and critic Kasper Niehaus (1889-1974) and the sculptors Jan Bronner (1881-1972), Mari Andriessen (1897-1979), Hildo Krop (1884-1970), John Rädecker (1885-1956), and Han Wezelaar (1901-1984). In 1939 they presented Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum with a small nude by Kogan, which was exhibited at the influential exhibition Rondom Rodin. Honderd jaar Fransche Sculptuur (Rodin and others. One hundred years of French sculpture).
In the period before the Second World War Kogan was regarded as one of the major representatives of French neo-classical sculpture. However, a number of the more recent studies, which give considerable weight to his early development, present him mainly as a German artist. Little mention is made of his connections with Holland - where he lived in 1924 and 1928 and from 1933 to 1936 - with the exception of his contact with the Dutch country doctor and art collector Hendrik Wiegersma (1891-1969).

Kogan is thought to have visited Holland for the first time in 1924, at the invitation of the painter Otto van Rees (1884-1957), whom he met in Paris in 1912 and who introduced him to Wiegersma. That meeting was recorded ten years later by the art critic Albert Plasschaert (1974-1941), and from then on this was taken to be Kogan's first visit. However, we may assume that he had been to Holland before: for one thing, it is remarkable that so many of his Dutch friends had connections with an artists' commune in Meerhuizen, a ramshackle villa just outside Amsterdam. The Meerhuizen group revolved around a rich and hospitable Jewish art dealer named Jack Vecht (1886-1965). He owed his wealth to Eduard van der Heydt, a German banker who moved to Holland in 1915. After the war Vecht acquired the so-called Yi Yüan collection, an important group of sculptures from Eastern and Southern Asia, and in 1919 he sold the entire collection to Von der Heydt. Vecht was then appointed director of Von der Heydt's own Yi Yüan Museum, on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam. Kogan's German friend Karl With (1891-1961) was curator there from 1920 to 1923. In 1922 Jizo was published, a bibliophile edition of a poem by With. This booklet, with signed woodcuts by Kogan, was dedicated to Von der Heydt and published by the museum. It is almost unthinkable that Vecht was not involved in all this.

Every week, on the eve of the sabbath, Vecht held a kind of open house, attended by a colourful group of people who were all in some way involved in art.
It was partly for this reason that Meehuizen is today best known as a breeding ground for the Amsterdam intellectual and artistic avant-garde of the day. The occupants included Rädecker and also Niehaus, who was in Paris before the war and, as an art critic, probably met Kogan there. Among the visitors was the expressionistic graphic artist Havermans. Karl With was also in touch with the group, and in his autobiography he mentions Havermans, Vecht and Rädecker. Although several of Kogan's best-known works came from Vecht's private collection, in the publications mentioned above Vecht's name appears only in passing: as one of the addresses where Kogan stayed in the thirties, and in connection with an exhibition of the latter's work, which Vecht mounted in 1932. This is surprising, since there is evidence that the two men were acquainted well before that time. For example, Vecht visited Kogan in Paris in the mid-twenties, together with Rädecker; Kogan showed them a bit of Jewish night life and introduced them to Marc Chagall. And strangely enough, the name of Rädecker does not appear at all in the Kogan literature, despite the fact that Kogan regarded him and Vecht as his major collectors in Holland.
Kogan's first exhibition in Holland took place in September-October 1924, at the invitation of the gallery owner Herman d'Audretsch (1872-1966) of The Hague. D'Audretsch was the same age as Kogan and before the First World War he had earned his spurs in the Paris art world. During that same period Krop and Rädecker had regularly exhibited at his gallery, together with such progressive French sculptors as Czaky, Maillol and Zadkine.

