The first Gorky show in Britain for a generation shows a life scarred by unthinkable anguish, transformed into radiant, exhilarating art

If you think the art press has only turned spiteful in recent years, then think again. Consider the December 1948 edition of ARTnews. Barely five months after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky hanged ­himself in a ­Connecticut barn after a year of ­incalculable agony – rectal cancer, a ­studio fire that destroyed much of his work, separation from his wife, a car crash that snapped his neck and ­paralysed his painting arm – the world's oldest art magazine chose to publish not a posthumous tribute but a derisively brief dispatch of his final show.

Among its insinuations was the claim that Gorky was an acolyte of the more successful Willem de Kooning, who immediately protested that the ­opposite was true. His letter remains the best of epitaphs: "When, about 15 years ago, I walked into Arshile's ­studio for the first time the atmosphere was so beautiful I got a little dizzy, and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately... I come from 36 Union Square."

Gorky's studio in Union Square, ­Manhattan, appears the only fixed point in his adult life. From his name (assumed) and age (uncertain) to the tales he wove to obscure a devastating past, there are so many inconsistencies that the myths have become almost as familiar as the work. In Britain, where Tate Modern owns only one canvas, it often feels as if there are more biographies in print than paintings on permanent display.

Since this is our first show in a ­generation, it can hardly help but take the life and suicide into account. But Gorky, heralded as the father of abstract expressionism, is no Rothko aiming for the tragic sublime; nor is his art a chronicle of death foretold. The revelation of this tremendous show is, instead, the astonishing atmosphere his paintings exude and sustain.

Gorky died at the age of 44 – or 46. Of all great artists, he may be the ­slowest off the mark. It takes nearly 20 years (and four galleries) for Gorky to snail his way through the lessons of Cézanne, Picasso and Miró, emulating his masters stroke by stroke. Move briskly through, noticing his powers of concentration, his ­passion and physical relish even here, and you will still have absorbed something of his spirit before the ­exhibition proper starts.

The icebreaker is The Artist and His Mother, one of the most powerful ­portraits of the 20th century: heart-rending, irreducibly beautiful. The young Gorky stands next to his mother like a bridegroom, clasping a posy that seems to have sprung from the ­blossoms on her apron; she sits erect and contained in the halo of her own outline, archaic as a ­Byzantine icon. Spectrally pale, their ghosts haunt the picture, traces of life and innocence lost when she starved to death in his arms after the ­Armenian genocide.

Even if you did not know the ­painting began with a photograph taken as proof (or reproof) to Gorky's father in America of a family waiting behind, you would have the sense of a relic ­reverently preserved. It is well known that Gorky reworked the painting over and again, sanding the surface like a man scouring for clues, trying to reach the past; he even began another version, never letting go.

And what is so remarkable is that the very loss at its core – a portrait is a ­person here, but not here – is ­countered by the slow lyricism of the work: Gorky's mother is brought back from ­annihilation, held in the bounding contours and gentle colour, her momentary image indelibly fused with the painting's hard-won surface.

The portrait drawings in the same room put Gorky with Ingres and Picasso as a master of concision. He has to master figuration before stepping away, and even when he does, images continue to suggest themselves as irresistibly in his art as in clouds. But the release into abstraction after his marriage is ­absolutely euphoric: the paintings begin to breathe, stretch and unfurl.

The pivot in this show is rural ­Virginia, where Gorky goes wild for the landscape. The sun's a flying saucer surrounded by rays of elation, foliage throbs, every ­little cricket, cottage and cow becomes an excited hieroglyph in a leaping black tracery. Colour suffuses the canvas like a blush, or gathers like condensation on glass, changing the picture's mood and temperature.

There is so much exhilaration here: The Plough and the Song, with its ­furrowed gold below a cobalt high noon; the ­rustling depths of Water of the ­Flowery Mill. Even when tragedy returns, when black becomes both teller and tale as in Charred Beloved, where Gorky reprises a burnt painting from memory in sombre tones, the effect is of resurgence – life (or love?) brought back from the ashes.

People find autobiography in the art – ploughs and palettes, his father's orchard, his mother's apron – that the poetry of his titles does nothing to ­discourage. But whatever the paintings absorb from his anguished life they also transcend.

