German Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter and its legacies 9781526121639

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German Expressi o n is m

German Expressionism Der Blaue Reiter and its legacies Edit e d b y Dorot h y Pr i c e

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 2162 2  hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Gabriele Münter, Boating, 1910. Milwaukee Art Museum, gift of Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley. Photographer credit: Efraim Lev-er. © DACS 2020

Typeset in Perpetua Std by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For my formidable German mother, Margund, and for my beautiful sisters, Cordelia in memoriam, and Christine with all my love.

Contents

List of figures

page ix

List of contributors xiii Acknowledgements xvii Introduction: why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? – Dorothy Price and Christopher Short

1

1 Is Der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? A discussion of anarchism, art and politics – Rose-Carol Washton Long

15

2 The dynamics of gendered artistic identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter – Shulamith Behr

34

3 The ‘primitive’ and the modern in Der Blaue Reiter almanac and the Folkwang Museum – Katherine Kuenzli

51

4 The ‘savages’ of Germany: a reassessment of the relationship between Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke – Christian Weikop

75

5  Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada – Deborah Lewer

105

6 Type/Face: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on language and perception – Annie Bourneuf

123

7 Feeling blue: Der Blaue Reiter, Francophilia and the Tate Gallery, 1960 – Nathan J. Timpano

136

viii

Contents 8  Die Tunisreise: the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter in the art of Paul Klee and Nacer Khemir – Sarah McGavran

159

Index 182

List of figures

1.1 Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911. Oil on canvas. Private collection, New York. page 18 1.2 Paul Signac, In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come, 1895. Oil on cavas. Ville de Montreuil. Photo: J. L. Tabuteau. 19 1.3 European copy of a Japanese pen drawing opposite a photograph of a column capital from Magdeburg Cathedral, c. 1210 as they appeared in Der Blaue Reiter. 21 1.4 Gabriele Münter, photo of Blaue Reiter members: Kandinsky sitting on over-turned bucket in centre, Thomas von Hartmann in bowler hat to his 22 left, 1911–1912. Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Munich. 1.5 Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints’ Day II, 1911. Oil on canvas. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 24 1.6 Wassily Kandinsky, Sound of Trumpets (Study for Large Resurrection), 1911. Watercolour, ink. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 25 1.7 Vasily Koren, Scene from Revelation VIII: 10–13, 1696. Coloured woodcut. Reproduced in Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Rovinskii, Kartiny iz Biblii i Apokalipsisa, raboty mastera Korenia (Paintings from the Bible and the Apocalypse, made by the Master of Korenia), St. Petersburg, 1881. Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 25 1.8 Stephan Arndes, ‘Jews with the Ark of the Covenant at the Walls of Jericho’, Lubeck Bible, 1494. Woodcut [from Wilhelm Worringer, Die altdeutsche Buchillustration, no. 69, Munich: Piper Verlag, 1912], appeared in Der Blaue Reiter. 27 2.1 Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin (Bildnis Marianne Werefkin),

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List of figures

2.2

2.3 2.4

2.5

3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

4.1

4.2

4.3

1909. Oil on board, 81 × 55 cm. © DACS 2018. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 38 Marianne Werefkin, Self Portrait (Selbstbildnis), c. 1910. Tempera on paper mounted on board, 51 × 34 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 41 Marianne Werefkin, Return Home (Heimkehr), c. 1909. Tempera on paper mounted on board, 53 × 71.5 cm. Fondazione Marianne Werefkin Ascona. 42 Letter by Else Lasker-Schüler to Marianne Werefkin (Blaue Reiterreiterin), 1913. Pen, ink and crayon on paper, 16.5 × 13.5 cm. 43 Private Collection. Photograph of Else Lasker-Schüler as Fakir from Thebes. Frontispiece from her novel Mein Herz, 1912. Image courtesy of The National Library of Israel. Else Lasker-Schüler Archive. 45 Der Blaue Reiter almanac, after p. 112 and before p. 113. Reproduced are Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Doctor Gachet, 1890. Oil on canvas, 68 × 57 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Utagawa Kuniyoshi, detail from Two Chinese Warriors of the Han Dynasty, nineteenth century. Colour woodcut, 36 × 24cm. Franz Marc Museum, Kochel. 52 Der Blaue Reiter almanac, pp. 8–9. Reproduced are Reinhold das Wunderkind, an illustration from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, according to Franz Marc, nineteenth century. Lithography. Location and dimensions unknown; Wassily Kandinsky, Lyrical, 1911. Colour woodcut on Japan paper, 14.9 × 21.8 cm (image) 18 × 31.2 cm (sheet). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 53 Folkwang Museum, grand staircase with sculptures from Bali, Japanese prints and baskets, and sculptures by Georg Minne and Constantin 54 Meunier, c. 1912. Photo: Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY. A display at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, 1921, depicting Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings Still Life with Mask (1911), Rhaetian Railway, Davos (1917), and Portrait of Oskar Schlemmer (1914) alongside a Bayaka Mask from central Africa and an Uli figure from New Guinea. Photo: Foto Marburg / 68 Art Resource, NY. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rest (Ruhe) (in-text plate, title page) from the periodical Der Sturm: Wochenschrift für Kultur und Künste, 2:75 (August 1911). Woodcut, page: 38.1 × 30 cm. Heidelberg University Library, CC BY SA 3.0. 77 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Summer (Sommer) (in-text plate, p. 567) from the periodical Der Sturm: Wochenschrift für Kultur und Künste, 2:71 (August 1911). Woodcut, page: 38.3 × 30.1 cm. Heidelberg University Library, CC BY SA 3.0. 78 Wassily Kandinsky, Drawing (Zeichnung) (in-text plate, title page) from the periodical Der Sturm: Halbmonatsschrift für Kultur und die Künste, 4:186/87



4.4

4.5

4.6

4.7 6.1

6.2

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

7.6 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4

List of figures xi (November 1913), page: 41.5 × 31 cm. Heidelberg University Library, CC BY SA 3.0. 79 Wassily Kandinsky, Moonrise (Mondaufgang), 1904. Colour woodcut, 26 × 15.5 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 84 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Chestnut Tree in Moonlight (Kastanienbaum im Mondlicht), 1904. Colour woodcut, 23.7 × 19.9 cm. Brücke Museum, Berlin. 85 Wassily Kandinsky, The Night, Large Version (Die Nacht, große Fassung), 1903. Colour woodcut, 29.9 × 12.7 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 86 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz and Maria Franck [Marc]. Watercolour over pencil drawing, 34 × 44.5 cm. Museum Penzberg. 89 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Anders’ (first page) from Klänge (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1913). Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph provided by the author. 127 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Anders’ (second page) from Klänge (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1913). Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. Photograph provided by the author. 128 Wassily Kandinsky Improvisation. Gorge, 1914. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 137 Franz Marc, Nude with Cat, 1910. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 138 August Macke, Promenade, 1913. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 139 Paul Klee, In the Houses of St. Germain, 1914. Private Collection/Paul Klee Zentrum. 148 Wassily Kandinsky, Riding Couple, 1906. Oil on canvas. 21.7 × 19.9” (55.0 × 50.5 cm). Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich. 149 Franz Marc, Deer in Snow II, 1911. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und 152 Kunstbau, Munich. Paul Klee, Before the Gates of Kairuan, 1914, 216. Watercolour on paper on cardboard, 20.7 × 31.5 cm. Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee. 163 Paul Klee, View Towards the Harbour of Hammamet, 1914, 35. Watercolour on paper, 21.5/21.7 × 27/26.6 cm. Bern: Private Collection. 164 Film still from Nacer Khemir, Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul, 2005. © trigon-film, Switzerland. DVD available at www.trigon-film.org. 165 August Macke, Vendor with Jugs, 1914. Watercolour on paper, 26.5 × 20.6 cm. Inv. Nr. KdZ 2120 LM. Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Westfälisches Landesmuseum), Münster / Sabine Ahlbrand-Dornseif. 170

xii

List of figures 8.5 Unknown artist, Gafsa Oasis, Tunisia, nineteenth century. Bed cover, wool; tapestry weave, 213.4 × 231.1 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Norman J. Caris, 98.272. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art. 171 8.6 Yla Margrit von Dach, photograph of Nacer Khemir’s sculptural installation shown in Die Tunisreise, 2007. 173 8.7 Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dance of the Almeh, 1863. Oil on wood panel, 50.2 × 81.3 cm. The Dayton Art Institute, gift of Mr. Robert Badenhop, 1951.15. 175 8.8 Film still from Nacer Khemir, Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul, 2005. © trigon-film, Switzerland. DVD available at www.trigon-film.org. 175

List of contributors

Shulamith Behr is Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She is a specialist in the study of German Expressionism and has published widely in the field: as editor, jointly with David Fanning and Douglas Jarman, of Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester University Press, 1993), as the curator – and author of the accompanying catalogues – of exhibitions on Conrad Felixmüller at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery (Leicester) and at The Courtauld Gallery in 1994, and as the author of Expressionism (Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999). Her publications encompass the contribution of women artists to German and Swedish modernism, starting with her Women Expressionists (Phaidon, 1988) to essays for catalogues of the Gabriele Münter (1992–1993) and Sigrid Hjérten (1999) retrospectives held in Germany and Stockholm. Relating to these interests, she was the curator and contributor to the catalogue of the exhibition Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906–1917, held at The Courtauld Gallery (23 June–11 September 2005), and is finalizing an in-depth study of Women Expressionists and the Public Sphere: From Empire to Emancipation. Annie Bourneuf is Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (University of Chicago Press), winner of the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award; her research has been supported by fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her book re-­ examining Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) is in progress. Katherine M. Kuenzli is Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on European modernism 1880–1940, which she studies from a broad cultural and political perspective. She is the author of a number of publications, including The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin de Siècle (Routledge, 2010) which examines the decorative painting of Nabi artists Edouard Vuillard, Pierre

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List of contributors Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Paul Ranson. In particular it reconstructs their relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition. It also re-positions the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism’s development from 1860 to 1914 and challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority. Kuenzli has also published articles in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art History, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, as well as essays in edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. Her work has been supported by Fulbright, Chateaubriand, Dedalus, DAAD, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Getty Library, Canadian Center for Architecture, ACLS and NEH grants. Deborah Lewer is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. She has published widely on many aspects of German modernism, particularly on Dada in Zurich and Berlin, on Expressionism and on aspects of Weimar culture, architecture and on art in the GDR. She also works on the intersection between art, the radical avantgarde and theology. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Art Journal, Art History and in Art in Translation, and she has edited the volume Post-Impressionism to World War II for the Blackwell anthologies series. She has also published numerous translations of key texts from the German. In 2009–2010 she held a Senior Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellowship at the University of Bonn, Germany. She is a Visiting Scholar at Sarum College, Salisbury. Sarah McGavran fell in love with the art of Der Blaue Reiter during a Fulbright year in Germany, and a decade later she earned her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis with a study on Paul Klee and Orientalism. The recipient of a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz and a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis, McGavran went on to work as an art consultant before starting her own business as an editor and translator for art-related writing. She now works as an editor at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Dorothy Price is Professor of History of Art at the University of Bristol and Editor of Art History, the journal of the Association for Art History, UK. She is the author and editor of numerous books including Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in German Modernism (Ashgate, 2003), Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750–2000 (with Abigail Harrison Moore, Wiley Blackwell, 2006), After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2013), Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (with Marsha Meskimmon, Manchester University Press, 2013) and Chantal Joffe: Personal Feeling is the Main Thing (Victoria Miro and Elephant, 2018). She has published extensively on her two main areas of research specialism, German art and black and diasporic art in Britain, in leading international exhibition catalogues and journals and she works as guest curator for a number of distinguished institutions in the



List of contributors xv

UK, including The Lowry, Salford, the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Dr Christopher Short is the author of two books, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909–1928: The Quest for Synthesis (Peter Lang, 2010) and Schiele (Phaidon, 1997). He has also written a number of essays on Der Blaue Reiter, and Wassily Kandinsky in particular. When not ruminating on Kandinsky, Short works as a photographer and researcher. His photographic research relates to land and seascape, and to portraiture. The latter is a new project, exploring the psychological relation of the subject to the photographic image. Until recently, he was also Senior Lecturer and Deputy Chair of the Centre for Fine Art Research at Cardiff School of Art and Design. Nathan J. Timpano is Associate Professor, Associate Chair and Area Head of Art History within the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami. His area of research centres on modern art and visual culture in Europe and the Americas, with a particular focus on Germany and Austria. Before joining the faculty in Miami, he was a Fulbright Fellow to Vienna, Austria, served as a Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, and held positions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. He is the author of Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet (Routledge, 2017), and has published articles and reviews in journals such as Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Journal of Art Historiography and caa.reviews. In line with his chapter in this volume, his current book project examines the role of colour symbolism in German modern art and literature, especially in works by Blaue Reiter artists. Rose-Carol Washton Long is Professor Emerita of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Particularly concerned with the relation of art to politics and other contextual issues, her special research interests are the visual culture of Germany, Central Europe, and Russia during the last twenty years of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. She was a founding member of the CAA-affiliated Historians of German, Scandinavia, and Central European Art and Architecture (HGSCEA). She has published Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Clarendon Press, 1980), edited the anthology, German Expressionism : Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (G. K. Hall, 1993), and has co-edited the anthologies Of ‘Truths Impossible to Put in Words’: Max Beckmann Contextualized (Peter Lang, 2009) and Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture: Antisemitism, Assimilation, Affirmation (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2010). Her most recent essay, ‘“Dangerous Portraits?” Lotte Jacobi’s Photos of Uzbek and Tajik Women’, appears in the fall 2019 issue of the Women’s Art Journal. She is working on a book on photography in the Weimar Republic. Christian Weikop is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, and is a specialist in modern and contemporary German art. He has taught, supervised,

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List of contributors and published extensively in this field, including an edited volume, articles and catalogue essays on the Brücke group and discrete essays on Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. He was co-editor of the third volume of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2013), devoted to the European avant-garde between 1880 and 1940. Weikop has led major projects for the Tate/National Galleries Scotland ARTIST ROOMS research partnership on August Sander, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, and continues to publish on these artists. He is a specialist on Kiefer and wrote an extended catalogue essay for the highly acclaimed Royal Academy of Arts Kiefer retrospective in 2014, a major Tate Kiefer In Focus publication and essays on the artist for Sammlung Marx – 40 Works, a Hamburger Bahnhof and Nationalgalerie Berlin publication in 2019.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. It began as a British Academy-funded conference at Tate Modern, London in 2011, on the centenary of the first exhibition of the editors of Der Blaue Reiter. For this first inception, I have to thank my co-organizers, Dr Christopher Short and Dr Marko Daniel, the British Academy, the University of Bristol and The Bristol Gallery for their invaluable financial support and the original line-up of conference speakers and participants. Turning the conference papers into a book was a process that took far longer than I had hoped, and was marked by a number of personal family losses. I have to sincerely thank all of the authors for their immense patience and hard work whilst waiting for the outcome to materialize. Furthermore, thanks are due to my former postgraduate research student, and now departmental colleague, Dr Elizabeth Robles, whose early help in tidying up the manuscript was invaluable. I would also like to acknowledge the pioneering work on Expressionism of Dr Jill Lloyd, Dr Adrian Locke for his continued support of my work and Chantal Joffe for her fiercely intelligent friendship. Thanks also to Emma Brennan, Alun Richards, anonymous readers and the team at Manchester University Press, who are consistently patient and a true pleasure to work with and to Nick James. And finally, my warmest thanks go to Andrew and Jasmine for making it all worthwhile.

Introduction: why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? Dorothy Price and Christopher Short

I

t is well over a hundred years since the editors of the Blaue Reiter (Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc) curated their first group exhibition in December 1911 in Munich and published what turned out to be their only group ‘manifesto’, the almanac of Der Blaue Reiter. Yet the legacy and impact of what the small group of artists in the circle of Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, Klee and Macke achieved in the few years preceding the outbreak of war in 1914 is immense. As a major artistic grouping of modernism, the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter were pioneers of abstraction and it is worth outlining in some detail how they began, what they achieved, and why their almanac is central to the significance of what they stood for, before considering what this particular book contributes to their understanding, legacies and impact – and why this volume is based on the premise that Der Blaue Reiter still matters.

The origins of Der Blaue Reiter On 2 December 1911, the selection jury of the Munich New Artists’ Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München, NKVM) rejected an artwork by Kandinsky (figure 1.1). Composition V was turned down for exhibition by the artist’s own organization for the professed reason that the painting exceeded the size limits that were written into the association’s statutes. However, as many scholars have observed, there was also a clear feeling among NKVM members that Composition V had veered too far towards abstraction (misunderstood by the jury as decoration), and that painting should maintain a closer, material connection to the visible world. As Leah Dickerman has commented, ‘Komposition V presented a radically new picture type and initiated the assault on referential form that would occur over the next year’ in Kandinsky’s practice as both painter and theorist: ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published in the same month that Komposition V was unveiled’ and ‘the combination had extraordinary impact, far greater than is generally recognized today’.1

2

Dorothy Price and Christopher Short The NKVM had been established in January 1909 by Kandinsky, Alexei von Jawlensky, Marianne Werefkin, Gabriele Münter, Adolf Erbslöh and Alexander Kanoldt, among others.2 Initially there were twenty-one members, and while numbers fluctuated, the range of disciplines represented would expand to include not just painting but also sculpture, dance and art theory.3 From the outset Kandinsky was elected to head the association. The foreword to the Catalogue of the First Exhibition of the NKVM (held in the gallery of the Munich dealer Heinrich Thannhauser from 1 December 1909 for two weeks), makes clear how Kandinsky mapped the association’s aims directly onto this own: Our point of departure is the belief that the artist, apart from those impressions that he received from the world of external appearances, continually accumulates experiences within his own inner world. We see artistic forms that should express the reciprocal permeation of all these experiences – forms that must be freed from everything incidental, in order to powerfully pronounce only that which is necessary – in short, artistic synthesis.4 Kandinsky was also keen to ensure that the ‘membership list included international names – Germany, France, Austria, Russia, Italy’, a ‘union of various countries to serve one purpose’.5 His writings had already called attention to the importance of the international reach of what he saw as a new movement in art, whose purpose was to reveal the spiritual, inner rather than material, outer aspects of the world. Inevitably, when faced with something unfamiliar, public reaction to the exhibitions organized by the NKVM were overwhelmingly negative and it was the more abstract works on display in particular that caused much of the indignation. Yet it was also those works which elicited one enthusiastic convert, the Bavarian painter Franz Marc, who wrote a sympathetic review praising the ‘fully spiritualised and dematerialised inwardness of feeling’ of the paintings on display. Marc then joined the association in February 1911, shortly after Kandinsky had resigned his presidency due to on-going differences of opinion with other members. These differences centred on a clear animosity on the part of other members of NKVM towards the burgeoning abstraction evident in Kandinsky’s practice.6 In particular it was the artists Adolf Erbslöh and Alexander Kanoldt, representing the majority of members, who rejected the move towards greater abstraction. Differences between Kandinsky and the association continued to intensify through 1911 and came to a head in December when the selection committee for their third exhibition rejected Composition V. As a result of the rejection, Kandinsky, Marc and Münter resigned from the association and developed plans to organize an exhibition of their own. It would be held beside the NKVM’s exhibition in the Moderne Gallery Thannhauser, opening on 18 December 1911, and its title would be The First Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter – a truly strange title for an exhibition. Yet it was as early as 19 June 1911, in a letter to Franz Marc, that Kandinsky had outlined plans for an almanac or yearbook, which was eventually to be called Der Blaue Reiter.7 From the moment of Kandinsky’s initial letter, the



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 3

editors – Kandinsky and Marc – worked feverishly to bring the volume together, ready for its publication by Reinhard Piper in May 1912. The clumsy title of their NKVM rival exhibition in December 1911 suggests the apparently ‘ad hoc’ circumstance that brought it about.8 As Kandinsky subsequently recalled, ‘we invented the name Blaue Reiter whilst sitting around a coffee table in the Marcs’ garden at Sindelsdorf … we both loved blue, Marc liked horses, and I liked riders, so the name came of its own accord’.9 Thus, the title of a book also became the basis of the title for an exhibition that, apparently, pursued the same aims and could act as advance publicity for the impending publication of the almanac. The editors invited artists with whose work they felt an affinity to contribute to the exhibition, including works by Albert Bloch, David Burliuk, Vladimir Burliuk, Heinrich Campendonck, Robert Delaunay, Elizabeth Epstein, Eugen Kahler, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Jean Niestlé, Henri Rousseau and Arnold Schoenberg. Marc included four paintings, and, among the six works he exhibited, Kandinsky included Composition V. About 50 works in total were exhibited.10 As the list of included names would suggest, the works on display were stylistically very diverse; the statement that Kandinsky wrote for the accompanying catalogue calls attention to this, in its ‘aim to show by means of the variety of forms represented, how the inner wishes of the artist are embodied in manifold ways’.11 During 1912 the exhibition travelled to Cologne, Bremen, Zurich, Hagen and Frankfurt, and an exhibition of works by the artists was used to open Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in early spring.12 But while the exhibition was still in Munich, Marc and Kandinsky started to plan a second exhibition – the Second Exhibition of the Editors of the Blaue Reiter – which was held at the Munich gallery, Neue Kunst, opening on 12 February, and running until April 1912. Whilst this second exhibition, subtitled Schwarz-Weiß (Black and White) was limited to prints, drawings and watercolours, a far broader range of artists and works were included than the first one. A total of 315 works by a thoroughly international array of artists were on display: from France were Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Roger de la Fresnaye, Robert Lotiron, Maurice de Vlaminck, and the Spaniard, Pablo Picasso; from Russia were Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova and Kasimir Malevich; from Germany were Maria Franck-Marc, Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Franz Marc, Moriz Melzer, Willhelm Morgner, Otto Müller, Münter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Georg Tappert; and from Switzerland were Hans Arp, Walter Helbig, Wilhelm Gimmi and Oscar Lüthy, plus the American, Albert Bloch.13 Also included in the ­exhibition were eight Russian folk prints (known as lubki). In the statement that accompanied the second exhibition, Kandinsky compared the diversity of artistic form to ‘the “infinite” variety, the “unlimited” richness of natural forms: elephant, ant, fir, rose, mountain, pebble’.14 He wrote that just as natural forms had, according to Darwinian theory, adapted in the most diverse ways to purpose, so artistic forms had evolved in the most diverse ways in order to adapt to their purpose. The exhibition sought to show ‘examples of the inexhaustible wealth of forms that,

4

Dorothy Price and Christopher Short unceasingly, the world of art creates by the operation of law’.15 Once again, Kandinsky makes a virtue of the diversity of artistic styles on display, asserting the necessity of such diversity, and establishing that a ‘law’ lies behind, and thus unites, all instances of it.

Der Blaue Reiter almanac The almanac itself would be no different from the exhibition in its principles of diversity of form – indeed, it would make the point still more forcefully. In the original letter sent from Kandinsky to Marc in June 1911, in which Kandinsky outlines his idea for the publication, he writes: Well, I have a new plan. Piper must be the publisher and the two of us the editors. A kind of almanac (yearbook) with reproductions and articles … and a chronicle!! that is, reports on exhibitions reviewed by artists, and artists alone. In the book, the entire year must be reflected; and a link to the past as well as a ray to the future must give this mirror its full life […] We will put an Egyptian work beside a small Zeh, a Chinese work beside a Rousseau, a folk print beside a Picasso, and the like! Eventually we will attract poets and musicians.16 The content of the Blaue Reiter was, for 1912, extraordinary in its diversity. The volume contains thirteen full-length articles on various aspects of the arts, ranging from August Macke’s essay on masks, to Thomas von Hartmann’s essay on anarchy in music and Kandinsky’s essay on stage composition, interspersed with poetry and citations from diverse authors; a total of 141 reproductions of artworks and artifacts; a stage play by Kandinsky; an untitled section containing three musical scores by Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton von Webern; and finally, at the back, a series of full and half-page advertisements for exhibitions of, and publications on, art sympathetic to that seen in the volume (principally, modern and non-western). In their typescript preface Kandinsky and Marc wrote that ‘the reader will find works in our volumes that … show an inner relationship although they may appear unrelated on the surface’, works that are born of what the editors refer to as an ‘inner necessity’.17 Three different editions of the book (the word ‘almanac’ was removed from the title shortly before publication) were published in 1912. The standard edition (hardcover or cloth bound) was printed in a run of 1,200 circulation copies; the deluxe edition (linen bound, with two hand-signed woodcuts by Kandinsky and Marc) consisted of fifty copies; and the museum edition, which was limited to ten copies, was bound in blue Morocco, and contained the two hand-signed woodcuts as in the deluxe edition as well as an original work by one of the two editors enclosed. Discussion of plans for a second volume of Der Blaue Reiter began immediately after publication of the first, but these were never realized, not least because of the outbreak of war in 1914 and Marc’s subsequent death. A second edition of Der Blaue Reiter was published in 1914, with forewords by each editor added.



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 5

To have brought together in a single publication works from such a variety of sources in so limited a time was surely an extraordinary feat. But rather than dwell upon the logistics of the production of the book and of the exhibitions, it is useful instead to consider the terms on which such diversity of content, in both the exhibitions and the publication, was purposeful to the editors.18 In this, it is important to note that it is the publication, rather than the exhibition, that most consistently offers information for understanding the ambitions of the overall project. Further, while it is clear that Marc’s input to the development of the exhibitions and almanac was essential, the philosophical position of the projects was underwritten first and foremost by Kandinsky. Not only was it Kandinsky’s letter to Marc that first outlined the very idea of Der Blaue Reiter in June 1911, but also the statements relating to both the exhibitions and the publication are unmistakably couched in language that relates directly to Kandinsky’s earlier and concurrent writings. It seems quite likely that Marc’s engagement with historical and (more so) philosophical texts was at least as thorough as Kandinsky’s but it was Kandinsky’s interpretation of such sources – most likely mediated by others – that seems to have driven Der Blaue Reiter’s key ambitions. Perhaps most striking was the extraordinary variety of styles present in both the exhibitions and the publication. What was the viewer to make of the inclusion in the same exhibition of Kandinsky’s Composition V (1911), for example, and Schoenberg’s Self-Portrait, Walking (1911)? Convention might have led the viewer of important art exhibitions – whether academic or avant-garde – to expect to see works that were at least stylistically related; such expectation was denied. On the one hand, a highly abstract, complex, esoteric set of marks and images; on the other, the untrained handling of paint and seemingly naïve depiction of a man walking a spatially incoherent pavement. In the former, no recognizable things seem to be depicted; in the latter, all-too-easily recognizable things appear. In the former, an extraordinary array of colour and shapes suggesting energy; in the latter, muted colour and a melancholic lack of energy. Apparently, they have next to nothing in common – and these are but two of the ‘modern’ works included in the first exhibition. A brief look at the almanac and things become still less clear. Those same two works are now joined, for example, by a fifteenth-century Biblical woodcut from Germany, depicting the Whore of Babylon and a ‘Japanese Drawing, origin questionable’ of what appears to be a cucumber and perhaps a tomato.19 Is this not just a jumble of images, in which works from radically different cultural sources with very different purposes are thrown together haphazardly? August Macke, who had made a significant contribution to the almanac by assisting in its preparation for publication, opens his essay, simply entitled Masks, by listing ‘a Persian spear, a holy vessel, a pagan idol … a Gothic cathedral and Chinese junk’. 20 He continues to write that ‘form is a mystery to us for it is the expression of mysterious powers … the “invisible God” ’.21 Here, Macke echoes Kandinsky’s list of unconnected things cited above in the statement that accompanied the second exhibition of the editors of Der Blaue Reiter, and points towards a key argument that Kandinsky articulates in the almanac. In ‘On the Question of Form’, he suggests that if the reader of Der Blaue Reiter

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Dorothy Price and Christopher Short banishes preconceptions ‘and then leafs through the book, passing from a votive picture to Delaunay, from Cézanne to a Russian folk-print, from a mask to Picasso, from a glass picture to Kubin, etc. etc’. he will begin to enter the realm of art.22 For Kandinsky, the only determinant of form should be ‘internal necessity’, a kind of imperative or drive felt within the artist as a result of the action on him of what Kandinsky calls the ‘abstract spirit’; artists responding to this imperative will produce, he writes, ‘living’ works of art.23 Thus, the works of trained European avant-garde artists can sit beside the works of untrained artists, medieval art, popular folk prints, glass paintings and the art of children, so long as the source of their work is understood to be the same ‘internal necessity’, underwritten by the transcendent spirit. What is more, in the art of the ‘primitive’ – in all the diverse forms in which it is present in the almanac – this internal necessity made itself heard most clearly and, in this sense, those who have been subjected to academic training must learn from those who have not.

