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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Cassou, Jean
Legal name: Cassou, Jean
Other names: Soucas, André (Pseudonyme collectif)
Noir, Jean (Pseudonyme)
Cassou, Raphaël Jean Lépold (birth)
Birthdate: 1897-07-09
Date of death: 1986-01-16
Burial location: Cimetière Communal, Thiais, Val-de-Marne, France
Gender: male
Nationality: France
Country (for map): France
Birthplace: Deusto, Bilbao, Spain
Place of death: Paris, France
Cause of death: Naturelle (Vieillesse)
Places of residence: Paris, France
Toulouse, France
Education: Lycée Charlemagne
Bayonne Lycée
Occupations: art critic
museum administrator
resistance fighter
poet
novelist
essayist (show all 7)
translator
Relationships: Humbert, Agnès (colleague)
Jankélévitch, Vladimir (brother-in-law)
Organizations: French Resistance
Musée National d'Art Moderne
Mercure de France
Awards and honors: Ordre de la Libération
Grand Prix national des Lettres
Grand Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres
Short biography: Jean Cassou was born in Bilbao, Spain, to a French father and Spanish mother. He grew up bilingual and studied both French and Spanish classics at school. He attended the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris while working to help support his family, and earned a master's degree at the Bayonne Lycée. From 1921 to 1929, he wrote a monthly column called "Lettres espagnoles" in the Mercure de France. He published his debut novel Éloge de la Folie in 1926. Cassou became an inspector of historic monuments in 1932, and joined the Comité de vigilance des intellectuels antifascistes (Committee of Anti-fascist Intellectuals). He was director of the magazine Europe from 1936 to 1939. In 1936, he joined the cabinet of Jean Zay, Minister of National Education and Fine Arts of the Popular Front government. In 1940, he was assigned to the Musée national d'art moderne (Museum of of Modern Art) as chief curator. After Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II, he joined the Resistance with his friends Claude Aveline and Agnès Humbert, founding the clandestine Groupe du musée de l'Homme, together with Boris Vildé, Anatole Lewitsky and Paul Rivet. When many members of the group were arrested, he escaped the Gestapo and fled to Toulouse. There he served as an agent of the "Bertaux group." He was arrested in December 1941 and sentenced to a year in a Vichy prison, where he wrote and memorized poems. His collection Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret (33 Sonnets Composed in Secret) was published in 1944 under the pseudonym of Jean Noir. After being released from prison, he was sent by to an internment camp at Saint-Sulpice. He was released in June 1943 and continued his activities for the Resistance using the pseudonyms "Alain" and Fournier." In August 1944, his car met an armed German patrol: two of his companions were killed and Cassou was left for dead. He spent three weeks in hospital in a coma. General Charles de Gaulle came to his bedside to personally present him with the Croix de la Libération. In 1945, Cassou returned to the Musée national d'art moderne and served as founder-director until 1965. He also taught at the Ecole du Louvre from 1961 to 1963. He published novels, poetry, essays, and art criticism. Composer Henri Dutilleux set four of his poems to music between 1944 and 1956. In 1971, Cassou received the Grand prix national des Lettres and in 1983 the grand Prix de la Société des Gens de Lettres for the whole of his work.

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Reviews

2 Kinetic Sculptors Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely by Jean Cassou

review of
2 Kinetic Sculptors Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 2-4, 2019

I probably 1st saw a photograph of a Nicolas Schöffer sculpture on the front cover of the Candide Karlheinz Stockhausen Prozession record that I got in 1975. I loved the record, I loved the cover, I generally loved Candide's covers. It's probable that I saw a photograph of Jean Tinguely's kinetic self-destroying sculpture "Homage to New York" (1960) around the same time when I was researching Fluxus & other things at the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library in downtown Baltimore. That's an interesting double-whammy, I liked them both vvvveeeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyy much!