And what increases the joy of them, to me at least, is that the source of this remains mysterious – not much ­apparent in either form or content. You can ­isolate the elements of a great Gorky: the ­decoupling of colour from line, the ­trademark shapes, from winged ­biomorphs to quirky triangles, their points on the verge of bursting open; the sense of being nose-deep in a scene that might be scaled to an insect or a giant, being equally intimate and epic; of ­teeming incidents held in ­nebulous space. The way his paintings are ­voluptuous yet august. But when you are in front of them, their open effects feel very ­secretive.

How does he get such cold ­colours to thaw, how can the paintings be so speechless yet eloquent? The hues shift and glow like St Elmo's fire, the tones may be discordant, the lines stringent, and still there is this radiant ambience. It seems to be a matter of atmosphere, as de Kooning said, of something beautiful in the air.

]]>

The first Gorky show in Britain for a generation shows a life scarred by unthinkable anguish, transformed into radiant, exhilarating art

If you think the art press has only turned spiteful in recent years, then think again. Consider the December 1948 edition of ARTnews. Barely five months after the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky hanged ­himself in a ­Connecticut barn after a year of ­incalculable agony – rectal cancer, a ­studio fire that destroyed much of his work, separation from his wife, a car crash that snapped his neck and ­paralysed his painting arm – the world's oldest art magazine chose to publish not a posthumous tribute but a derisively brief dispatch of his final show.

Among its insinuations was the claim that Gorky was an acolyte of the more successful Willem de Kooning, who immediately protested that the ­opposite was true. His letter remains the best of epitaphs: "When, about 15 years ago, I walked into Arshile's ­studio for the first time the atmosphere was so beautiful I got a little dizzy, and when I came to, I was bright enough to take the hint immediately... I come from 36 Union Square."

Gorky's studio in Union Square, ­Manhattan, appears the only fixed point in his adult life. From his name (assumed) and age (uncertain) to the tales he wove to obscure a devastating past, there are so many inconsistencies that the myths have become almost as familiar as the work. In Britain, where Tate Modern owns only one canvas, it often feels as if there are more biographies in print than paintings on permanent display.

Since this is our first show in a ­generation, it can hardly help but take the life and suicide into account. But Gorky, heralded as the father of abstract expressionism, is no Rothko aiming for the tragic sublime; nor is his art a chronicle of death foretold. The revelation of this tremendous show is, instead, the astonishing atmosphere his paintings exude and sustain.

Gorky died at the age of 44 – or 46. Of all great artists, he may be the ­slowest off the mark. It takes nearly 20 years (and four galleries) for Gorky to snail his way through the lessons of Cézanne, Picasso and Miró, emulating his masters stroke by stroke. Move briskly through, noticing his powers of concentration, his ­passion and physical relish even here, and you will still have absorbed something of his spirit before the ­exhibition proper starts.

The icebreaker is The Artist and His Mother, one of the most powerful ­portraits of the 20th century: heart-rending, irreducibly beautiful. The young Gorky stands next to his mother like a bridegroom, clasping a posy that seems to have sprung from the ­blossoms on her apron; she sits erect and contained in the halo of her own outline, archaic as a ­Byzantine icon. Spectrally pale, their ghosts haunt the picture, traces of life and innocence lost when she starved to death in his arms after the ­Armenian genocide.

Even if you did not know the ­painting began with a photograph taken as proof (or reproof) to Gorky's father in America of a family waiting behind, you would have the sense of a relic ­reverently preserved. It is well known that Gorky reworked the painting over and again, sanding the surface like a man scouring for clues, trying to reach the past; he even began another version, never letting go.

And what is so remarkable is that the very loss at its core – a portrait is a ­person here, but not here – is ­countered by the slow lyricism of the work: Gorky's mother is brought back from ­annihilation, held in the bounding contours and gentle colour, her momentary image indelibly fused with the painting's hard-won surface.

The portrait drawings in the same room put Gorky with Ingres and Picasso as a master of concision. He has to master figuration before stepping away, and even when he does, images continue to suggest themselves as irresistibly in his art as in clouds. But the release into abstraction after his marriage is ­absolutely euphoric: the paintings begin to breathe, stretch and unfurl.