The national, the international and Der Blaue Reiter Less obvious, perhaps, than the diversity of styles, is that the works presented in the exhibitions and the publication are from an array of different international sources. Whilst we may recognize signs that the works represented originate from very different cultures, it is perhaps not until we read the labels that we fully appreciate the extent of the internationalism at the heart of the project.24 The variety of international contacts that Kandinsky cultivated in the years before Der Blaue Reiter had facilitated the exhibition of his work not only in Germany but throughout Europe. Indeed, the complete list of venues in which his work was shown is impressive in its reach, ‘St. Petersburg (1904), Rome (1904, 1905, 1907), Moscow (1904, 1905), Hamburg (1904, 1905), Dresden (1904, 1905, 1907), Paris (1904–9), Prague (1906), Warsaw (1905), Vienna (1905)’.25 To this, we should add Kandinsky’s own travels, which, after 1904, became extensive. In 1905 Kandinsky visited Tunisia with Gabriele Münter, was caught up in the events of the Russian Revolution in Odessa and spent December in Italy; in May1906 he moved to Paris where he stayed for a little over a year and returned to Berlin in autumn 1907; in autumn 1910, he stayed in Moscow; spring and summer of 1911 were spent back in Murnau where he and Münter had bought a house in 1909. From October to December of 1912 he was in Odessa, Moscow (where he returned in 1913) and St. Petersburg. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he moved first to Switzerland, then to Odessa and then to Moscow. His practical involvement in an international forum is clear. It was in his ‘Letters from Munich’, which Kandinsky wrote for Apollon from 1909–10, that he began to describe his opposition to the nationalism he perceived in the German art world and his support for internationalism most clearly. Thus, for example, the third ‘Letter’ (April 1910) ridicules the circular accompanying the Deutsche Künstler Verband’s newly opened exhibition for its ‘outrageously anti-international principle’ and the fifth ‘Letter’ runs through a list of subjects for paintings included in the Glaspalast, which were on display that year ‘without the French – indeed, without any



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 7

foreigners at all’.26 He also despairs that the same type of large-scale compositions have been ‘trotted out’ over the last forty years at exhibitions: ‘cuirassiers ride, cannons roar, stricken horses and Frenchmen collapse, and the whole proclaims the valor of German arms’.27 These ‘heaps of rubbish’ include a ‘mountain of German graphics, born ten years ago and now … already dead’.28 It is against this background, then, that in the preface to the almanac, the editors declare: It should be almost superfluous to emphasise specifically that in our case the principle of internationalism is the only one possible … in the last resort … national coloration is merely incidental. The whole work, called art, knows no borders or nations, only humanity.29 In the first of his ‘Letters from Munich’, Kandinsky had written that it is an ‘inner tone’, ‘one universal sound’, ‘the sound of the spirit of man’ that unites all important work from both east and west.30 This ‘spirit of man’ is itself transcended by what he came to call in ‘On the Question of Form’ the ‘abstract’ or ‘creative spirit’, which, as we have already seen, determines all living art through the internal necessity that it creates in the artist. Here, this principle is applied to all true artists of all nations. Thus, Kandinsky clearly makes the case for international unity grounded, once more, in a transcendent spirit.31

The almanac as Gesamtkunstwerk A further key aspect of diversity in Der Blaue Reiter almanac was the range of media it embraced. This isn’t necessarily immediately apparent on leafing through the book, as all works are reproduced in print. Drawings, paintings, statues, prose, shadow puppets, poetry, masks and so on are rendered similar on initial inspection, but very soon the diversity of the depicted makes itself felt. As this happens, the book becomes heavily ‘textured’ by the radically different objects it now contains: it becomes an extraordinary, apparently discontinuous bricolage of objects and materials. The almanac, then, was conceived as a kind of synthetic artwork, on the model of the romantic notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, particularly as developed by Richard Wagner.32 In his early writings Kandinsky turned to Wagner in his efforts to lay the ground for his version of a ­multi-media art form, a form he called ‘the monumental art’. He devised an account of mutual support for the different art forms that would lead to an overall expression greater than the sum of the parts, such that the arts would identify their common ‘sounds’ allowing mutual reinforcement, as well as each of the arts identifying its own particular colouration, which it would add to the overall sound. But as early as 1911, the additions made to Concerning the Spiritual in Art shortly before publication demonstrate a strong assertion of a somewhat different, more complex principle. Kandinsky writes that apart from the concordance of the elements of stage composition, lies the possibility of their discordance, alternation of their individual effects, and the emancipation of each individual element.33 Thus, he goes on to suggest the creation of a monumental art by

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Dorothy Price and Christopher Short means of ‘juxtaposition (= opposition)’ as well as parallel movement of its elements.34 The essay ‘On Stage Composition’ in Der Blaue Reiter expands on this.35 Kandinsky writes that Wagner’s efforts to strengthen resources by repetition of the same ‘external sound’ could remain only at that level – a consequence of external, not internal necessity. Now, the realm of contrast, the antithesis of duplication, as well as the series of possibilities that lie between contrast and duplication, becomes the essential basis of the synthesis of the different art forms. In this way, writes Kandinsky, art would develop to reflect the contradictions of its age: ‘The incompatibility of certain forms … should be regarded not as something ‘disharmonious’, but conversely as offering new possibilities’ and thus a form of ‘harmony’.36 In the almanac, it is Arnold Schoenberg who becomes, for Kandinsky, representative of a more consistent adherence to ‘inner harmony’. With him begins the ‘purely spiritual’ ‘music of the future’.37 Kandinsky and Marc heard Schoenberg’s atonal music for the first time in January 1911, and from that moment, Kandinsky befriended the composer, made great efforts to understand his Theory of Harmony, and adopted what he regarded as the key ideas from that book for his own theory of art. Indeed, by 1912, in the foreword to the second edition of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky reframed the entire book on Schoenbergian terms, as constituting the initial chapters of a kind of ‘Theory of Harmony of Painting’. Careful reading of Kandinsky’s texts during 1911–1912 shows that the above principles for the organisation of the different arts within the concept of the ‘monumental art’, foregrounding such concepts as dissonance and extended harmony, derive from Schoenberg’s theory and musical composition.38 Such formal freedom is not unbounded, but it is the task of each historical period to explore and exhaust the limits of freedom made possible to its age: thus, in his commentary on Schoenberg’s ‘On Parallel Octaves and Fifths’ from the Theory of Harmony, Kandinsky quotes Schoenberg: ‘I feel even today that there are certain limits which determine my use of this or that dissonance’.39 As the human spirit develops, argues Kandinsky in relation to Schoenberg’s text, so artistic freedom develops to become more spiritual – but artistic freedom cannot exceed the spiritual development of its age. Thus, in relation to Schoenberg’s justification of the emancipation of musical dissonance through the history and development of the theory of harmony, Kandinsky began to develop a historical account of the emancipation of artistic form in relation to the development of human spirituality. The idea that each epoch has limits to its artistic freedom is one to which we shall return below; for the moment, however, we shall focus our attention on Schoenberg’s most explicit contribution to the almanac, his essay entitled ‘The Relationship to the Text’. For Kandinsky, the most important point in Schoenberg’s essay for Der Blaue Reiter was the insistence that ‘the external congruence of music and text … has little to do with the internal congruence. An apparent divergence on the surface can be necessary because of a parallel movement on a higher level’.40 In a number of his writings, including in the almanac itself, Kandinsky adopted this argument, and converted it into a law in which external disunity of any artistic form could be used as evidence for internal coherence. In ‘On the Question of Form’, with typographical emphasis and as if a guide to the entire



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 9

volume in which it appeared, he wrote that ‘the greatest external dissimilarity becomes the greatest internal similarity’.41 On this principle, the diverse pictures, poems, drawings and musical scores that appear within the volume are, despite their apparent incongruity with each other and the text, most fully united. Yet the material in Der Blaue Reiter is not organized merely according to principles of dissimilarity or conflict.42 Rather, text and image sometimes coincide and reinforce each other, and sometimes they become quite separate and contradictory. Certain of the images form sequences that reinforce what is written in the text, and others remain quite remote from themes of the text. In this way, parallel reinforcement joins opposition and contradiction as an organizational principle. The almanac is organized according to concepts that Kandinsky also developed, both in the almanac and related texts, for ‘monumental art’. As such, the publication should be engaged not merely as a book, but as a compact version of the Gesamtkunstwerk in which the most diverse art forms are organized into a single work.

Legacies Today, either as individuals, in pairs or occasionally as a group, artworks by Der Blaue Reiter are regularly subject to lavish exhibitions – within Germany and the United States, in particular – so it remains surprising that there has been no major academic stand-alone study of the group published in the English language to date. Whilst numerous studies published in English focus on individual artists and, in particular, on its leading light, Wassily Kandinsky and more recently on Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter either together, or apart, none have sought to explore the origins, contexts and legacies of Der Blaue Reiter as a whole outside of occasional exhibition catalogues.43 When Der Blaue Reiter has been considered in English-language scholarship as a group, it has inevitably been yoked together with the other major group associated with German Expressionism, Die Brücke.44 Yet despite this frequent conjoining of the two groups in a single study, very few accounts of Expressionism in Germany actually take time to consider the differences, similarities, exchanges and influences between them (something that is re-dressed by Christian Weikop’s chapter further along in this volume). And while Die Brücke have been subject to a more recent edited volume published in English, this is the first new edited collection of academic essays in English to consider the origins, legacies and impact of Der Blaue Reiter across the twentieth century into the present.45 Arising from the only Blaue Reiter centenary conference held in 2011 at Tate Modern in London (funded by the British Academy), this volume brings together established and emerging scholars in the field of German Expressionist studies to look again at the histories, contexts and legacies of Der Blaue Reiter for new audiences in the ­twenty-first century. Consisting of eight newly researched essays, the volume builds on the already excellent body of research on the origins, formation, exhibitions, publication and demise of Der Blaue Reiter that has been meticulously established by Helmut Friedel

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Dorothy Price and Christopher Short and Annegret Hoberg of the Lenbachhaus in Munich, in particular, as well as Peg Weiss and Vivian Endicott Barnett in the USA, in order to offer an in-depth examination of different facets of the group that have not been previously considered. The current volume draws on academic inter-disciplinary theories and methods rather than primarily curatorially motivated ones, in order to consider the contributions and legacies of this major avant-garde group of European modernism. Particular features include its mix of both established and emerging art historical voices combined with the variety of perspectives brought to bear on both the activities of Der Blaue Reiter itself, in particular the almanac and the first and second exhibitions, but also, crucially, on its interactions and influences with other modernist groups (Die Brücke, Dada and Bauhaus, in particular) and some of the Blaue Reiter’s artistic and conceptual legacies in both post-war and more recent contemporary aesthetic practices. The opening chapter explores whether Der Blaue Reiter is still relevant for contemporary art practices by focusing on the much-overlooked political ideals of anarchism that structure aspects of Der Blaue Reiter almanac and Kandinsky’s theoretical writings. The apparent disunity of the almanac’s structure and contents are shown by the author Rose-Carol Washton Long to be motivated by a deliberate challenge to the orthodox structures of classical institutional academic training motivated by a revolutionary impulse to change the existing order. Comparisons are effectively made between Blaue Reiter strategies of disruption and explicit embrace of anarchy as a political tactic and the peaceful protests of the recent political movements such as Occupy. The second chapter, by Shulamith Behr, addresses the dynamics of gender in relation to Der Blaue Reiter. In stark contrast to Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter included an active community of female artists, patrons and supporters as central to its activities, without whom the financial prospects of the group would have foundered even before their first exhibition. Behr explores the specific dynamics of gendered artistic identity and creativity through the case studies of Marianne Werefkin and Gabriele Münter in particular. Three further chapters consider the different ways in which the ideals of Der Blaue Reiter were connected with other avant-garde practices of their era. In Weikop’s chapter, Der Blaue Reiter’s affinities, exchanges and differences from Die Brücke are explored, while in Katherine Kuenzli’s chapter it is their influences on the museological directions of Karl Ernst Osthaus’s Folkwang Museum in Essen that are highlighted. In chapter 5 Deborah Lewer considers Der Blaue Reiter’s influence on Hugo Ball’s early thinking about Dada in Zurich, before Dada’s explicit rejection of Der Blaue Reiter, despite having named the café on the premises of the Galerie Dada in Zurich, as the Kandinsky room.46 Chapter 6 by Annie Bourneuf considers affinities in the use of language and perception between Walter Benjamin and Wassily Kandinsky, in particular Kandinsky’s seminal contribution to Der Blaue Reiter almanac ‘On the Question of Form’. The final two chapters explore diverse legacies that can be claimed for different aspects of Der Blaue Reiter after 1945. Nathan Timpano’s chapter focuses on the hostile critical reception of the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter at the Tate Gallery in 1960, as a symptom of the British art establishment’s Francophilia coupled with its long-standing



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 11

hostility to German modernism since World War II. And the final chapter by Sarah McGavran takes a different approach again, focusing on the ways in which contemporary Tunisian artist Nacer Khemir engages with legacies of modernism’s colonial past in his 2007 film Die Tunisreise. As McGavran demonstrates, Khemir does this by retracing the steps of Paul Klee and his Blaue Reiter companions, August Macke and Louis Moilliet, on their visit to Tunisia in April 1914. The chapter raises important questions about the nature of cultural exchange across time and place within the frameworks of both post-colonialism and transnationalism in ways that have not normally been explored in relation to the more conventional extant scholarship on Der Blaue Reiter. It is hoped that the volume as a whole also enables contemporary readers to think more widely about what some critics have regarded as a particularly niche and esoteric moment of spiritual modernism. Indeed, the most trenchant critique of Der Blaue Reiter as a form of solipsistic modernism can be found in the pages of the infamous Aesthetics and Politics debates played out by members of the Frankfurt School of philosophy during the 1930s and 1940s. In his essay ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ (1934), Marxist critic Georg Lukács criticized the Expressionists for their lack of concrete actions with regard to the underlying economic, political and social causes of the crises of modernity that they were experiencing and expressing through their artwork. According to Lukács, the Expressionists’ ‘mystical irrationalism’ was merely a form of heightened subjectivism that only reflected the experience of social crisis on a personal level without a consideration of the wider economic, social and ideological contexts in which they were working. Writing in the left-wing journal Das Wort in 1938, just after the opening of the ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’ in which the Nazis had included hundreds of artworks by Expressionist artists for vilification, Ernst Bloch, also a Marxist, offered a vigorous and incisive counter-attack to Lukács’ criticisms of Expressionism. Bloch’s defence was written in the full knowledge that the Nazis, although for different reasons, had launched a virulent attack on Expressionism and one which he could not stand by and watch. He astutely recognized that the need for a defence (including of Der Blaue Reiter with whom he opens his essay) was urgent if it wasn’t to be consigned to the dustbin of political disavowal. As Jason Gaiger has elegantly summarized, ‘Bloch argued that as a critical reaction to the progressive elimination of the role of the subject in modern society (and especially under fascism), the Expressionist emphasis on the subject’s inner life constituted a valid form of resistance’.47 And we would add, a vital one. Bloch’s redemption of Expressionism was timely and the legacies of Der Blaue Reiter have been continually re-envisioned since and well into the twenty-first century in multiple ways. The art of Nacer Khemir that Sarah McGavran highlights in her chapter is but one example of the myriad ways in which artists continue to reference, deference and difference the art of the Blaue Reiter. For example, in 2005 British artist Chris Ofili exhibited a new series of works in Berlin simply called The Blue Rider in unequivocal homage to the group. Ofili produced a lavish series of large-scale works on paper executed in a variety of blues and silver in a loose nod to the spiritual associations

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Dorothy Price and Christopher Short that Der Blaue Reiter celebrated in their choice of favoured colour. And in 2006 the Lenbachhaus in Munich, where many of the seminal works by Blaue Reiter artists are still housed today, commissioned four contemporary artists to respond to the artworks on display by four of the artists of Der Blaue Reiter: Franz Ackermann to Franz Marc, Katharina Grosse to Alexej Jawlensky, Olafur Eliasson to Wassily Kandinsky, and Thomas Demand to August Macke. Furthermore Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu is well known for her declared interest in Kandinsky’s concept of ‘the Great Utopia, when he talked about the inevitable implosion and/or explosion of our constructed spaces out of the sheer necessity of agency’.48 Numerous other artists could not have conceived of their practice without the drive to abstraction pioneered by the artists of Der Blaue Reiter. For the first time, then, Der Blaue Reiter is subject in this volume to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives ranging from philosophical enquiry into language and visual perception, through an analysis of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century, and its legacies for certain kinds of post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a renewed perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction and takes seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that we hope might recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Der Blaue Reiter still matters, we would argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today. As Leah Dickerman has so ably demonstrated, it was only after Kandinsky had exhibited Composition V that ‘abstraction not only began to seem plausible but took on the character of an imperative’.49

Notes  1 Leah Dickerman ‘Vasily Kandinsky Without Words’, in Leah Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York, London: Thames and Hudson, 2012), p. 50.   2 Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky (Munich: Prestel, 2008), p. 83.   3 Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (eds), Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, vols I and II (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 52.   4 Wassily Kandinsky ‘Forward to the Catalogue of the First Exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung Munich’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 53.   5 Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (London, Tate Publishing 2006), p. 12.   6 Ibid., p. 13.   7 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 109.   8 Although it is clear that plans for just such an exhibition pre-dated the artists’ resignation. See Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 110.   9 Kandinsky cited in Barry Herbert, German Expressionism: Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (London: Jupiter Books, 1983), p. 154. 10 Friedel and Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky, p. 114. 11 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 113.



Why does Der Blaue Reiter still matter? 13

12 Reinhold Heller, ‘The Blue Rider’, in E. da Costa Meyer and F. Wasserman (eds), Schoenberg, Kandinsky and the Blue Rider (New York: Scala, 2003), p. 76. 13 Paul Vogt, The Blue Rider (New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 1980), pp. 47–50. 14 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 228. 15 Ibid. 16 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 15–16. 17 Ibid., pp. 250–1. 18 For an excellent summary of the work undertaken, see Friedel and Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky. 19 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 275. 20 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 59. 21 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 83. 22 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 256. 23 Ibid., p. 235. 24 See Christopher Short, Friedrich Nietzsche and German Expressionist Art (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Essex, 1995). 25 Kenneth Lindsay’s research, referenced in P. Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 77. 26 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 77. 27 Ibid., p. 78. 28 Ibid. 29 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 251. 30 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 59. 31 See Christopher Short, ‘Development of Theory During the War and After the Revolution’, in The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909–1928: The Quest for Synthesis (London: Peter Lang, 2010). 32 Christopher Short, ‘Kandinsky’s Animated Page: The Almanac, The Blue Rider as a Work of Art’, in K. Brown (ed.), The Art Book Tradition in Twentieth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013). For more on the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, see also Juliet Koss Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 33 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 206. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., pp. 257–65. 36 Ibid., p. 163. 37 Ibid., p. 149. 38 See Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, pp. 55–64. 39 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 93. 40 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 102. 41 Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, p. 245. 42 Short, ‘Kandinsky’s Animated Page’. 43 Examples of these kinds of studies in the English language include Bibiana Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky, Münter, Arp and Taeuber (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014) and Reinhold Heller, Gabriele Münter: The Years of Expressionism 1903–1920 (Munich: Prestel, 1997). 44 For examples of this, see Barry Herbert, German Expressionism (London: Jupiter Books, 1983) and Shulamith Behr, German Expressionism (London: Tate Publishing, 1999). 45 See Christian Weikop, New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 46 See Leah Dickerman ‘Vasily Kandinsky Without Words’, in Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, p. 50.

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Dorothy Price and Christopher Short 47 Jason Gaiger ‘Expressionism and the Crisis of Subjectivity’, in Paul Wood and Steve Edwards (eds), Art of the Avant-Gardes (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 55–6. 48 Julie Mehretu, quoted in Thelma Golden, ‘Julie Mehretu’s Eruptive Lines of Flight as Ethos of Revolution’, in Catherine De Zegher and Thelma Golden (eds), Julie Mehretu: The Drawings (New York: Rizzoli, 2007). 49 Leah Dickerman ‘Inventing Abstraction’, in Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, p. 14.

1 Is Der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? A discussion of anarchism, art and politics Rose-Carol Washton Long

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u r i n g the last century, scholars celebrated the two editors of Der Blaue Reiter for their publication of a yearbook, which brought together an extraordinary mixture of art works from a variety of periods and countries.1 That the two artists were messianic utopians as well as consummate publicists has usually not been questioned.2 Yet, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially with the 1984 English translation of Peter Bürger’s book Theory of the Avant-Garde reiterating many of the comments of the Marxist historian Georg Lukács from the 1930s, a number of art historian such as Richard Sheppard and Margaret Tupitsyn have considered the works of Der Blaue Reiter too hermetic and not sufficiently anti-institutional to be politically relevant or effective.3 In other words, the concept of ‘avant-garde’ as a political vanguard would no longer be awarded to Der Blaue Reiter. But the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Der Blaue Reiter almanac demands a re-evaluation of these critiques, especially since art historians have become so much more aware of the complexities of causation. Instead of insisting upon party affiliation as the determining factor in the establishment of a political viewpoint, they are more open to examining the range of an artist’s opposition to traditional beliefs.4 In addition, historians studying the period before the 1917 Russian Revolution have often discussed the political motivations of contemporaneous writers, artists and philosophers. Christopher Read, for example, has maintained that the intensity of repression under the Czars led many of the intelligentsia to use ‘artistic creativity’ in the search for social justice, even though they might be divided as to the actual method.5 Accordingly, more art historians are determined to uncover the multiple forces – the co-mingling of social, cultural, and political issues – that contribute to a nuanced narrative of change.6 Although Kandinsky and Marc shared the responsibilities of producing the almanac, Kandinsky’s contribution has been given greater weight in most studies of Der Blaue Reiter. The multiplicity of his theoretical writings explaining their experimental innovations, in addition to the Bavarian’s shortened life, have led to an emphasis on the

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Rose-Carol Washton Long Russian-born artist in deciphering the political and social position of Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky himself was partly responsible for the negative assessment of his political interests and those of Der Blaue Reiter. In his 1911 manifesto, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he had assigned politicians to a very low level in his mapping of those who enlarged understanding of the world. Likening his schematic representation of affective types to a triangle, he had placed politicians – whom he specified as ‘elected representatives and their supporters’ – on the lowest rung. But he did not include a range of political representatives, never citing racists or even monarchists, but primarily leftists and socialists. He even praised socialists for their economic policies that attempted to kill off, what he termed, ‘the capitalist hydra’ by severing ‘the head of evil’. Nonetheless he critiqued them for being unthinking followers of doctrines and platitudes, and especially for their hatred of anarchism about which, he claimed, they knew little except for ‘the terrifying name’.7 Kandinsky’s acerbic words have led many to maintain he had no political concerns;8 few have sensed his own interest in anarchism as a political, social and cultural concept. Scholars have acknowledged that Kandinsky used the term anarchistic to describe his new works as well as the paintings and music of his contemporaries, but they have primarily viewed his use of the term as an aesthetic choice, as an emphasis of his belief in freedom from stylistic rules unconnected to audience participation.9 They have been more likely to see Symbolism and Theosophy rather than their co-mingling with anarchism as motivation for his theoretical views or as a major basis for his structural and thematic works.10 Contextual investigations into the practices of Cubism and/or the Russian avant-garde,11 are a further reminder that it is time now for a more thorough examination of the role anarchistic thought, in addition to Theosophical and Symbolist philosophies, played in Kandinsky’s vision of Der Blaue Reiter as a journal designed to impel the spectator into making societal change.12 From the turn of the century to World War I, concerned citizens in Germany and even more so in Russia were plagued by the problem of how to achieve greater economic and social justice for all. Growing industrialization and commercialism, along with the seemingly unchanging political system of autocratic monarchies, led many of the educated elite to explore not only the heretical metaphysical concepts of Theosophy but also alternative political theories such as Marxism and anarchism as they sought to transform the restrictive social, religious and political institutions in their respective countries. Although anarchists, like Theosophists, consisted of many shifting factions and contradictory philosophies, adherents of both groups believed in an international brotherhood which would work to combat the unequal, stultified systems in their native lands. Both admired creativity and gave artists a special place in the struggle for a just world. But anarchists, infused by the economic writings of Marx, argued with socialists as to which was the most effective political force in battling capitalism.13 Whether oriented towards individual or communal action, anarchists in Russia and Germany praised small rural villages for their communitarianism and emphasized their faith in natural law (stemming from the medieval period) over parliamentary law.



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Russian philosophers such as Nikolai Berdiaev and Sergei Bulgakov (whose views Kandinsky had hoped to include in the almanac)14 and poets associated with Russian Symbolism, such as Viacheslav Ivanov and Georgi Chulkov, who called themselves mystical anarchists,15 interacted in their investigations of Marxism, socialism, anarchism, Symbolism, and mysticism as they as they struggled to find affective means to oppose the autocracy of czardom and its relation to the official Russian Orthodox church.16 In Germany, scholars such as Andrew Carlson have explained that anarchists ‘exerted power all out of proportion to their numbers’.17 Herwarth Walden, whose Sturm gallery gave the Blaue Reiter artists their first exhibition in Berlin, encouraged anarchists such as the poet Paul Scheerbart and the architect Bruno Taut to write for his journal Der Sturm. Taut, who had incorporated the Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin’s concept of mutual-aid into his own philosophical justifications, praised Kandinsky’s inclusion of the principal of freedom – his openness to multiple styles – as a model for architects in a 1914 essay published in Walden’s Sturm.18 Gustav Landauer, the German translator of Kropotkin’s tracts, had known Walden and his first wife Else Lasker-Schuler since the early years of the century, and moved among others in Kandinsky’s social circle.19 Calling himself both a socialist and an anarchist, Landauer, who in 1919 became one of the leading members of the short-lived Bavarian Socialist Räterrepublik, attacked private ownership and praised the middle ages and the medieval guild as a model of communitarian organization. In June 1914, Kandinsky was invited to meet with Landauer and other anarcho-pacifists to discuss problems preventing world peace.20 Although Kandinsky did not attend the conference, the invitation points to his interest in the political events of the day. A few anarchists were terrorists and their success with assassination led, as is well known, to the censorship of newspapers and pamphlets and to rigorous checking of individuals associated in any way with anarchism by the police and other security personnel.21 Nonetheless, Kandinsky mounted a defense of anarchism in the almanac. In the essay ‘On the Question of Form’, he challenged the notion that anarchism was aimless and unstructured, and insisted that the term indicated ‘a certain systematic quality and order’.22 Yet the artworks included in the almanac, such as Kandinsky’s large 1911 oil painting which he called Composition V (figure 1.1), as well as those of his co-editor Marc and the other artists involved with the group, seem particularly unstructured. The visual results seem to be markedly different from that of well-known anarchist painters such as the French artist Paul Signac, whose 1895 large-scale oil painting In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come (figure 1.2) included not only the French symbol of anarchism – the rooster – in the lower right, but a peaceful and calm scene of the pleasures that cooperation and mutual-aid could bring to the masses.23 In contrast to Signac’s work, Composition V seems jarring and turbulent in its swirls of amorphous colour. Yet Kandinsky not only referred several times to Signac’s 1899 book, De Delacroix au NéoImpressionisme, which was translated into German in 1910, but also pointed to the role of Neo-Impressionist colour as the beginning of his process of abstracting images from the external descriptive world.24 In addition to admiring Signac’s use of colour, Kandinsky shared other affinities with this famous French painter. Like Signac, Kandinsky drew

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1.1  Wassily Kandinsky, Composition V, 1911.

support from the communitarian understanding of anarchism – from Kropotkin, then living in exile in London – and more directly from Landauer,25 active in intellectual circles in Munich around Der Blaue Reiter, as well as from Bulgakov, who had been Kandinsky’s professor at the University of Moscow, and Ivanov, whose approach to drama Kandinsky admired. All these seekers for change, from Kropotkin to Ivanov, rejected written law – ­codified law – in favour of indigenous, communally inspired oral regulations, or what today we might call vernacular codes. Criticizing the middle class, particularly the socialists for using these written systems so rigidly that they made the state and capitalism inseparable, Kropotkin for example called for ‘mutual-aid’ or freely agreed upon cooperation, which he described as emerging from the ‘natural law’ or the basically ethical morality of early peasant communities.26 Both celebrated these indigenous codes as the truth that lay hidden behind the artificial structures imposed on humanity by established, authoritarian systems, and both cited the middle ages as an example of a period when some artisans and farmers worked freely and cooperatively. In Russia, Berdiaev and Bulgakov castigated Marxist materialism while praising ‘ethical Marxism’ and a new religiosity derived from the communal system of the Russian peasant in their search for a solution to Russian authoritarianism, while poets such as Ivanov envisioned the theatre as means for propagating his mystical anarchist view of reuniting the poet and the masses. The Russians in particular referred to the Russian Symbolist philosopher Soloviev’s concept of sobernost (community) as well as his interpretation of ‘natural law’, and all urged writers and artists to use their particular skills to find strategies that could motivate change.27 Kropotkin’s citation, for example, that artists’ ‘impressive pictures’ should portray the ‘heroic struggles of the people against their oppressors’, was particularly significant to those committed to artistic practice.28 Ivanov stressed the need to find new, unconventional methods that would increase the communion between the artists and the ‘crowd’.29



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1.2  Paul Signac, In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age has not Yet Passed: It is Still to Come, 1895.

In his memoirs, published shortly before the beginning of World War I, Kandinsky had discussed the importance of stirring up ‘a critical attitude towards accustomed phenomena’.30 He even praised ‘activism’ as central to freedom by noting the significance student protest had for him when he was at the university in Moscow in the 1880s. Repression, particularly that of student groups, had led to both individual and collective activism that contributed to undermining the rigid conditions of his time. He guardedly admitted his anti-institutional attitudes in these memoirs by referring to his student days, where he had discovered his preference for the internal law or the natural law of the Russian peasant in contrast to the inflexibility and rigidity of centralized, government rules or what he called Roman law.31 Without flexible stimuli, Kandinsky believed change would be difficult, and like many anarchists he relied on the concept of natural law to provide him with a defence for moving into areas that were uncharted, even disturbing to many. To find startling stimuli that would awaken the public, Kandinsky had to move beyond the conventional easel painting of academically rendered realistic forms to which the public was accustomed. His belief in natural law assisted his transformation of a nineteenth-century concept of Gesamtkunstwerk into a twentieth-century ‘total work of art’. Instead of relating parallel stimuli – local colours and forms to produce ordinary, natural shapes – Kandinsky looked to multiple contrasting stimuli of colours and abstracted forms, synthesized from drama, poetry and music to communicate the chaos and disharmony of his time. If he could prove that confusion led eventually to knowledge, he could deal with the problematics of communicating to the spectator. Accordingly, he used numerous means –writing manifestos, organizing exhibitions, formulating a yearbook for the Blaue Reiter cohorts to both promote and to explain the significance of their approach to a frequently uncomprehending public.

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Rose-Carol Washton Long In his longest and most theoretical essay in the almanac as well as in the slightly earlier manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky used the concept of ‘natural law’ in relation to his belief that an underlying law or principle existed for all the arts, calling this principle Innere Notwendigkeit (inner or internal necessity). He explained in the yearbook essay that three elements – (1) the personal, (2) the period, that is time and space including the national, and (3) the universal – made up Innere Notwendigkeit and he stressed that all three had to be exchangeable in order to be forceful.32 The key word was ‘exchangeable’ – that is, all three were in play in the creation of new forms, which had to be both the ‘child of its time’ and the ‘mother of the future’.33 Believing that the exchange, the intermingling of different styles (abstraction and realism), different art forms (drama, poetry and music) were strengthened due to their origins in natural law, he and Marc had the confidence not only to break with the dominant styles of the past but also to emphasize their freedom from all rules. Zealously asserting their intention of striking against ‘old, established power’, they assured that ‘everything would be [is] permitted’ in their battle to affect the future.34 Although the editors believed in the concept of the inter-relationship of the senses, unlike the earlier generation of Symbolists and Wagnerites, who attempted to parallel stimuli like sound with colour, they maintained that a more dynamic effect could be achieved by contrasting stimuli. Kandinsky argued that his own conflicted and disharmonious period demanded ‘clashing discords, loss of equilibrium ... opposites and contradictions’.35 Since each of the arts had its own underlying natural law or basic principle, he urged the exchange as well as the incorporation of multiple, contrasting stimuli in one total art work, calling this combination a ‘truly monumental art’, a form he believed was on the edge of major expansion.36 The almanac was an expansion of this concept, as the editors placed reproductions of such marginalized artefacts as Russian lubki, Bavarian religious paintings on glass, and Gothic woodcuts next to Blaue Reiter works as well as comparing anonymous artworks from different periods of time and place with well-known international painters such as Henri Matisse. They were clearly aware of how shocking these comparisons might be to the popular eye, especially if they were used in essay after essay. But the choices were also intended to educate the onlooker accustomed to established traditions. The art historian Wilhelm Worringer, from whose 1912 book, Die altdeutsche Buchillustration, reproductions were borrowed for the yearbook, had stressed that alternative art forms could help to alter the ‘cultural arrogance’ of ‘educated Europeans’.37 At the conclusion of ‘On the Question of Form’, the editors placed a European copy of a Japanese abstract, geometric drawing opposite a thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture from Magdeburg Cathedral (figure 1.3) to signal through the pictorial that both tropes – abstract and real – were the answer to the central question about form that had been raised by the title. The choice to reproduce a thirteenth-century sculpture, depicting the parable of the Foolish Virgin tormented by her lack of preparation for the second coming, may also lie in its subliminal message of preparation for the new world to come on earth – the ultimate aim of Der Blaue Reiter.



