EXHIBITION

A COSMOPOLITAN REALISM

THE KWY GROUP IN THE SERRALVES COLLECTION

22 MAY — 27 SEP 2015

Detail from silkscreen by René Bertholo (after silkscreens by Lourdes Castro, Corneille, Peter Saul and António Costa Pinheiro) for the cover of issue 10 of KWY (Paris), Autumn 1962. Artist Books and Editions. Coll. Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto

English

A COSMOPOLITAN REALISM: THE KWY GROUP IN THE SERRALVES COLLECTION Starting in the late 1950s, the KWY group were major contributors to the opening up of Portuguese art to the international context and the launching of a keen interest in the new figurative languages that brought about one of the most stimulating periods in twentieth-century European culture. The group, which formed in Paris around the magazine KWY, published from 1958 to 1963/64, included Portuguese artists René Bertholo, Lourdes Castro, António Costa Pinheiro, Gonçalo Duarte, José Escada and João Vieira, as well as Bulgarian artist Christo and German artist Jan Voss. Featuring a selection of works and publications in the Serralves Collection by members of the KWY group and by other Portuguese and foreign artists who collaborated in the KWY publishing project — such as António Areal, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Bernard Heidsieck, Yves Klein, Jorge Martins and Wolf Vostell —, the exhibition showcases the artistic changes occurred in the period and traces the reach and influence of the ‘KWY spirit’ beyond the publication of the magazine. The title was chosen by René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro, the driving forces behind the magazine, to put into use the letters that had been banished from the Portuguese alphabet in that period, in what constituted an initial sign of overture to realities that were inaccessible to Portuguese culture at the time. The country was experiencing ‘Years of Lead’, in which the enduring dictatorship and the socalled ‘New State’ (1926—1974), in post-war democratic Europe, accentuated Portugal’s isolation in the international panorama. The absence of a cultural policy and adequate artistic learning, together with the lack of commissions and an enlightened art collectors’ market, defined this period. All Portuguese artists in the KWY group had interrupted their art studies at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts in the mid-1950s to

migrate to Paris, between 1957 and 1960, sometimes with brief stints in Munich. KWY was initially conceived as a letter to the friends that Bertholo and Castro had left behind, but the range of collaborators and the magazine’s reception quickly expanded. The three banned letters appearing on the title were used in an ironical play on the typical Portuguese expression of resignation ‘cá vamos indo’ [literally, ‘we keep going’]: ‘ká wamos yndo’. As the editors pursued their own individual careers and cultivated connections to the international artistic community living and sojourning in Paris, the magazine became known for three salient features. The first was its artisanal production (aside from the June 1960 issue, which was mechanically printed to address growing demand). Artisanal silkscreen printing, alongside collage, photo-serigraphy, the use of synthetic materials, small objects and a wide range of papers gave the magazine a distinctive character and ensured that every copy was unique. KWY was initially printed on an old adapted wooden table in the small studio shared by Bertholo and Castro on Boulevard Pasteur. This ensured low production costs and a free use of colour, contrasting with the more usual monochrome of other magazines of the time and anticipating the widespread use of silkscreen printing by Nouveau Réalisme and Anglo-Saxon Pop artists from the 1960 onwards. Secondly, neither the magazine nor the group had a predefined aesthetic programme. Far from the presuppositions of early twentiethcentury avant-gardes, the topicality of the KWY project was founded precisely on the absence of an artistic manifesto and the possibility of varied, eclectic artistic trends to coexist. The ‘KWY Group’, with all its eight members, would only be formally established in the June 1960 issue of the magazine, although all members had already contributed to the issues edited by Bertholo and Castro. This issue contained an editorial, the only one in the whole series, which

clearly upheld the stylistic and processual freedom of all editors and collaborators. That was also the spirit behind the three exhibitions carrying the ‘KWY Group’ label featured in 1960 and 1961 at the University of Saarbrücken (Germany), at Lisbon’s Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes and the Parisian gallery Le Soleil dans la tête. Thirdly, the magazine was a platform to feed a broad contact network beyond the group’s publishing activities and into collaborations with other artist publications as well as the participation in various solo and group exhibitions. The intense dialogues that were established reveal a cosmopolitan, transnational environment that sustained the revision and overcoming of the different abstract languages that permeated postwar artistic practices. Moreover, there were broad and fertile intersections between emerging artistic trends (from the Spanish El Paso group to Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, lettrist experiments, sound poetry and Portuguese New Figuration) that questioned the modernist artistic tradition and thereby affirmed the presence of art at the centre of the sociocultural events of the time.