The pivot in this show is rural ­Virginia, where Gorky goes wild for the landscape. The sun's a flying saucer surrounded by rays of elation, foliage throbs, every ­little cricket, cottage and cow becomes an excited hieroglyph in a leaping black tracery. Colour suffuses the canvas like a blush, or gathers like condensation on glass, changing the picture's mood and temperature.

There is so much exhilaration here: The Plough and the Song, with its ­furrowed gold below a cobalt high noon; the ­rustling depths of Water of the ­Flowery Mill. Even when tragedy returns, when black becomes both teller and tale as in Charred Beloved, where Gorky reprises a burnt painting from memory in sombre tones, the effect is of resurgence – life (or love?) brought back from the ashes.

People find autobiography in the art – ploughs and palettes, his father's orchard, his mother's apron – that the poetry of his titles does nothing to ­discourage. But whatever the paintings absorb from his anguished life they also transcend.

And what increases the joy of them, to me at least, is that the source of this remains mysterious – not much ­apparent in either form or content. You can ­isolate the elements of a great Gorky: the ­decoupling of colour from line, the ­trademark shapes, from winged ­biomorphs to quirky triangles, their points on the verge of bursting open; the sense of being nose-deep in a scene that might be scaled to an insect or a giant, being equally intimate and epic; of ­teeming incidents held in ­nebulous space. The way his paintings are ­voluptuous yet august. But when you are in front of them, their open effects feel very ­secretive.

How does he get such cold ­colours to thaw, how can the paintings be so speechless yet eloquent? The hues shift and glow like St Elmo's fire, the tones may be discordant, the lines stringent, and still there is this radiant ambience. It seems to be a matter of atmosphere, as de Kooning said, of something beautiful in the air.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/arshile-gorky-a-retrospective-art-review/6518/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/arshile-gorky-at-tate-modern-monsters-myths-and-memories/5478/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/arshile-gorky-at-tate-modern-monsters-myths-and-memories/5478/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:08:53 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/12/arshile-gorky-tate-modern-review

Both serious and surprising, this new retrospective looks at the work of an artist famous for his swirls of colour and spectral shapes

This is the kind of exhibition Tate Modern should put on all the time – a serious, sensitive and eye-opening encounter with a great modern artist.

Arshile Gorky was one of a generation of artists in 1930s New York who were fed by Roosevelt's New Deal while they studied the works of the European modern movement in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, these painters were opening themselves to a Jungian unconscious of mythic forms; by around 1950, they were becoming famous for abstract, wall-filling visions of sublime mystery.

But by the time Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists broke the ice, Gorky was dead. He killed himself in 1948, with his painting still in the movement's intermediate phase of development, not yet purely abstract; his tearpools of paintings swim with psychic metaphors and spectral shapes, shards of figures, washes of landscape.

The achievement of this exhibition is to reveal that – far from being unresolved – these are among the monuments of American art. They flow and burst with life, evoking waterfalls in drips of thin green and orange paint. The talent that enabled Gorky to perfectly ape Cézanne in an early still life makes his poetic dreams of the 1940s formidably sharp. These are not vague shimmers, like Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, but scarily real encounters with monsters and memories, made real in jagged black lines that stab through swirls of colour. These colours are by turns harshly hot and mercifully cool, and flow with a captivating freedom.

In the two versions of his portrait The Artist and His Mother, Gorky himself faces you: a boy lost in time with his mother, who died in Turkey's Armenian genocide at the end of the first world war. His canvases return obsessively to his childhood by Lake Van, as they strive manfully to create a place for a displaced heart.

]]>

Both serious and surprising, this new retrospective looks at the work of an artist famous for his swirls of colour and spectral shapes

This is the kind of exhibition Tate Modern should put on all the time – a serious, sensitive and eye-opening encounter with a great modern artist.

Arshile Gorky was one of a generation of artists in 1930s New York who were fed by Roosevelt's New Deal while they studied the works of the European modern movement in Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. By the 1940s, these painters were opening themselves to a Jungian unconscious of mythic forms; by around 1950, they were becoming famous for abstract, wall-filling visions of sublime mystery.

But by the time Jackson Pollock and the other abstract expressionists broke the ice, Gorky was dead. He killed himself in 1948, with his painting still in the movement's intermediate phase of development, not yet purely abstract; his tearpools of paintings swim with psychic metaphors and spectral shapes, shards of figures, washes of landscape.