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1.3  European copy of a Japanese pen drawing opposite a photograph of a column capital from Magdeburg Cathedral, c. 1210 as they appeared in Der Blaue Reiter.

The two artists also selected essayists who could further convey the reasons for their disengagement from the academic requirements of a narrative structure or conventional notions of beauty and harmony to communicate their utopian message. Because they believed music was the most removed from convention, musical scores by several contemporary composers – Alban Berg, Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern – along with explanatory essays by Schönberg, the composer Thomas von Hartmann, and the theorist Nikolai Kulbin were included in the yearbook. All the essayists on music were particularly close to Kandinsky and not only supported learning from the various arts but also were engaged in this practice. Schönberg painted as well as composed music. Not only was his musical score for one of Kandinsky’s favourite dramatists and poets – Maurice Maeterlinck – placed in the almanac, but reproductions of the composer’s paintings were included as well. In his essay ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schönberg specifically disputed the need for paralleling text and music.38 He insisted that a ‘delicate’ idea in poetry, for example, could become more affective if it was paired with a ‘fast and vigorous’ musical theme, a concept he followed in composing the music for Maeterlinck’s poem Herzgewaechse. The Russian music and art theorist Nikolai Kulbin, who read portions of On the Spiritual to a Russian congress of artists at the end of 1911, also painted. He was even more explicit about oppositions in his essay ‘Free Music’. Advocating for musical intervals he called ‘the discord’ in order to excite and arouse the

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1.4  Gabriele Münter, photo of Blaue Reiter members: Kandinsky sitting on over-turned bucket in centre, Thomas von Hartmann in bowler hat to his left, 1911–1912.

observer, he encouraged musicians to study alternative sources, such as non-western musical compositions, citing the concept of natural law to justify the resulting ‘dissonance’.39 Affecting the observer was central to Kulbin and he clearly urged the artist to ‘provoke the creative imagination of the spectator’ so that both would ‘jointly create the picture’.40 The other composer, Thomas von Hartmann, who wrote the music for Kandinsky’s stage composition, not only referred to anarchist ideas, but actually titled his essay ‘On anarchy in Music’. Von Hartmann is often seen in photographs of Der Blaue Reiter group next to Kandinsky (see figure 1.4), who described his warm feelings about the composer and his wife as similar to the closeness he felt with Marc and his wife.41 In his essay, Von Hartmann, who met Kandinsky in Munich where he was studying music, urged his readers to ‘welcome’ the anarchistic principles that led composers to use what he called ‘opposite sounds combinations’ to awaken the audience.42 Indeed, he deliberately used the German verb erschüttern – to shock – to describe the effect he wanted to produce.43 Like Kandinsky, Hartmann used the term Innere Notwendigkeit to justify his use of disharmonious sounds. He also did not advocate one singular style or source, arguing for the combination of both conscious and unconscious intuitive choices to produce the strongest direction for future creativity. Similar to the invited composers, Kandinsky argued for contrasting or alternative stimuli from multiple sources to explain how he would startle his audience. Building on colour and form – the basic elements of the painter – and appropriating concepts from music, poetry, dance, and drama, he used charts in On the Spiritual to point out how colour opposites could create a sensation of dance-like motion by advancing and then



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receding from the spectator. He also discussed how adding different tones of another colour could enhance or reduce these affects and could even produce an illusion of opening the canvas into infinite space. To insist that primarily colour and form rather than images delineated by traditional linear perspective could convey the illusion of space was an unsettling idea. But, like his composer friends, he relied on the concept of Innere Notwendigkeit not just to reiterate the evocative potential of colour and form but more importantly to justify the pairing of colour and forms previously thought to be disjunctive, stating: ‘the incompatibility of certain forms and certain colors should be regarded not as something “disharmonious’, but conversely, as offering new possibilities’.44 To emphasize the potential destabilizing power of repetition – simple from advertising or complex from numerous media,45 he cited experiments from the poetry of Maeterlinck. Describing how the dramatist used the same word over and over again to loosen its external signification so that its sound could create a mood, Kandinsky also referred to a production of a Maeterlinck play in St. Petersburg where Ivanov used a plain piece of canvas to suggest a tower rather than imitate explicit natural form. Kandinsky, who had been in St. Petersburg at about the time of that production, praised this approach for being able ‘to arouse the imagination of the audience’.46 Although he explained the importance of abstracting from the natural, corporal image, he also discussed the importance of retaining some portion of it to add to the resonance of his works, writing that the ‘choice of object’ in addition to the choice of color and form had to grow out of the ‘Prinzip der inneren Notwendigkeit’.47 Fearing accusations of ornamentalism, Kandinsky emphasized that the repetition of increasingly hidden imagery could also be a weapon for involving the spectator. Similar to Kulbin and Hartmann, Kandinsky also mentioned that some of these stimuli might be subliminal or ‘subconscious’ but that they could ‘exert just as lively and creative an effect’.48 To emphasize that he was not prescribing absolute laws, Kandinsky often warned that his equations of stimuli were ‘extremely provisional and clumsy’.49 Rigid rules would not have been appropriate for an artist committed to freedom from established, conventional ideas. His insistence in ‘On the Question of Form’ that the artist should be allowed to use either real or abstract forms and his use of italics to reinforce the answer to his title by stating ‘the question of form does not in principle exist’ stems from his absorption of the anarchist belief in freedom from absolutism.50 The potential of ‘different elements’ in ‘different forms’ or the ‘different arts’ synthesized into one ‘monumental art’ was the challenge for him before World War I.51 In Composition V (figure 1.1), painted during the months that he was completing On the Spiritual and Der Blaue Reiter almanac, Kandinsky combined many of the multiple dissonant stimuli about which he had been writing to produce a monumental oil that could be one more example of a ‘total work of art’. The very title is of course meant to suggest the abstract, non-material quality of music. On first impression, a dominant black shape startles as it contrasts with multiple colours from the other parts of the canvas. Beginning as a narrow line at the top right of the canvas, it runs towards the upper left, and then thickens considerably as it curves towards the centre.

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1.5  Wassily Kandinsky, All Saints’ Day II, 1911.

But on second impression, images – trumpets, walled cities with bent towers – appear to emerge from within the lines and colours. Since Kandinsky had explained that the theme of the Last Judgement was the starting point for this oil as well as for a number of other works,52 it should not be surprising that these types of images with their evocation of conflict and struggle would appear in other 1911 works such as a smaller oil All Saints’ Day (figure 1.5) and a watercolour Sound of Trumpets (figure 1.6), both based on Russian folk imagery (see figure 1.7). But when compared to those smaller works, only the arrangement of a walled city with bent towers atop a mountain peak in the top centre of the large oil is clearly visible. Other motifs visible in the watercolour and the smaller oil – the angels with trumpets in either corner, St. John viewing his apocalyptic vision in the lower right, the person about to retrieve his head at the sound of the trumpet, and the rowboat struggling in the tumultuous waters – are not readily identifiable, as Kandinsky simplified their corporality into a skeletal line and/or veiled these motifs with amorphous colours.53 In the case of the trumpets, not only are the trumpets in the upper corners hard to perceive due to their illusionary transparency (the background colours are visible within their black outline), but Kandinsky multiplied their number to a total of five.



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1.6  Wassily Kandinsky, Sound of Trumpets (Study for Large Resurrection), 1911.

1.7  Vasily Koren, Scene from Revelation VIII: 10–13, 1696.

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Rose-Carol Washton Long The third trumpet outlined in black comes forth from the lower left, and becomes transparent before it merges with the large black, curved form. This dark, ominous, threatening shape seems to increase in size as it moves towards the spectator and may be an attempt to represent the terrible sound of the trumpet on Judgement Day. Others had tried to represent sound visually through colour and line – for example in a nineteenth-century lubok the stream of sound is represented by a widening rectangular shape positioned diagonally across the print – but no other artist (to my mind) has been so successful in conveying the blasting sound of Judgement.54 But Kandinsky did not want to simulate past renditions of Judgement Day, but rather to evoke the disturbing mood and anxiety of the chaos of the present. By using the discord of contrasting colours and the disjunction of barely visible motifs, he aimed to startle and then involve the viewer. Since this canvas is over six feet in height, the centre of the canvas where the trumpet and the dark curving shapes appear to merge, meets the eye of the spectator. Using very thin, curving black lines and pale colours at the bottom corners of the canvas, Kandinsky produced a very destabilizing, immaterial quality. By employing ‘the overriding of one color by another, or of many colors by a single color .... /the very thinness or thickness of a line, the positioning of the form upon the surface’, he created an illusion of expanded space that appears to ‘turn the painting into a being hovering in mid-air’.55 That is, the traditional canvas could become an entity such as a ‘stage’ upon which the struggle for a contemporary revelation could be waged. Similarly, in the essay ‘On Stage Composition’ placed before the text of his multi-dimensional theatre piece, The Yellow Sound, Kandinsky specifically argued, as had Ivanov, for unconventional strategies, calling for the use of antithesis rather than a Wagnerian paralleling of sound and colour.56 In the directions for the theatrical work, Kandinsky listed a series of oppositions: giants versus small people, foggy colours but loud music, stationary figures and ones running in different directions, light versus dark shapes. In ‘Scene 3’, for example, he asked for the coloured lights to become the most intense when the music was to subside. At the end, after a yellowish-white light caused a yellow giant to grow to the top of the stage while extending his arms to form a cross, the stage was to become immediately and dramatically dark while the music continued.57 Explaining in all his major essays of this period, that he wanted his works to ‘klingen’ to sound to ‘vibrate’, this multimedia presentation – The Yellow Sound – was meant through its multiple strategies to shock the spectator into involvement. Many of the reproductions, such as ‘Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho’ (figure 1.8), drawn from Worringer’s Die altdeutsche Buchillustration and relating to biblical battles, are one more example of the struggle in achieving goals. After all, it was Worringer who defended Der Blaue Reiter in 1911 when nationalist critics attacked their work as alien and ‘childish’ by emphasizing that a new art form should emerge from the combination of the abstract and empathetic currents of the medieval Gothic period.58 Worringer’s concept, clearly expressed in his well-known earlier books Abstraction and Empathy and Form in Gothic,59 was one more echo of the anarchist belief that the medieval epoch had a special lesson for the present time,



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1.8  Stephan Arndes, ‘Jews with the Ark of the Covenant at the Walls of Jericho’, Lubeck Bible, 1494, appeared in Der Blaue Reiter.

and was most likely one of the reasons the editors thought of having this art historian contribute to a possible second edition of the almanac. Believing their troubled times should produce provocative form, Kandinsky emphasized that all artists, not just painters, should consider ‘clashing discords’ and ‘oppositions and contradictions’ as he had in Composition V and in The Yellow Sound. The dissonance would take the spectator by surprise, and help to break the reliance on the harmony put forth by the idealized and conventional naturalism of the Italian Renaissance and the academic painters supported by the German and Russian monarchies. Although Signac wanted to challenge conventional ways of thinking by depicting a golden age brought about by the natural law of mutual assistance, his peaceful, calm work could only be the beginning as Kandinsky stated. It could not suggest continuous protest nor shock the spectator. Across Europe, overlapping circles of intellectuals including Theosophists, Symbolists and anarchists, as well as followers of Bergson and Nietzsche, were all committed to exploring new processes of thought to bring about change in the world order, but the contribution of Russian and German communal anarchists, particularly their commitment to freedom from rules, their hatred of capitalism and materialism, and their embrace of the concept of mutual-aid from what they believed were the middle ages (or what Worringer considered the Gothic period) should not be neglected as we try to re-examine the relevance of Der Blaue Reiter. They gave theoretical support to the Blaue Reiter artists’ search for alternative visual approaches, such as the embrace of the vernacular and of the discordant and dissonant to awaken the unaware, the dormant masses. The collective critiques of anarchism repeated throughout the twentieth and ­twenty-first centuries have obscured the tremendous appeal of communitarian anarchists to ‘progressive utopians’ before World War I. In the 1920s, right-wing German

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Rose-Carol Washton Long nationalists charged the faculty and students of the Bauhaus with being full of ‘anarchy and disorder’, attacks which continued in the 1930s when National Socialists derogatorily described modern art as degenerate as well as politically and culturally anarchistic.60 Stalinist communists and Frankfurt school theoreticians, as well as French Post Structuralists, have insisted that those anarchists groups that sought insight into rural peasant life rather than that of the urban labourer were romantic and nostalgic. Lukács, for example, writing in the 1930s, long after the Soviet communists had moved towards enforcing a centralized and bureaucratic state, linked anarchism with bohemian confusion and an inability to comprehend the economic difficulties of the proletariat. Scholars have not only written about the abandonment of anarchist principles by the Soviets but chronicled the massacre of anarchists by Soviet communists, as the Soviet state began to eliminate its political opponents.61 Altering our perception of the dominant system through visual and aural dissonance is central to the critical discourse about performance art and multi-media presentations today. Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto, performed in New York’s Park Avenue Amory from 7 December 2016 to 8 January 2017 with its searing opposition of 13 large scale screens where film, text and words shock the spectator out of their complacency is but one reminder of the general impact of Kandinsky’s concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk made up of contrasting forces. Not only does Rosenfeldt include reference to the preface of the almanac, but a ‘call to activism through art’ is implicit in his programme.62 Of course, Der Blaue Reiter was not the only source for Rosenfeldt and others who utilize multi-media presentation, but exploration of how and why Kandinsky addressed spectatorship under the guise of early twentieth-century anarchism may produce further solutions for our problematic twenty-first century. Although Kandinsky was not a member of a Theosophical or anarchist group, he was a synthesizer of ideas from opponents of the Russian and German mainstream establishment. His reference to these religious and political philosophers, literary and artistic figures indicates a clear preference for public personas who found alternative strategies for motivating societal change. Moreover, Kandinsky’s later participation, along with other artists not always considered socially engaged, such as Ivanov,63 in the newly formed Soviet government, suggests that their readiness to accept Soviet communism (albeit for a brief time) as the anticipated solution to the problems of injustice and inequality, is not unrelated to their earlier calls for social upheaval. Their practice of activating the viewer may not always be interpreted as political, but perhaps we should enlarge our understanding of what we mean by the political. Lifting the public from their passivity may be even more central in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth.

Notes   1 The documentary edition, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited by Klaus Lankheit and first published in English in 1974, has been frequently reissued, although it is not identical in size to the original and does not consistently follow the original layout. Lankheit’s account of the group is



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nonetheless still a good general introduction to its history. The Munich Lenbachhaus has been the source of numerous scholarly volumes. See, for example, A. Zweite (ed.), The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus Munich (Munich: Prestel, 1989).   2 See Annegret Hoberg, ‘The Blue Rider – History and Ideas’, in. H. Friedel and A. Hoberg (eds), The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich (Munich: Prestel, 2013), esp. pp. 56–66; and Hoberg, ‘Painting Alone Was Not Enough For Us, Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc: The “Blaue Reiter” Almanac Revisited’, in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky (Munich: Prestel, 2008, 2016), pp. 85–95.  3 Although Jochen Schulte-Sasse, who wrote the introduction to Bürger’s well-known book, emphasized that Bürger was qualifying Lukács, Bürger continued the Hungarian’s over-simplified critique of Expressionism and abstraction as aestheticzing; see ‘Foreword: Theory of Modernism versus Theory of the Avant-Garde’, in P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxxiii–iv. For reflections of some of these concepts in treatments of Kandinsky, see Richard Sheppard, who characterized Kandinsky’s work as representing conservative longings for the past, ‘Kandinsky’s Oeuvre 1900–1914: The Avant-Garde as Rear-Guard’, Word & Image, 6:1 (1990), p. 42. The title of Margarita Tupitsyn’s Gegen Kandinsky/Against Kandinsky (Munich: Villa Stuck / Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006) reflects her of view of Kandinsky’s abstraction as dream-like and removed from the material, concrete world especially when compared to Soviet artists such as Rodchenko, see pp. 33–4/142. Valery Turchin, Kandinsky in Russia (Moscow: Society of Admirers of the Art of Wassily Kandinsky, 2005), also does not believe that Kandinsky was ‘political’.  4 My interpretation of the concept of ‘political’ has been inspired by Marsha Meskimmon’s chapter ‘Politics, the Neue Sahlichkeit and Women Artists’, in M. Meskimmon and S. West (eds), Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995), pp. 9–27. Although she was focusing on the degree to which women’s political views have been over-looked, I feel her concept of opposition to mainstream ideologies is relevant to men as well.   5 See C. Read, Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia: The Intelligentsia and the Transition from Tsarism to Communism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), esp. pp. 22–35; and also Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia, 1900–1912: The Vekhi Debate and its Intellecutal Background (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 15–27.  6 For a thoughtful discussion of this approach, see A. Confino, ‘Prologue: The Historian’s Representations’, in Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 1–22.   7 See Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual in Art’ [1912], in K. C. Lindsay and P. Vergo (eds), Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, vol. 1 (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 139. However, the English words ‘republicans or democrats’ in that translation of the German ‘Volksvertretungsanhänger oder Republikaner’ would be better served by the translation ‘elected representatives and their followers or Republicans’; see W. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 7th ed. (Bern-Bümpliz: Benteli, 1963), p. 36.  8 See, for example, Christine Hopfengart, ‘The Fateful Year of 1933’, in M. Baumgartner, A.  Hoberg and C. Hopfengart (eds), Klee & Kandinsky (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee / Munich: Prestel, 2015), p. 224.   9 Reinhard Zimmermann refers to Kandinsky’s association of anarchism with freedom but does not explore this connection, see R. Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Kandinsky, vol. 2 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002), p. 658. The cultural historian, Peter Jelevich, is one of the few who wrote about the possibility of anarchism’s impact on Kandinsky, particularly his theatre pieces; see P. Jelevich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 217–35. More recently

30

Rose-Carol Washton Long Olga Burenina-Petrova mentions Kandinsky as an ‘anarchist sympathizer’, in ‘Anarchism and the Russian Artistic Avant-Garde’, in M. Tupitsyn (ed.), Russian Dada 1914–1924 (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia / Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018); see p. 229. See also N. Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy: Art and Ideology in the Early Russian Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), for her contention that anarchism had an impact on Kandinsky as well as other Russian artists and poets, pp. 75–84ff. 10 Following the lead of German cultural historians such as Ulrich Linse and Janos Frecot, who examined the immersion of intellectuals in Germany at the turn of the century in anarchist theories, as well as art historians and historians such as Robert and Eugenia Herbert, and Donald Drew Egbert, I posited in a 1987 essay that Kandinsky’s awareness of Russian and German anarchist theories, along with other alternatives to established institutions such as Symbolism and Theosophy, were critical for Kandinsky’s development of abstraction; see Long, ‘Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art of the Future’, Art Journal, 46:1 (1987), pp. 38–45, reprinted in M. Blechman (ed.), Drunken Boat (New York: Autonomedia, 1994), p. 125ff. More recent contextual scholarship, such as Hoberg’s essays or the catalogue for the exhibition, E. Smithgall (ed.), Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border (Washington, DC, The Phillips Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2011), do not, however, include references to anarchism. The study by L. Florman, Concerning the Spiritual – and the Concrete – in Kandinsky’s Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014) makes no mention of occultism, anarchism or Symbolism but instead problematically emphasizes Hegel. Surveys of Kandinsky’s lifework such as Kandinsky, A Retrospective (Paris, Centre Pompidou and Milwaukee Art Museum, 2014) and Philippe Sers, Kandinsky: The Elements of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016) do not engage with the issues of contextualization but provide many good quality illustrations. 11 See, for example, M. Antliff and P. Leighten, ‘Introduction’, in Antliff and Leighten (eds), A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906–1914 (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 9, as well as their other books and essays; also see A. Antliff, Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007); and Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy. These contextual results have often been challenged or ignored by other scholars focusing on Cubism; see, for example, R. Krauss, ‘The Circulation of the Sign’ [1992], in The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 25–85, or A. Umland, Picasso: Guitars 1912–1914 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), pp. 16–27, 33–9, who makes no reference to the possible impact of anarchism upon Picasso. L. Dickerman (ed.), Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York, London: Thames and Hudson, 2012) mentions neither anarchism nor Theosophy, relegating the possibility of such concepts to a footnote, p. 35 note 3. 12 For discussion of the impact of Symbolism and Theosophy upon Kandinsky’s works, see R-C. W. Long, Kandinsky: The Devolopment of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). For background on the interplay between Symbolism, Theosophy and other occult groups see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (ed.), The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a discussion of the relation between Thesophy, occultism and science, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Abstraction, the Ether and the Fourth Dimension: Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich in Context’, in Der weisse Abgrund Unendlichkeit/The Infinite White Abyss (Dusseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2013), esp. pp. 236–8. 13 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchists and Marxists argued over which group represented socialism. At times, International Socialist conferences excluded anarchists, but boundaries between the two were often porous. Even religious parties argued about how Marx might be utilized and some proposed a type of Christian socialism; see Read, Religion, Revolution, pp. 17–27.



Is Der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? 31

14 Letter from Kandinsky to Marc, 1 September 1911, as partly cited in K. Lankheit, ‘A History of the Almanac’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (London, Thames and Hudson 1974), pp. 16–17. 15 Read describes Bulgakov as close to ‘Christian anarchism’ and discusses his theories of religious universalism; see Read, Religion, Revolution, pp. 57–67. He also mentions that Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Chulkov and Ivanov all worked together in 1904–1905 on the journal Voprosy Zhizhi. 16 See Long, Kandinsky, pp. 36–9, for a discussion of the fascination that Rudolf Steiner, the head of the German Theosophical Society until 1913, had upon these Russians, particularly Ivanov, who felt Theosophy would help to revive the age-old Russian messianism of being a saviour to the world. Also see Rosenthal, The Occult and O. A. Maslenikov, The Frenzied Poets: Andrey Biely and the Russian Symbolists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952). 17 A. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, vol. 1 The Early Movement (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972), p. 7. 18 B. Taut, ‘Eine Notwendigkeit’, Der Sturm, 4:196–7 (1914) in English translation in Long (ed.), German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 123–6. 19 For a discussion of some of these overlapping groups, see J. Frecot, ‘Literatur zwischen Betrieb und Einsamkeit’, in Berlin um 1900, exh. cat. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1984), pp. 319–47, 351–3; also see E. Klüsener, Else Lasker-Schüler (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1980), pp. 44–68; and E. Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 3–16, and passim. Lunn explains that Landauer’s reference to his approach as anarcho-socialist was, most likely, an attempt to unite both groups, see pp. 104–5 and 190–4. 20 For a discussion of this conference, see Lunn, Prophet of Community, p. 245. Letters from the Serbian writer Dimitri Mitrinovič to Kandinsky discuss the forthcoming peace conference; see Mitrinovič to Kandinsky, 25 June 1914, 30 June 1914, and undated in Gabriele Münter– Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. See also a letter to Kandinsky dated June (?) 1914, in which Mitronovič mentioned that Landauer had introduced him to the writings of Kropotkin. See in addition, S. Behr, ‘Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic: Pan-Christian Universalism and the Yearbook “Towards the Mankind of the Future through Aryan Europe” ’, in The Oxford Art Journal, 15:1 (1992), pp. 81–8. 21 Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, p. 7. 22 Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, in Complete Writings on Art, p. 242. 23 For analysis of the relation of Signac’s painting to anarchist concepts see M. Feretti-Bocquillon, et al. (eds), Signac 1863–1935 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 195–200; and also R. Roslak, Neo-impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Siecle France (Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 126–32, 141–62, 186–92. 24 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 149; Kandinsky cites the German edition of Signac’s work published by Axel Juncker, Charlottenburg, 1910. 25 Landauer translated, for example, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid into German in 1904. For a discussion of the impact of Kropotkin, as well as Proudhon, and Tolstoy upon Landauer, see Lunn, Prophet of Community, p. 213ff. 26 See the collection of Kropotkin’s essays, especially ‘Anarchist Communism’, in R. N. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets (New York, London: Benjamin Blom, 1968); also see P. Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 26–33. 27 Read discusses the centrality of Soloviev’s philosophy to the Russian intelligentsia in his Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 38–9. Noemi Smolik believes that Soloviev and Bulgakov were critical for Kandinsky’s ideas but due to her focus on the importance of Russian religious

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Rose-Carol Washton Long philosophy and art, she neglects discussion of German and Russian anarchism, and Theosophy’s German and Russian groups, in addition to the role of Russian lubki and Bavarian glass paintings; see N. Smolik, ‘Russian Beginnings, Modernism’s Prophet or its Adversary?’, in Friedel and Hoberg (eds), Vasily Kandinsky, pp. 30–53. 28 See Kropotkin, ‘An Appeal to the Young’ [1880], in Baldwin (ed.), Kroptokin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 278. 29 Rosenthal, ‘Theater as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists’, Russian History, 4:2 (1977), pp. 122–41. See also Gurianova, The Aesthetics of Anarchy, for her discussion of Chulkov’s and Ivanov’s interpretations of anarchist beliefs, esp. 54–8. 30 Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 361–2. Turchin’s emphasis that the ‘Reminiscences’ were filtered through Kandinsky’s attempt to publicize himself further reminds us of the importance of his choosing to mention activism in 1913. 31 Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’, p. 362. 32 Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, pp. 240–2. 33 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 131. 34 Quotations from Franz Marc, ‘The “Savages” of Germany’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 61, and Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, p. 241. 35 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 193. 36 The clearest statement for this possibility is in ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 155. Kandinsky used italics to emphasize this concept in the German edition: ‘die wirkliche monumental Kunst; see Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 56. 37 W. Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, in English translation, in Long (ed.), German Expressionism, pp. 10–13. 38 A. Schönberg, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 90–102. 39 N. Kulbin, ‘Free Music’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 141–6. Kulbin’s essay is an abridged version of one that appeared in 1910 in the St. Petersburg publication Studiia Impressionistov; an English excerpt appears in J. E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 11–17. 40 Kulbin, ‘Svobodnaia muzyka’ (Free music), Studiia Impressionistov (1910), p. 26. Kandinsky letters to Kulbin from the end of 1911 and the beginning of 1912 indicate that the Russian theorist sent Kandinsky a lubok of the Last Judgement; see E. F. Kovtun’s editing of Kandinsky’s letters to Kulbin in Monuments of Culture, New Discoveries (Leningrad: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1981). 41 Kandinsky unpublished letter to Gabriele Münter, 10 August 1911, in Gabriele Münter– Johannes Eichner Stiftung, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachaus, Munich. Jelena Hahl-Koch noted that Kandinsky used the more private ‘Du’ rather than the more formal ‘Sie’ when communicating with von Hartmann; see J. Hahl-Koch (ed.), Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 138–9, and 157–9. (In the 1981/83 German edition, Hartmut Zelinsky refers to the impact of the ego anarchist Max Stirner but does not discuss communal anarchists.) 42 In two interviews (18 June 1965 and 8 September 1965) with von Hartmann’s wife Olga in New York, she recalled how both men would experiment with writing to friends in Russia and receiving answers although the letters were not mailed. She also described their shared interest in extra sensory phenomena and in Theosophical literature. 43 For the German edition used, see T. von Hartmann, ‘Über Anarchie in der Musik’, Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1965), p. 90; for the English version, Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 114.



Is Der Blaue Reiter relevant for the twenty-first century? 33

44 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 163. He indicated that a geometric form such as a triangle could communicate a mood of, say, stability or peacefulness but its placement in relation to its position of the canvas could change that perception. 45 Ibid., p. 192. 46 Ibid., p. 146. For a discussion of this St. Petersburg group, see, Rosenthal, ‘Theater as Church: The Vision of the Mystical Anarchists’, pp. 122–41. 47 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 168. 48 Ibid., pp. 168–9. 49 Ibid., p. 189. 50 See Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, p. 248. 51 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, p. 192. 52 Kandinsky, manuscript prepared for lecture at the Kreis der Kunst exhibition, Cologne, 30 January 1914, published in J. Eichner, Kandinsky und Munter (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1957), pp. 109–16, and discussed in Long, Kandinsky, p. 108ff. 53 Even in the large oil study for Composition V in the collection of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg most of the motifs are not easily identified. For a specific discussion of these motifs in a number of Kandinsky’s other works produced between 1910 and 1912, see Long, Kandinsky, pp. 75–107. 54 For a reproduction of this lubok, see Long, ‘Constructing the Total Work of Art: Painting and the Public’, in J. Lloyd (ed.), Vasily Kandinsky: From Blaue Reiter to the Bauhaus, 1910–1925 (New York: Neue Galerie, 2013), p. 43. 55 Kandinsky, ‘On the Spiritual’, pp. 194–5. 56 Kandinsky, ‘On Stage Composition’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 260–2. 57 Kandinsky, ‘The Yellow Sound’, in Lindsay and Vergo (eds), Complete Writings on Art, pp. 278, 283. For further discussion of Kandinsky’s connection to the Russian poets and playwrights who called themselves ‘mystical anarchists’, see Long, ‘Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction’, pp. 39–40; and for the impact of Maeterlinck and others on the concept of stage compositions, see Long, Kandinsky, pp. 58–64. 58 See Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, pp. 10–13; also see K. A. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Smith (ed.), The Expressionist Turn in Art History: A Critical Anthology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 1–7. 59 W. Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. M. Bullock (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1967) and Form in Gothic [1910], trans. M. Bullock (New York: Schocken Books, 1964). 60 ‘Die Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar’, Beilage zur Thüringer Tageszeitung, 3 January 1920; for the linkage of ‘political anarchy’ with ‘cultural anarchy’ see also Fritz Kaiser, Führer durch die Austellung Entartete Kunst [1937], in English translation in Long, German Expressionism, pp. 308–11. 61 For Lukács’ dismissal of anarchism, see ‘“Grösse und Verfall” des Expressionismus’, Internationale Literatur 1 (1934) in English translation in Long, German Exressionism, pp. 313–17. For a discussion of Kropotkin’s critique of Lenin and others before he died in 1921 in Russia, see Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, pp. 225–8. Olga Burenina-Petrova believes the crack-down on Moscow anarchists began in 1918; see ‘Anarchism and the Russian Artistic Avant-Garde’, pp. 230–42. 62 See brochure for Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto (New York: Thompson Arts Center at Park Avenue Armory, 2016/17). 63 Kandinsky left the Soviet Union for Germany in 1921 and Ivanov left in 1924. The Russian Symbolist poet Andre Belyi, who sought solutions for change in Marxism and Steinerism, also welcomed the Revolution of 1917.