Since then, I've gotten a Nicolas Schöffer record called Hommage à Bartok on the exceptional Hungaraton label & watched a video of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera entitled Help, Help, the Globolinks! (1968) ( https://youtu.be/Te-XVgq0sb4 ) (wch I also have the score for) wch has costumes & choreography by Alwin Nikolais (uncredited on the Help, Help, the Globolinks! Wikipedia page) & scenic light design by Nicolas Schöffer (also strangely uncredited on Wikipedia). Alwin Nikolais's another one that I find very interesting — despite his being more 'poppy' I find him more radical in some ways than Merce Cunningham.

SO, to find a catalog from a show that featured both Schöffer's & Tinguely's work at the The Jewish Museum in NYC seemed like a find. In fact, for me, this bk is worth it just for the one color plate of Schöffer's Lux 19 (1959) alone. This being a catalog it's a bit more superficial than wd truly titillate the scholar in me but, still, there's plenty to read & many good plates. Take these excerpts from Jewish Museum director Sam Hunter's intro (& run w/ them):

"The machine has in countless ways been a fertile sense of inspiration for half a century. The Italian futurists seized on it to express their romantic enthusiasm for speed and dynamism ; reacting violently to the mechanized mass destruction of the First World War, the Dadaists created their own version of an "infernal" machine in a variety of sardonic and fantastic inventions ; Calder's mobiles later restored a spirit of optimism and innocent pleasure to the spectacle of mechanical forms in motion." - p 8

"in 1920, the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo for the first time made a sculpture that actually moved. Kinetic sculpture gained impetus in the thirties with Calder's invention of the air-driven mobile, so named by Marcel Duchamp whose "ready-made" bicycle wheel of 1913, mounted on a stool in a parody of the museum art object, was in fact the first motion sculpture of the century. The historical development of kinetic experiment includes many other important episodes : Man Ray's suspended coat-hangers, which anticipated Calder, Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, Gabo's Vibrating Spring, Moholy-Nagy's Light Machine, and the animated abstract films of Eggling and Richter." - p 8

"Nicolas Schöffer takes the engineer's optimistic view of the possibilities of a technological society, and works, in effect, for a more rational future. He tries to fit his art to the social circumstances of mechanical civilization. He is a devoted and proficient student of computer technology, and the intricate movements of his complex works are automatically programmed by electronic engineers under his close supervision. In 1954 in Paris, Schöffer made his first programmed sculpture, a machine-construction operating in three-dimensions with rotating reflecting disks, plastic screens and projectors which bathed them in a constantly changing colored light." - p 10

Fascinating, eh?! I'd love to have a Schöffer activated every time someone pressed my otherwise dysfunctional doorbell.

Then there're words from K. G. Hultèn, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm:

"The self-destroying machines throw an even more penetrating ray of light on our present cultural situation and the complexity of its thought. If art is a reflection of the fundamental ideas of a civilization, one can think of few more pertinent images or symbols. These machines have the richness and beauty of all very simple and therefore very great inventions. (What an appropriate name he gave to the first of these machines, "Homage to New York," an homage to the capitol of our modern mechanistic madness.)" - p 14

& it's "Homage to New York" that's really stuck w/ me as a kinetic sculpture all these decades since I 1st learned of it. I love Schöffer's work but it's Tinguely's that's most resonated w/ me intuitively.

"His machines are a piece of pure existence, eternally changeable, and they do not have to mean anything or refer to anything. But one is mistaken to believe that their artistic message is innocent or harmless. They subvert the established order and convey a sense of anarchy and individual liberation which would otherwise not exist." - p 15

&, of course, the work of SRL (Survival Research Labs) & the Seemen has followed Tinguely's lineage.

Jean Casou, formerly the chief curator of Le Musée de L'Art Moderne in Paris, addresses us next.

"Since 1954 Schöffer has been building "spatiodynamic" towers which diffuse both music and images, entirely without outside intervention, made feasible through the use of electronics. From that invention to the creation of cybernetic machines was only a step, which the prodigious magician could not fail to take. On May 26, 1956, on the occasion of a "Night of Poetry" at the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, he presented his first "cybernetic" sculpture, CYSP I, completed in collaboration with François Terny, an engineer of the Philips Company. It is a senstivie machine, endowed with an electronic brain, moving by itself, reacting to colors, to lights, to sounds, to silences." - p 18

Again, fascinating — & more proof that Philips was a far-sighted company of perspicacity beyond the pale of typical corporate culture. Not only did they invent the audio cassette & make it public property, not only did they have a great record label for Musique Concrete & other advanced musics, but they also helped foster Schöffer's visionary work.

