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Cercle et Carre - Thoughts for the 1930s
Press Release
On October 11 the Rachel Adler Gallery will inaugurate its new location at 41 East 57 with an exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture entitled Cercle et Carre: Thoughts for the 1930s. Among the artists represented in the exhibition are Jean Arp, Willi Baumeister, Cesar Domela, Alexandra Exter, Wassily Kandinsky, Le Corbusier, Fernand Leger, Piet Mondrian, Amedee Ozenfant, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Georges Vantongerloo. An illustrated catalogue with a text by Michel Seuphor, the influential art critic and historian, will accompany the exhibition which will continue through November 12, 1990.
Founded in 1929 in Paris by Michel Seuphor and Joaquin Torres-Garcia with the encouragement of Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo, Cercle et Carre achieved importance by uniting, through the publication of a periodical and the organization of a major exhibition, some of the most prominent non-figurative artists working in Paris during that period. The Cercle et Carre exhibition brought together like-minded artists from all over Europe, as well as Russia, Poland, North and South America, during a decade which was generally unresponsive to abstract art. The changing political and social climate of the 1920s had fostered a resurgence of figurative art as reflected in the popularity of the Realist and Surrealist movements, in Germany, France and Italy. Cercle et Carre strove to provide a forum in which, as John Elderfield has written in an earlier catalogue for the Dallas Museum, "a wide range of abstract styles allowed young artists to assimilate the lessons of thirty years of modern art."
Cercle et Carre was the first of many movements which set the tone for the 1930s. It was followed soon after by Art Concret and Abstraction-Creation, with many of the same artists participating in the subsequent manifestos. The free expression of varied ideologies was an important catalyst for the group. It encouraged them in their attempts to define the nature of abstraction and produced a continual realignment of partisans of one theory or another. Michel Seuphor was always at the center of these discussions and his introduction to the catalogue reveals him to still be an actively engaged polemicist.
The exhibition comprised of important loans from many European and American collections, attempts to underline the influence of these ideas on both European and American artists during the 1930s and the decades following World War II.
Vilmos Huszar
Fernand Leger
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Cercle et Carre
Thoughts for the 1930s
introduction by Michel Seuphor (1990)
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