2 The dynamics of gendered artistic identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter Shulamith Behr

I

n my study ‘Künstlergruppe Brücke and the Public Sphere: Bridging the Gender Divide’, it was argued that, while the Brücke group was comprised exclusively of male practitioners, women participated in its promotion as spectators, patrons and supporters of contemporary art.1 Urbanization and modernity, the concomitant rise of the middle classes and the struggle for emancipation, albeit far short of political equality, were guarantors of women’s engagement in the public sphere. As participants in debates that called for cultural reform, women constituted a strong social entity in developing direct relationships with artists. This phenomenon was particularly apparent in regional cities, such as Dresden, Hamburg and Jena, where efforts were made to forge modern identity by mobilizing local institutions, traditions and culture. Women’s initiatives were no less important to the promotion of Der Blaue Reiter, as in the case of Der Gereonsklub in Cologne (1911–1913), which served as the second venue of the travelling exhibition in June 1912.2 Spurred on by secessionist ideas regarding the advancement of contemporary German and French art, the private club was founded by the artists Olga Oppenheimer (1886– 1941) and Franz Matthias Jansen (1885–1958); indeed, its activities and exhibitions took place in Oppenheimer’s studio in the Gereonshaus, a recently completed office block that was commissioned by her father Max. The exhibition secretary was Emmy Worringer (1978–1961), sister of the well-known art historian Wilhelm. In 1907, she pursued artistic training with Oppenheimer in Munich and Dachau, and maintained contact with literary and artistic circles following the dissolution of the Gereonsklub. Without resurrecting debates about the nature of the avant-garde and modernism of the 1970s and 1980s, here avant-gardism can be interpreted as a broad field that embraced male practitioner, woman patron or supporter in a self-conscious definition of what constituted modern theory and practice. But does this fluid sociological model suffice to explore the international community of artists, dancers, composers and art historians who were drawn into the circles of the



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 35

Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM, Munich New Artists’ Association) and Der Blaue Reiter? Inevitably, the admission of women to the rank of exhibitors upsets the patriarchal hegemony of avant-garde creativity and introduces new relationships of power between people in the group.3 Such practices allow for critical use of methodologies that question the enshrined separateness of the artistic process and focus on issues of collaboration around gendered relationships and difference.4 Built around the intimate creative partnerships of Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, on the one hand, and Alexej Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin on the other – or their combined force as a meta-group within the NKVM – scholarship has examined whether such interchanges can escape the limitations imposed by social and psychological constructions of gender that identify separateness with masculinity, and connectedness and domesticity with femininity.5 Yet, by late 1911, the public profile of the exhibiting group Der Blaue Reiter had eclipsed that of the NKVM. Here, as Karen Lang reminds us, modernism brings in its wake the idea of the avant-garde and its narrative of ‘failed inheritance’, which purportedly drives the struggle against tradition and convention in art.6 Instructively, if we think laterally to events in the Berlin art world, in a speech celebrating the Berlin Secession’s tenth anniversary, Max Liebermann stressed that, even if secessions should disappear, they would rise again in different form and under different names: ‘Those who count as modern today may tomorrow be thrown on the scrap heap by their still modern successors. We are all children of our times’.7 Liebermann’s declaration was prescient since, two years hence, the Berlin Secession was riven by internal dissension, which led to the formation of the Neue Secession.8 As a group in early German modernism, Der Blaue Reiter shares in the ideas outlined above and in the avant-garde’s narrative of ‘failed inheritance’. Moreover, the ethos and aesthetic of ‘children of our times’ and ‘oedipal killing off of the parent’ has particular resonance in the events leading up to the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter; it is broadly acknowledged that Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction and technical radicalism was responsible for his, Münter’s, Franz Marc’s and Alfred Kubin’s secession from the NKVM on 2 December 1911. However, the desire to cleanse the slate and start afresh altered the sociology and gender balance of the group. The nucleus of the foursome had expanded to include the young Munich artist Marc and his future wife, the artist Maria Franck, as well as the Bonn-based couple August and Elisabeth Macke, among others. Indeed, the dynamics of Münter’s and Kandinsky’s collaboration was changed by the linkage of his name with that of Marc, as co-editor of the almanac and organizer of the exhibitions. Within a short period Kandinsky’s correspondence with Marc reached an intensity that was comparable to the exchange of letters with Münter.9 Although much of this was dedicated to planning, there was meaningful communication regarding their current artistic theory and practice. As in the case of the pre-war relationship between Picasso and Braque, while maintaining the integrity of their distinctive statements, Marc and Kandinsky forged a path based on mutual recognition of each other’s talent. Whether Münter was merely a spectator to this new evolving male artistic partnership or shared

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Shulamith Behr in what has been termed a ‘doubling of masculine creativity’ are considerations that will be held in abeyance.10 For, at this juncture, it is pertinent to question the model of male-bonding containment and, via a discussion that includes Werefkin, examine whether Der Blaue Reiter harboured the staging of more complex notions of gendered authorship and agency. Certainly, in 1913, the concept of a ‘blauen Reiterreiterin’ was entertained in the correspondence between the poet, artist and writer Else Lasker-Schüler and Werefkin. As we will see, through consideration of the laws of association and networking in literary and artistic communities, the plural meanings of Werefkin’s name challenge logocentric interpretations of Der Blaue Reiter.11 Hence, this study aims to go beyond stereotypical categories of binary thinking about the nature of masculinity and femininity in exposing women artists’ positioning in this avant-garde group.

Gender and place The Munich milieu was critical to the ambience in which incipient emancipation, progressive modernism and the transnational (or foreign) fulminated against the local and the traditional. Since the mid-nineteenth century the Bavarian capital vied with Berlin for pre-eminence. Artists were attracted to the Munich art world, which offered the coexistence of monumental history painting, associated with the Academy, naturalistic modes, rooted in the Artists’ Union and bourgeois art market, alongside secessionist and Jugendstil stirrings in the 1890s.12 For aspiring women artists the formation of the w ­ omen’s academy of the Münchner Künstlerinnenverein (Munich Women Artists’ Association) in 1882 was critical to the initial instruction of Käthe Schmidt (Kollwitz) and Münter, to name a few.13 The encounter with feminist circles was inevitable in this environment, so much so that it was observed that the modern literary and artistic movement was so closely interlinked with the women’s movement that those trends of ‘the Moderns’ were, as a norm, regarded and confounded with those of ‘the woman’, to quote well-known writer and art historian Georg Jacob Wolf.14 As the artists’ and intellectuals’ quarter in the northern part of Munich, the Schwabing area had its own Bohemia. Within the censorious milieu of a Roman Catholic majority, the Dionysian rituals pursued within the circle of the writers Karl Wolfskehl and Stefan George achieved notoriety. Apparently, the promiscuous lifestyle of the token woman in this group, the writer and artist Franziska zu Reventlov (1871–1918), went unmolested by the police only by virtue of her aristocratic descent.15 Arriving in Munich from St. Petersburg in 1896, Marianne Werefkin (1860–1938) became known as the ‘Baronin’, which drew on the advantages of her mother’s aristocratic lineage and father’s military background.16 She was trained by Ilya Repin in the Wanderers’ realist tradition, as well as in the Moscow Academy, and her works from the 1890s portrayed figural types – Jews, peasants, servants – drawn from the margins of society that she encountered at the Werefkin summer estate in Kovno (now Kaunas), Lithuania. In Munich, her Giselastraße residence in Schwabing became the hub of the so-called ‘Russian colony’.17 Devoting her



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 37

first decade in Munich to discourse rather than painting, Werefkin’s aura as a ‘prophetic voice’ was established early on in her formation of the Brotherhood of St. Luke in 1897. These informal salons, which were held at her apartment, were centred on the emotional art of the future in considering the works of van Gogh and Gauguin. In 1909, her pivotal role as a founder member of the NKVM signalled her centrality to the utopian and synthesizing aims of the association. Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) paid deference to her in the Portrait of Marianne Werefkin, 1909 (figure 2.1), painted in Murnau, negotiating the spectacle of an urbane woman’s sojourn in the Bavarian town. In an undated note, Münter recalled: ‘I painted the Werefkina in 1909 before the yellow base of my house. It was a bombastic appearance, self-confidently, authoritatively, richly dressed, with a hat like a carriage wheel, on which all kinds of things had place’.18 Typical of a disciple, Münter’s reminiscence was not without ambivalence, Werefkin’s purported aristocratic origins and temperamental strength of character being well documented.19 Nevertheless, her painting valorizes the older woman, the casually elegant draping of the long scarf and tipped hat reinforcing a youthful demeanour. Demonstrating her technical command and fluency with codes of expressive emphasis that are as audacious as Fauvist painting, Münter arranges the three-quarter-length figure against a freely painted yellow ground (the wall of her house). The triangular composition and directional brushstrokes guide our attention to the head, which is turned towards the spectator but glances sideways. Discordant colour combinations, the largely olive tones of the face reflecting the plum-like colours of the scarf, reinforce this focus. Thickened dark lines furthermore circumscribe colour areas, making them function as vibrant shapes. In reviewing the first travelling exhibition of the NKVM, the art critic of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung appeared to lack the experience and vocabulary to assess the abstraction in Münter’s portraiture: Gabriele Münter literally imitates the drawings of small children, of which the most modern education has made too much fuss – this uninhibited manner that flies in the face of any sense for perspective and natural forms and [this manner] that pretends hideous features to be human faces, green spots to be eyes, square blocks to be noses, broad slits to be mouths, must be rejected. The broad mass of spectators must be protected from such a sight; will they not otherwise also become mad? – The principle ‘sensation at any price’ does not belong in an art exhibition.20 Whereas the critic is perceptive in detecting the importance of child art to Münter, one is curious as to why he felt that these works were so troubling – her submission included two portraits of women – and why spectators required protection.21 Although we are aware that Münter’s Paris sojourn had acquainted her with Synthetist aesthetic theory, particularly in relation to her coloured linocut portraits, she wrote in her diary of the epochal Murnau visit of 1908, where she, Kandinsky, Werefkin and

38

Shulamith Behr

2.1  Gabriele Münter, Portrait of Marianne Werefkin (Bildnis Marianne Werefkin), 1909.



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 39

Jawlensky forged their relationship and pursued shared interests. This initiated a period of interaction that involved them testing the limits of painting within the landscape genre, as well as activating their interest in folk art. Münter testified to her departure from an Impressionist mode of depicting nature, ‘to feeling the content of things – abstracting – conveying an extract’.22 She referred chiefly to Jawlensky, who ‘passed on what he had experienced and learned – talked about “synthesis” ’. Of the four artists, Jawlensky had the most consistent experience of the French avant-garde and he adopted the term ‘synthesis’ to apply to the technique of Cloisonnism, the radical simplification of form and colour, bound by line, so as to avoid anecdotal content.23 Indeed the term became a rhetorical catchword in Kandinsky’s formulation of the programme for the catalogue of the first exhibition of the NKVM in 1909, wherein he proclaimed their search ‘for artistic forms … that must be freed from everything incidental, in order to bring only what is necessary to express strongly – in short, the pursuit of artistic synthesis’.24 In her portrayal of women from her social and artistic environment, Münter certainly went beyond the incidental embodiment of the subject. As we have seen in her Portrait of Werefkin, this was not a prescriptive idealization of form, since Münter relied on a daring use of the phenomenological and sensate experience of space. Given that traditional artistic vocabulary was inadequate to signify women’s entry into modernity, Münter’s portraits suggest a ‘new synthesis’ whereby the abstracting processes – low viewing point, proximity, facture – direct the spectator to an unexpected assertion of womanhood. The anonymous reviewer cited above was evidently threatened by this ‘show of force’, these portraits functioning as an ‘emblematic sign of the failure of power’s symbolic currency’.25 Since ‘woman as a sign’ is critical to this theorization of ‘synthesis’, it differentiates Münter’s practice from her male colleagues’ usage of the term and alludes to the more vexing construction of the ‘woman as artist’.26 Certainly, at this juncture, we can observe that Münter’s avant-garde strategies match those outlined by Griselda Pollock, albeit in another context, which include a reference to contemporary practice, deference to the latest developments and difference from current aesthetics and criticism in the bid for ‘modern’ art.27 As will be shown, such conclusions can also be drawn from Werefkin’s theories and concurrent practice. While the constitutive constraints on modern artistic identity in Germany were applicable to both genders, societal constructions of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘artist’ were mutually exclusive. These dualities plagued Werefkin, who found it necessary to invent a third self, as she noted in her journal Lettres á un Inconnu (Letters to an Unknown, 1901–1905) in 1905: I am not cowardly and I keep my word. I am faithful to myself, ferocious to myself and indulgent to others. That is I, the man. I love the song of love – that is I, the woman. I consciously create for myself illusions and dreams, that is I the artist … I am much more a man than a woman. The desire to please and to pity alone makes me a woman. I hear and I take note … I am neither man nor woman – I am I.28

40

Shulamith Behr Werefkin’s well-known Self Portrait, 1910 (figure 2.2), appears to draw on the sustenance of this inner rapport in presenting the woman artist as a visionary force. Here, Werefkin has no need to wear her womanliness as a mask in order to hide the possession of masculinity.29 The appropriation of masculine Nietzschean energy, in order to forge her creativity (‘I am neither man nor woman – I am I [the artist]’, was the vehicle through which she was able to explore the autonomy of artistic formation.30 Evidently, although the portrayal of the self-image would appear to be one of the most solitary acts of the creative process, the artist as model, the portrait evinces the most complex interaction between private and public life.31 In this instance, it is instructive that Werefkin exhibited the work as one of eight paintings contributed to the third exhibition of the NKVM, which opened at the Galerie Thannhauser on 18 December 1911, concurrent with the initiating exhibition of the Editors of Der Blaue Reiter.32 While this painting serves to illuminate the limits of Werefkin’s homage to painterly abstraction, the critical language used in developing a theory of art making differs substantially from Kandinsky’s writings.33 No longer do we encounter the rhetoric of phallic mastery and penetration but a rapport that speaks of ‘illusions’ and ‘dreams’, almost as though the creative process involves a fantasy of sexual foreplay before the divided self attains its unique identity in the work of art. Although it responds to precedents of van Gogh and, indeed, Jawlensky in its three-quarter-view pose, summarily cut-off composition and swirling brushstrokes, its crafting is more layered, stylistically speaking. When Werefkin resumed painting in 1906, she revised her understanding of what constituted high art and abandoned the earthy tonalities of oil painting on canvas. Preferring to use the saturation of colours and the quicker drying processes of a mixed technique, she achieves translucency as well as impasto-like effects within the limited flexibility of the gouache and tempera mediums. This is focused in particular on the area of most concentrated attention, around the startling red eyes and knitted brow. As one of a series of works presumed to have arisen out of her return visit to Kovno, where her brother Peter was governor of the Province or gubernia, the Self Portrait signals Werefkin’s assertive – albeit conflicted – engagement with her Russian origins. The discovery of Werefkin’s correspondence with Jawlensky, including letters from her period of absence between December 1909 and the spring of 1910, reveals much about her yearning for a privileged youth in the outposts of Imperial Russia.34 Typical of émigré experience on returning to their roots,35 Werefkin commented that she ached ‘for everything that is sweet and good, which is called Russian life’ – that which was absent from a city in which the dialect was mainly Polish or broken Russian.36 Indeed, only escape into a church – ‘Dark, empty. Lights flickering before icons’ – provided succour. In Kovno, she stated, ‘something terrible, terrible lies over everything’ and yet was a ‘treasure-trove for artists’. As has been effectively argued, paintings, such as Return Home, c. 1909 (figure 2.3), match the evocative language and fiery scenarios configured in Werefkin’s illustrated correspondence.37 Whereas her earlier focus on the social topic of labour had much in common with the paintings of the school of Pont Aven and expressive distortions of



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 41

2.2  Marianne Werefkin, Self Portrait (Selbstbildnis), c. 1910.

42

Shulamith Behr

2.3  Marianne Werefkin, Return Home (Heimkehr), c. 1909.

Edvard Munch, here she invests the motifs common to her Murnau interlude with transnational and -cultural resonance. Indeed, there is merit to the claim that she was strongly aware of the importance of local ethnicities to modern Lithuanian painting.38 Werefkin imbues the receding provincial cityscape with an eerie beauty of reflected coloured light and the procession of faceless and burdened washerwomen reveals a less than idealized commentary on peasant life in the changing economy and identity politics of the Pale. In November 1912, on the publication of Otto Fischer’s controversial book Das Neue Bild, Werefkin, Jawlensky, Wladimir von Bechtejeff, Moissey Kogan and Alexander Mogilewski seceded from the NKVM.39 Interestingly, then, neither Werefkin’s nor Jawlensky’s works were included in the initial Blaue Reiter exhibitions. Indeed, they weren’t listed as participating in its Berlin venue in March 1912, which launched the opening of Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Gallery, an event that had tremendous significance for the marketing of Der Blaue Reiter. But by October 1912 they were included in a large exhibition that opened at the premises of the Neue Kunstsalon Hans Goltz at Odeonsplatz and, by 1913, along with other artists of Der Blaue Reiter, their works were featured in Walden’s Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, a blockbuster exhibition of international importance. Hence, given Werefkin’s complex relationships to the NKVM and Der Blaue Reiter, it is understandable that the uncovering of interactions and communications, the networks linking space and time, is achieved through less tangible evidence – through her correspondence and theoretical aims – than the mere listing of her name in exhibition catalogues.



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 43

Else Lasker-Schuler, Prince of Thebes As indicated earlier, in 1913, the notion ‘des blauen Reiterreiterin’ (the blue rider’s woman rider) was broached in the correspondence between the poet, writer and artist Else Lasker-Schüler and Werefkin (see figure 2.4). Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) was already in an epistolary exchange with Marc, which held consequences for both their developments.40 Here, however, Lasker-Schüler deployed the term as a metaphor, suggesting the integration of the rider and horsewoman, Werefkin being addressed as both ‘vieladeliger, wilder Junge’ (noble, wild lad) and ‘süsse Malerin’ (sweet woman painter). This conjunction and disjunction of values and gender-crossing is as typical of the poet’s style of addressing her female colleagues as it is of her own fictional self-­ naming. She signs herself ‘Prince Jussuf/the Prince of Thebes’ and this is accompanied

2.4  Letter by Else Lasker-Schüler to Marianne Werefkin (Blaue Reiterreiterin), 1913.

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Shulamith Behr by her self-portrait, adorned with cosmic symbols and exotic, plumed hat, which can be identified as a Kriegshut (War Hat). This can be viewed in a concurrent reproduction, based on a drawing in Marc’s possession at the time and published in the literary magazine Saturn 3:4, April, 1913.41 Though her second marriage to Herwarth Walden disintegrated in 1911, LaskerSchüler, albeit impoverished, was by that time in the forefront of literary productivity and was invited to give poetry readings in Berlin and other major European cities, performances which were highly charged with the intensity of both her personality and her material. One can judge from posed photographs, dependent on notions of gesture and masquerade, Lasker-Schüler herself dressed in baggy Eastern trouser suits and gaudy cheap jewellery for these occasions, modelling her adopted persona on a Pharaonic funerary relief source (figure 2.5).42 Interpretations abound of Lasker-Schüler’s appropriation of the Joseph myth elicited in part from her own reminiscences regarding her German-Jewish childhood and of her dressing up in colourful clothes to act out the story. Apparently, her mother encouraged these fantasies, since the ability to interpret dreams was something very rare and special.43 On a more critical level, her identification with the outsider prince testifies to her marginality, as a German-Jew and woman poet seeking prophetic status in male-dominated literary circles. Hence, as in the case of Werefkin, the integrated figure of the ‘wo/man’ is seen as a subversive agent, through which Lasker-Schüler could experiment with poetic licence.44 In 1913, Lasker-Schüler dedicated a poem to Werefkin which stressed the artist’s Russian origins and childhood emergence into a ‘Meisterin’. In three of the five stanzas cited below, one can speculate that she was referring to Werefkin’s works comparable to the painting Return Home, portraying the silhouettes of peasant women in the sunset-lit darkness of the cityscape:       Marianne von Werefkin Marianne plays with the colours of Russia’s painting: Green, light green, pink, white, And not forgetting cobalt blue, These are her faithful playfellows. Marianne von Werefkin – I called her the noble street lad, Rascal of Russian town, a hand In every prank for miles around. … Marianne’s soul and her unbounded heart Like to play at joy and pain, Just as she takes to painting melancholy In colours that twitter like birds.45



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 45

2.5  Photograph of Else Lasker-Schüler as Fakir from Thebes. Frontispiece from her novel Mein Herz, 1912.

46

Shulamith Behr Lasker-Schüler seizes on the constructs of child-like ‘play’ with the formal elements as appropriate to the creative process as well as to the ‘Süßigkeit’ (sweetness) of the colouration. Yet these childhood games are invested with transgression – the rascal sows havoc in the Russian town. The severity of Werefkin’s style, steep perspectives and elongated figures evoke alienating experiences of her return home, as conveyed in her correspondence with Jawlensky. Painted in gouache and tempera, conceived over a period of time and undated, these mysterious works elicit the sensations of the Expressionist repertoire, the familiar made strange, the toying with both joyous and painful memories.46 In 1914, in a little known ‘Talk on the symbol, the sign and its significance in mystical art’, a treatise that accompanied an exhibition of her works in The School of Art in Vilnius, Werefkin could speak with collegiality of the multivalent positions – between abstraction and figuration – in Der Blaue Reiter: Many of my friends … talk directly the language of primary symbols, for example, Kandinsky in painting or Schœnberg in music and they are right, perhaps even more than I am. But my closest friends and I … believe only in the example of it [life]. That is why we do not renounce it, we do not escape from it, but we love it, it and its forms; we compel it to serve our faith … I would have liked to show you and tell you about the work of my friends in order to explain more accurately, in the light of their examples, what we believe in. But you do not know their works. I must be content to talk about my works which you have kindly had brought to you. I would ask you for this reason not to consider this speech … as the desire of promoting myself. My friends and I we form a unity.47 Werefkin’s conception of her position in the group interpolates in the well-worn narratives of Der Blaue Reiter and allows some insight as to how her persona as a Reiter/ Reiterin, who could channel the irrational wildness of the id through creative play, attracted a cohort of talented women, such as the poet Lasker-Schüler. In the Derridean sense, the power of the aristocratic name ‘von Werefkin’ or ‘Baronin’, which circulated in the German art world’s print communities, marked her entry into language – defying the singularity offered by the logos.48 That Der Blaue Reiter could accommodate for this form of metonymic and performative interplay between the masculine and feminine signals that its major legacies to the field of pre-emancipation sexual and cultural politics has yet to be written.

Notes  1 S. Behr, ‘Künstlergruppe Brücke and the Public Sphere: Bridging the Gender Divide’, in Christian Weikop (ed.), Bridging History: Perspectives on Brücke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 99–124.  2 See Hildegard Reinhardt, ‘Die Geschichte des Kölner Gereonsklubs (1911–1913)’, in Der



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 47

Gereonsklub 1911–1913. Europas Avantgarde im Rheinland (Bonn: August Macke Haus, 1993), pp. 9–24.   3 This ethos stemmed from the openness of Russian precedents, where there were more opportunities for women practitioners on both professional and social fronts, and where women were allowed access to academic training thirty years earlier than in Germany. Indeed, Kandinsky forcefully chided the Berlin organizers of the Neue Secession exhibitions for setting up barriers against women’s art, which he stated in his experience ‘poisons’ the best of intentions. See A.  Hoberg, ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München und Blaue Reiter’, in A. Hoberg and H. Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild 1909–1912 (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München, 1999), p. 17, note 20, citing Kandinsky’s letter to George Tappert, 14 December 1912, Gabriele Münter- und Johannes Eichner-Stiftung.   4 Such questions are posed in W. Chadwick and I. de Courtivron (eds), Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).  5 Ibid., p. 7. In their introduction, the editors refer to these concepts raised by the feminist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow in her book, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); See S. Behr, ‘Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership’, in Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird (eds), Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1900–1921 (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), pp. 77–100; 213–14; B. K. Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky & Münter, Arp & Tauber (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2014); R. Benjamin with C. Ashjian, ‘Kandinsky and Münter in Tunisia’, in Kandinsky and Klee in Tunisia (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), pp. 17–94.   6 K. Lang, ‘Response: The Far in the Near’, The Art Bulletin, 81:1 (March 2007), pp. 26–34. Such an intervention was initially made by feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who deployed the Freudian oedipal trope of ‘killing off’ predecessors to characterize avant-garde male artists’ rejection of father figures. See G. Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures) (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 20, note 16, p. 74.  7 M. Liebermann, ‘Zehn Jahre Sezession’ [1908], in Günter Busch (ed.), Die Phantasie in der Malerei: Schriften und Reden (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1978), p. 179, cited by P. Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, London: Belknap Press, 1980), p. 167.  8 For amplification on the Neue Secession, founded in April 1910, see A. Daemgen, ‘Die Neue Secession in Berlin’, in exh. cat., Liebermanns Gegner: Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus (Berlin: Max Liebermann Haus, 2011), pp. 13–83.  9 See W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983). 10 Further discussion of this terminology can be found in J. Beckett, ‘Book Review’, Women’s Art Magazine, 54:29–30 (September/October, 1993). 11 Here, I rely on the post-structural methodology of Jacques Derrida in ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’, in Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1978), pp. 27–73. 12 R. Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 108–11. 13 Extensive material on the Munich Künstlerinnenverein can be found in Y. Deseyve, Der Künstlerinnen-Verein München e.V. und seine Damen-Akademie. Eine Studie zur Ausbildungssituation von Künstlerinnen im späten 19, und frühen 20 Jahrhundert (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2005). 14 G. J. Wolf, Die Münchnerin: Kultur- und Sittenbilder aus dem alten und neuen München (Munich: Franz Hanfstaengl, 1924), p. 218: ‘Es [die moderne Literatur- und Kunstbewegung] wurden daher häufig die beiden Strömungen, die der Frauenbewegung und die der “Moderne”, als eines Wesens angesehen und verwechselt’.

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Shulamith Behr 15 See C. Diethe, Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), p. 194. 16 See G. Pauli, Erinnerungen aus sieben Jahrzehnten (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1936), pp. 264ff. For biography, bibliography and discussion of key works see S. Behr, ‘Marianne Werefkin’, in D. Gaze (ed.), Dictionary of Women Artists, vol. 2 (London, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborne, 1997), pp. 1441–5. 17 A. Kochman, ‘Russian Émigré Artists and Political Opposition in Fin-De-Siècle Munich’, Emporia State Research Studies, 45:1 (2009), pp. 6–26. 18 A. Hoberg and H. Friedel, Gabriele Münter 1877–1962. Retrospektive (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1992), p. 264, cat. no. 63: ‘Die Werefkina malte ich 1909 vor dem gelben Sockel meines Hauses. Sie war eine pompöse Erscheinung, selbstbewußt, herrisch, reich gekleidet, mit einem Hut wie ein Wagenrad, auf dem allerhand Dinge Platz hatten’. 19 See E. Erdmann-Macke, Erinnerung an August Macke (Stuttgart: Fischer, 1982), pp. 238–40. 20 Anon., Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 8 May 1910: ‘Gabriele Münter imitiert buchstäblich die Zeichnungen kleiner Kinder, von denen die modernste Pädagogik zu viel Wesens gemacht hat – diese Ungeniertheit, die jedem Sinn für Perspektive und natürliche Formen hohnspricht und ekelhafte Fratzen als menschliches Gesichter, die grüne Flecken für Augen, eckige Klötze für Nasen, breite Schlitze für Münder ausgibt, muß abgelehnt werden. Vor solchem Anblick muß die breite Masse der Besucher bewahrt werden; muß auch sie nicht irre werden? – Der Grundsatz ‘Sensation um jeden Preis’ gehört nicht in eine Kunstausstellung’. 21 See Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pls. 34 and 35 (Dame mit Hut, 1909–1910, oil on board, 76 × 52 cm, Private Collection; Bildnis einer jungen Dame – Junge Polin, 1909, oil on canvas, 70.5 × 52.4 cm, Milwaukee Art Museum Gift of Mrs Harry Lynde Bradley). Barbara Wörwag examines the significance of child art to Münter and Kandinsky in her essay ‘“There is an Unconscious, Vast Power in the Child”: Notes on Kandinsky, Münter and Children’s Drawings’, in Jonathan Fineberg (ed.), Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 68–94. 22 Münter, Diary, 1911, in A. Hoberg (ed.), Wassily Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter in Murnau und Kochel 1902–1914, Briefe und Erinnerungen (Munich: Prestel, 1994), pp. 45–6. 23 A. Hoberg, ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München und Blaue Reiter’, in Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pp. 13–14. Jawlensky spent short periods in Normandy and Paris in 1903 and 1905 and absorbed the impact in his painting of van Gogh, Gauguin and the Nabis. In 1907, the painter monk Willibrod Verkade worked in Jawlensky’s studio in Munich, thus endorsing the lessons of Gauguin and Paul Sérusier. 24 W. Kandinsky, ‘Vorwort’, Neue Künstlervereinigung München (Munich: Moderne Galerie, 1909): ‘das suchen nach künstlerischen Formen … die von allem Nebensächlichen befreit sein müssen, um nur das Notwendige stark zum Ausdruck zu bringen – kurz das Streben nach künstlerischer Synthese’. 25 A. Kroker and D. Cook, ‘Parson’s Foucault’, in The Post-Modern Scene, Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 228, as cited in L. Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 8. 26 For the feminist coordinates of ‘differencing synthesis’ see S. Behr, ‘Beyond the Muse: Gabriele Münter as Expressionistin’, in Gabriele Münter: The Search for Expression 1906–1917 (London: Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 2005), pp. 58–68. 27 Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits 1888–1893, pp. 12–15. I thank the anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to endorse this observation. 28 ‘Je ne suis pas lâche et je tiens la parole donnée. Je suis fidèle à moi-même, féroce à moi même et indulgente aux autres. Voilà moi homme. J’aime le chant de l’amour – voilà moi femme. Je me crée consciemment des illusions et des rêves – voilà moi artiste … Je suis un homme bien



Gendered identity and creativity in Der Blaue Reiter 49

plus qu’une femme. Le besoin de plaire et le pitié seuls me font femme. J’écoute et je prends notes. Tous les jugements tombent à côté. Il est beaucoup trop jeune pour comprendre ce qu’il pouvait avoir en moi. Je ne suis ni homme, ni femme: je suis moi’. Fondazione Marianne Werefkin (Archive), Museo Comunale d’Arte di Ascona: M. Werefkin, Lettres á un Inconnu, vol. 3 (30 October 1905), p. 257. 29 See J. Rivière, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ [1929], in V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan, Formations of Fantasy (London, New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 38. 30 This was discussed by Mara Witzling in an unpublished paper ‘My beautiful, my unique, myself, my muse: Werefkin’s “Inconnu” and women artists’ appropriation of artistic authority’, College Art Association, 1993. 31 For a discussion of women artists’ negotiation of self-portraiture see S. Behr, ‘Die Arbeit am eigenen Bild. Das Selbstporträt bei Gabriele Münter’, in A. Hoberg and H. Friedel, Gabriele Münter 1877–1962. Retrospektive (Munich: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1992), pp. 85–91. 32 Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, p. 50. 33 Further examination of the dynamic between Kandinsky and Werefkin can be found in S. Behr, ‘Veiling Venus: Gender and Painterly Abstraction in Early German Modernism’, in C. Arscott and K. Scott (eds), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 126–41. 34 L. Laučkaitė-Surgailienė, ‘Marianna Verefkina. Zhizn’ v iskusstve’, Vilnius, 2 (1992), pp. 92–104; 3 (1992), pp. 126–37; ‘Reisen nach Litauen’, in N. Brögmann (ed.), Marianne von Werefkin.: Oeuvres peintes 1907–1936 (Gingin: Fondation Neumann, 1996), pp. 93–101; ‘Der unbekannte Briefnachlaß der Malerin Marianne Werefkin’, in B. Weidle (ed.), Marianne Werefkin. Die Farbe beisst mich ans Herz (Bonn: August Macke Haus, 1999), pp. 58–71. 35 E. Said observes this phenomenon in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2001), p. 175. 36 See A. Kochmann, ‘Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin’s Return Home, c. 1909’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (spring 2006), p. 4, for translation of letter to Alexej Jawlensky, 1910, RS Fond 19–1458, pp. 17–18, 27–8, Lithuanian MartynasMazvydas National Library, Vilnius. 37 Ibid., pp. 1–21. 38 A. Merges-Knoth, ‘“Ich sehe in allem hier mich selbst”: Marianne Werefkin und Litauen’, in Weidle (ed.), Marianne Werefkin, pp. 76–88. 39 For coverage of the impact of O. Fischer’s Das Neue Bild (Munich: Delphin, 1912), see H. Wille, ‘“Das Neue Bild” von Otto Fischer’, in Hoberg and Friedel (eds), Der Blaue Reiter und das Neue Bild, pp. 321–8. 40 F. Marc and E. Lasker-Schüler, ‘Der Blaue Reiter präsentiert Eurer Hoheit sein Blaues Pferd’: Karten und Briefe, ed. P-K. Schuster (Munich: Prestel, 1987). 41 Selbstbildniß des Prinzen von Theben im Kriegshut in ‘Werkverzeichnis’, in R. Dick (ed.), Elsa LaskerSchüler. Die Bilder (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 2010), no. i23, p. 264. 42 The origins and development of the Joseph theme are discussed in R. Dick, ‘Elsa Lasker-Schüler als Künstlerin’, in Dick (ed.), Elsa Lasker-Schüler, pp. 123–9. 43 Elsa Lasker-Schüler, Das Hebräerland (Zurich: Oprecht, 1937), in Elsa Lasker-Schüler. Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 4:1, pp. 57ff. For the exilic context of Lasker-Schüler’s reminiscences see A. Schmetterling, ‘“Das ist direkt ein Diebstahl an den Kunsthistorikern”. Elsa Lasker-Schülers bildnerisches Werk im kunsthistorischen Kontext’, in R. Dick (ed.), Elsa Lasker-Schüler, pp. 161–93. 44 For further amplification see S. Behr, ‘Performing the Wo/man: The ‘Interplay’ between Marianne Werefkin and Else Lasker-Schüler’, in Tanja Malycheva and Isabel Wünsche (eds),

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Shulamith Behr Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in her Circle (Leiden, Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), pp. 92–105. 45 K. J. Skrodzki (ed.), Else Lasker-Schüler, Sämtliche Gedichte, trans. N. Shearman (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), pp. 344ff:                        

Marianne spielt mit den Farben Rußlands Malen: Grün, Hellgrün, Rosa, Weiß, Und namentlich der Kobaltblau Sind ihre treuen Spielgefährtin. Marianne von Werefkin – Ich nannte sie den adeligen Straßenjungen Schelm der Russenstadt, im weiten Umkreis Jeden Streich gepachtet … Mariannens Seele und ihr unbändig Herz Spielen gern zusammen Freud und Leid, Wie sie so oft die Melancholie Hinmalt mit zwitschernden Farbentönen.