The achievement of this exhibition is to reveal that – far from being unresolved – these are among the monuments of American art. They flow and burst with life, evoking waterfalls in drips of thin green and orange paint. The talent that enabled Gorky to perfectly ape Cézanne in an early still life makes his poetic dreams of the 1940s formidably sharp. These are not vague shimmers, like Rothko's Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, but scarily real encounters with monsters and memories, made real in jagged black lines that stab through swirls of colour. These colours are by turns harshly hot and mercifully cool, and flow with a captivating freedom.

In the two versions of his portrait The Artist and His Mother, Gorky himself faces you: a boy lost in time with his mother, who died in Turkey's Armenian genocide at the end of the first world war. His canvases return obsessively to his childhood by Lake Van, as they strive manfully to create a place for a displaced heart.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/arshile-gorky-at-tate-modern-monsters-myths-and-memories/5478/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/what-ever-happened-to-modern-art-jonathan-jones/5465/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/what-ever-happened-to-modern-art-jonathan-jones/5465/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:48:05 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/feb/11/modern-art-modernism-picasso

The legacy of modernism is all around us. But to find the true power of modern art, we have to look to the past ...

Modern art. I used to know what those words meant. Modern art began with Manet and the discovery of flatness as a value in painting. It reached a new clarity of purpose with Cézanne and exploded into full existence in Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon... or, if I remember The Shock of the New, it began with the Eiffel Tower and the motor car ...

I am talking, of course, about modernism – the art movement, or constellation of art movements, that is widely held to have ended in the 1960s. When I was a student, the fashionable term for what came afterwards was postmodernism. That fell with The Late Show. And now? Well, we all say "modern art" and mean anything from Duchamp to Ryan Gander.

When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said "modern art", I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties. But since then it has become clear that modern art, in its current sense of the art of today and its direct antecedents, is here to stay. It's understandable when we are so obviously living in modern times, in a world hurtling towards a new future every day. This is tomorrow. If modernism dreamt of a utopia, it's here.

But, when I personally say "a great modern artist", I still probably mean an artist who worked before 1960. We may have modern art, but modernism (RIP) still sets the bar higher than most of our own moderns dream of.

And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century. Our glibly high evaluation of today's art, casually calling it "modern art" as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism's history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie. The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance. The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison. Modern art? I wish it would come back.

]]>

The legacy of modernism is all around us. But to find the true power of modern art, we have to look to the past ...

Modern art. I used to know what those words meant. Modern art began with Manet and the discovery of flatness as a value in painting. It reached a new clarity of purpose with Cézanne and exploded into full existence in Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon... or, if I remember The Shock of the New, it began with the Eiffel Tower and the motor car ...

I am talking, of course, about modernism – the art movement, or constellation of art movements, that is widely held to have ended in the 1960s. When I was a student, the fashionable term for what came afterwards was postmodernism. That fell with The Late Show. And now? Well, we all say "modern art" and mean anything from Duchamp to Ryan Gander.

When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said "modern art", I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties. But since then it has become clear that modern art, in its current sense of the art of today and its direct antecedents, is here to stay. It's understandable when we are so obviously living in modern times, in a world hurtling towards a new future every day. This is tomorrow. If modernism dreamt of a utopia, it's here.

But, when I personally say "a great modern artist", I still probably mean an artist who worked before 1960. We may have modern art, but modernism (RIP) still sets the bar higher than most of our own moderns dream of.

And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century. Our glibly high evaluation of today's art, casually calling it "modern art" as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism's history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie. The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance. The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison. Modern art? I wish it would come back.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/what-ever-happened-to-modern-art-jonathan-jones/5465/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/abstract-expressionism-when-art-became-larger-than-life-jonathan-jones/4933/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/abstract-expressionism-when-art-became-larger-than-life-jonathan-jones/4933/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:35:57 +0000 Jonathan Jones http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/feb/11/abstract-expressionism-art-gorky-rothko

With their giant canvases and towering ambition, Gorky and Rothko transcended everything we thought possible of art today

The abstract expressionists, those Amercian artists who made their country's art famous 60 years ago, cannot be ignored. They are so real and so massive; so absolute.