academicism or official modernism promoted by the regime’s propaganda apparatus. In 1957, in Munich, Bertholo, Castro, Costa Pinheiro and Duarte met Voss, who like Pinheiro studied at the local Academy of Fine Arts and joined the group upon arriving in Paris in 1960, as Christo had done in 1958. Up until issue 5, published in December 1959, all KWY group artists had already contributed to the magazine with original silkscreens, anthologies of essays and poems or thematic files showcasing their trajectories. The first years saw a dominance of the abstractionism of the second School of Paris, to which all the artists and collaborators had been connected after the war, as seen in their works of the period, without any discernible theme and focused on the free play of forms and chromatic rhythms. The piecemeal penetration of reality and social issues in art that characterized the 1960s is evident in the works by Raymond Hains — a set of ‘hypnagogic photographs’ inspired by mental images produced in the transition from wakefulness to sleep and obtained with ribbed lenses that created abstract, repeated forms.

This exhibition is organized in four different moments that illustrate some of the artistic questions explored in the KWY magazine and other publications of the time through works in the Serralves Collection by KWY artists and other contributors to the magazine.

Letters, words and signs, explored in their symbolic, visual and objectual dimensions, occupy the second room, showcasing the significance of language in this period, a matter that KWY members also keenly investigated.

The first room showcases the early issues of the KWY magazine, published in 195859, as the friendship between the various artists was consolidated before leaving Portugal and in the first years of their exile. Bertholo, Duarte, Escada and Vieira had shared a studio in Lisbon in 1956 and were regulars at Lisbon’s Café Gelo, where they met the poets Helder Macedo and Herberto Helder (collaborators in issues 2 and 3, of August and October 1958). All KWY artists had also shown their work at Galeria Pórtico, one of the few spaces that featured artistic proposals outside the naturalist

Manuel Millares’ drawings show a powerful calligraphic gesturalism that points to the practice of an art engaged with historical circumstances and the significance of human action. Like Saura, Millares belonged to the Spanish El Paso group (1957—60), and the two collaborated with KWY after having met and befriended Vieira. Castro is represented by a 1962 assemblage made of letters and small objects that introduce the outlines and silhouettes of her famous projected shadows. Vieira’s works illustrate his evolution from a painting

pervaded by a formal dynamics based on calligraphic exploration and literary references to the use of alphabet letters as performative objects capable of unleashing a questioning of language and the direct involvement of viewers. As for Bertholo, his works reveal the narrative dimension that words may take on in art; here, this is anchored in the visual devices of the comicstrip and the linearity and colours of Pop as he used them in the diaristic recording of his 1972—73 stay in Berlin. Literary and art magazines Daily Bul and grâmmes represented further inroads into the formal possibilities opened up by a new interest for words and language. Published by poet André Balthazar and artist Pol Bury, collaborators of the KWY magazine, issue 7 of Daily Bul (September 1958) features an anthology of onomatopoeias appearing in the works of renowned authors, from Francis of Assisi to the Countess de Ségur, to Masoch, Nietszche, Rimbaud or Sartre. The elevation of onomatopoeia to the status of literature worthy of being quoted and anthologized fits perfectly into the surrealist and derisory drive that prevails in this issue of the magazine. In grâmmes, published by the Ultra-Lettrist group, the reproduction of an affiche lacérée (‘torn poster’) by Jacques de la Villeglé exemplifies the practice of ripping off posters from street walls that he and Raymond Hains had been carrying out since 1949 to produce works whose distortions and visual abstractions were based on existing reality. As for sound poetry, of which KWY magazine collaborator François Dufrêne was a protagonist, the stage was set for experimental and sound poems that explored the meaning of words through phonemic re-composition based upon analogy, randomness, choice and fragment in the same vein of Nouveau Réaliste explorations in the field of advertising images and consumer objects. The third room shows how the reutilization of objects and pre-existing images implied