46 The Freudian unheimlich is raised in Kochman, ‘Ambiguity of Home’, pp. 7–8. 47 Marianne Werefkin, Vilenskij vestnik (1914) no. 3234, as trans. ‘Causerie sur le symbole, le signe et sa signification dans l’art mystique’, in Marianne Werefkin Lettres a un inconnu: Aux sources de l’expressionisme, ed. Gabrielle Dufour-Kowalska (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), pp. 175–82, English trans. I. Boldry. 48 See, in particular, the essay ‘Khōra’, in J. Derrida, On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit, trans. I. McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89–127, in which the proper noun and its associations are discussed. Here khōraic metonymy supersedes the singularity offered by the logos.

‘Primitive

3 The ‘primitive’ and the modern in Der Blaue Reiter almanac and the Folkwang Museum Katherine Kuenzli

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a s s i l y Kandinsky wrote to Franz Marc in June 1911 of his ideas for a yearly almanac, in which visual art, music and theatre would be coordinated to constitute a totality that transcended historical and geographical difference. Originating with visual art, the almanac would also include important contributions from writers and musicians. Although the publication as he conceived it would privilege recent artistic developments, it would also demonstrate affinities between contemporary artistic practice and purportedly universal, human intuition. To this end, Kandinsky proposed side-by-side juxtapositions of western and non-western art, painting and ethnographic objects, high and low art, modern art and antiquities: ‘There we will place an Egyptian next to [a child’s drawing], a Chinese alongside a Rousseau, a popular print next to a Picasso and much more of this sort!’1 Such unorthodox visual pairings, Kandinsky proposed, would demonstrate underlying spiritual affinities uniting different traditions and modes of artistic creation. Upon its publication in early 1912, Der Blaue Reiter almanac included the image pairings that Kandinsky envisioned, but their nature and meaning were more complex and contradictory than he had initially imagined. Resulting from intense discussions between the almanac’s editors Kandinsky, Marc and August Macke in Sindelsdorf and Murnau in the autumn of 1911, image comparisons in Der Blaue Reiter presented varied views of form and its relationship to inner ‘spiritual’ content. Certain comparisons suggest stylistic similarities between modern and non-western art, for example the pairing of Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890) and a detail from Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s colour woodcut, Two Chinese Warriors of the Han Dynasty (nineteenth century) (figure 3.1). The Japanese print has been cropped so that it more closely resembles the format and composition of van Gogh’s painting. In both works, flattened form and irregularly curving, asymmetrical lines convey the portrayed persons’ states of mental agitation. Such pairings of otherwise unrelated compositions suggest formal and psychological concordances between distant cultures. However, other image comparisons in Der Blaue

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3.1  Der Blaue Reiter almanac, after p. 112 and before p. 113. Reproduced are Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Doctor Gachet, 1890 and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, detail from Two Chinese Warriors of the Han Dynasty, nineteenth century.

Reiter display stylistic differences. Historical costumes, naturalistic detail, and illusionistic representation in a lithographic illustration from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (nineteenth century) contrast with Kandinsky’s Lyrical (1911), in which a few summary lines and colour patches suggest the forms of horse and rider (figure 3.2). Der Blaue Reiter almanac’s pairing of ‘primitive’ art with the modern took shape in response to displays at the Folkwang Museum, where Kandinsky exhibited as early as 1909, and which hosted Der Blaue Reiter’s first exhibition in 1911. Karl Ernst Osthaus founded the Folkwang in 1902 in Hagen, a small industrial city located in the heart of Germany’s Ruhr Valley.2 He commissioned interiors for his museum from Belgian artist Henry van de Velde. Together, they constructed visually striking displays in which NeoImpressionist, Fauvist and Expressionist art appeared alongside ‘primitive’ artworks from archaic Greece, medieval Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Oceania.3 ‘Primitive’ was a term employed by artists, collectors and critics to designate art that lay outside of the Western Beaux-Arts tradition. The designation ‘primitive’ remained sufficiently vague, eliding histories of objects and their functions in specific social settings and also minimizing significant cultural differences, for example between court and ‘tribal’ societies.4 The Folkwang’s contribution to the growing European fascination with these objects was to visually associate ‘primitive’ works with the most recent European sculptures and paintings; the resulting ahistorical arrangements constituted a central feature of what James Sheehan has termed the modernist museum.5 Together, Osthaus and van de Velde installed modern art and its ‘other’ at the Folkwang Museum in visually striking displays that evolved from the museum’s opening



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

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3.2  Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 8–9. Reproduced are Reinhold das Wunderkind, an illustration from Grimms’ Fairy Tales, according to Franz Marc, nineteenth century, and Wassily Kandinsky, Lyrical, 1911.

through its much-publicized tenth-anniversary celebration, which took place in 1912, shortly after Der Blaue Reiter exhibition. The museum housed European art from the medieval to the modern era along with Greek and Egyptian antiquities and art from East Asia and Africa. However, within these loose groupings, formal principles trumped chronological and geographical classification, and the museum’s central plan worked towards dissolving clear-cut spatial and temporal boundaries. A photograph taken around 1910, for instance, shows a display of objects from around the world arranged in the museum’s grand staircase. A gilded buddha sculpture presides at the top of the stairs, which housed changing displays of Islamic miniatures, Japanese prints and baskets, Balinese temple figures, Egyptian glass and modern sculpture (figure 3.3). In this particular photograph, two sculptures, one by Constantin Meunier and the other by Georg Minne, sit on pedestals at the base of the stairs. The coordination of modern and ‘primitive’art reached new heights in 1912, when paintings by Paul Gauguin and sculptures by Georg Minne appeared in a gallery together with ancient Korean stone carvings and Laotian bronzes.6 The Folkwang was the first art museum to exhibit modern alongside ‘primitive’ art; together, they constituted components of an architectural ‘total work of art’, or Gesamtkunstwerk that united the visual arts with musical performances and poetry readings. Displays at the Folkwang eschewed historical and geographical classification in favour of formal principles based in abstract, musical combinations of line, colour and surface.7

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3.3  Folkwang Museum, grand staircase with sculptures from Bali, Japanese prints and baskets, and sculptures by Georg Minne and Constantin Meunier, c. 1912.

Rhythms of line and harmonies of colour evidenced in the museum’s visually striking installations were heighted by aural experience, for the Folkwang’s main painting gallery led directly into a lavishly appointed music room that doubled as an exhibition space. Visitors to the museum marvelled at the music room’s pinkish-yellowish coloured walls, natural oak doors and furniture, copper-coloured upholstery, and opal glass skylight with white, light blue, greennd purple glazing. Corners of the room contained shelves for displaying ceramics, and built-in cabinets housed musical scores. A wall painting by



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

Emil Rudolf Weiss framed the door of the music room, providing a ceremonial entrance into the painting gallery. Another doorway at the far end of the painting gallery led to a small auditorium designed by Peter Behrens, which provided a forum for literary events; larger events, including avant-garde theatre performances timed to coincide with important art exhibits, took place throughout Hagen. Displays at the Folkwang stimulated Kandinsky’s stated ambition to bring together works from seemingly unrelated historical periods and geographical regions in a publication that would address the visual arts, music, poetry and theatre. In Der Blaue Reiter almanac, as at the Folkwang Museum, artifacts were given only loose geographic identifications, for example ‘German’ or ‘Benin’; images in Der Blaue Reiter appeared alongside poems and musical scores, and essays by Arnold Schoenberg and others addressed the basis for coordinating the arts. The relationship between the Folkwang’s ahistorical installations and the almanac is all the more compelling, since Kandinsky, Marc and Macke had first-hand knowledge of the museum. Beyond exhibiting works by Kandinsky and Jawlensky in 1909, Osthaus in 1910 hosted the second exhibit of the Munich New Artists’ Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), of which Kandinsky and Marc were members, and in 1911 he organized an exhibition of Marc’s work at the Folkwang. That same year he financially supported Der Blaue Reiter almanac in addition to hosting the group’s first exhibition.8 Macke visited the Folkwang on a weekly basis upon his return to Bonn in 1910. Most commonly associated with Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and performances of his musical dramas at Bayreuth, the Gesamtkunstwerk became a field of intense experimentation and competition in the decades following the composer’s death in 1883.9 Visual artists, in particular, sought to go beyond Wagner’s focus on music and poetry and to secure for the visual arts a leading role in artistic synthesis. While Der Blaue Reiter almanac has long been understood in relationship to a general impulse to coordinate the arts, especially due to Kandinsky’s contacts with Arnold Schoenberg, we have yet to understand how this impulse structured the almanac’s image programme.10 The bewildering diversity of images and their seeming disconnection from the almanac’s literary and musical content has long been a source of both fascination and consternation.11 This perplexity is justified, for the selection and layout of images are far from coherent; they originate in not one, but at least two competing theories and practices of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which respectively focus on opposing principles of consonance and dissonance. Together, the connected, but not identical, formal strategies of Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum foreground how competing theories and practices of the Gesamtkunstwerk helped shape modernists’ interest in ‘primitive’ art. Most discussions of twentieth-century modernist primitivism treat the visual arts in isolation, following a standard set by Carl Einstein in his influential book, Negro Sculpture (1915). Studies of European ‘primitivism’ since Einstein consider formal borrowings, whether in isolation or in the context of colonial power relationships.12 Yet to be considered is how ideas of ‘primitivism’ informed constructions of the Gesamtkunstwerk. European artists turned to ‘primitive’ art not only for alternatives to western constructions of space, narrative

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Katherine Kuenzli and illusionism; they also saw in ‘primitive’ art ritualistic and communal meanings that had escaped European art in the modern era. The consequences of this discourse for European modernism exceeded the strict domains of painting and sculpture and prompted new experimental attempts to integrate the visual arts with music, poetry and theatre. Any consideration of the totalizing motivations and spiritual preoccupations of Der Blaue Reiter and the Gesamtkunstwerk must confront Georg Lukács’s and others’ charges that their art was escapist, and ultimately enabled the rise of totalitarian governments in Europe. Against these critiques, I underscore the unfinished, incomplete and ambivalent nature of Der Blaue Reiter almanac.13 A close look at the almanac’s image pairings reveals how they resist any totalizing method or narrative; some confirm an expressive understanding of form as embodying a hidden psychological truth, an idea indebted to displays at the Folkwang. Yet other image pairings present a radically different conception of form in which external appearances bear no necessary relationship to spiritual essences. Beginning with Stéphane Mallarmé’s negative poetics, modernist artists approached the ‘total work of art’ through the figure of the fragment.14 Members of Der Blaue Reiter followed in the trajectory of Mallarmé’s poetics; although they sought unity, they found anarchy of parts. Their realization of the impossibility of fully realizing and representing totality provides helpful parameters for approaching Der Blaue Reiter almanac and its fascinating, if inconclusive, attempt at cultural and artistic synthesis.

The modern and the primitive at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen The almanac benefitted from the material and moral support of a new generation of art museum directors in Germany, who shifted the focus of their institutions away from the past in favour of modern art. As James Sheehan has noted, German art museums underwent a sea change around 1900, when their directors rejected nineteenth-century historicist practices based in rational, chronological, and geographical arrangement in favour of visually striking displays that fostered a more immediate and sensual experience of objects.15 Directors, including Hugo von Tschudi in Berlin and Munich, Georg Swarzenski in Frankfurt, Gustav Pauli in Bremen, Alfred Lichtwark in Hamburg, not to mention Osthaus in Hagen, began presenting their collections in dynamic and engaging displays in an attempt to address the needs and sensibilities of a potentially broader audience. Informed by recent developments in experimental psychology, they introduced bright colours and decorative patterning into gallery installations and reduced the number of objects exhibited in order to foster an intimate, emotional relationship between viewer and artwork.16 These brightly coloured displays were well suited to modern, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, which were the focus of new acquisitions.17 In the case of Hugo von Tschudi’s re-installation of paintings at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie in 1897, for instance, paintings by Edouard Manet and his followers appeared against pinkish-yellow and light-green-striped wallpaper and above wooden wainscoting painted bright red. Tschudi toned down the brightly colouristic effects in his



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

1908 reinstallation of Impressionist paintings in the same museum, where they appeared against a cloth that Peter Behrens printed with a fine geometric pattern. Both displays in Berlin show sensitivity to the purely visual framing of artworks and to their direct sensory appeal. Kandinsky and Marc acknowledged some of these museological developments by dedicating the almanac to the memory of von Tschudi, who in 1909 became Director of Munich’s Neue Pinakothek and whose premature death coincided with the almanac’s publication. In his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures’, Marc acknowledged von Tschudi’s heroic efforts to bring the best of modern art to Germany.18 He also credited the role of von Tschudi’s friend and collaborator, Julius Meier-Graefe, whose art criticism defined a modern aesthetic for German audiences.19 In the heyday of his influence around 1900, Meier-Graefe worked closely with German museum directors to acquire significant works of modern art, above all from Paris, as a means of introducing advanced aesthetics to German artists and their public. Over the course of 1911 and 1912, aesthetically progressive directors answered requests from Kandinsky, Macke and Marc for help by supporting Der Blaue Reiter almanac and exhibit. While Marc, Macke and Kandinsky drew support from a broad range of museums, none is more relevant to the almanac’s complex illustration programme than the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. Often overlooked in favour of larger and more prominently placed German museums, the Folkwang held special significance for Der Blaue Reiter movement. The establishment of the Folkwang coincided with the expansion of Germany’s ethnographic museums, but it broke with their scientific practices by displaying ethnographic objects for their formal and material properties alone, divorced from all cultural contexts.20 Whereas ethnographers distinguished between ‘primitive’ cultures in Africa and North America and the highly refined court cultures of South and East Asia, these distinctions proved less important to Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists, who valued ‘primitive’ art for its formal properties, detached from its culture of origin. To be sure, the Folkwang and Blaue Reiter artists’ juxtapositions of primitive and modern objects were coloured by colonialist and imperialist biases that are an inescapable feature of early twentieth-century Germany.21 In other respects, however, Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists adopted progressive positions by elevating ethnographic objects as art and insisting on their aesthetic importance. They looked to African, Oceanic and Japanese art for two reasons: it provided them with alternatives to naturalistic and illusionistic modes of representation and models of art’s integration into religious or social rituals. In these foreign or distant cultures, imagination and participation seemed to take precedence over description and detached observation; their willful distortions of nature seemed to spring from some deeper, spiritual source and counter what Osthaus and Der Blaue Reiter saw as modern western culture’s excessive materialism and its isolation of art from the common culture. Following the precedent set by Meier-Graefe and von Tschudi, Osthaus broke with historicist museum practices and centred his collection on modern art. Between 1900 and his untimely death in 1921, he acquired and exhibited key works of Impressionist,

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Katherine Kuenzli Post-Impressionist and, eventually, Expressionist painting. He declared the modernity of his museum when he purchased Renoir’s Lise in 1901. Paintings by van Gogh and Maurice Denis followed. In 1903, he acquired key works by Paul Gauguin following an exhibit of the artist’s work that year at the Folkwang. Before 1910, Osthaus acquired Matisse’s Still Life with Asphodels and Bathers with a Turtle along with modern sculptures, including works by Auguste Rodin, Constantin Meunier and Georg Minne. After 1910 he shifted his attention from Parisian to German artists who had carefully studied Parisian models and channelled their formal innovations, including bright colour, expressive line, and formal and spatial flattening, to advance ‘Germanic’ ideals, such as the cultivation of interiority and spirituality. Osthaus particularly favoured the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde, who responded in complex and fascinating ways to the work of van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the Fauves.22 Beyond Die Brücke, Osthaus also supported rival Expressionist groups in Munich; following an exhibit of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München that he hosted in 1910, the Folkwang acquired works by Alexey Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Marc and Macke. Osthaus’s taste in modern art overlapped with von Tschudi’s at the National Gallery in Berlin and Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, but the Folkwang stood apart from these institutions in exhibiting modern artworks alongside ‘primitive’ art. The inclusion of art from different world cultures had been part of Osthaus’s plan from the beginning. He undertook a series of trips to North Africa, Asia Minor and the Middle East beginning in 1898, which marked the beginning of his collecting activity. Upon returning to Germany, he continued collecting non-western and pre-modern art with the help of colleagues, friends and art dealers. He purchased Japanese applied art objects and Germanic antiquities from Julius Brinckmann of Hamburg’s Museum of Applied Art. These were followed by additional purchases of Chinese and Japanese applied art from Sigfried Bing in Paris. In 1912, Osthaus visited Joseph Brummer’s gallery on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, leading to increased purchases of African art, which he acquired in 1913 from the Hamburg dealer of ethnographic art, J. F. G. Umlauff, whom he met through Macke. That same year, Osthaus’s assistant and specialist in Japanese Buddhist art Karl With acquired objects on his research trips to Japan, China, Java and Bali. One year later, Ada and Emil Nolde sent Osthaus an important collection of Oceanic sculptures that they purchased on their trip to German New Guinea in 1914.23 In collecting, Osthaus prized quality over quantity, and his selectivity distinguished him from ethnographers’ quantitative approaches. A series of articles published in 1913 drew attention to the Folkwang Museum’s unconventional display practices. The museum director’s wife and artistic collaborator, Gertrud Osthaus, offered the most compelling account of the Folkwang’s exhibits and their contribution to a unified world culture. She identified two principles at work in the installation of objects: first, the loose ordering of works to display the technical and stylistic characteristics of a single culture, and second the juxtaposition of works from disparate cultures to reveal their spiritual oneness. Osthaus addressed how arrangements of ‘harmoniously contrasting’ objects resulted in a heightened aesthetic effect



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

and originated in ‘the will to skip over time, place, and history in order to unite the psychologically related.’24 Conjuring up the visually striking displays in the minds of her readers, Osthaus related how paintings by Gauguin and a sculpture by Minne appeared in a room alongside ‘sacred stones’ from Korea and Laotian bronzes. ‘How odd’, she observed, ‘the life of these works unifies itself into a seamless whole; the viewer’s gaze glides from one object to another, and the experience of one deepens one’s appreciation of another.’ She then turned her attention to juxtapositions of Honoré Daumier’s Ecce Homo with a Gothic panel painting, and Matisse’s and Nolde’s paintings with ‘demonic works from African culture.’ Art as she presented it originates in universal structures of intuition, and she noted a ‘strange psychic affinity’ between modern artists and those living in ‘distant, dusky regions.’25 By 1910, Osthaus was not alone in exhibiting modern alongside ‘primitive’ art. In his Parisian gallery, opened in 1909, Joseph Brummer sold paintings by Henri (Douanier) Rousseau, African and Oceanic sculptures, and ancient Egyptian and Syrian art. In 1913, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler organized an exhibit devoted to the relationship between Picasso’s art and African sculpture at the Neue Galerie in Berlin. Osthaus’s collecting evolved through contact with these dealers. For instance, a visit that he paid to Brummer in 1912 led to the acquisition of more African art for the Folkwang.26 And yet the Folkwang, rather than these more centrally located galleries, provided the most direct precedent for the almanac’s image comparisons. Art dealers in Paris and Berlin set up a series of purely visual comparisons, whereas the Folkwang, like Der Blaue Reiter almanac, integrated modern and primitive art into a ‘total work of art’ that included the visual arts, music, poetry and the performing arts. Rather than selling art, Osthaus’s goal was to provide viewers with an uplifting aesthetic and moral experience. He hoped that his museum would become the museological equivalent of Bayreuth as a site of pilgrimage for modern artists, industrialists and workers. The goals of Der Blaue Reiter almanac were equally non-commercial and messianic, as Franz Marc proclaimed in his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures’, in which he announced the advent of a new, spiritual era. The roots of the Folkwang’s formal comparisons and approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk lie in a modern aesthetic as defined by art critic Meier-Graefe. Indeed, while many progressive curators in Germany, including Hugo von Tschudi, looked to Meier-Graefe, Osthaus most fully realized his idea of a modern aesthetic that originated in painting and provided the basis for coordinating all the arts.27 Osthaus originally envisioned his collection along the lines of a natural history museum that combined paintings by members of Düsseldorf’s Academy of Fine Art with natural history, ethnographic objects, folk art from the Sauerland, and Middle Eastern artifacts. Upon reading Meier-Graefe’s writings in 1900, he developed a more systematic aesthetic rooted in modern European artistic practice, especially as it took shape in Paris. Osthaus first encountered Meier-Graefe’s ideas in the periodicals Dekorative Kunst and Die Insel before reading their fully developed version in the critic’s magnum opus, Developmental History of Modern Art: Comparative Consideration of the Visual Arts, as a Contribution to a New Aesthetic (1904). In these texts,

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Katherine Kuenzli Meier-Graefe defined a modern formal language in which sensation was abstracted and distorted to constitute musical, rhythmic arrangements of line and colour. Although Meier-Graefe located the origins of a modern aesthetic in Parisian painterly developments, above all in the work of Manet, Renoir, Georges Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin and Denis, he saw the future development of a modern aesthetic as lying outside France. What first developed in Parisian easel painting, he predicted, would evolve into a spatial practice of art that was being developed in Flanders and Germany by van de Velde, Minne, and Behrens.28 Meier-Graefe elevated a three-dimensional aesthetic over two-dimensional easel painting, because it provided an immersive environment that surrounded the viewer and provoked a rich synaesthetic experience. His writings led Osthaus to van de Velde, and together they designed a museum and built a collection that exemplified Meier-Graefe’s aesthetic, even if they mobilized it in the service of different ideological objectives. Van de Velde yoked the critic’s writings to his internationalist aesthetic, whereas Osthaus took Meier-Graefe’s writings to support pan-Germanic ideas embodied in the museum’s name, ‘Folkwang’, the palace of the Goddess Freya in Nordic mythology.29 Although he focused on contemporary artistic production, Meier-Graefe emphasized how modern artists, beginning with the Impressionists, synthesized individual sensation with abstract, decorative principles derived from pre-modern and non-western traditions. He emphasized ‘comparative viewing’ rather than chronological narrative. In particular he signalled the importance to modern art of Byzantine mosaics and Japanese and Indonesian objects that were obtained through expanding trade and colonial networks. He also underlined the significance of European applied arts traditions, including tapestry, embroidery and fresco. Modern artists, Meier-Graefe observed, looked to art outside the western classical tradition for examples of decorative arrangement, and he compared paintings by van Gogh and Seurat to Gobelin tapestries, quattrocento fresco paintings, and ancient mosaics: ‘The joy emanating from this painting [Seurat’s Chahut] paradoxically conjures up antiquities: splendid stone mosaics that decorated palaces in Naples at the time of Alexander’s battles.’30 Meier-Graefe’s misdating of a Roman floor mosaic preserved at the Archaeological Museum Naples to the time of Alexander the Great does not affect his argument; his emphasis is not on history, but on unarticulated affinities between modern art and antiquities that share a common ornamental impulse. Modern artists, according to Meier-Graefe, looked to pre-modern and non-western art in their attempt to integrate painting and sculpture into architectural environments and to imbue them with spiritual, and even ritualistic, importance. Meier-Graefe associated the painting of Manet, Renoir, Gauguin and Denis with a musical aesthetic and synaesthesia, particularly in the final chapter of Developmental History devoted to Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche.31 Acknowledging his predecessors’ commitments to artistic synthesis, Meier-Graefe nevertheless revised what he characterized as their limited and mistaken views of the visual arts. Sorely neglected by Nietzsche and Wagner, the visual arts play a dominant role in a ‘total work of art’ (Gesamtkunstwerk) in Meier-Graefe’s account. Before the arts could be synthesized, he cautioned, they needed to be purified into just their material components. In the case of



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

painting, this entailed eliminating painting’s anecdotal and descriptive elements in favour of a concentration on line, colour and surface. This purified visual vocabulary was not an end, but a means of coordinating fine and applied arts and architecture and constructing unified spatial environments. Once purified, Meier-Graefe noted, the visual arts could be coordinated with music, poetry and stage performance. Following Meier-Graefe, Osthaus and van de Velde constructed the Folkwang Museum as a Gesamtkunstwerk in ways that anticipated aspects of Der Blaue Reiter almanac. For instance, in 1909, Osthaus organized a performance of Diogenes, a play by Otto Erich Harleben that was framed by musical performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s and Franz Liszt’s compositions. In 1911, he organized a ‘Theatre Exhibition’ at the Folkwang that featured Greek theatre masks and terracotta actor figures, Japanese masks, Javanese marionettes, and modern European designs for stage sets and costumes. The exhibit was accompanied by a ‘Dance Evening’ featuring a performance by Alexander Sacharoff, a Russian dancer and friend of Der Blaue Reiter, who conceived of dance in relationship to both painting and music.32 Sacharoff returned to Hagen in 1912, where he performed dances to music by several composers, among them Thomas von Hartmann, Kandinsky’s close associate. That same year, von Hartmann contributed an essay, ‘Über die Anarchie in der Musik’, to Der Blaue Reiter almanac and also composed music for Kandinsky’s play, The Yellow Sound, which appeared in the almanac alongside Kandinsky’s essay on stage composition.

