Art Concret

With the growing power of Surrealism, abstract artists living in Paris felt the need to assert their preferred style and began to discuss creating a united front.

Theo van Doesburg had taken part in such conversations, initially with Joaquín Torres-García, but complained of insufficiently rigorous criteria for the type of work that should be included.

In their names Van Doesburg sent a copy of a manifesto stating their position on abstract art (eventually to appear under the title Base de la peinture concrete) to Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, who declined to sign it.

[4] The retitled manifesto appeared in the group's magazine, by now called Art Concret, in April 1930, a month after the first issue of the rival Cercle et Carré.

[5] At the same time Van Doesburg hosted further discussions at his home with the artists of both groups and early in 1931 launched the new movement, Abstraction-Création, with himself briefly as vice-president.

He later elaborates that the geometrical elements of a painting appear in numerical relationship but are modified by colour; works of art always differ from one another because of the laws of relativity.

The following page was taken up with a satirical attack on art journalism: first "A few words that have nothing to do with art": "sensibility, sensuality, emotion," but also including watchwords of the Cercle et Carré group ("abstraction") and of the Cubists ("instantaneity"); then on the second half of the page a section titled "Critical standards for hire", a verbal collage created from a vacuous "selection of recent items in the press".

"We are not alone", the Art Concret signatories assured readers on page 15, quoting from various public figures and artists, among whom appear the English dandies, Beau Brummel and Oscar Wilde.

[8] Nevertheless, the group's manifesto had helped popularise the term Concrete Art and, through the championship of others (Torres-García among them), resulted eventually in the establishment of geometric abstraction under this name as an international phenomenon.