They've rolled back over me recently. Walking into Tate Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, I found that Mark Rothko had got to the Albert Dock before me. His Seagram Murals currently hang in a warehouse space on the ground floor of the museum, and I found them devastatingly beautiful. Their wine-dark ecstasy pays such Bacchic homage to the House of Mysteries in Pompeii, whose paintings he saw while planning them. Just recently, I saw Roman wall paintings in the archaeological museum in Naples that bleed with Rothko reds.

Rothko is a great artist, and so is Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern. I'll be reviewing that shortly, so I will just comment more generally on how Gorky and Rothko transcended almost everything we now expect art to be. They aspired to greatness – a quality almost no art nowadays believes it can attain. Some people call them pompous for that; I call them courageous.

It's worth looking, in the first few rooms of the Gorky show, at how he tried on different habits of excellence: painting like Picasso, then like Cézanne. The desperation to achieve on their level is both moving and disconcerting. But finally he, like Rothko, found a personal, original road to the highest mountains.

When I encountered the abstract expressionists en masse for the first time in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s, they taught me that art in our time can be not merely interesting or shocking – let alone "fun" – but can attain the most profound qualities of the noblest masters. And here in the UK, they've taught me that all over again.

]]>

With their giant canvases and towering ambition, Gorky and Rothko transcended everything we thought possible of art today

The abstract expressionists, those Amercian artists who made their country's art famous 60 years ago, cannot be ignored. They are so real and so massive; so absolute.

They've rolled back over me recently. Walking into Tate Liverpool a couple of weeks ago, I found that Mark Rothko had got to the Albert Dock before me. His Seagram Murals currently hang in a warehouse space on the ground floor of the museum, and I found them devastatingly beautiful. Their wine-dark ecstasy pays such Bacchic homage to the House of Mysteries in Pompeii, whose paintings he saw while planning them. Just recently, I saw Roman wall paintings in the archaeological museum in Naples that bleed with Rothko reds.

Rothko is a great artist, and so is Arshile Gorky, whose retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern. I'll be reviewing that shortly, so I will just comment more generally on how Gorky and Rothko transcended almost everything we now expect art to be. They aspired to greatness – a quality almost no art nowadays believes it can attain. Some people call them pompous for that; I call them courageous.

It's worth looking, in the first few rooms of the Gorky show, at how he tried on different habits of excellence: painting like Picasso, then like Cézanne. The desperation to achieve on their level is both moving and disconcerting. But finally he, like Rothko, found a personal, original road to the highest mountains.

When I encountered the abstract expressionists en masse for the first time in New York's Museum of Modern Art in the 1990s, they taught me that art in our time can be not merely interesting or shocking – let alone "fun" – but can attain the most profound qualities of the noblest masters. And here in the UK, they've taught me that all over again.

]]> http://www.muraclay.com.au/abstract-expressionism-when-art-became-larger-than-life-jonathan-jones/4933/feed/ 0 http://www.muraclay.com.au/theo-van-doesburg-the-splintered-self-2/1325/ http://www.muraclay.com.au/theo-van-doesburg-the-splintered-self-2/1325/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:36:56 +0000 Adrian Searle http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/01/theo-van-doesburg-avant-garde-tate

Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg experimented with poetry, design, architecture and even advertising. Adrian Searle applauds a new show that captures his many lives

Even the title of Tate ­Modern's new exhibition, Van Doesburg and the ­International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, seems to go on and on. The amount of stuff here is daunting. There are tiled floors for holiday homes, ­back-lit geometric stained-glass ­windows (based on a woman's head and the fugues of Bach). There are ­vitrines filled with magazines, letters and notes; chairs and lamps, elegant nightclub ashtrays and designs for Dutch cheese wrappers; architectural models for houses and a nightclub-cum-cinema complex in Strasbourg, as well as endless, endless paintings.