Macke and Kandinsky: two approaches to the Gesamtkunstwerk Der Blaue Reiter almanac’s texts and images represent a strong response to the Folkwang Museum’s alluring and synaesthetic installations of modern and ‘primitive’ art. By reproducing folk art alongside modern paintings, and Aztec carvings alongside masks from New Caledonia, the almanac’s editors affirmed the existence of a unified world culture, a central tenet of the Folkwang. However, members of Der Blaue Reiter disagreed over how unity might be achieved. Far from obtaining the desired synthesis, each artist approached the almanac through the lens of his own practice and intellectual commitments. In selecting images, Kandinsky adopted heterogeneity as his guiding principle; his arrangements of votive pictures, Egyptian shadow puppets, children’s drawings, and modern paintings foreground the spiritual, rather than formal, commonalities between objects. For his part, Marc emphasized relationships between modern painting and folk art in specific national contexts, which led him to include Bavarian Hinterglasmalerei, Russian lubki, French images d’Épinal, and German fairy tale illustrations alongside examples of modern painting from Germany, Russia, and France, respectively.33 Whereas Kandinsky was militantly internationalist, Marc saw national identity as an essential component of world culture. However, differences between Kandinsky and Marc pale in comparison to those separating Kandinsky and Marc from Macke, whose contributions to the almanac tend to be marginalized, if not ignored, in part because Kandinsky refused to acknowledge him

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Katherine Kuenzli as co-editor on the title page of the almanac.34 Macke worked on the publication alongside Marc and Kandinsky over the course of 1911, composing a text, selecting images, and facilitating contacts with dealers and collectors in the Rhine Valley. Recovering Macke’s perspective lends new insights into the almanac and its heterogeneous and unresolved aesthetic. Among other points of disagreement, Macke diverged from Marc and Kandinsky on the nature and function of image comparisons. He shared with his co-­editors an interest in Parisian painting, Old German woodcuts, and ethnographic objects, as well as a belief that some larger, universal spirit united all of these objects. However, Macke insisted that spiritual unity manifested itself through stylistic consonance, an idea that he adopted from the Folkwang, whereas Kandinsky and Marc asserted the importance of formal dissonance as a means of bringing viewers to uncover an underlying spiritual likeness. These contradictory understandings of form and totality can be traced to divergent theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Macke’s essay in Der Blaue Reiter almanac, ‘The Masks’, has often been misunderstood as merely repeating the language of Marc and Kandinsky, and yet he brought his own aesthetic commitments to the Blaue Reiter circle, among them a deep engagement with Meier-Graefe’s writings, avant-garde theatre décor, and displays at the Folkwang.35 Marc acknowledged these commitments in a letter dated 1911 to Macke, in which he related the projected almanac to Macke’s interests in comparative art history (a sure reference to Meier-Graefe’s emphasis on comparative viewing in his Developmental History of Modern Art) and stage design.36 Macke’s essay for the almanac lived up to Marc’s expectations. It opens with a striking series of juxtapositions that stem from Macke’s dual interests in Parisian painting and avant-garde theatre. Employing a rich, synaesthetic language, Macke invokes plays by Maeterlinck and Ibsen, medieval mystery plays, van Gogh’s and Cézanne’s painting, cellos, bells, and the whistle of a steam locomotive. He finds these sights and sounds to be articulations of a common spirit and illustrates his essay with images of works from Brazil, the Easter Islands, Cameroon, Mexico, New Caledonia, Alaska and the Middle East. Macke associates art viewing with participation in modern and ‘primitive rituals’, including military marches, the cinematograph, and Loië Fuller’s dances ‘that absolutely enthrall everyone in exactly the same way as the fire dance enthralls the African, or the mysterious drumming of the fakirs enthralls the Indian.’37 In every case, aesthetic experience dissolves geographic, social and historical difference and provokes feelings of oneness with the environment, according to Macke’s account. Macke’s interest in ritualistic performance led him to take part in avant-garde theatre experiments. During his studies at the Düsseldorf School of Applied Arts (which was directed by Behrens), he became a committed costume and set designer for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Founded in 1905 by actress Louise Dumont and theatre director Gustav Lindemann, the Schauspielhaus featured the most advanced ideas in dramaturgy, architecture and stage design.38 Dumont had initially envisioned founding a festival theatre in Weimar and had asked van de Velde to produce preliminary designs for a theatre building in 1904. When the Weimar court rejected these plans, Dumont



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

and Lindemann took their plans to Düsseldorf, a city less tied to the classical past, which welcomed an experimental repertoire. Influenced by van de Velde and English actor and theatre director Edward Gordon Craig, Dumont and Lindemann replaced naturalistic set designs with more expressive, abstract arrangements of line and colour. Lindemann wrote of the necessity of ‘spiritualizing’ the theatre in ways that anticipated the work and rhetoric of Der Blaue Reiter. In 1906, Macke embraced these new, ‘spiritualized’ practices. ‘I will create moods through curtains and colours alone, without imitating nature’, he wrote to his future wife, Elisabeth Gerhardt.39 His work reflects the influence of Craig, who partnered with Dumont first in Weimar and subsequently in Düsseldorf. Like Craig, Macke created flickering patterns of light and shadow by projecting coloured lights onto simplified stage décor.40 Macke’s approach to set design can be seen above all in his studies for the Schauspielhaus’s production of Little Red Riding Hood in 1906. A forest scene that he created consists of simplified and flattened trees set against a semi-circular backdrop comprised of moving, coloured curtains. Repeated vertical lines and alternating green, yellow, grey and red colours almost obscure Little Red Riding Hood’s and the wolf’s diminutive, shadowy figures.41 Such stage designs led Macke to equate a modern formal vocabulary with formal flattening and nearly abstract arrangements of line and colour, which he developed in his paintings, including Tegernsee Landscape (1910). His interest in artistic synthesis and in colour and line as independent, expressive languages brought him to discover the writings of Meier-Graefe and to undertake trips to Paris, where he studied the paintings of the critic’s preferred artists, Manet, Seurat and Denis.42 Avant-garde theatre, Parisian painting and Meier-Graefe’s writings came together at the Folkwang Museum, which Macke visited as early as 1910 upon moving from the Tegernsee back to his native Bonn. During his time in and around Munich, Macke had befriended Marc, who also hosted Macke’s cousin, painter Helmut Macke, during his extended visit. Helmut and August visited the Folkwang together on a regular basis beginning in 1910 and communicated their enthusiasm for the collection to Marc on several occasions. For instance, Macke recounted to Marc his enthusiasm for the Folkwang’s displays in 1910: ‘I was in Hagen, saw two Matisses that delighted me. A large collection of Japanese masks. Divine!’43 In so many words, Macke associates Matisse’s paintings with Japanese Noh theatre masks in ways that verbally recreate the Folkwang’s visual juxtapositions. Upon this preliminary encounter, Macke expresses amazement and enthusiasm for the Folkwang’s linkage of modern to ‘primitive’ art without defining their relationship. He would return to the topic one year later in his essay for Der Blaue Reiter almanac. ‘Masks’ drew on Macke’s experiences in Düsseldorf and Hagen. Not only does the essay’s title evoke the Noh theatre masks which Macke admired at Folkwang; it shares its title with theatre periodicals published first by the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and subsequently by Craig.44 Macke also incorporated ideas from the Folkwang into his essay, in which he equated exterior form with spiritual essence. ‘Man expresses his life

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Katherine Kuenzli in forms’, he observes. ‘Each form of art is an expression of his inner life. The exterior of a form of art is its interior.’45 He relates this idea of ‘correspondences’ directly to the almanac’s image comparisons: Does van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet not originate from a spiritual life similar to the amazed grimace of a Japanese juggler cut in a wood block? The mask of the Demon of Disease from Ceylon is the gesture of horror of a primitive race by which their priests conjure sickness. The grotesque embellishments found on a mask have their analogies in Gothic monuments and in the almost unknown buildings and inscriptions in the primeval forests of Mexico.’46 As at the Folkwang, Macke finds psychic affinities between western and non-western artworks evidenced in their concordant formal relationships. By contrast, Marc and Kandinsky adopted dissonance rather than harmony as the principle that structures image comparisons in Der Blaue Reiter almanac. Although Marc and Kandinsky were familiar with visual theatre, Parisian painting, and the Folkwang, they proposed a competing conception of form indebted to the music and writings of Arnold Schoenberg, whose contributions to Der Blaue Reiter movement Macke more or less rejected.47 Macke disliked Schoenberg for the very reasons that Kandinsky and Marc identified with him. In his essay published in the almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg dismisses outer, formal resemblances between music and text as merely superficial, noting how ‘the external congruence of music and text, which reveals itself in declamation, tempo, loudness, has … little to do with the internal congruence.’48 Thus, Schoenberg concludes that divergences in form might be necessitated by higher, spiritual concerns. Similarly, Kandinsky and Marc in their respective essays in the almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’, and ‘Two Images’, dissociate external appearances from inner content. They employ image juxtapositions to demonstrate not formal similarities, but differences. Sharply contrasting forms, Kandinsky and Marc reasoned, would bring viewers to perceive works’ more enduring spiritual content. The side-by-side placement of a votive panel and a Delaunay painting, of a Cézanne painting and a Russian popular print, or of an African mask and Picasso painting, Kandinsky claims, provokes a series of vibrations in the viewer’s soul that awaken the beholder’s inner impulse or creative spirit.49 Marc expresses similar ideas with the memorable phrase, ‘genuine art can always be compared with genuine art, however different the expression may be.’50 Breaking with Macke and the Folkwang’s emphasis on form, Kandinsky and Marc maintain that the goal of art is not the creation of formal harmonies, but the awakening of an inner or creative spirit by means of contrast and defamiliarization. Schoenberg’s insistence on formal dissonance between text and music provided Marc, and above all Kandinsky, with a basis for image comparisons and a stage composition in Der Blaue Reiter almanac that present startling and illogical juxtapositions. Marc deeply appreciated Schoenberg’s work at the same time that he admitted little



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

competence in musical matters. Kandinsky’s engagement with Schoenberg was more thorough and permeated every aspect of his work, including painting, playwriting and stage design.51 In particular, Kandinsky’s insistence on the inner affinities between modern and non-western art, despite their outer dissimilarities, must be understood as a response to Schoenberg’s embrace of juxtaposition and dissonance. In his essay ‘On Stage Composition’, Kandinsky claims that the coordination of the arts results in the same ‘vibrations of the human soul’ that he associates with contrasting images.52 Such oppositions are evident in the illustrations accompanying Kandinsky’s text, including the pairing of an Egyptian shadow puppet of a lion and trainer (fourteenth to sixteenth century) with Kandinsky’s abstract Composition V (1911). Contradiction also constitutes a central feature of his play, The Yellow Sound, in which ‘vague chords’ replace musical harmonies, and dialogue consists of oxymoronic word pairings. Scenery colours change abruptly, and images accompanying the text present another layer of oppositions.53 Kandinsky and Marc’s approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk resulted in a new conception of modern art’s relationship to the ‘primitive’ based on inner affinity, not exterior resemblance. Yet it also led to a more distanced relationship to the Folkwang Museum. After his exhibit there in 1909, Kandinsky maintained a polite, but detached relationship with Osthaus. Marc exhibited at the Folkwang in 1911, but he often called upon Macke as an intermediary between Der Blaue Reiter and Osthaus. In 1912, Kandinsky donated a watercolour to the museum upon its tenth anniversary, which coincided with its hosting of Der Blaue Reiter’s exhibit. It was a kind, but modest gift. Osthaus’s view of Der Blaue Reiter group was equally sympathetic, but limited. He did not purchase any of the works that Kandinsky exhibited at his museum in 1909. He did, however, buy Marc’s Three Horses for the Folkwang following the artist’s 1911 exhibit. In 1913, Osthaus acquired Kandinsky’s large painting Improvisation for his museum, but made no further purchases. In 1913, he contributed to Herwarth Walden’s Protest für Kandinsky (1913), but his defense of the artist was hardly effusive: ‘The fact that the Folkwang Museum contains works by Kandinsky should tell you enough about my opinion of the artist.’54 By contrast, Macke enjoyed a more sustained relationship with Osthaus and his projects. Following his departure from Der Blaue Reiter group in 1912, Macke worked alongside Osthaus in organizing the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne. He also facilitated contacts between Osthaus and art dealers and made regular visits to the Folkwang until his untimely death in World War I. In a 1920 letter to Osthaus, Helmuth Macke referred to his and August’s memorable visits to the Folkwang, which he described as ‘our Mecca.’55

The almanac as an imperfect synthesis Although the process of gathering images was very much a collective effort, Marc took responsibility for the final decisions regarding image layout. Rather than choosing one strategy over the other, Marc included both approaches to image comparisons and, by extension, to the Gesamtkunstwerk. He supported Kandinsky’s notion of formal difference by pairing formally dissimilar works, including a Russian folk sculpture of St.

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Katherine Kuenzli George (nineteenth century) with David Burljuk’s portrait study (1911). The sculpture’s figural language contrasts with Burljuk’s geometric, faceted planes. However, other pairings demonstrate formal and spiritual affinities between modern, pre-modern, and non-western artworks. For example, both Gauguin’s carving Pape Moë (1893–1895) and an Etruscan bronze relief Gorgo, Goddess of the Animals (6 BCE) depict stylized figures either frontally or in profile against a flat plane. In both works, figures fill the surfaces of the support and display an ornamental character, and their side-by-side layout in Der Blaue Reiter almanac heightens this sense of formal ‘affinity.’ Differences in approach among Blaue Reiter artists did not go unnoticed. Already upon the group’s exhibition at the Folkwang in July 1912, Osthaus’s assistant, Kurt Freyer, underlined the heterogeneous approaches taken by group members. He noted that they partook in different ways in the common striving towards abstraction. Kandinsky, he observed, approached it ‘through a sheer delight in colours and lines’, whereas Macke, Marc and others tended towards abstraction through ‘the dissolution of space and through bright, artificial colours.’ He concluded: ‘In sum, the interest of these works lies more in experimentation than in pure artistic pleasure.’56 Freyer astutely recognized the group’s heterogeneity, even if certain of his comments might seem surprising, above all his association of Marc’s art with Macke’s as opposed to Kandinsky’s. His comments underline the important relationships that bound Marc to Macke, even if the artists disagreed on crucial points. Differences between Marc and Kandinsky were also significant, and over the course of 1913 the artists moved in dissimilar directions. Marc continued to identify wholeheartedly with Der Blaue Reiter movement and set about publishing a second edition of the almanac, whereas Kandinsky, despite his loyalty to Marc, saw the almanac as representing a moment in time that was superseded by his ongoing experiments. Marc’s appeasement of both Macke and Kandinsky in the image layout of the almanac had both personal and aesthetic motivations. He valued Macke’s art and Meier-Graefe’s writings, which he acknowledged in his essay ‘Spiritual Treasures.’57 He also respected Kandinsky’s intelligence, revered his work, and shared his enthusiasm for Schoenberg. Marc was less doctrinaire than Kandinsky, more willing to tolerate difference, not only between Macke and Kandinsky, but also between Kandinsky and Die Brücke artists. Marc based his aesthetic judgments on aesthetic quality and what he found to be a work’s ethical content rather than on specific intellectual or formal criteria. Unlike Kandinsky, his understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk was radically inclusive, summing up the most advanced tendencies in German and international art and underlining their contribution to a new, ‘spiritual’ epoch. Marc’s wide-ranging strategy suggests the principles that he, Kandinsky, and Macke had in common. Despite their different inflections of form, Blaue Reiter artists shared a common association of non-western, popular and pre-modern art with the Gesamtkunstwerk and display practices at the Folkwang. Together, the almanac’s editors identified non-western and folk art with a series of inclusive rituals that demanded active viewer engagement. Image comparisons of works from disparate cultures challenge viewers to identify a basis of comparison. Comparative viewing involves viewers in



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

the production of meaning, which varies according to beholders’ temperament and imagination. Whatever their differences, Osthaus and Blaue Reiter artists’ interest in ‘primitive’ art stemmed from a common commitment to identify universal creative impulses. Although individual approaches to formal comparisons varied, both Osthaus and Der Blaue Reiter disrupted linear temporality and narrative through strategies of repetition and juxtaposition in an attempt to uncover spiritual likeness. The Folkwang Museum and Der Blaue Reiter’s belief in totality and engagement with the Gesamtkunstwerk sets them apart from a later and competing discourse on the primitive and modern art that is best exemplified by Carl Einstein’s writings. Along with members of Der Blaue Reiter, Einstein learned from the Folkwang, but he entirely rejected ideas of the Gesamtkunstwerk upon which its collection and displays were founded. Einstein opposed all notions of interactive viewing, treating the visual arts in isolation and denying subjective and empathetic relationships between artwork and viewer.58 His understanding of form as self-sufficient informed Negro Sculpture’s pages of unlabeled illustrations, in which sculptures, including two pieces of African sculpture from the Folkwang, appear as isolated artworks.59 Far from following Einstein’s example, the Folkwang Museum continued, and even intensified, its display strategies based on principles of juxtaposition and the Gesamtkunstwerk into the 1920s and beyond. Following Osthaus’s death in 1921, his assistant Karl With organized an exhibit entitled ‘Exotics and Expressionists’, in which paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner appeared alongside a Bayaka Mask from central Africa and an Uli figure from New Guinea (figure 3.4). This display continued the logic not only of the Folkwang’s previous practices, but also of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, in which Gauguin’s wood carving appears opposite a bronze Etruscan sculptural relief.60 World War I renewed With’s conviction that a world spirit united all world cultures and that this spirit could be uncovered by formal juxtapositions of art objects of the highest quality from around the world. Whereas up until 1918, Osthaus had aligned the concept of world culture with the expansion of the German spirit, With’s experience of Germany’s defeat in World War I led him to unequivocally associate the Folkwang’s displays with principles of internationalism, including efforts underway to found a League of Nations. In an article of 1919, With observed that modern man no longer feels himself at the pinnacle of human civilization, but instead finds his place in a larger order that is determined by essential structures of the human mind.61 In the almanac, Kandinsky put forward a similar understanding of form as an elemental human expression that, beyond belonging to a personality, people, nation, and age embodies an essential ‘inner necessity’ common to all. However, the form of this common spirit remained undecided. In 1919, With described the museum’s collection and installations as dynamically evolving; displays at the Folkwang, according to With, functioned dialectically, alternating between principles of intimacy and transition, distinctiveness and commonality, evolution and juxtaposition. Whether consciously or not, in 1919 With seems to invoke some of Kandinsky’s oppositional binaries which suggests the possibility that the Folkwang learned from Der Blaue Reiter just as Der Blaue Reiter had responded

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Katherine Kuenzli

3.4  A display at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, 1921, depicting Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings Still Life with Mask (1911), Rhaetian Railway, Davos (1917), and Portrait of Oskar Schlemmer (1914) alongside a Bayaka Mask from central Africa and an Uli figure from New Guinea.

to displays at the Folkwang. Both entities approached totality haltingly, courting open-­ endedness and multiplicity as paths to the universal. The points of overlap, as well as tension, between Der Blaue Reiter and the Folkwang Museum reveal a new dimension to the ‘primitivizing’ impulses underlying German Expressionism. Primarily associated with matters of art’s subject matter, style and materials, the ‘primitive’, as it was understood by German artists in the early twentieth century, also encompassed a desire to forge synaesthetic, spatial environments in which the boundaries between the arts, as well as between self and other, would be overcome. The Gesamtkunstwerk, in all its multiple and conflicting definitions, served as a medium for these totalizing ambitions.

Notes  1 Kandinsky to Marc, 19 June 1911, in W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983), p. 40. Cited in Brigitte Salmen (ed.), Der Almanach der ‘Blaue Reiter’. Bilder und Bildwerke in Originalen (Murnau: Schloßmuseum Murnau, 1998), p. 7. [‘Da bringen wir einen Ägypter neben einem kleinen Zeh [Nikolaus and Oskar Zeh were the children of a friend of Kandinsky], einen Chinesen neben Rousseau, ein Volksblatt neben



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

Picasso und dergleich noch viel mehr!’] Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.  2 For a comprehensive, documentary history of the Folkwang Museum, see Herta HesseFrielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus. Leben und Werk (Recklinghausen: Aurel Bongers, 1971), pp. 119–258. For accounts of the museum’s contributions to the development of European modernism, see James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Katherine Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum: The Folkwang as Gesamtkunstwerk’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 72:4 (December 2013), pp. 503–29.   3 The Folkwang Museum is widely recognized for its outstanding collection of modern European art, but its significant collection of non-European and pre-modern art, which was relegated to storage in the 1960s, has begun to receive renewed attention. See Karla Bilang, Bild und Gegenbild: Das Ursprüngliche in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1990); Rainer Stamm, ‘Exoten und Expressionsten – Das Folkwang Museum als “Mikrokosmos des Geistes der Erde” ’, Westfalen. Hefte für Geschichte, Kunst, und Volkskunde, 71 (1993), pp. 251–8. More recently, the Folkwang Museum in Essen launched an effort to study non-European and pre-modern works in its collection, and the results so far have been published in two volumes: Hartwig Fischer and Uwe Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’. Museum Folkwang bis 1933 (Essen: Edition Folkwang, 2010) and its accompanying volume of essays, Hartwig Fischer and Uwe Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’. Museum Folkwang bis 1933. Essays zur Geschichte der Folkwang (Essen: Edition Folkwang, 2010).   4 On the concept of ‘primitivism’ in modern art, see Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Painting (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938); Colin Rhodes, Primitivism and Modern Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994); Frances Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). See also the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial exhibit organized by William Rubin (ed.), Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). This exhibition generated noteworthy critical reviews, including Yve-Alain Bois, ‘La Pensée sauvage’, Art in America (April 1985), pp. 178–88, and James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 189–214. For an excellent, recent assessment, see Joshua Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks: Rethinking Modern “Primitivist” uses of African and Oceanic Art, 1905–08’, The Art Bulletin, 99:2 (2017), pp. 136–65.  5 Sheehan, Museums in the German Art World.   6 On these colour relationships, see Frau K. E. Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’, Kölnische Zeitung, 10 August 1913.   7 Van de Velde’s museum building in Hagen has been restored today and currently houses the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum. However, the original building suffered heavy damage in World War II, and all of the original stained glass and wall treatments have been lost. A key source for reconstructing the Hagen Folkwang Museum’s interiors and early displays are the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings pertaining to the Folkwang that Gertrud Osthaus compiled, and which are held at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Archives, located in the Osthaus Museum in Hagen (SM Folkwang, Z100). I thank Dr Birgit Schulte for making these documents available to me. These clippings, in which art critics describe in great detail the museum’s colour combinations and displays, allowed me to reconstruct the Folkwang’s appearance in the first decade of the twentieth century here and in my article, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’.   8 On the relationship between the Folkwang and the Blue Rider, see Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus; Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, Die Neue Künstlervereinigung München, Der

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Katherine Kuenzli Blaue Reiter, und das Folkwang Museum Hagen (Hagen: Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum, 1980); Andrea Sinzel, ‘Hagen’, in Christine Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 2000), pp. 69–70.   9 On Wagnerianism in the visual arts, see Sophie Duplaix and Marcella Lista (eds), Sons et lumières: Une histoire du son dans l’art du XXe siècle (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2004); Marcella Lista, L’Oeuvre d’art totale à la naissance des avant-gardes, 1908–1914 (Paris: Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2006); Anne Leonard, ‘Picturing Listening in the Late Nineteenth Century’, The Art Bulletin, 89:2 (June 2007), pp. 266–86; Juliet Koss, Modernism After Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Intimate Modernism: The Nabis, Symbolist Theatre, and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas (eds), Art, History, and the Senses (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 67–82; David Michael Imhoof, Margaret Menninger and Anthony Steinhoff (eds), The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 10 For a recent example of how Der Blue Rider almanac has been aligned with notions of totality in general without attention to the specific and competing discourses on totality in the visual arts, see Jessica Horsley, Der Almanach des Blauen Reiters als Gesamtkunstwerk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006). Most discussions of the ‘total work of art’ in relationship to Der Blaue Reiter understandably focus on the fascinating intellectual exchange between Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. For a recent example, see Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman (eds), Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider (New York: The Jewish Museum, 2003). 11 For studies of the origins of particular works reproduced in the Blue Rider Almanach, see Salmen (ed.), Der Almanach ‘Der Blaue Reiter’; Katharina Erling, ‘Der Almanach der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (2000), pp. 188–239. For studies of image comparisons, see Felix Thürlemann, ‘“Famose Gegenklänge”. Der Diskurs der Abbildungen im Almanach “Der Blaue Reiter” ’, in Hans Christoph von Tavel (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter (Bern: Kunstmuseum Bern, 1986), pp. 210–22; Magdalena Bushart, ‘“Echtes bleibt neben Echtem bestehen”. Zum Bildkonzept des Blauen Reiters’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, pp. 240–7; Ursula Heiderich, ‘“Der Leib ist die Seele”. August Mackes Beitrag zum Almanach der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, pp. 248–54. These studies privilege Marc and Kandinsky’s or Macke’s role in constructing image comparisons, but do not explore significant differences in the three artists’ approaches. 12 Studies of modernist art and the ‘primitive’ around 1900 that have informed my thinking include Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Kahnweiler’s Lesson’, in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 65–97; Patricia Leighton, ‘The White Peril and L’Art nègre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism’, The Art Bulletin, 72:4 (1990), pp. 609–30; Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1991); Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin’s Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997); Alastair Wright, ‘Seeing Difference: Looking Otherwise at Matisse’s Morocco’, in Matisse and the Subject of Modernism (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 193–219; Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Cohen, ‘Fauve Masks’. Despite their varied approaches, which range from the semiotic to the socio-historical, all the above-mentioned authors focus on the visual arts independent of developments in music, poetry, dance and theatre performance. 13 Georg Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ [1934], reprinted in his Essays on Realism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), pp. 76–113. 14 On the modernist ‘total work of art’, see David Roberts, The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 15 James Sheehan, ‘Museums and Modernism, 1880–1914’, in Museums in the German Art World, pp. 139–84.



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16 On the psychological dimensions of modernist museum displays, see Charlotte Klonk, ‘Interiority and Intimacy’, in Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 49–86. 17 ‘Post-Impressionism’ here is a period term used by Roger Fry in organizing influential exhibits of modern Parisian painting in London beginning in 1910. Hugo von Tschudi and likeminded German curators would have known Fry’s exhibits and writings, and they collected and exhibited the same artists ranging from Manet to Matisse whom Fry extolled. On Roger Fry and his relationship to German art criticism and collecting, see Jaqueline Falkenheim, Roger Fry and the Beginnings of Formalist Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980). 18 Franz Marc, ‘Geistige Güter’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter ([Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1912]; Munich: Prestel, 2008), pp. 1–4. 19 On von Tschudi, see Barbara Paul, Hugo von Tschudi und die moderne französische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1993); Johann Georg Prinz von Hohenzollern and PeterKlaus Schuster (eds), Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne (Munich: Prestel, 1996). On Meier-Graefe, see Kenworth Moffett, Meier-Graefe as Art Critic (Munich: Prestel, 1973). 20 On display practices in ethnographic museums, see H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 21 For instance, Marc reinforced the logic of colonization in a letter to Macke, in which he wrote, ‘The goal “to desire the inner” is a natural instinct that comes forth without any theoretical consideration and stems purely from a healthy instinct for colour that is common to all primitive peoples. That we want to make “paintings” and not just colourful columns, capitals, straw hats, and ceramic vessels, – is our advantage, our “Europeanness.” ’ [‘Das Ziel, “auf’s innigste zu wünschen”, ist nun natürlich, so etwas ohne theoretische Überlegung herauszubringen, rein aus einem gesunden Farbeninstinkt, wie es die primitive Völker alle hatten. Dass wir daraus “Bilder” machen wollen und nicht nur bunte Säulen und Kapitäle und Strohhüte und Tongefässe, – ist unser Vorzug, unser “Europäertum” ’.] Marc to Macke, 14 January 1911. Cited in Wolfgang Macke (ed.) August Macke und Franz Marc: Briefwechsel (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964), p. 41. 22 Osthaus and his collaborators went to great, and sometimes illogical, lengths to show how work by French painters could be compatible with the cultivation of interiority that they saw as specifically Germanic. See, for instance, Emil Rudolf Weiß’s review of an exhibition of Gauguin’s paintings at the Folkwang Museum in 1903, in which he claimed Gauguin’s mysticism as manifesting the ‘northern’ spirit: ‘Paul Gauguin. Elementarische Bermerkungen anläßlich der Ausstellung von sieben Gemälden Gauguins im Folkwang’, Hagener Zeitung und Westfälisches Tageblatt, 19 December 1903. The article is preserved in the binders of press clippings at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum’s archives, KEOM SM, Z100, 3 1901/2. 23 On Osthaus’s acquisitions of pre-modern and non-western art, see Rainer Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne’, in Fischer and Schneede (eds), ‘Das schönste Museum der Welt’, pp. 27–46. 24 Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’. [‘ein anderes Mal erreicht ein – sozusagen harmonischer – Gegensatz eine merkwürdige Steigerung des künstlerischen Ausdrucks’; ‘In den anstoßenden Räumen dagegen hat der Wille zu einer Vereinigung des Psychisch-Verwandten Zeiten und Länder und Historie übersprungen.’] 25 Osthaus, ‘Das Museum Folkwang in Hagen’. [‘Und seltsam, das Leben dieser Werke vereinigt sich hemmungslos; gleitend geht der Blick des Beschauers von einem zum andern; an dem einen für das andere vielleicht nur tiefer erregt’; ‘die dämonischen Werke afrikanischer Kultur’; ‘seltsamer psychischer Verwandtschaft’; ‘aus jenen fernen düstern Gebieten’.] 26 Rainer Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne.’

