Pape on Paper

        This summer we visited quite a few museums, including Tate Modern in London.  There weren’t many block prints on display there - in fact, I noticed only this one: Weaving, by Lygia Pape (Brazil, 1927-2004).  Maybe I wouldn’t have picked it out if I’d had whole galleries of relief prints from which to choose, but in the Tate’s world of big, bombastic, attention-seeking pieces, I hailed the sight of this small print as a welcome oasis.  The horizontal lines are restrained and restful, but imbued with enough of the natural wood grain and natural hand-carving not to seem overly mechanical or restrictive.  The way the geometric shapes fit into each other without quite blending into larger shapes gives it subtle interest and a sense of dimension.  The caption implies that each of the shapes was a separate block, and while some of the blocks could be arranged spontaneously, some must have been planned to fit together in certain ways.  I’m pretty sure that the long rectangle and pair of triangles at the top and bottom (in other words, the top three shapes and the bottom three shapes) are the same three blocks, printed twice each on the paper.  I can’t determine whether any of the other triangles are duplicates.

        Back home I looked up Pape and more of her art and found that I’m honestly not much enamored of most of it.  She was, it turns out, a member of the “concrete art” movement.  Concrete art, according to Wikipedia, “intended to defend the objectivity of art through paintings that ‘have no other significance than [themselves].’  It forbade the use of natural forms, lyricism, and sentiment.”  While I have no objection to art having no other significance than itself, I figure once you’ve left out natural forms, lyricism, and sentiment, you’ve got nothing worthwhile left.  Besides, what’s this nonsense about the “objectivity of art”?  The whole point of art is how uniquely subjective it is.

        But let’s look back at Pape’s piece once again…  Wood grain is most certainly a natural form.  The idea of weaving certainly has some lyricism.  The suggestion of textiles, with their human creation and intimate human use, can’t help but at least hint of sentiment.  So Pape, though a card-carrying concretist in the 1950s, was clearly not following their ideals as deeply and wholly as she might.  And indeed in 1959 Pape signed the Neo-Concrete Manifesto, which remained wedded to abstract, non-representational geometry, but embraced art’s relationship with the organic, the human, the meditative, and the importance of its relationship with the active viewer.

        All this sounds rather artificially intellectual to me, and indeed downright dreary. I want to cry, “Stop pontificating and justifying and posturing, and just make something you enjoy, to share with others so that they’ll enjoy it, too!  Is that so hard?”  But Pape said, “To me, art is a way of knowing the world… to see how the world is… of getting to know the world.”  And I guess when it comes right down to it, if that’s really what she was doing, and if for her the way to do it was through concrete art and neo-concrete art, then I’m not going to complain.  So here are a couple more I like, as well.

[Pictures: Tecelar (Weaving), woodcut by Lygia Pape, 1957 (Image from Tate);

Tecelar (Weaving), woodcut by Pape, 1958 (Image from artbook);

unknown woodcut by Pape, unknown date (Image from Artwell Guide).]