an often-critical fascination with emerging consumer society and how art sought to leave behind specialized, museum knowledge to join quotidian activities through streetactions and happenings that called for the participation of the public. The KWY magazine was a hotbed for all these trends, as shown in issue 7 (published in the winter of 1960), which includes interventions by Christo that reveal his budding interest for real objects and their packaging. Issue 8 (autumn 1961) was dedicated to the fascination caused, during the summer of the same year, by cosmonaut Titov and his ship Vostok 2. The space trip during which Titov orbited the Earth inspired Castro to created one of her first assemblages, a rocket made with various materials, including screws, and covered in aluminium paint, a feature of her works at the time. Issue 11 (spring 1963) was dedicated almost in its entirety to the artists of Nouveau Réalisme. It featured an introductory text by the great mentor of the movement, art critic Pierre Restany, as well as a homage to recently deceased Yves Klein and his immaterial art, condensed in his famous photomontage Saut dans le vide, published in ‘Dimanche 27 Novembre — Le Journal d’un seul jour’, a paper sold in the streets of Paris for a single day that appropriated one of the most common activities in contemporary societies: information circulation. The communicative resonance and the symbols of contemporary culture and middleclass comfort, such as Mickey Mouse and the Volkswagen Beetle, were used by Lourdes Castro in a series of collages combining chocolate wrappers, pencil shavings, painted silhouettes and an excerpt of ‘Tabacaria [Tobbaco Shop] by Álvaro de Campos (one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms) alluding to the metaphysics contained in the act of eating chocolates. The reutilization of chocolate wrappers after they have been pleasurably emptied is Castro’s way of asserting her love for life and her keenness on bringing it into her artistic work.

From one of the most fertile periods in his work, two cut-out reliefs by Escada show how the organic and symmetric outlines that he had been working on for a few years were turned into three-dimensional objects and conferred corporeal density to shapes resembling frogs and insects and are reminiscent of Rorschach tests, the renowned psychological evaluation technique through the observation and interpretation of symmetrical inkblots. The option to produce objects inspired in urban culture is evident in the works by Bertholo and Costa Pinheiro. In 1966 Bertholo had started his production of ‘reduced models’ of trivial natural phenomena, objects activated by random repetitive movement generating programmes. In their Pop and quasi-infantile simplicity, the suns, clouds, seas, rainbows that compose these slowly-moving objects appear like the idyllic landscapes on tourist travel books. An oneiric quality is also apparent in the utopian objects created by Costa Pinheiro from 1967 onwards. These are objects designed to integrate poetry in urban spaces and create alternative, more creative forms of building and inhabiting cities. Universonaut Raumschiff [Universonaut Spacecraft] and Cosmo Language, together with the book Imagination & Ironie, feature a gallery of characters and devices such as the Universonaut, Cosmolanguage, the RayColour Device, the Cosmolanguage Visor and the Universonaut Spaceship that hail from the galactic depths to instigate new realities and rehabilitate humankind’s imaginative ability while activating the motto stamped on several works in this series: ‘L’Imagination est notre liberté’ [Imagination is our freedom]. The forth and final room examines the leading role of painting in the understanding of art as a questioning of quotidian realities and sociocultural circumstances, a phenomenon associated with a return to the figure that would become known as New Figuration. René Bertholo and Jorge Martins were both living in Paris when they made the paintings featured in this room. In Littératture conjugale [Marital Literature] René Bertholo, who

