Andrew Cardiff Ritchie [Editor]: THE NEW DECADE [22 European Painters and Sculptors]. New York: Museum of Modern Art, April 1955. Quarto. First edition. Decorated paper covered boards. 111 pp. Black and white plates. Cover design by Alvin Lustig. Glazed boards lightly worn and rubbed [as usual], otherwise a nearly fine copy.
8.5 x 9.75 hardcover books with 111 pages fully illustrated with black and white plates and statements and illustrated profiles of Afro (Afro Basaldella), Karel Appel, Kenneth Armitage, Francis Bacon, Jean Bazaine, Alberto Burri, Reg Butler, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Lynn Chadwick, Jean Dubuffet, Étienne Hajdu, Alfred Manessier, Luciano Minguzzi, Mirko, Édouard Pignon, Germaine Richier, William Scott, Pierre Soulages, Hans Uhlmann, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Theodor Werner, and Fritz Winter.
A Museum of Modern Art press release dated May 11, 1955 stated “NEW DECADE: 22 EUROPEAN PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, from May 11 through August 7. The 85 works of art, most of them shown for the first time in this country, were selected by Andrew Cardiff Ritchie, Director of the Museum's Department of Painting and Sculpture. The artists, each represented by three to five works, have all come into prominence during the past ten years. Each has made a special contribution to the art of this decade. Seven are French, five British and five Italian, three German, one Dutch and one Portuguese. Fourteen are painters and eight are sculptors.
After the New York showing, the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition will be seen in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.
In his foreword to the catalog which accompanies the exhibition, Mr. Ritchie says that today European art, like politics, is in a state of flux but that in both fields there are remarkable signs of hope, despite a decide of anxiety, not to say despair. He points out that: "... there has been a stirring of ideas that may eventually lead to a more stable, unified continent; and among younger artists there appears to have been a serious reappraisal of pre-war art movements and a searching for new points of departure.
"The greatest tensions during the decade have been political. One by-product has been that in art the Communists have sought to steal the term 'realism' just as they have sought to appropriate the words 'peace' and 'democracy,' In France, most non-Communist painters tend to be abstract, in one way or another. In Italy, and West Germany, the same is true, and in these two countries the memory of the sentimental, would-be heroic realism of Fascist or Nazi art may have had something to do with their choice of an opposite direction. Britain, on the other hand, with more conservative political and artistic traditions has been less affected by these totalitarian pressures."
Mr. Ritchie continues by noting that "the weakness, even sterility, of most noncommunist figurative painting is in part the result of stronger minded artists having chosen an extreme reactionary or advanced position, leaving the middle ground to become impoverished, This impoverishment is no doubt a great misfortune; but it should surprise no one in a world where the middle ground between ideological extremes becomes daily more difficult to maintain."
Mr. Ritchie, however, comments upon the fact that of the fourteen painters presented, "nine are abstract, in one or another meaning of that ambiguous tern. Of the eight sculptors, only one has maintained a purely abstract direction." The middle ground in sculpture has not, for a number of reasons become so impoverished, he feels, perhaps because "Sculpture* for one thing, is a more expensive, less mobile medium and does not lend itself as easily as painting does to mass propaganda," As a result, possibly, the "Communist debasement of figurative imagery has had less opportunity to operate."
"One can only speculate, however," Mr. Ritchie says, "on the reasons why artists today follow one direction or another. Even their statements [in the catalog] rive only vague clues as to why they paint or make sculpture as they do. Nevertheless, in reading their one is struck by how much these statements have in common and by the similarity of problems of experience referred to; the role that instinct or intuition plays in creation; how much the act of making has to do with discovering what a work will turn out to be; the work of art as an entity; art as an instrument for discovering meaning in the world; the relation of art to the object or the external world; and finally, the most frequent reference, the question of space.”
All the French artists in the NEW DECADE except for Soulages, were born before the first World War, and two of the seven are sculptors. Etienne Ilajdu is represented by a marble portrait head, a bronze Woman with Braids and by two recent bas-reliefs in hammered sheet metal, a method in which he has become more interested lately because he says it "allows one to reunite technically many contrary elements and to assure their interaction." Germaine Richier, one of two women in the show, is the other French sculptor. Her first one-man show in this country was held in Chicago last year. Three of her bronze figures are included.
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