It is striking that in all the literature on Kogan, there is no mention of his political activism. In Amsterdam Kogan, like most of his Dutch friends and acquaintances, was a member of the BKVK (Union of Artists for the Defence of Cultural Rights), an association which in right-wing circles was seen as a communist cover organization. It was against the background of pre-war Jewish and politically leftist milieus that Kogan set up his network throughout greater Amsterdam. A central role was played by the party communists Van Hall and Havermans, who shared living quarters and a studio in an old rectory near Amsterdam, where Kogan also worked during the thirties. He probably made even more use of Krop's studio, and for much longer periods; we know that he stored a number of his moulds there, which he needed for his livelihood. Later Hildo and Mien Krop were unmasked as informers for the Russian espionage service GPOe (the later KGB). Like Krop's brother-in-law d'Audretsch - Kogan's gallery owner - they took in communist infiltrators from the Eastern Block. In recognition of his role as artist and as activist, Kogan was the only foreigner included in the exhibition 'Kunst in het harnas' (Art up in arms), held at the Stedelijk Museum in July 1945 to honour the Dutch artists active in the Resistance.
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Amnesia and anamnesis
Krijn de Koning
Sven Lütticken

The site-specific installations of Krijn de Koning are reminiscent of the work of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, who have been incorporating the exhibition space into their work since around 1970. Art became a reflection on its context: not only the white cube of museum or gallery, but also all the other places where art was displayed were scrutinized. De Koning's work is much less explicitly directed towards the demystification of the art context than, say, Buren (with whom he studied). The ideological intensity of seventies art has evaporated. That does not mean that De Koning is not analytical, but rather that his method is more indirect and historical. I see him less as an institutional critic and more as an archaeologist. At the sites where he constructs his works, he peels away old layers of time and adds new ones.
The utensils he uses are simple, harking back to the minimalist tradition: right-angled walls, floors and volumes made of plasterboard, chipboard or wood painted in bright colours. In the case of De Koning, however, the effect is seldom bright, neat, and minimalist. For works like his installation in the art centre Begane Grond in 2001, De Koning - like some kind of builder from hell - does not make the space more orderly and practical, but rather more difficult to navigate and to understand. There is a non-human quality to some of his installations. It is as if they were not built by representatives of any recognizable civilization. But their unfunctional qualities are sometimes intensified until they take on a kind of science fiction quality, more suggestive of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey than of most minimal art. The structures have no recognizable function or purpose. Why would anyone want to divide a space in such a totally irrational way as De Koning did in the Begane Grond, with its awkward differences in height and its strange passageways?
Bas Heijne has pointed to the importance of ruins in the work of De Koning. Ruins are human constructions which have been reconquered by nature; in the Romantic era they were a spot in which to muse about the transience of this world. Often they were set out in landscape gardens like ready-made follies, simulations of a distant past. The construction De Koning erected in a small wood in Hilversum (1999) is a reverse ruin: it is not nature which has taken possession of a construction, but rather the construction which has forced its way into nature. Indeed, in the modern era nature has often been turned into a ruin: a single tree that remains after a landscape has been turned into arable land. Like ruins in which the ravages of time become visible, De Koning's works are time structures. But here it is not the work itself which is the ruin; rather, it turns its context into a ruin. Their oddness, and the absence of a true dialogue with the context, robs that context of its integrity and logic. In 2001, in the courtyard of a dilapidated hotel in Metz, De Koning addressed a genuine ruin, although one not yet overgrown by plants: the new structure penetrated into the old.
In early 2003 Krijn de Koning had an exhibition in the Musée des Moulages in Lyon which was unique in several respects. The museum has a collection of plaster casts of classical - and a few Medieval and Renaissance - sculptures, housed in a restored factory. While such collections were once a prominent component of European culture, in the twentieth century they were increasingly seen as an anachronism and many were destroyed. The collection in Lyon had long been neglected; during the sixties most of the casts, which had been discoloured by layers of dust, were clumsily painted over with white paint. De Koning began by arranging the plaster casts in a number of closely packed groups. In between these groups he created 'paths' marked by means of coloured partitions made of plasterboard. Just as in Metz, he was dealing with a 'ruin': a long neglected collection. By positioning the casts close together, without any logical or scientific organizing principle, he reduced them to a kind of forest of plaster trees and shrubs, again highlighting the alienation between his structure and the context. De Koning was not trying to actualize the context, to make it accessible or interesting, as installation artists often do when they are called in to perform an 'an intervention' in a museum. In fact, the reverse is true; his pieces emphasize the anachronistic qualities of their context.
Walter Benjamin regarded ruins as one of the areas in which the Baroque and the Romantic come together. They play an important role in his analysis of the German Baroque tragic drama: these plays were highly allegorical and, according to Benjamin, allegory is 'in the realm of thoughts' what ruins are 'in the realm of objects'. The clash between De Koning's structures and their surroundings goes beyond the limitations of the allegory of German Baroque poets, who on the one hand displayed a melancholy fixation on the ruins of meaning with which they worked and, on the other hand, subordinated them to Christian moralizing. De Koning makes montages, dialectical images of ruins and new structures that suggest that there is something beyond allegorical mourning. But the alien and illogical character of his structures also suggests that our minds are incapable of fathoming that beyond.
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Dilettantism as a way of life
Maarten van Buuren

