Artworks

Impress your friends at dinner parties with your knowledge of Totalism—thanks to Chris McAuliffe, director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University which, by the way, has on at the moment the exhibition for the inaugural Basil Sellars Art Prize—this is for art that takes sport as its subject.

Transcript

Chris McAuliffe: I'd like to introduce you to a lesser-known -ism; Totalism. It's not my favourite -ism, it's not one of the great -isms. But it does tell us a lot about how -isms were used by artists in the heyday of 20th century modernism.

You've never heard of Totalism? Don't worry. Totalism had possibly the shortest life-span of any 20th century -ism. It had one adherent: the French painter Andre Lhote. There were no Totalist exhibitions. In fact, the only manifestation of Totalism was a declaration of principles published in an obscure French art magazine in 1916. Totalism was not so much a dead-end as a complete non-starter. What if you threw a party and nobody came? Poor old Andre Lhote knew the feeling.

So why look at an -ism that never even got off the ground? Because the non-event that was Totalism shows us how avant-garde artists began to see the -ism as a tactic rather than as definition of style or aesthetic ambition.

To understand how strategy, rather than aesthetics, propelled Totalism, we need to reflect on the state of play in the Parisian art world of 1916.

The First World War significantly disrupted the avant-garde art scene in Paris. Artists were dispersed: some went to the front, other retreated to the southern provinces. The key dealers-Germans like Gustav Kahnweiller and Wilhelm Uhde-were driven from Paris and their stock confiscated. The international connections between the European avant-gardes-expressionists, cubists, futurists, suprematists-were broken.

While the focus of the Parisian scene, dominated by Cubism, had been lost, there was still a sense of opportunity. On the eve of the war, in June 1914, a group of Parisian collectors staged a heavily promoted auction: selling their avant-garde collection at a surprising profit, they demonstrated that there was money to be made from the radical modernist styles. And a new art dealer Leonce Rosenberg was stalking the studios of Paris, seeking to take up the territory opened up by the flight of the German dealers.

So, when Andre Lhote, published his manifesto of Totalism in 1916 he was looking to step into the vacuum. It was an opportunistic gesture, letting the art world-and Rosenberg in particular-know that there were still players in town. Lhote himself was a self-taught artist from Bordeaux. He had developed a relatively tame, tidied up version of Cubism that had earned him a place among the second-string Cubists, deep in the long shadow of Picasso and Braque. Later, he was dubbed an 'academic Cubist': almost a contradiction in terms. After WWI, he did actually open an academy. He had a minor impact on Australian modernism: artists like Dorrit Black studied with him in the 1920s.

Lhote's manifesto appeared in a deluxe journal of the arts called l'elan, which means 'vigour or spirit. This particular issue used purple paper and gold ink on its cover: as if determined to resist the strictures of war. The manifesto, to put it crudely, was a real dog's breakfast. Lhote opened by declaring that avant-garde art was actually a pretty sober affair. Cézanne had injected a note of reason into the subjective excesses of Impressionism. Mathematics would bring a further sense of order to art. Sounds like he was counterbalancing the chaos of war with reassuring Cartesian rationalism. But then he launched into a celebration of modern life: 'steel, steam and all the furnaces of industry'. Totalism demanded the 'shock of antagonisms'; multiple styles in the one canvas. So what's it going to be Andre? Sober reason or modern chaos?

None of it really made sense. And Lhote doesn't appear to have produced a painting that showed what Totalism would look like. It's all a bit rich coming from an artist who had previously lurked on the fringes of Cubism and extolled the virtues of provincial Bordeaux.

Totalism was barely even a blip on the art world's radar. What it shows, though, is that artists were realising that declaring an -ism was what got you past the velvet rope and into modernism's inner sanctum.

The Italian Futurists has shown this when they published their first manifesto on the front page of a Parisian newspaper, before they'd even made any futurist art works. Their 1912 roadshow toured an exhibition across Europe and effectively sold the style. After WWI, the surrealists developed the manifesto into a fine art and made surrealism a global -ism. Totalism is forgotten and Andre Lhote is remembered by the good folk of Bordeaux and, to a lesser extent, Melbourne. So next time you encounter an -ism don't just treat it as a handy definition of a style, ask yourself how the artist is using the -ism as a calling card or even a brand.

Further Information

Ian Potter Museum at Melbourne University

Story Researcher and Producer

Suzanne Donisthorpe

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