Under the influence of Wassily ­Kandinsky, and on the eve of the first world war, Theo van Doesburg painted target-like cosmic suns, erupting ­penumbras of colour, and a vacuous-looking red-cheeked face with ­gormless button eyes, which he called Girl With Buttercups. His subsequent mobilisation in the Dutch army seemed to cure him of Kandinsky's half-baked spiritual claptrap and this sort of whimsy – but not the shared aim to make a new art for a new century. ­Wagner's Lohengrin and the operatic ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk (total ­artwork) provided Van Doesburg's art with big ambitions. He was also a born organiser, a networker, who ­always wanted to see himself in an ­international rather than a local Dutch context. He was a thoroughly modern artist: on the one hand, he pursued an art of increasing aesthetic purity and hygiene, even reducing a picture of a cow to a series of geometric blocks; and on the other, he wrote dadaist ­poems of startling scatological and blasphemous verve and obscenity.

For a while, Van Doesburg's art looked just like Mondrian's, and the two hang together here, one the great painter, the other an artist who never stopped moving, and who tried his hand at poetry, advertising, architecture and design, theorising and play-acting; he immersed himself in the various movements and machinations of the avant garde. Seeing Van Doesburg in the company of Mondrian and Kurt ­Schwitters, Hans Arp, Jean Hélion, Raoul Hausmann and Tristan Tzara is to see an artist on the run in the 20th century.

Everything lies on the surface

The proliferating "isms" of the 1920s – neo-cubism, futurism, neo-plasticism, constructivism, dadaism, to name but a few – are confusing. All the divergent philosophies and ruptures over ­seemingly inconsequential issues, the strident manifestos and depersonalised and interchangeable artworks, are ­frequently less dramatic than the lives and friendships that produced them. This fascinating show is perhaps more fun than it ought to be because it ­succeeds in drawing out the latter. One can walk through admiring here a ­sideboard by Gerrit Rietveld (it looks like a Rennie Mackintosh, coupled with a Frank Lloyd Wright), pausing gratefully over a Mondrian with an empty grey centre, laughing at the words "merde" and "caca" graffittied over a postcard portrait of German ­expressionist Herwarth Walden. One can enjoy the naive early abstract ­animation of a Hans Richter film, or worry over the developing use of the horizontal and the vertical, and the ­disruption caused by the use of a ­diagonal. And were those neo-­plasticists really allowed to use purple?

In 1902, at the age of 19, Christian Emil Marie Küpper first adopted the name of his stepfather and became Theo van Doesburg. Later he toyed with using Küpper as the first of a number of pseudonyms or noms de guerre. He published articles under the name Pipifox, briefly, and became a dadaist called IK Bonset. He even got his third wife, Nelly van Moorsel – wearing a convincing moustache, and with pipe in mouth – to pose for a ­portrait as the mysterious artist. Bonset could do what Van Doesburg could not.

Van Doesburg's leanings towards iconoclastic, anti-art dada – seemingly at complete odds to the purity and ­rigour of his own art and beliefs – have been described as "guilt-ridden", and "quasi-clandestine". He produced a dadaist magazine, Mecano, alongside his ­impeccable de Stijl (the Style) ­magazine, which was devoted to a ­theory of ­abstraction. He said he wanted to ­"splinter himself" and explore different identities, the ­irrational as well as the ­rational. (One might well wonder how far all this Jekyll and Hyde splintering went, in the artist's private life as well as his public.)

Rational and rectilinear, Van ­Doesburg's paintings ditched all ­representation and illusions of depth, including foreground and background. Everything lies on the surface. ­Mathematical progressions and the use of the grid allowed him to plot his ­compositions in relation to the ­rectangle or square on which they sit. He came to believe that art "should not contain any natural form, sensuality or sentimentality", and that the painter's technique "should be mechanical rather than 'impressionistic'". ­Individualism, he felt, got in the way. The pleasures of his art are ­austere, and he lacks even Mondrian's musicality. All this appears at odds with Bonset's all-over-the-place, ­cluttered dada posters, and the ­manifesto in which he spits on God, ­Jesus and Marx and "on the knicknack and papier-mache artists who want to make a world of soft chocolate and ­perfumed shit". "Life," Bonset ­concludes, is "a venereal disease".

Van Doesburg, meanwhile, once wrote that "life is an extraordinary ­invention". His play with selves and ­artistic personalities might be compared to those of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who invented several characters who each wrote in a different manner and voice. Behind all this play, there is a recognition that artistic ­personality and authenticity are guises, however deep-seated they appear. There is nothing natural about it, and being an artist has long been an act of self-invention. Marcel Duchamp, ­inventing his female alter ego Rrose ­Sélavy, said he believed more in the artist than the art.