"But beyond that, in addition to such splendors, they can also be accompanied by actual music, and the best composers of contemporary musique concrète collaborated with Schöffer. Everything is material for his genius, every element and every resource enter into the limitless possibilities of his constructions." - p 19

As for Schöffer's own music? Well, judging from the afrementioned Hungaraton record of his I'd have to say that it's something that only an engineer's mother cd love b/c it's way too devoid of any richness in any area to be of much interest to anyone else who isn't, say, brain-damaged. (OK, that's uncalled-for!, I'm giving myself an imaginary slap-on-the-wrist — HEY! That imaginarily hurts!) What I mean is that it has the type of musicality that a person who's more of an artist than they are a person w/ a sensitivity to music might create — making it an "Hommage à Bartok" might've just been a good career move that enabled the record's publication on the state-run classical label. As such, it's a good thing that he collaborated w/ some Musique Concrete composers.

"1950 Exhibition of first kinetic sculpture at Galerie des Deux-Iles, Paris. Designs spatiodynamic electric clock with Henry Perlstein, an engineer."

[..]

"1954 Constructs a sound-equipped spatiodynamic and cybernetic tower (for the Salon des Travaux Publics, Paris) with the technical assistance of Jacques Bureau, an engineer, in collaboration with the composer Pierre Henry.

"1956 Designs house with invisible interior walls, formed by sharply differentiated temperature zones, at the Salon des Travaux Publics, Paris, in collaboration with the Philips and the Saint-Gobain Companies." - p 22

That last idea seems particularly inspired. Just don't get up in the middle of the night & go to the wrong rm to pee, you might get a painful urinecicle.

"Tower is an abstract sculpture, 52 meters high, with 66 mirror plates, electronically controlled, which create audio-visual, "luminodynamic" spectacle, with musical accompaniment programmed by Henri Pousseur. Tower constructed by the Philips Company." - p 23

Pierre Henry!! Henri Pousseur!! Philips Company!!

On to Tinguely:

"1939 Constructs sound-making "orchestra" out-of-doors by placing in a running brook some thirty water wheels each attached to a different object that makes noise." - p 24

That's something that still seems fun & inspired to me 80 yrs later. If I heard of something like this near me I'd want to check it out. Speaking of things from yesteryr that continue to interest me I've always been a big fan of Scriabin's plans for a color organ. These have been realized w/ some success prior to & after Schöffer but that's no reason to Schöff at Schöffer''s:

"Musiscope, 1960
Visual organ with plastic screen for color projections" - p 26

& then there's Tinguely's

"Viridiana, 1963
Steel, motorized" - p 28

Does that have anything to w/ the 1961 film of the same name by Luis Buñuel? I'd bet my bottom dollar that it does, whatever a "bottom dollar" is. & what about:

"Tinguely : Eureka, 1964, motorized construction, 30 feet high
Official symbol and signal tower of the Lausanna National Fair, Switzerland" - p 58

?

Why the thing just reeks of wild energy! But then you know what those people of Lausanne are like w/ their Outsider Art n'at.

The "Selected Bibliography" informs us that there's this bk about Schöffer:

"Habasque, Guy and Ménétrier, Jacques, Nicolas Schöffer. Editions du Griffon, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1963. Introduction by Jean Cassou, with a phonograph record, "Spatiodynamism," music by Pierre Henry, produced by "La Diffusion magnétique sonore."" - p 64

Don't you just wish you had that?! I do.

& then there's a section about Tinguely in:

"Tomkins, Dalvin, The Bride and the Bachelors, The Viking Press, New York, 1965." - p 65

That one I thought I have.. but I don't.. I'm ssssssoooooooooo disappointed. I'm not disappointed by this catalog, tho. It's got some great pictures & I find the subject(s) more interesting than yr average bear.… (more)

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tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |

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