Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944

Romantic Reverberations

105 Romantic Reverberations Jed Perl In 1941, Eugene Jolas, the friend of Joyce and editor of Transition, was living in the United States, where he assembled Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions. The book, published by the Gotham Book Mart in New York, included poems, essays, classic texts by Kleist and Victor Hugo, a cover design of an ascending snake by Calder, and drawings of Romantic idols, including Kleist and Dionysus, by André Masson, one of the artists who participated in Pontigny-en-Amérique. Jolas, who there is reason to believe was himself a visitor to Mount Holyoke, announced in Vertical that“Romanticism is not dead.” He argued that the Romantic revolutions of the eighteenth century, which had been“paralyzed by the advent of the positivistmechanistic age,” were now at last resurgent. “We are again in the midst of a Romantic revolution in the arts—and in life—which is sweeping across continents with the force of a tidal wave. It is part of the apocalyptic sensation which we all experience in the present social convulsions accompanying the war, and it is also the expression of vast creative forces that are preparing the way for a spiritual resurrection.”1 Although Jolas was right to emphasize the importance of Romanticism in the mid-century years, the future of Romanticism was not as promising as he believed. While Romanticism was on the move, this development was closer to paroxysm than to revolution. What we see in the 1940s and 1950s is the extraordinary final fireworks of the Romantic sense of art and life, of the belief that men and women exist in a thrillingly and even terrifyingly organic relationship with nature, with culture, with history. Certainly these Romantic reverberations could be felt at Pontigny-en-Amérique. Masson, who chaired one of the sessions about art, had been present at the beginnings of the Surrealist movement, which the critic Cyril Connolly referred to in his 1944 book The Unquiet Grave as“Romanticism’s last stand.”2 He had broken with Breton, the ringleader of the Surrealists, but he was surely aware that in the 1930s, at the time of official French celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Victor Hugo’s Hernani, a defining event in the battles between Romanticists and classicists, Breton had argued that the Surrealists were the inheritors of the Romantic tradition. Working in America in the early 1940s, Masson was painting a series of poetic portraits of historical figures—from Heraclitus to Leonardo and Kleist—whose interest in mystery and metamor- Signatures of Masson, Motherwell, Bespaloff, Bourgeois, Hayter, and others.“Register,” MS 0768, Entretiens de Pontigny records, 1942–45, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. RomanticReverberations 107 phosis made them icons of Romantic thinking and feeling, and who shared some of Masson’s fascination with tumbling, reeling, careening sensation. Another visitor to Pontigny was Marc Chagall, whose levitating lovers and topsy-turvy interminglings of far-flung times and places reflected a modern man’s besotted responses to the wayward Romantic spirit of eastern Europe’s Yiddish culture. Romanticism was also very much on the minds of some of the Americans who spoke at Pontigny-en-Amérique. A few years before Robert Motherwell came to Mount Holyoke, he was taking a seminar at Harvard with Arthur O. Lovejoy on “The Idea of Romanticism,” where he focused his studies on the Journals of Delacroix, that greatest of all Romantic painters. Although Motherwell did not pursue his scholarly studies, he later wrote—in an introduction to Delacroix’s Journals—that “the image of Delacroix’s alert and cultivated mind constantly rolling, like an ever-changing tide, over the rocky questions of l’art moderne, an art made by self-chosen individuals rather than the tribal artists of the past, remained a sustaining moral force in my inner life, as I think it may have in the lives of many artists.”3 And there’s more. Robert Goldwater, the art historian who was at Pontigny-en-Amérique, had published in 1938 his pioneering book Primitivism in Modern Painting, in which he observed that primitivism and Romanticism, in spite of all their differences , were both “attempts to infuse new life into art by breaking away from the current and accepted formulas”—and were thus attempts “to renew the essentials of art.”4 The thread that links Motherwell’s and Goldwater’s comments is the...