Modernism is still heady stuff, even if we think it's over. No one even uses the word "postmodernism" much any more, and there seem to be no more big, or even small isms to worry about or be confused by (stuckism, for what it's worth, isn't a movement but a ­publicity stunt). There's no mainstream, apart from a tedious, almost universal fixation with celebrity and art as ­entertainment; there is no artistic ­gambit that hasn't been tried or can't find a public or a market, somewhere. That in itself is confusing. Whatever happened to high ideals? How would Van Doesburg fare today? I think he'd accommodate and fit in pretty well. He was a smart guy, a bit of an operator.

A rigorous goodbye

One can also see how Van Doesburg's last and most rigorous phase, art ­concret, which called for works to be self-referential and absolutist – ­"entirely designed and formed by the mind prior to execution" – might even lead towards conceptualism. Art's all in the head, anyway. While Van Doesburg expunged his art of outside references and all expression, art concret led not to a dead end but to minimalism's boxes, cubes and literal forms. It also inspired the great flowering and ­playfulness of the Brazilian ­neo-­concretist art of the 1950s and 60s, the gliding planes of suspended colour, the flowing banners and cloaks of Hélio Oiticica, and the manipulable, ­mysterious forms of Lygia Clark. Had he not died of a heart attack in his late 40s, perhaps Van Doesburg's art would have become even more emptied out; perhaps he would have turned his ­attentions fully to objects rather than paintings. Who knows. He might have had to invent several more pseudonyms to cope with all the possibilities.

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Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg experimented with poetry, design, architecture and even advertising. Adrian Searle applauds a new show that captures his many lives

Even the title of Tate ­Modern's new exhibition, Van Doesburg and the ­International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World, seems to go on and on. The amount of stuff here is daunting. There are tiled floors for holiday homes, ­back-lit geometric stained-glass ­windows (based on a woman's head and the fugues of Bach). There are ­vitrines filled with magazines, letters and notes; chairs and lamps, elegant nightclub ashtrays and designs for Dutch cheese wrappers; architectural models for houses and a nightclub-cum-cinema complex in Strasbourg, as well as endless, endless paintings.

Under the influence of Wassily ­Kandinsky, and on the eve of the first world war, Theo van Doesburg painted target-like cosmic suns, erupting ­penumbras of colour, and a vacuous-looking red-cheeked face with ­gormless button eyes, which he called Girl With Buttercups. His subsequent mobilisation in the Dutch army seemed to cure him of Kandinsky's half-baked spiritual claptrap and this sort of whimsy – but not the shared aim to make a new art for a new century. ­Wagner's Lohengrin and the operatic ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk (total ­artwork) provided Van Doesburg's art with big ambitions. He was also a born organiser, a networker, who ­always wanted to see himself in an ­international rather than a local Dutch context. He was a thoroughly modern artist: on the one hand, he pursued an art of increasing aesthetic purity and hygiene, even reducing a picture of a cow to a series of geometric blocks; and on the other, he wrote dadaist ­poems of startling scatological and blasphemous verve and obscenity.

For a while, Van Doesburg's art looked just like Mondrian's, and the two hang together here, one the great painter, the other an artist who never stopped moving, and who tried his hand at poetry, advertising, architecture and design, theorising and play-acting; he immersed himself in the various movements and machinations of the avant garde. Seeing Van Doesburg in the company of Mondrian and Kurt ­Schwitters, Hans Arp, Jean Hélion, Raoul Hausmann and Tristan Tzara is to see an artist on the run in the 20th century.

Everything lies on the surface

The proliferating "isms" of the 1920s – neo-cubism, futurism, neo-plasticism, constructivism, dadaism, to name but a few – are confusing. All the divergent philosophies and ruptures over ­seemingly inconsequential issues, the strident manifestos and depersonalised and interchangeable artworks, are ­frequently less dramatic than the lives and friendships that produced them. This fascinating show is perhaps more fun than it ought to be because it ­succeeds in drawing out the latter. One can walk through admiring here a ­sideboard by Gerrit Rietveld (it looks like a Rennie Mackintosh, coupled with a Frank Lloyd Wright), pausing gratefully over a Mondrian with an empty grey centre, laughing at the words "merde" and "caca" graffittied over a postcard portrait of German ­expressionist Herwarth Walden. One can enjoy the naive early abstract ­animation of a Hans Richter film, or worry over the developing use of the horizontal and the vertical, and the ­disruption caused by the use of a ­diagonal. And were those neo-­plasticists really allowed to use purple?