Dilettantism - together with terms like decadentism and nervosism - belongs to a select vocabulary which reflects the mentality of the fin-de-siècle. And yet the exact meaning of 'dilettante' is as vague as all the other terms which make up the alphabet of the fin-de-siècle.
While several studies published in France have focused on this concept, those authors confined themselves to the Francophone world and to a period of a few decades. In my search for the origin and further development of this concept, I came upon the English Society of Dilettante, founded in the early 18th century, whose members were the first to use the word in its modern sense. In the second half of the 19th century Walter Pater borrowed the term from them, elaborating upon it to suit his own purposes. The dilettante embodied the very aesthetic to which he himself aspired: he saw the dilettante as an artist who bases his experience of art and of life on fleeting sensory impressions; by combining those impressions into a 'mood', he lends them a harmonious, artistic unity. Thanks to its conservative effect, this artistic unity solves the problem of transitoriness, which weighed so heavily on Pater's artistic principles. Dilettantism is interwoven with other core concepts of Pater's aesthetics: bricolage or montage and the essay, which in Pater's view fulfils - in a literary sense - the same function as other dilettantist works of art. These are the key words in what may be seen as Pater's aesthetic of dilettantism.
In the final decades of the 19th century Paul Bourget and Maurice Barrès linked dilettantism with 'decadentism'. They considered dilettantism not so much the core of an aesthetics as an ethics based on the sceptical, comprehension-oriented attitude of an observer who is interested in everything but involved in nothing. Initially, both Bourget and Barrès publicly toy with the concept and identify themselves with it. The form which they give to their 'ego culture', the title of the trilogy with which Barrès' debuted, is also dilettante. But over the years they both adopt a more critical attitude, and tend more and more to associate the term dilettante with the negative aspects of décadence. Ultimately they disassociate themselves from the combination of dilettantism and decadentism. They see dilettantism as a synonym for impotence, lack of principles, rootlessness and the absence of a fatherland. To counter this complex of degenerative evils, they peopled their patriotic novels with anti-dilettantistic heroes whose sterling qualities include nationalism, Catholicism, and firm roots in the land of their birth. In these heroes we see a foreshadowing of the future ideology of blood ties and native soil. The difference between Barrès and Bourget is that Barrès reinstates dilettantism as an artistic concept, harking back to the values which had earlier been stressed by Walter Pater: the importance of fleeting sensory impressions, auto-reflexivity and bricolage.
In any case, I believe that the dilettante should not be associated primarily with the fin-de-siècle. In my view, Pater, Bourget and Barrès formulated principles which they themselves did not wholeheartedly endorse, and which only came to full fruition in the early decades of the 20th century, in the work of Paul Valéry, André Gide, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil, i.e., in the work of the modernists. This means that dilettantism is a far more striking characteristic of modernism than of the fin-de-siècle. I will further explore this development in a subsequent article.
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