was engaged in figurative and narrative art accessible to all, created an inventory of objects from domestic, matrimonial spaces. Scattered across the surface of the painting and without any apparent order, a multitude of small objects, figures and abstract forms hover that belong to the intuitive, fragmented iconography of everyday reality invented by Bertholo. Martins, who had collaborated in issue 5 of KWY (December 1959), creates a strange familiar scene in Itinerário erótico [Erotic Itinerary], a body lying down late in the night. The various objects in this painting seem illuminated by the contrast with the neutral gray background against which they stand. The scenographic arrangement of the different elements in the interior space give the painting an unequivocally narrative character, even if there is no story to take in, only the intention of promoting a dynamic and active vision opposed to the contemplative gaze required by abstract art. The eerie tone of this work does not seem to establish any relationship with the real world and the things that populate it. Martins questions painting and how (in the face of the indifference generated by the profusion of images in the public space) it could remain as a means to express ideas and feeling, i.e. to communicate with others. António Areal, the author of one of the most singular bodies of work in the Portuguese artistic context, published an essay in issue 8 of KWY (autumn 1961) on the potential consequences of Titov’s recent orbital journey on the relationship between art and technology. In their seeming pictorial banality and the abstract expression of their forms XVI Desenhos [XVI Drawings] reveal a chaotic montage of fragments of objects such as windows, coffins and tree profiles. The use of Popinspired, simple uniform colours is driven by the artist’s intention to neutralize the sentimental and literary quality in the textures and chromatic gradations of informal painting. The album reveals a sort of surrealistic drift that is plastically treated according to the new interest for the representation of ideas and questions

brought about by everyday life experiences. In Portugal, New Figuration, which developed after the mid-1960s in parallel with other reality-focused international movements, fulfilled two objectives: to emancipate art from the academic naturalism and official propaganda in which it had been steeped for decades, and to benefit from post-war abstractionist experiments to rebuild the sociocultural meaning of art while proposing new ways for images to show a world in transformation. The KWY artists and collaborators were part of this process that, by means of direct contact with the international context, opened up ways to internationalization, reformulated Portuguese art and paved the way for the conceptual experimentalism of the 1970s.

Text by Catarina Rosendo Translated from the Portuguese by Rui Cascais-Parada

PUBLICATION A new volume ‘from the Collection’ series is being published on the occasion of the exhibition: Catarina Rosendo, A Cosmopolitan Realism: The KWY Group in the Serralves Collection, Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2015.

Entrance to the exhibition

Bookshop

Entrance to the Museum 3rd Floor

‘A Cosmopolitan Realism: The KWY Group in the Serralves Collection’ is curated by Catarina Rosendo, Collection Research Fellow, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Exhibition coordinator: Isabel Sousa Braga Registrar: Daniela Oliveira Conservator: Nancy Fonseca Advisors to the exhibition design: Filipa Alfaro and Ana Maio Installation staff: João Brites, Artur Ruivo, Lázaro Silva Education: Liliana Coutinho (coordinator), Diana Cruz, Cristina Lapa

GUIDED TOURS AND TALKS Museum Galleries

Guided tour by Catarina Rosendo, curator of the exhibition 23 MAY (Sat), 16h00

Family workshop-tour by Joana Mendonça, Museum Educator 25 JUL (Sat) 16h30-18h30

Guided tour by Cristina Alves, Museum Educator 14 JUN (Sun), 12h00-13h00

Guided tour by Joana Mendonça, Museum Educator 26 JUL (Sun), 12h00-13h00

Curators in conversation Catarina Rosendo, curator of ‘A Cosmopolitan Realism’, and André Tavares, curator of ‘The Seraalves Villa: The Client as Architect’, talk about working with archives and collections Exclusive for Members. 17 JUN (Wed), 19h30-20h30 ‘The European connections fostered by the KWY group and their impact in Portugal’ Guided tour to the exhibition by Ricardo Bastos Areias, Director of CAAA — Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitectura and Researcher at I2ADS — Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto 04 JUL (Sat), 17h00-18h00

Institutional support

The KWY Group and Artists’ Publications Guided tour to the exhibition by art historian Ana Filipa Candeias, Instituto de História de Arte FCSH-UNL, Lisbon 19 SEP (Sat), 17h00-18h00 Every weekend the Educational Department of the Serralves Museum offers a programme of guided tours to the exhibitions at the following hours: Saturdays: 16h00-17h00 (in English) Saturdays: 17h00-18h00 (in Portuguese) Sundays: 12h00-13h00 (in Portuguese) The guided tours are conducted by Museum Educators or guests. More information at www.serralves.pt

‘Serralves — Património Classificado’ project co-financed by

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