In 1902, at the age of 19, Christian Emil Marie Küpper first adopted the name of his stepfather and became Theo van Doesburg. Later he toyed with using Küpper as the first of a number of pseudonyms or noms de guerre. He published articles under the name Pipifox, briefly, and became a dadaist called IK Bonset. He even got his third wife, Nelly van Moorsel – wearing a convincing moustache, and with pipe in mouth – to pose for a ­portrait as the mysterious artist. Bonset could do what Van Doesburg could not.

Van Doesburg's leanings towards iconoclastic, anti-art dada – seemingly at complete odds to the purity and ­rigour of his own art and beliefs – have been described as "guilt-ridden", and "quasi-clandestine". He produced a dadaist magazine, Mecano, alongside his ­impeccable de Stijl (the Style) ­magazine, which was devoted to a ­theory of ­abstraction. He said he wanted to ­"splinter himself" and explore different identities, the ­irrational as well as the ­rational. (One might well wonder how far all this Jekyll and Hyde splintering went, in the artist's private life as well as his public.)

Rational and rectilinear, Van ­Doesburg's paintings ditched all ­representation and illusions of depth, including foreground and background. Everything lies on the surface. ­Mathematical progressions and the use of the grid allowed him to plot his ­compositions in relation to the ­rectangle or square on which they sit. He came to believe that art "should not contain any natural form, sensuality or sentimentality", and that the painter's technique "should be mechanical rather than 'impressionistic'". ­Individualism, he felt, got in the way. The pleasures of his art are ­austere, and he lacks even Mondrian's musicality. All this appears at odds with Bonset's all-over-the-place, ­cluttered dada posters, and the ­manifesto in which he spits on God, ­Jesus and Marx and "on the knicknack and papier-mache artists who want to make a world of soft chocolate and ­perfumed shit". "Life," Bonset ­concludes, is "a venereal disease".

Van Doesburg, meanwhile, once wrote that "life is an extraordinary ­invention". His play with selves and ­artistic personalities might be compared to those of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, who invented several characters who each wrote in a different manner and voice. Behind all this play, there is a recognition that artistic ­personality and authenticity are guises, however deep-seated they appear. There is nothing natural about it, and being an artist has long been an act of self-invention. Marcel Duchamp, ­inventing his female alter ego Rrose ­Sélavy, said he believed more in the artist than the art.

Modernism is still heady stuff, even if we think it's over. No one even uses the word "postmodernism" much any more, and there seem to be no more big, or even small isms to worry about or be confused by (stuckism, for what it's worth, isn't a movement but a ­publicity stunt). There's no mainstream, apart from a tedious, almost universal fixation with celebrity and art as ­entertainment; there is no artistic ­gambit that hasn't been tried or can't find a public or a market, somewhere. That in itself is confusing. Whatever happened to high ideals? How would Van Doesburg fare today? I think he'd accommodate and fit in pretty well. He was a smart guy, a bit of an operator.

A rigorous goodbye

One can also see how Van Doesburg's last and most rigorous phase, art ­concret, which called for works to be self-referential and absolutist – ­"entirely designed and formed by the mind prior to execution" – might even lead towards conceptualism. Art's all in the head, anyway. While Van Doesburg expunged his art of outside references and all expression, art concret led not to a dead end but to minimalism's boxes, cubes and literal forms. It also inspired the great flowering and ­playfulness of the Brazilian ­neo-­concretist art of the 1950s and 60s, the gliding planes of suspended colour, the flowing banners and cloaks of Hélio Oiticica, and the manipulable, ­mysterious forms of Lygia Clark. Had he not died of a heart attack in his late 40s, perhaps Van Doesburg's art would have become even more emptied out; perhaps he would have turned his ­attentions fully to objects rather than paintings. Who knows. He might have had to invent several more pseudonyms to cope with all the possibilities.

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