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Katherine Kuenzli 27 On Meier-Graefe and his role in the construction of a modernist ‘total work of art’, see Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’. 28 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. Vergleichende Betrachtung der bildenen Künste, als Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik, 3 vols (Stuttgart: J. Hofmann, 1904). Though he is known as the first ‘historian’ of modern art, this reputation is largely based on subsequent editions of his Entwicklungsgeschichte and not on the first, more influential edition that reads as a work, not of art history, but of art criticism. On the book’s complicated publication history and evolving arguments, see Catherine Krahmer, ‘Meier-Graefes Weg zur Kunst’, in Gerhard Neumann, Ursula Renner, Günter Schnitzler and Gotthard Wunberg (eds), Hofmannsthal. Jahrbuch zur europäischen Moderne, vol. 4 (Freiburg: Rombach, 1996), pp. 168–226; Grischka Petri, ‘The English Edition of Julius Meier-Graefe’s Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst’, Visual Culture in Britain, 6:2 (2005), pp. 171–88; Jenny Anger, ‘Courbet, the Decorative, and the Canon: Rewriting and Rereading Meier-Graefe’s Modern Art’, in Anna Brzyski (ed.), Partisan Canons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 157–77. 29 On ideological tensions between van de Velde and Osthaus, see Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Architecture, Individualism, and Nation: Henry van de Velde’s 1914 Werkbund Theatre Building’, The Art Bulletin, 94:2 (June 2012), pp. 251–73; Kuenzli, ‘The Birth of the Modernist Art Museum’. On Osthaus’s intellectual biography and right-wing nationalism, see Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus; Rainer Stamm (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus. Reden und Schriften (Cologne: Walther König, 2002). 30 Meier-Graefe, Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, I: 232–3. [‘die Freude, die das Bild ausstrahlt, ruft widerspruchsvollerweise antike Dinge in die Erinnerung: glänzende Steinbilder, die zur Zeit der Alexanderschlacht in Neapel die Paläste schmückten.’] 31 Julius Meier-Graefe, ‘Nietzsche und Wagner’, in Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, II: 739–51. 32 On Osthaus and theatre, including his Theatre Exhibit, see Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 59–65. On Sacharoff’s relationships with the Folkwang Museum and Der Blaue Reiter, see Frank-Manuel Peter and Rainer Stamm (eds), Die Sacharoffs. Zwei Tänzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2002). For Osthaus’s writings on dance and theatre performance, see Stamm, Karl Ernst Osthaus. Reden und Schriften, pp. 145–54. 33 On differences between Marc and Kandinsky, see Magdalena Bushart, ‘“Echtes bleibt neben Echtem bestehen ….” Zum Bildkonzept des Blauen Reiters’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter. 34 W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983), pp. 136–7. On tensions between Macke and Kandinsky, see Rosel Gollek, ‘Indianer, Sturm, und Masken: August Mackes Beitrag zum Blauen Reiter’, in Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.), August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen (Munich: Bruckmann, 1986), pp. 39–48. 35 Felix Thürlemann underestimates the differences between Macke’s and Kandinsky’s approaches to image juxtapositions in his ‘“Famose Gegenklänge” ’. Ursula Heiderich emphasizes the importance of Oscar Wilde’s art criticism on Macke’s artistic practice in her ‘“Der Leib ist die Seele”. August Mackes Beitrag zum Almanach Der Blaue Reiter’, in Hopfengart (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter, while I underline the importance of Meier-Graefe and a French painterly tradition. 36 Marc to Macke, 8 September 1911; cited in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, p. 73. 37 August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 24. Translated in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 87. [‘die jeden unbedingt ebenso erfassen, wie der Feuertanz den Neger oder das geheimnisvolle Trommeln der Fakire den Inder.’] 38 On the history of the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, see Winrich Meiszies, ‘Vorbühne des



‘Primitive’ and modern in Der Blaue Reiter

Westens – Das Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf unter Louise Dumont und Gustav Lindemann zwischen 1905 und 1914’, in Wolfgang Schepers, Stephan von Wiese and Jutta Hülsewieg-Johnen (eds), Der Westdeutsche Impuls 1900–1914: Kunst und Umweltgestaltung im Industriegebiet. Düsseldorf, eine Grosstadt auf dem Weg in die Moderne (Düsseldorf: Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, 1984), pp. 229–40. On Macke’s designs for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, see Irene KleinschmidtAltpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, in Güse, August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, pp. 9–22. 39 Letter from August Macke to Elisabeth Gerhardt, May 1906; cited in Kleinschmidt-Altpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, p. 14. [‘Ich würde Stimmungen durch Vorhänge und Farben allein machen, ohne Nachahmung der Natur.’] 40 On Craig, see Denis Bablet, The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, trans. Daphne Woodward (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981); Uta Grund, Zwischen den Künsten: Edward Gordon Craig und das Bildtheater um 1900 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002). 41 See Kleinschmidt-Altpeter, ‘August Macke – Aspekte des Frühwerks’, pp. 9–22. 42 On Macke’s engagement with French painting, see Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ‘August Macke, der Impressionismus und die Fauves. Ein Beitrag zu Mackes Rezeption französischer Malerei’, in Güse, August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, pp. 23–38. 43 August Macke to Franz Marc, 26 December, 1910; cited in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, p. 32. [‘Ich war in Hagen, sah zwei Matisse, die mich entzückten. Eine grosse Sammlung japanischer Masken. Göttlich!’] 44 Beginning in 1905, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus published a bi-monthly theatre periodical entitled Die Masken. For his part, Edward Gordon Craig published a quarterly theatre periodical entitled The Mask beginning in 1908. 45 August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, p. 22. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 85. [‘Der Mensch äussert sein Leben in Formen. Jede Kunstform ist Aeusserung seines inneren Lebens. Das Aeussere der Kunstform ist ihr Inneres.’] 46 August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, p. 24. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 88–9. [‘Stammt das Porträt des Dr. Gachet von van Gogh nicht aus einem ähnlichen geistigen Leben, wie die im Holzdruck geformte, erstaunte Fratze des japanischen Gauklers. Die Maske des Krankheitsdämons aus Ceylon ist die Schreckensgeste eines Naturvolkes, mit der seine Priester Krankes beschwören. Für die grotesken Zierate der Maske finden wir Analogien in den Baudenkmälern der Gotik, in den fast unbekannten Bauten und Inschriften im Urwalde von Mexiko.’] 47 See Macke’s letters to Marc at the end of January 2012, reprinted in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, pp. 97, 99. On Kandinsky’s departures from Meier-Graefe’s aesthetic, see Katherine Kuenzli, ‘Expanding the Boundaries of Modern Art: The Blaue Reiter, Parisian Modernism, and Henri Rousseau’, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (New York: DelMonico Books and Prestel, 2014), pp. 250–61. 48 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Das Verhältnis zum Text’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 33. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 102. [‘die äusserliche Übereinstimmung zwischen Musik und Text, wie sie sich in Deklamation, Tempo und Tonstärke zeigt, nur wenig zu tun hat mit der innern (Übereinstimmung).’] 49 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Über die Formfrage’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 99. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 186. 50 Franz Marc, ‘Zwei Bilder’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), p. 8. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 65. [‘Echtes bleibt stets neben Echtem bestehen, so verschieden auch sein Ausdruck sein mag.’] 51 For Franz Marc’s limited understanding of Schoenberg’s music, see his letter to August Macke in August Macke, Franz Marc Briefwechsel, pp. 40–1. On Kandinsky’s relationship with Schoenberg,

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Katherine Kuenzli see Esther da Costa Meyer and Fred Wasserman (eds), Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider; Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 88–137. On Kandinsky’s approach to stage composition, see Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 92–106; Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 52–64. 52 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Über Bühnenkomposition’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), pp. 104. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 190. 53 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Der Gelbe Klang’, in Der Blaue Reiter ([1912]; 2008), pp. 115–31. Translated in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 208–25. 54 Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 76. [‘Die Tatsache, daß sich Arbeiten von Kandinsky im Folkwang-Museum befinden wird ihnen zur Genüge sagen, was ich von dem Künstler halte.’] 55 Cited in Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 222. [‘Es war unser Mekka.’] On Macke’s role as an intermediary between Osthaus and dealers of African art, see Stamm, ‘Weltkunst und Moderne’, p. 41; Hesse-Frielinghaus, ed., Karl Ernst Osthaus, 245–59. 56 Kurt Freyer, ‘Ausstellungen. Hagen’, Cicerone. Halbmonatsschrift für Künstler, Kunstfreunde, und Sammler 4, no. 20 (1912): 609. [‘durch ein reines Spiel mit Farben und Linien’; ‘durch Aufhebung des Räumlichen und durch bunte, unwirkliche Farben’; ‘Im ganzen hat man bei diesen Werken mehr Interesse am Experiment als reinen künstlerischen Genuß.’] 57 On Macke’s friendship with Marc and his Rheinland connections, see Rosel Gollek, ‘Indianer, Sturm und Masken: August Mackes Beitrag zum Blauen Reiter’, in August Macke. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, 39–48. 58 On Carl Einstein and his relationship to Der Blaue Reiter, see Uwe Fleckner, Carl Einstein und sein Jahrhundert. Fragmente einer intellektuellen Biographie (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006), pp. 15–98. 59 In Negerplastik, Einstein reproduced a Baule figure from the Ivory Coast and a Bayaka Mask from the Congo, both of which belonged to the Folkwang. See Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus (ed.), Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 251; Carl Einstein, Negerplastik, 2nd ed. (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1920), pp. 57, 101. On Einstein’s image programme, see Z. S. Strother, ‘Looking for Africa in Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik’, African Arts, 46:4 (Winter 2013), pp. 8–21. 60 See Stamm, ‘Exoten und Expressionsten – Das Folkwang Museum als ‘Mikrokosmos des Geistes der Erde.’ 61 Karl With, ‘Das Museum Folkwang und die ägyptischen Neuerwerbungen’, Die Rheinlande 19 (1919), pp. 97–107. On With’s contributions to the Folkwang Museum in Hagen as well as to the Folkwang Verlag, where he initiated a series devoted to world art entitled ‘Cultures of the Globe’ (‘Kulturen der Erde’), see Rainer Stamm, Der Folkwang-Verlag: Auf dem Weg zu einem imaginären Museum (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung GmbH, 1999).

4 The ‘savages’ of Germany: a reassessment of the relationship between Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke Christian Weikop

F

r a n z Marc attached considerable importance to his short essay published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac (1912), entitled ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’ (The ‘Savages’ of Germany), which briefly surveyed Die Brücke, Neue Secession and the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM, Munich New Artists’ Association) – the society from which Der Blaue Reiter emerged – as all representing the cutting edge of contemporary German art, circles that shared progressive anti-academic and anti-materialist values.1 Marc’s brief essay represents the first instance of these key manifestations of ‘Expressionism’ being considered together in any kind of sustained fashion, but this clustering did not set the trend for art historians reflecting back on this period, who tended to approach the circles as separate and distinct entities. This chapter examines the reasons for this polarization, but attempts, with close reference to often overlooked primary sources, to reassess the web of connections that existed between Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, and the degree to which the circles influenced each other.

Early reception and historiography In ‘The “Savages” of Germany’ Marc did not use the word ‘Expressionisten’, a term still in an early stage of etymological development. He preferred instead to use ‘Die “Wilden” ’, the German translation of the French ‘Fauve’ (a term that was also used for the next almanac entry, ‘Die “Wilden” Russlands’ by David Burljuk), and one that seemed therefore to have international currency.2 Two years later, when the critic Paul Fechter published the first book on Der Expressionismus (1914), brought out by the same publisher responsible for Der Blaue Reiter almanac, he considered the ‘expressionism found in the work of all post-impressionist artists’, but discussed only seven artists as ‘Expressionisten’, drawn principally from both Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke, namely: Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Max Pechstein, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.3 Fechter also included the Austrian artist Oskar

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Christian Weikop Kokoschka, who had been promoted heavily in the early issues of Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm journal. At the first Sturm gallery exhibition in 1912 (12 March–12 April), Walden was unspecific with regards the national identity of the label ‘Expressionisten’. This exhibition was entitled Der Blaue Reiter, Franz Flaum, Oskar Kokoschka, Expressionisten. The Brücke artists Pechstein and Kirchner were included in the show, but it is possible that at this moment Walden saw them as part of the international Blaue Reiter project, which also included Russian and French artists. Walden may have used the term ‘Expressionisten’ to designate an international tendency, incorporating Der Blaue Reiter circle, Flaum, Kokoschka and French artists, or he may have been influenced by the Twenty-Second Berlin Secession exhibition in spring 1911, which included chiefly French artists such as Othon Friesz, Auguste Herbin, and Maurice de Vlaminck in a gallery labelled ‘Expressionisten’. A year later Walden would include these artists in his opening Sturm gallery show. At the Twenty-Second Berlin Secession, a total of eleven predominantly Fauve artists were exhibited as ‘Expressionisten’, but there was a cross-border connection in that one of the eleven, the Dutchman Kees van Dongen, had been listed as an active member of Die Brücke in Dresden, and was involved with Matisse’s Fauve circle in Paris, as well as the NKV in Munich.4 For the fourth Sturm exhibition in June–July 1912, Walden did use the term ‘Deutsche Expressionisten’ (for German members of Der Blaue Reiter), but then he also referred to ‘Französische Expressionisten’ (Braque, Derain, Friesz, Herbin, Vlaminck and Marie Laurencin) for the fifth Sturm exhibition in July–August of that year.5 The polarization of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter in later art criticism and art historical surveys might have been due to the fact that Walden’s focus of interest shifted dramatically away from Die Brücke, whose work he covered a great deal in 1911 issues of Der Sturm (figures 4.1 and 4.2), to the newly formed Blaue Reiter, whose artists featured strongly in Der Sturm from 1912 onwards (figure 4.3). In the Sturm gallery between the autumn months of 1912 and the spring of 1914 he also ‘arranged no fewer than nine exhibitions featuring their paintings, including a series of one-man shows devoted in turn to Kandinsky, Münter, Delaunay, Bloch, Marc and Macke’.6 Der Blaue Reiter seemed to connect more emphatically with Walden’s own vision of international modernism and his increasing interest in the transnational potential of abstract art. By contrast, Fechter’s discussion and selection of artists in Der Expressionismus effectively nationalized a ‘movement’, a point visually reinforced by Pechstein’s striking cover that seemed to align Expressionism with the German Gothic tradition, and was clearly inspired by his and Fechter’s understanding of Wilhelm Worringer’s influential Formprobleme der Gotik (1911).7 In addition to a reading of Worringer that focused on the national rather than transnational aspects of his text, there is little doubt that Fechter’s decision to spotlight German and Austrian artists (and the ‘Munich Russian’, Kandinsky) as ‘Expressionists’, must have in part been motivated by a heightened sense of cultural nationalism brought about by the general patriotic fervour leading up to the outbreak of World War I.



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4.1  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Rest (Ruhe) from the periodical Der Sturm: Wochenschrift für Kultur und Künste, 2:75 (August 1911).

Rose-Carol Washton Long has discussed the two currents of ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ Expressionism outlined in Fechter’s book. The former current is represented by Die Brücke, the latter by Der Blaue Reiter. Furthermore, the term ‘intensive’ was later reformulated as ‘Der abstrakte Expressionismus’ in a Der Sturm article by Oswald Herzog.8 Long has argued that ‘Fechter’s two part division of Expressionism could be said to have provided a theoretical structure for mid-century critics’ preference for an

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4.2  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Summer (Sommer) (in-text plate, p. 567) from the periodical Der Sturm: Wochenschrift für Kultur und Künste, 2:71 (August 1911).

abstract-expressionism over the figurative variant’, although it should also be noted that Fechter still identified the ‘home-town’ of Expressionism as Dresden.9 This shift in preference can be detected in the exhibitions staged by the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. In German Painting and Sculpture (1931), Barr included ‘most of the artists connected to the Brücke and three from Der Blaue



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4.3  Wassily Kandinsky, Drawing (Zeichnung) (in-text plate, title page) from the periodical Der Sturm: Halbmonatsschrift für Kultur und die Künste, 4:186/87 (November 1913).

Reiter – Marc, Klee and Campendonk’. However, in the famous chart to his highly influential exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art of 1936, Barr totally excluded Die Brücke. ‘EXPRESSIONISM’ was paired with the word ‘ABSTRACT’, and ‘Munich’, rather than Dresden, was identified as its centre of origin.10 In the synoptic surveys on German Expressionism that emerged after World War II, the two currents first identified by Fechter tended to be treated separately rather than comparatively. Peter Selz’s German Expressionist Painting and Bernard Myer’s The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt, both published in 1957, devoted separate

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Christian Weikop chapters to Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. This tendency may well have been driven by knowledge that the core Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists came from distinct regions. While Die Brücke had essentially been based in the capitals of Saxony and Prussia, Der Blaue Reiter had primarily been located in Bavaria (specifically Munich and the alpine foothill villages of Murnau am Staffelsee, Kochel, Sindelsdorf and Penzberg). It could also be argued that these distinct socio-cultural environments led to the development of quite different aesthetic values, despite being corralled together under the umbrella term ‘Expressionism’. Selz’s and Myer’s surveys were published a year after Lothar Buchheim’s seminal Künstlergemeinschaft Brücke (1956) and the year before his Graphik des Deutschen Expressionismus (1958), the latter translated into English in 1960. In a review article for Art Bulletin in March 1959, Herschel B. Chipp discussed the increase in critical and curatorial attention given to German Expressionism in the late 1950s, especially Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, giving various reasons for a shift away from the previously dominant ‘School of Paris’. Chipp stated that one explanation was the inspiration of first-generation Expressionism for the contemporary ‘New York School’, arguing that though ‘differing in spirit, the American “Abstract-Expressionists” seem clearly to evoke the Germans as precursors’.11 In the review, Chipp provides detailed commentary on the aforementioned surveys by Selz and Myer, as well as German Expressionism and Abstract Art: The Harvard Collections (1957) by Charles L. Kuhn. The exhibition A Hundred Years of German Painting (1956) at the Tate Gallery in London and the Musuem of Modern Art’s immense German Art of the Twentieth Century (1957) are also considered as evidence of an Anglo-American reassessment of modern German art in general and Expressionism in particular. Notwithstanding this surge in Anglophone surveys, Chipp is clear in crediting Buchheim in Germany for writing the ‘first comprehensive study of the Brücke … devoted mainly to an analysis of the group characteristics of the artists’.12 In 1958, two years after his Brücke monograph was published, Buchheim made sure to underscore his own authority in the field by publishing a short article on the group in the high circulation international graphic design magazine Graphis.13 Unusually, the article was trilingual, with Buchheim’s thoughts on Die Brücke’s graphic production being published in English, German, and French. The article effectively functioned as a territory-marker for his book-length scholarship on Die Brücke, and sought to raise awareness of the group’s significance for non-German audiences. Collectively, these 1950s English and German book publications inspired the next generation of scholars on Expressionism, such as Donald Gordon and Reinhold Heller, and were often cited in the expanding literature on the movement from the 1960s onwards. Yet Buchheim’s 1959 monograph Der Blaue Reiter und die ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’ has received less attention than his other publications on Expressionism. The reasons for this remain unclear, but it is perhaps because he was a greater collector and enthusiast of Die Brücke’s figurative Expressionism than Blaue Reiter art.14 Furthermore, unlike Graphik des Deutschen Expressionismus, which spilt more ink on Die Brücke’s print culture than Der Blaue Reiter’s, Der Blaue Reiter und die ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’



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was not translated into English, and has been neglected in Anglo-American scholarship. Given this discursive omission, his main points are worth re-examining here. The key section for the purposes of this chapter is entitled ‘Neue Kuenstlervereingung München und Kuenstlergemeinschaft Brücke’.15 In writing this section, Buchheim took a rather different position to Marc’s ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’, with the author seemingly disputing the ‘Wilden’ aspect of the NKVM in comparison with the ‘Wilden’ aspects that he identified in Die Brücke. Buchheim’s study of the two circles was further subdivided into ‘Unterschiede und Gegensätze’ (‘Differences and Contrasts’) and ‘Gemeinsamkeiten der Beiden Gruppe’ (‘Similarities Between the Groups’). In the second brief subsection, he summed up the similarities as follows: both circles shared a conviction in their avant-garde artistic objectives and an enthusiasm for the ideas of Nietzsche; both shared an antipathy towards conservative art scenes, stagnant academic mediocrity, and bourgeois narrow-­ mindedness; and both rejected rationalism, logic, and impressionism. In the much larger first subsection, Buchheim emphasized significant differences in the regional cultural milieus of Munich and Dresden as a key determinant to help explain aesthetic and ideological divergences between artists of the two circles: ‘a difference […] that is even more striking when one considers that the Brücke’s home was not the grand Baroque centre of Dresden, but the proletarian quarter around the Friedrichstadt railway ­station’.16 Ignoring the predominantly middle-class backgrounds of Die Brücke’s active and passive membership, Buchheim continued to stress the rebellious leftist credentials of the group, who with the exception of Kirchner, ‘a native of Aschaffenburg’, all grew up in the ‘industrial environment’ of Saxony. Clearly warming to his somewhat exaggerated theme of working-class Dresden boys versus a privileged elite in Bavaria, and identifying more closely with Die Brücke’s more modest origins, Buchheim pointed to the fact that their first exhibition was staged in the salesroom of a Löbtau lamp factory; whereas the ‘Münchner’, who were blessed with a clearer ‘European air’, discussed art in the ‘salon of Baroness Werefkin’. Ignoring, too, Kandinsky’s founding of the progressive ‘Phalanx’ association and his willingness to secede from what was already a secession from the Munich Secession, the NKVM, Buchheim perhaps unfairly questioned the anti-academic credentials of Kandinsky in terms of his attitude and his work, arguing that he did have some ties to the official academy ‘medal’ system and that in 1906 he received the ‘Grand Prix de l’Exposition Nationale des Beaux Art’.17 Buchheim further argued that through the ‘Bruderschaft’ (brotherhood) and ‘Werkgemeinschaft’ (working community) of the tightly knit Brücke group, a collaborative collective style developed, a practice quite different to the working processes and stylistic diversity of the much looser association of Blaue Reiter artists. He then made a few points that are rather more contentious. The first of these was that ‘while the Brücke artists had hardly any contact with foreign art, the artists who joined forces in Munich were cosmopolitan’.18 Of course it is not true that Die Brücke lacked connections to ‘foreign art’ as revealed by later scholarship on their reading habits, exhibition attendance, touring exhibitions, and their associations with ‘non-German’ art and artists

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Christian Weikop through travel to France, Italy and elsewhere.19 Buchheim’s comment on the German make-up of Die Brücke contra the ‘cosmopolitan’ composition of Der Blaue Reiter is valid if we consider Die Brücke’s core membership, but less so if we take into account the expanded active membership of 1906–1913, which included Akseli Gallen-Kallela (Finland), Lambertus Zijl (Holland), Kees van Dongen (Holland), Bohumil Kubišta (Bohemia), as well as Cuno Amiet (Switzerland), and would have included Henri Matisse (France) and Edvard Munch (Norway) had they been successful in recruiting them for their cause.20 The passive membership drawn primarily from a professional class supportive of their cooperative artistic aims also extended beyond the borders of Germany, and demonstrates that the group had international ambitions even if they saw themselves creating ‘a new German art’, and even if Kirchner was guilty of committing many sins of omission with respect to influences in his Chronik (1913), a document more defined by his attempt to associate Die Brücke with a German canon.21 On the question of artistic influences, Buchheim made another questionable comment in arguing that the expressive intensity of Munch’s work was a model for the Dresden artists, but that his art did not generate a ‘spark’ in the ‘more balanced intellectual environment of Munich’.22 This remark does not hold up if we examine the artistic oeuvre of ‘Baroness Werefkin’, who clearly drew a great deal of inspiration from Munch’s experimental approach to form and perspective. On the question of artistic approach, Buchheim pointed out other differences, namely that Die Brücke, who unlike Der Blaue Reiter were ‘hardly ever preoccupied with theorising’, wanted to express their élan vital in a very direct sensual manner, to encourage the viewer to take some vicarious pleasure in optically tracing the physical dynamism that led to the artwork.23 This he argued, differed greatly from the meditative contemplation of the pictorial idea evident in Blaue Reiter art, which was focused on the lyrical and transcendental rather than ‘anecdotal’ sensual expression.24 Continuing in this vein Buchheim argued that Blaue Reiter art had a religious Christian aspect absent in the work of Die Brücke, stating that Kandinsky, in particular, drew on biblical subject matter, and that Marc even had plans for a modern illustrated Bible.25 In making this point, Buchheim neglected to mention that Die Brücke artists did draw on biblical subjects, especially for the international Sonderbund exhibition in 1912, and during and just after World War I when their work was partially determined by what Reinhold Heller, and more recently Lisa Marie Anderson, have referred to as a ‘messianic Expressionism’.26 Furthermore, in the spring of 1913 core Brücke member Heckel agreed to contribute to Marc’s planned illustrated Blaue Reiter bible.27 Buchheim’s interpretation of the two circles is engaging and some of his observations quite revealing; however, his insistence on regional differences with his constant reference to the ‘Dresdner’ and the ‘Münchner’ is a distraction from the actual ties, friendship and rivalries that did exist between Die Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists, irrespective of their regional identities. It is these ties and rivalries that this chapter will now explore.



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First encounters: Kirchner in Munich and Kandinsky in Dresden There are intriguing links between founding Brücke member, Kirchner, and founding Blaue Reiter editor, Kandinsky, in a period before the formation of either group – links related to their Jugendstil roots. Kandinsky’s exhibiting society and art school ‘Phalanx’, which he co–founded in 1901, was located in the midst of Munich’s bohemian quarter, Schwabing, directly across the street from the innovative school of teaching and applied arts founded by Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz, where Kirchner studied during his Munich sojourn of 1903–1904. Obrist and Kandinsky were on good terms and of course it is possible that Kirchner would have met Kandinsky, however briefly, at some point during his studies in the Bavarian capital. Peter Lasko has shown how Obrist’s ideas deeply influenced Kirchner, but as a progressive exhibiting society that manifested an ideology of creative craft and fine art, Kandinsky’s ‘Phalanx’ association could also have functioned as a structural model, among others, for the formation of the Brücke group, a year or so after Kirchner’s Munich trip.28 Furthermore, the schools of Obrist and Kandinsky may have provided some spark of inspiration for Kirchner and fellow Brücke member, Pechstein, when they decided to start their own private art school (MUIM) in Berlin in 1911. Kirchner would have seen Kandinsky’s colour woodcuts at the eleventh ‘Phalanx’ exhibition in the Galerie Hugo Helbig in April 1904, prints that had some influence on his early attempts in the medium, as a comparison of Kandinsky’s Moonrise of 1904 with Kirchner’s Chestnut Tree in Moonlight of the same year, demonstrates (figures 4.4 and 4.5).29 In Kandinsky’s woodcut, which brings to mind Arnold Böcklin’s melancholic landscapes, the spectral forms of a well-dressed couple seem to float on a lunar-like field. By contrast, in Kirchner’s woodcut, three naked figures appear to physically call out to the moon in a manner that is suggestive of the nature-worshiping free-body culture motifs of Hugo Höppener (Fidus), an early influence on Die Brücke. In 1904, Kandinsky’s woodcut The Night (figure 4.6) was shown at Phalanx XI and in the Great Art Exhibition in Dresden; in 1905, two of his 1903 woodcuts, Singer and Lady with a Fan were reproduced in the magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, giving the other Brücke members the opportunity to see his work. Although it is not known for certain whether Kandinsky met Kirchner in Munich, or other members of the newly formed Die Brücke in Dresden, when he travelled there with Gabriele Münter in the summer of 1905, some encounter seems possible given that he was invited to participate in Die Brücke’s woodcut exhibition at the Karl–Max Seifert showroom in Dresden the following year (3 December 1906–31 January 1907). They also invited Kandinsky’s fellow Munichbased printmaker Hans Neumann, who had participated in Kandinsky’s Phalanx XI. Even though Die Brücke were not well established at this time, Kandinsky willingly sent six woodcuts at the request of Schmidt-Rottluff, including the aforementioned Night and The Golden Sail, both created in 1903. Buchheim argued that Die Brücke would have disapproved of the Märchen (fairy-tale) symbolist art of Kandinsky, but there is no evidence to support this assumption.30

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4.4  Wassily Kandinsky, Moonrise (Mondaufgang), 1904.

The woodcuts that the founding Brücke members secured from Wilhelm Laage, Nolde and Gallen-Kallela for the same 1906 woodcut exhibition in which Kandinsky’s prints could be seen also had a fairy-tale quality. Gallen-Kallela, who had already exhibited in one of Kandinsky’s ‘Phalanx’ exhibitions, sent the woodcut Girl and Death in the Forest (1895) to Dresden, a print which later appeared in one of the Brücke portfolios, and was, as Alexander Dückers has described it, ‘a pure manifestation of Jugendstil’.31 Nolde’s first cycle of woodcuts, produced in 1906 for Die Brücke’s woodcut exhibition, and greatly admired by the founding members, was actually entitled Märchen, although this cycle differed from the more ornamental prints of Kandinsky and Gallen-Kallela



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4.5  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Chestnut Tree in Moonlight (Kastanienbaum im Mondlicht), 1904.

in stressing the rough-cut material quality of the block in the print itself. Buchheim’s assumption simply does not apply to this early stage of Die Brücke’s formation, not least because Kirchner’s own Two People cycle of 1905 had a fairy-tale Jugendstil quality as well. Of course Die Brücke’s use of the woodcut in terms of posters, portfolios, year reports, invitations and insignia, and membership lists and cards was very successful in helping to define the Brücke image, especially in their early years, and while it is a speculative point it is possible that Kandinsky took some cues from the group branding in the graphic ephemera of Kirchner, Pechstein and other Brücke artists when he decided to produce a woodcut membership card for the NKVM in 1909.

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4.6  Wassily Kandinsky, The Night, Large Version (Die Nacht, große Fassung), 1903.

Second encounters: new associations and alliances/ splinter groups and conflict It is worth observing that both the Brücke group and the circle around Kandinsky underscored their avant-garde credentials by effectively seceding from secessions, and in this respect both were following in the footsteps of the ‘Klimt group’, who in 1905 broke away from the Vienna Secession, which they had founded, only to form a new exhibition association for the 1908 and 1909 ‘Kunstschau’.32 In January 1909, Kandinsky led a



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revolt against the Munich Secession, which culminated in the formation of the NKVM, with the first exhibition being held in December of that year at the Moderne Galerie Thannhauser in Munich; and similarly in April 1910, Georg Tappert and Brücke member Max Pechstein formed the Neue Secession in a rebellion that included most of the Brücke group against the growing conservatism of the Berlin Secession, a conservatism which culminated in a jury, including Max Beckmann (no friend of Die Brücke or NKVM artists), rejecting many vanguard canvases. The first exhibition of the Neue Secession was held at the Kunstsalon Maximilian Macht in Berlin under the title ‘Zurückgewiesener der Secession Berlin’ (Rejections from the Berlin Secession). Within a period lasting from May 1910 until the middle of April 1911, the first three exhibitions of the Neue Secession were held at the Kunstsalon Maximilan Macht, but the fourth exhibition was staged on a rented floor above Kaufhaus Kopp & Joseph, Potsdamer Straße 122, and ran from 18 November 1911 until 31 January 1912. Again, it involved the Brücke artists, former Brücke member Nolde, Kubišta (who joined Die Brücke as the exhibition was in process in December 1911), and key NKVM members Kandinsky, Münter, Marc, Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin, as well as many other avant-garde artists from across Europe.33 The fourth Neue Secession exhibition therefore effectively brought the work of the Brücke artists and the soon-to-be-formed Blaue Reiter circle together in close proximity for the first time.34 It was also notable for the inclusion of a semi-abstract female nude by Kandinsky, extremely rare in his oeuvre, which he may well have submitted to this exhibition knowing the proclivity of Pechstein, Kirchner et al. for more sensual subject matter. In considering the importance of the Neue Secession in his memoirs, Pechstein took credit for bringing the two circles together: ‘We […] collected […] the names of all those who appeared to us to be comrades in arms. I even did so in connection with the group “Blaue Reiter” in Munich, with Franz Marc, August Macke and Kandinsky’.35 However, just as these artists were being shown together in Berlin in the same space, Marc, Kandinsky and Münter decided to secede from the NKV in Munich because of a controversy over a committee ruling regarding a Kandinsky painting in the build-up to the third and final NKVM exhibition. They formed the ‘Blaue Reiter’ (which was already in process as a publication project) and organized a parallel show in the same Thannhauser venue held in December 1911. Almost simultaneously, Die Brücke would break away from the Neue Secession during the fourth exhibition as Pechstein, though a founding president of the Neue Secession was not elected to the board. Ironically, Pechstein would again exhibit with the Berlin Secession in 1912, which resulted in him being expelled from Die Brücke for breaking their group exhibition policy. It was originally planned for Pechstein to submit an essay on the Neue Secession for Der Blaue Reiter almanac, but his name appeared and then disappeared from the various handwritten tables of content and printed press releases produced between September 1911 and February 1912.36 It is not certain whether Pechstein’s essay was submitted and then rejected by the editorial team, with Marc deciding to cover the Neue Secession in his own essay ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’, or whether Pechstein’s departure from the Neue Secession

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Christian Weikop meant that he no longer felt inclined to submit such a contribution. The latter seems much more likely given Pechstein’s difficult relations with some other members of the Neue Secession who were not part of Die Brücke, nor as progressive.37 Even Marc, an admirer of Pechstein, felt inclined to characterize his forthright personality in a letter to Kandinsky in December 1911 as ‘the small Napoleon of the Berlin art scene’.38 Whether it was always Marc’s intention to cover the Neue Secession as well as Die Brücke and NKVM in his ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’ essay is not clear, but as late as 23 January 1912, Marc wrote to Kandinsky imploring him to send his essay to Berlin, or to refrain from sending it to the publisher Piper until he returned to Bavaria, as he had to ‘make amendments’.39 The language of Marc’s essay is in fact not dissimilar to that of the Brücke Programm of 1906, and Marc was willing to acknowledge the trailblazing role played by Die Brücke in his essay, stating: ‘The oldest of the three, the Brücke, was inaugurated with great seriousness, but Dresden proved too infertile a soil for its ideas’.40 The lines of Die Brücke’s own Programm are as follows: ‘With a belief in continuing evolution, in a new generation of creators as well as appreciators, we call together all youth. And as youth that is carrying the future, we intend to obtain freedom of movement and of life for ourselves in opposition to older, well-established powers. Whoever renders directly and authentically that which impels him to create is one of us’.41 By comparison, Marc’s opening sentence for ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’ states: ‘In this time of the great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized “savages” against an old, established power’.42 It is also possible that one of the Brücke artists had shown him the Galerie Arnold catalogue of 1910, with its opening introductory line: ‘Brücke was formed out of the necessity to create a path for a new German art’.43 However, Marc avoided expressing the desire for cultural regeneration in national terms. Just like the Brücke Programm, other lines in Marc’s essay have a highly Nietzschean character, especially when he considers the values of the Neue Secession: ‘they have no restraint; they want to proceed at any price, like a river that carries along everything, possible and impossible, trusting in its own purifying force’.44 Finally, Marc extends a welcome to all kindred spirits in a manner that echoes the openness and inclusivity of the Brücke Programm: ‘there are many quiet powers in Germany struggling with the same high distant goals […] in the dark, without knowing them, we give them our hand’.45 While it seems that Marc’s essay owed something to Die Brücke’s manifesto, in a sense both statements are predated by the editorial manifesto of Ver Sacrum, the periodical of the Vienna Secession. The ideas of youthful regeneration, cleansing annihilation, of cultivating fresh talent and overcoming established forces (what Carl Schorske has termed a ‘collective oedipal revolt’), were certainly critical for Klimt’s circle too.46 Marc visited the Brücke artists in their Berlin studios in January 1912 and secured work for both the almanac and the second exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter, which was devoted to graphic work, and entitled Schwarz-Weiß, after the example of the graphic exhibitions of the Berlin Secession.47 A very rare document of visual evidence for one of these studio visits, an artistic testament to the interaction of Die Brücke and Der Blaue



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4.7  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz and Maria Franck [Marc].

Reiter, exists in the collection of the Museum Penzberg in Bavaria. An atmospheric watercolour and pencil drawing of Franz and Maria Marc by Kirchner depicts the couple in Die Brücke’s exotic Berlin-Wilmersdorf studio at Durlacherstrasse 14, in front of two arches of a wall painting (figure 4.7). They occupy a similar position to that taken up by Erna Schilling and Kirchner in the same space in a much reproduced photograph from 1912. A pipe-smoking Franz in a brown jacket is depicted in a relaxed pose on a divan as he glances across at Maria, who is engaged in the act of turning the pages of a book or catalogue. In front of them is a table with what looks like three glasses of red wine or another beverage, and one of Kirchner’s wood carved caryatid fruit bowls inspired by Cameroonian artefacts. There is a vibrant energy about this studio scene generated through Kirchner’s quickly applied short strokes of watercolour paint, dynamic gestures that are not contained by the pencil outlines of the figures and pared down room details. It is an affectionate friendship painting of a creative couple. At times, Marc felt a little in awe of the bohemian atmosphere of the Berlin Brücke studios, especially after he and his wife, Maria, visited Heckel and Sidi Riha. He wrote to Kandinsky: ‘As we left, we both felt that we had been with two children. In a sparse attic the little dancer sits in a light blue silk dress with wonderful silver brooches that Heckel designed for her. The chair made of painted planks nailed together collapsed as soon as

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Christian Weikop Maria sat in it; both of us felt there that we were cloddish bears’.48 Marc would go on to establish a particularly good connection with Heckel, and the two artists corresponded frequently in 1912, exploring possibilities for further collaboration, and attempting to help each other’s groups with exhibition venues in different parts of Germany, including Berlin and Munich. For instance, a letter of April/May 1912 from Heckel to Marc, reveals such efforts in this regard with Heckel informing Marc that unfortunately he had not been successful in arranging an exhibition for Der Blaue Reiter in Mannheim, but that there may be other possibilities there with respect to an exhibition of modern drawing. Heckel also wrote that he had attempted to persuade the Galerie Commeter in Hamburg to have a collective exhibition of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, but that they were not at all interested.49 In the end, the Galerie Commeter functioned only as the second venue of the Brücke exhibition first shown at the Kunstsalon Fritz Gurlitt in April 1912, minus any contribution by Pechstein, who had been expelled from Die Brücke in the interim. In the same letter, Heckel also politely reminded Marc to speak with Heinrich Thannhauser in Munich to see whether he might be interested in taking the Brücke exhibition in November 1912 after the showing at the Galerie Commeter.50 This did not occur. In 1930, reflecting back on the Blaue Reiter period, Kandinsky remarked that Die Brücke was ‘completely unknown in Munich’,51 however, their work did appear in the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in February–April 1912, and it should be noted that the last Brücke exhibition was staged at Der Neue Kunstsalon at Königinstraße 44 in the Bavarian capital in January 1913, a gallery run by Paul Ferdinand Schmidt, a passive member of Die Brücke since 1908. Marc always reported back to Kandinsky on the activities of Die Brücke. But Marc’s positive comments were not always greeted with equal enthusiasm by his Blaue Reiter collaborator, and, as I demonstrate in more detail below, there are moments in various letter exchanges where he seems to cajole Kandinsky into accepting their worth, and moments where he is clearly frustrated by Kandinsky’s less than flattering view on Brücke art. The correspondence between Marc and Heckel, and Marc and Kandinsky, was intense during this period and these letter exchanges provide us with a good indicator of the changing dynamics between the circles. Over the course of a single year, they demonstrate the shifting alliances and varying degrees of success in certain exhibitions, notably the Cologne Sonderbund of 1912. On 2 January 1912, Marc wrote to Kandinsky stating that he had spent the morning with Pechstein and Kirchner: they had been impressed by the catalogue for the first Blaue Reiter exhibition at the Thannhauser Galerie in Munich, and were also enthusiastic and ‘without any pretentions’ interested in the possibility of further collaboration with Der Blaue Reiter.52 In this letter, Marc remarked that he had secured a great deal of material for the second Blaue Reiter exhibition on graphic art, but also informed Kandinsky of his intention to have a painting by Pechstein and a painting and wood sculpture by Kirchner (curiously described as ‘very lively, perhaps a bit African, but that does not matter’) sent in time for the second venue of the first travelling Blaue Reiter exhibition



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at the Gereonsklub in Cologne.53 Intriguingly, the only known letter sent by Kirchner to Kandinsky concerns this long-touring show and the whereabouts of his work. In an undated letter written around the beginning of 1914 (after the dissolution of Die Brücke), he explains to Kandinsky that he had discussed this matter with Walden, but that Walden had informed him that the painting and the sculpture were on show in Christiana (Oslo).54 Kirchner asks Kandinsky whether this information is correct before demanding some assurance that his work would be returned. He then tempers his tone by stating that he would be happy to provide further work for Der Blaue Reiter, and flatters Kandinsky by stating that he had seen some beautiful work by him at the ‘Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon’ (First German Autumn Salon) of 1913, which he describes as being a ‘wonderful culture of colours’.55 Conversely, Kandinsky’s view of Kirchner’s work is difficult to ascertain, but in an earlier letter (14.I.1912) regarding the second Blaue Reiter exhibition, Kandinsky commented to Marc that he could not help but notice the number of explicit Brücke artworks from the selection of photographs that Marc had provided: ‘9 + ½ nudes with or without pubic hair, five bather artworks, and two circus pictures’.56 Ignoring Kandinsky’s reticence about this quota, Marc, in his next letter to Kandinsky (16.I.1912), referred with admiration to the expressive erotic work of Pechstein, Kirchner and Heckel.57 Prints by Die Brücke that were reproduced in the Blaue Reiter Schwarz-Weiß catalogue were the same as those that appeared in the Blaue Reiter almanac. With the exception of one woodcut by Pechstein, which did possess the characteristic ‘free body’ representation that seemed to trouble Kandinsky, the almanac did not best showcase Die Brücke’s achievement in printmaking, and a selection of their prints in various media might have suffered from the intervention of a stubborn Kandinsky, who in spite of Marc’s enthusiasm, was clearly far from convinced that Die Brücke should be included in their almanac at all. He wrote to Marc (2.II.1912): These things must be exhibited. But I think it is incorrect to immortalise them in the document of our modern art (and, this is what our book ought to be) or as a more or less decisive, leading factor. At any rate, I am against large reproductions … The small reproduction means: this too is being done. The large one: this is being done.58 And in the almanac the graphic dynamism of Die Brücke’s prints is somehow lost by the small scale of reproduction. Clearly frustrated that he was unable to win over Kandinsky on this issue, Marc responded two days later: With all due respect, I do not share your view on the Brücke. I don’t know if you have seen the paintings that I have seen in Berlin […] it is a shame that you don’t know the large portrait that I have sent to the Blaue Reiter exhibition in Cologne […] this work has really very little to do with Impressionism, but has a great deal to do with modern life and the metropolis. Their work is outwardly

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Christian Weikop ugly, especially that of Kirchner and Heckel, but I feel it is full of deep meaning and realism.59 In another letter to Kandinsky written in March 1912, Marc suggested that their lack of consensus on Die Brücke was perhaps no bad thing, a stimulating exchange rather than a block to development, following up his point by stating that he did not share Kandinsky’s love of Arnold Schoenberg as a painter, and was unsure about Münter’s ‘current’ work, a comment that would have most likely irritated his Russian collaborator.60 In addition to personal meetings and a busy exchange of letters in the first half of 1912 between key figures of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, there was also an exchange of publications. In an undated letter to Marc written around January/February 1912, Kirchner informed him that he had met up with the ‘young Macke’, probably with regard to the sending of his work to the second stage of the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Cologne, and described him as a very clever ‘Mensch’.61 In the same letter, he also expresses his pleasure at the Blaue Reiter Schwarz-Weiß catalogue, which he had clearly just received, and enquires about the progress of the almanac. The Brücke artists would receive the almanac in May 1912, but prior to this Heckel had sent Marc the catalogue for the Brücke exhibition held at the Berlin Fritz Gurlitt gallery in April 1912. The Gurlitt catalogue included a number of Brücke woodcuts and reproductions of paintings that collectively reveal the group’s obsession with free body culture and sexual vitalism, and, as indicated above, it was this aspect of Brücke art that bothered Kandinsky, who found their sensual nudes and bather images problematic in terms of his own conception of artistic creativity and spectatorship. As Milton Cohen has pointed out, this was also the root cause of a spat between Kandinsky and Macke: ‘The sunny sensuousness of Macke’s art and his delight in the colours and texture of nature were too deep for him to abandon the physical world; and his sardonic scepticism had little patience with Kandinsky’s and Marc’s mysticism’.62 Kandinsky clearly had some aversion to the naked body, something indicated by the aforementioned rarity of the nude in his oeuvre, as well as by a striking comment in his Reminiscences of 1913. He reflected with some distaste on his earlier studio training in life drawing, stating: ‘Students thronged around these smelly, apathetic, expressionless, characterless, natural phenomena’.63 It is hard to imagine any Brücke artist making such a comment, but Kandinsky’s attitude was also reflected in his disdainful view of the character of art emerging from the Munich Secession, a view expressed in his ‘Letters from Munich’ published in the Russian journal Apollon between 1909 and 1910: ‘Naked bodies in the open air, without any attempt at painting. Women lying on the ground with their heels to the spectator.’64 Shulamith Behr has convincingly argued that for Kandinsky ‘denying the relevance of the body was a means of ameliorating the artist’s discomfort in being controlled by its presence’.65 Kandinsky’s position in this respect runs close to that of the Romantic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who criticized artistic depictions of nudes, as they stimulated desire and hindered the viewer from becoming ‘the pure will-free subject of knowing’.66 Like Schopenhauer, Kandinsky believed that art should



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aspire to the condition of music, that is abstract; and it is known that Schopenhauer had some impact on Kandinsky’s theoretical writings, which resonate with the ideas of the philosopher’s World as Will and Representation (1844). Schopenhauer wrote that in music, our emotions are recalled to us ‘always in the universal, in the mere form, without the material, always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon; [but] the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon, without the body’.67 By contrast, Brücke art pursued physical bodily expression, effectively disavowing Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of the will to life, and responding positively to Nietzsche’s turn against such asceticism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892), the Will to Power (1901), and elsewhere. Die Brücke connected with Nietzsche’s affirmations of artistic creativity as sublimated sexual desire, as opposed to Schopenhauer’s idea of aesthetic experience leading to a momentary renunciation of desire and the achievement of a nirvanic state. ‘Artists’, said Nietzsche, ‘if they are any good, are strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual … Artists should see nothing as it is, but fuller, simpler, stronger: to that end, their lives must contain a kind of youth and spring, a kind of habitual intoxication’.68 And we know that it was the vitalism of Nietzsche’s philosophy that helped galvanize the Brücke group from their student days onwards.

The ‘Sonderbund’ (1912) and the ‘Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon’ (1913) Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists both exhibited in the 1912 international Cologne ‘Sonderbund’, which ran from late May until late September. They wanted to be identified as group formations within the context of this exhibition, although their ambitions were thwarted in this respect. In the oversimplified ground plan that constituted part of Macke’s correspondence to Marc dated on the opening day of the exhibition, there are two connecting rooms marked Berlin and Munich.69 According to Macke’s plan, the Berlin room was linked to the Sonderbund chapel, an expression of ‘modern Gothic’, which had been decorated by Heckel and Kirchner, and which presented the stained glass windows of Johan Thorn Prikker. Marc wrote to Kandinsky on 16 May 1912: ‘Heckel and Kirchner have been commissioned to paint the chapel in the Cologne exhibition and they are extremely happy about it’.70 Later Marc would report enthusiastically to Kandinsky on works by Munch, Heckel, Picasso and, above all, Matisse, but he was far more self-critical: ‘I don’t like my own things at all; they’re sweet and sickly. I’m horrified’.71 The Brücke artists received good individual coverage in the exhibition (with 23 paintings being shown), as well as Kirchner and Heckel receiving the late but welcome call to decorate the Sonderbund chapel. The Blaue Reiter artists, by contrast, suffered at the hands of the selection committee, even though they seemed much better placed than Die Brücke to benefit from their personal connections with key members of the Sonderbund jury. Richart Reiche, the Director of the Sonderbund, was a close associate of wealthy Berlin factory owner, Bernhard Koehler, who was August Macke’s uncle-in-law on

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Christian Weikop his wife’s side. Indeed, Macke benefitted throughout his career from the various kinds of support extended by his wife Elisabeth and her family. Without Koehler’s financial assistance, the almanach may never have reached fruition, and through Koehler’s connections, Macke landed an important role on the Sonderbund jury. As such, the NKVM/ Blaue Reiter artists were the first to be invited to participate in the Sonderbund. But while Macke was also on the editorial board of Der Blaue Reiter, he felt uncomfortable with the pressure that Marc and Kandinsky were placing on him to ensure that the Blaue Reiter artists were exhibited as a collective rather than as individuals at the exhibition. Irrespective of his own views on the matter, he felt he could not overturn Reiche or the general Sonderbund policy of only exhibiting artists as individuals rather than as groups.72 As late as April/May 1912, Heckel had written to Marc to inform him of his expectations that a collective show would occur: ‘Dear Herr Marc […] I am not a member of the Sonderbund. If I am invited there, then I will not exhibit alone but together with other members of the Brücke just as in the Secession’.73 While all the Brücke artists were exhibited, their work was not labelled and hung as a group as Heckel desired. But not only were the Blaue Reiter artists not exhibited together at all, the selection of their work was reduced to a few paintings each, with many works being put ‘on reserve’ because of an apparent lack of wall space, a point that upset Marc in particular, who railed against this rationale, especially as ‘over 100 Van Goghs’ could be seen.74 In protest over the selection process, he withdrew his work from the exhibition, and published an article in Der Sturm criticizing the jury system. Walden leaped at the opportunity, and quickly exhibited the withdrawn works by Marc and the work held in reserve of other Blaue Reiter members for his fourth Sturm exhibition under the title ‘Deutsche Expressionisten. Zurückgestellte Bilder des Sonderbundes’ (German Expressionists. The Reserved Works of the Sonderbund). This was clearly a publicity stunt, one that must have been inspired in part by Pechstein’s decision to produce a poster for the first Neue Secession with the legend ‘Zurückgewiesener der Secession Berlin 1910’ (Rejections from the Berlin Secession, 1910), although Marc’s and Walden’s tagline was less sensational. Initially, Marc and Kandinsky contemplated using the more dramatic word ‘Refüsierte’, which of course brings to mind the famous Parisian Salon des Refusés of 1863, but were advised against such a move by Macke, who clearly felt that they should not be burning bridges with the Sonderbund. By contrast, the Brücke artists seemed very encouraged by their showing in Cologne, and saw it as a great opportunity, irrespective of any disappointment at not being able to show together as a close group. Around this time, however, there was a difference of opinion between Heckel and Marc on future objectives in Berlin. In spring 1912, the Blaue Reiter artists were busy cementing their relationship with Walden and the Sturm Gallery, while Die Brücke kept their distance. While Marc had obviously tried to persuade Heckel that ‘Walden’s Way’ was the way forward, Heckel indicated in a letter that he was sad that they could not agree: ‘but perhaps sooner or later you will abandon Sturm or the New Secession after all. Or else you are right, and we [Die Brücke] are in error in the attempt to make the exhibition halls of the Secession more interesting’.75



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Heckel primarily argued that aligning Die Brücke with Walden was not possible for financial reasons: ‘Finally, the four of us, who do not have financial backing and who have a hard enough time staying afloat, have to consider the present economic situation. We do not have the slightest chance to sell with Walden, while the Secession does have a certain clientele’.76 Nevertheless, Marc persisted in trying to persuade Heckel that Die Brücke should move forward with Der Blaue Reiter in terms of working with Walden, and in a postcard that he sent to Heckel in Berlin on 4 April 1913, Marc invited Die Brücke to participate in the ‘Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon’, which Walden and Macke had been planning together. He assured Heckel that the event was financially secure, but that the utmost discretion was required in not informing the ‘outside (Cassirer)’.77 But in an undated letter to Marc written around this period, Heckel reiterated that ‘“Walden’s Way” was not an option’, and that they remained committed to exhibiting with Walden’s rival, Paul Cassirer, at the Secession.78 This led to a high point of tension with respect to Marc’s relationship with Heckel and Die Brücke in general, as is revealed by his correspondence to Macke on 19 April 1913: The Brücke won’t participate. Schmidt-Rottluff wrote a long letter in which he said that while he had complete sympathy for Walden’s undertaking, he must put the interests of the Sonderbund before anything else!!! It is not possible to respond to such nonsense. Heckel is also fearful that he would be compromised by the Sturm. He is shuttling across to the old Secession. Let him! It can all happen without the Brücke.79 Die Brücke’s stance infuriated Macke, who reported to Walden on 21 April 1913: ‘It’s really a shame that the Berliners [Die Brücke] don’t cooperate. After all, for whom should one consider oneself an artist when artists fall so deplorably for something which they have earlier so much despised? In any case I am rather fed up with “cooperation” […] I’ll give Heckel, however, a piece of my mind’.80 By falling for something they had earlier ‘despised’, Macke was clearly referring to Die Brücke’s initial break from the Berlin Secession to form the New Secession in 1910, and their return to the flock of the ‘old’ Secession in 1912.

The Almanach ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ (1912) and the Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke (1913) Just as Brücke’s Programm may well have had some bearing on Marc’s essay ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’, so the whole concept of Der Blaue Reiter almanac could have triggered Kirchner, Heckel, and the other Brücke members to plan the Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke in the first place. Certainly Pechstein was aware of the Blaue Reiter periodical project by no later than September 1911, since he was listed as an essay contributor to the almanac in the ‘provisional table of contents of the first number’, which was enclosed

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Christian Weikop in the letter that Marc sent to Piper on 10 September 1911.81 At this point in Brücke history, when relations between the artists were good, it seems highly likely that Pechstein would have informed the other members of his involvement with the Blaue Reiter publication. Intriguingly, there is a section in this early draft table of contents entitled Chronik with two individual contributions.82 Furthermore, Kandinsky first mentioned the idea of a Chronik in the letter that marks the inception of the Blaue Reiter project on 19 June 1911: ‘Well, I have a new idea. Piper must be the publisher and the two of us editors. A kind of almanac (yearbook) with reproductions and articles … and a chronicle!! that is, reports on exhibitions reviewed by artists, and artists alone’.83 The Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke (1913) was also intended to be a collaborative enterprise, and its forthcoming publication was announced in the last annual Brücke report of 1911/12, which was sent out in early 1912 at about the same time that Der Blaue Reiter almanac was in an advanced stage of production and had already been promoted by Piper Verlag. According to the report, the publication of the Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke would be ‘Spring’ 1912, and would therefore be released around the same time or shortly after Der Blaue Reiter almanac, although of course the planned Brücke publication never transpired at this point. Kirchner privately printed his version in 1913. It was originally intended that the Chronik should include guest writers, such as passive Brücke member and art collector, Gustav Schiefler, and this would have resulted in a publication closer in spirit to Der Blaue Reiter almanac project. Even more intriguing is the fact that in the Brücke year report of 1911/12, details were given of ‘a long-cherished plan’ to be realized by the end of 1912, ‘for a comprehensive exhibition inviting representatives of the new international art movement that will also reveal through some artworks the similar aspirations of other peoples and other times’.84 As Meike Hoffmann has pointed out, this is clearly reminiscent of the project of Der Blaue Reiter and, as was the case with the Chronik, it did not transpire as the group hoped.85 While Heckel’s address is given at the foot of this year report (as was usually the case with him being in effect the business manager of Die Brücke), the report seems to have been closely steered by Kirchner. In typical fashion Kirchner did not want his work (or that of the Brücke group more generally) to be eclipsed by the advances of other artists. The careful inclusion of the expression ‘long-cherished’ deliberately indicated that they had independently arrived at such ideas. Exploring certain patterns of intention from his correspondence with Marc in the early part of 1912, it could be that Heckel had it in mind to include the Blaue Reiter artists in the Brücke Chronik in some capacity; he was certainly keen on the two circles collaborating and greatly welcomed Marc’s efforts in ensuring that Die Brücke had a place in Der Blaue Reiter almanac. In an undated letter that would have been written at some point in May 1912, Heckel wrote to Marc: ‘Today your “Blaue Reiter” book was delivered. It is a big help for all of us and for the movement; I for my part want to thank you and Kandinsky very much’.86 It seems possible that the Brücke artists (specifically Kirchner and Heckel) were already in possession of a copy of the almanac at the point of leaving Berlin to decorate the chapel in Cologne on the 17 May 1912. Just three days



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before their departure, Heckel wrote to Schiefler to inform him that Die Brücke’s own plans to create a book, the Chronik, would have to be suspended for a while due to his and Kirchner’s intensive preparations for the Sonderbund chapel.87 And later in the year, Heckel would also write to Marc to assure him that their plans had not been dropped altogether: ‘I think we will still succeed with the book since the book is what we want’.88 The book or Chronik in question was not a success, mainly because Kirchner hijacked the project in the wake of Pechstein’s departure from the group and produced a text that was self-aggrandizing, which upset Heckel in particular. The main Chronik text by Kirchner remains, nevertheless, a revealing rhetorical statement, and one that signals both visually and textually the two key inspirations that Kirchner was prepared to acknowledge: namely, the Gothic tradition and so-called ‘primitive’ art. In the Chronik, aside from references to the ‘old prints of Nürnberg’, canonical figures such as Cranach and Beham, and ‘other German masters of the Middle Ages’, Kirchner proudly mentions that for the Sonderbund, Heckel and himself were commissioned to decorate the chapel.89 While there is no reason to doubt that these Brücke artists had an independent interest in the Gothic, Kirchner’s fascination with the idea of ‘modern Gothic’ was fortified both directly and indirectly by the publications of Worringer.90 The Sonderbund curators, also inspired by Worringer, were interested in finding northern antecedents for Expressionism. The editors of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, who in many ways appeared to be visually translating Worringer’s theories – linking expressionist art in the broadest possible sense to all kinds of non-classical material, including ‘primitive’ fifteenth-century German and Swiss woodblock prints – would have led the way for Kirchner. The tetramorphic image of Kirchner’s woodcut for the Chronik cover is intriguing and it is visually related to the tradition of medieval illuminated manuscripts.91 Here, there is a close point of contact with the editorial project of Macke, Kandinsky and Marc, as Worringer’s Die alt deutsche Buchillustration (Old German Book Illustration) published by Piper in 1912, was a book that directly influenced some of the visual arrangements in the almanac; indeed Piper lent the editors of the Blaue Reiter plates from Worringer’s work for their own project.92 Macke, who knew Worringer personally from his involvement at the Gereonsklub in Cologne, and who had promoted his work to his friend Marc in July 1911, may well have been the first to recommend Worringer’s publications to Kirchner on meeting the artist early the following year. Worringer’s respect for the authenticity of expression seen in much ‘non-European’ art, set alongside his appreciation of the German Gothic, also helped to validate Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter’s concomitant interest in the wood carving of African and Oceanic art and artefacts, and the roughcut appearance and stylistic peculiarities of the woodcut portraits in the Chronik are ­suggestive of all these sources. Kirchner respected Kandinsky and the other Blaue Reiter artists, and, as indicated above, there are certainly links between the almanac and the Chronik. Both were intended to be a compendium of theoretical articles, photographs, reproductions of paintings and prints. Both identified non-academic/non-classical sources as an inspiration, and both challenged the divisive hierarchy of fine art and craft, attempting to blur such conventional

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Christian Weikop distinctions. The idea behind Kirchner’s two theoretical texts in the Chronik, ‘Über die Malerei’ (‘Concerning Painting’) and ‘Über die Graphik’ (‘Concerning Graphics’) must have also been a response to Kandinsky’s manifesto, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (Concerning the Spiritual in Art: Especially in Painting), published towards the end of 1911, as well as the two theoretical texts in the almanac, ‘Über die Formfrage’ (Concerning the Question of Form), and ‘Über Bühnenkomposition’ (Concerning Stage Composition). Buchheim had argued that the Blaue Reiter artists were given to programmes and theorizing, whereas the Brücke artists were motivated by spontaneity and raw direct experience. During the Brücke period, however, Kirchner did make some tentative steps towards theorizing about his art, something he developed much more in the post-Brücke years when using the pseudonym Louis de Marsalle.93 His two attempts to formulate artistic principles in the Chronik were considerably shorter than Kandinsky’s more analytical writings, amounting to no more than a paragraph in each case. Beyond lifting the ‘Über’ of Kandinsky’s titles, he also owed something to the latter’s idea of ‘inner necessity’. Kirchner stressed that there were no preconceived laws to artistic creation. In ‘Über die Malerei’ he wrote: ‘the instinctive enhancement of form through sensual experience is transferred impulsively onto the surface […] the artwork arises through the tireless transposition of experience into creative work’.94 Kandinsky would have placed rather less emphasis on ‘sensual experience’ (sinnlichen Erlebnis) and more likely would have substituted this expression with ‘spiritual experience’ (geistiges Erlebnis), but both artists rejected naturalism in art in favour of forms of inner expression. In many ways though, in opposing programmatic formulations of a theoretical position and stressing the importance of personal sensory experience, Kirchner appeared to be challenging the more ascetic Kandinsky and his intellectual approach. Marc’s ‘Die “Wilden” ’ essay seems to testify to this approach in his comments about the modus operandi of the NKVM: ‘Characteristic of artists in the association was their strong emphasis on the program … perhaps one heard the word “synthesis” too often’.95 In negotiating this web of associations it should be acknowledged that there were also key aesthetic divergences between Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, something that can partially be gauged in their respective approaches to the woodcut medium. Woodcuts by Brücke artists often stressed, following the example of Gauguin and Munch, the grain and irregularities of timber, along with the traces of woodcutting tools in an expression of organic material, while Blaue Reiter woodcuts tend to be smooth and clean cut by comparison, and in the case of prints by Marc and Campendonk, almost have the appearance of engraved ivory. In general, Brücke’s woodcarving culture was more varied than that of Der Blaue Reiter. In addition to Gauguin and Munch, Die Brücke recognized and were directly inspired by the woodcarvings of Cameroon tribesmen and Palau islanders, appreciated as a shared form of Gemeinschaft expression; whereas for Der Blaue Reiter an interest in African and Oceanic artefacts was more theoretical. These were sources that existed alongside Gothic carvings, children’s drawings, and naïve or folk art as examples of non-academic ‘authentic’ artistic production. They functioned more as a series of visual correspondences to modern art than as transformative sources. By contrast, many



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Brücke woodcuts and wood carvings were direct responses to carved objects seen in the ethnographic museums of Dresden and Berlin. In the Chronik, Kirchner was even willing to admit such a connection whereas he usually defended himself vigorously against any suggestion that he might have been influenced by other contemporary artists or movements in his or Die Brücke’s work.96 It is true that Macke shared with Kirchner and Die Brücke a keen interest in the African and Oceanic objects that could be seen in German ethnographic museums. Macke’s illustrated essay for the almanac, ‘Masks’, is an important contribution to the anti-academic vision of the whole project. These sources did not, however, impact on Macke’s own art or the aesthetics of Der Blaue Reiter in the same way that they did on Die Brücke.97 The opposite is perhaps true with respect to the influence of peasant art and culture, which also appears in the almanac in the form of Bavarian glass painting and Russian folk art. During the same period that the Munich-based Blaue Reiter were making summer excursions to rural Murnau, the Brücke artists (together and separately), made trips to various remote parts of northern Germany. Whereas Der Blaue Reiter explored peasant art and culture in various forms and often represented rural populations, Die Brücke, with the notable exception of Pechstein, who produced an extraordinary set of rough-hewn woodcuts representing Nidden fishermen, were more interested in the ‘primitivism’ of their free body culture. Nevertheless, the degree to which Der Blaue Reiter ‘played’ primitive is open to question, as Robin Lenman has commented, ‘Kandinsky, even in lederhosen, was the embodiment of a sophisticated cosmopolitanism’.98 It was not until after Die Brücke dissolved that Schmidt-Rottluff increasingly turned to the peasant theme and, on his move to the Swiss Alps in 1917, Kirchner totally embraced the mountain culture of Swiss peasants, in a manner that resonated more strongly in his work of this period than in the art of many members of Der Blaue Reiter, perhaps Gabriele Münter withstanding. The aesthetic and ideological similarities and divergences between the Chronik and the almanac are complex and fascinating as well as being difficult to summarize. It is worth remembering that the latter was intended to be a new periodical signalling new directions and inspirations, in opposition to the established neoclassicism of the academy, whereas in its ‘final’ contested form the Chronik was an attempt to sum up what had already been achieved by Die Brücke. It was therefore more of a historical document. With the incredible diversity of its contributors, the almanac expressed an international vision of modernism, while the Chronik was ultimately far more an expression of cultural nationalism than cosmopolitan internationalism. In sum, I have attempted to demonstrate that Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter shared to some degree aesthetic and ideological ideals and developed strong anti-­academic agendas in their artistic practices. These circles intersected through the mutual desire of their members to push against what was increasingly interpreted as the outworn styles and values of the Berlin and Munich Secessions, those once progressive alternatives to the conservative academy system, alternatives that this emerging expressionist generation no longer considered to be sufficiently avant-garde. They were also unified, in the

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Christian Weikop words of Long, by ‘an antipathy to the dominance of materialism in modern life and made reference to Nietzsche’s unsettling of contemporary morality’.99 Yet it should be re-emphasized that key points of distinction between Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter can also be expressed in Nietzschean terms, especially concerning the markedly different attitudes of their respective leading figures, Kirchner and Kandinsky, regarding the relationship between art and erotic life. Kandinsky’s austere distaste for life drawing has been discussed and when the singular nude or couples very occasionally surfaced in his oeuvre, figures were veiled, the motifs stripped of their ‘obvious physicality’,100 in his striving for spiritual renewal through abstract art. And while the nude was more present in the work of other Blaue Reiter artists such as Marc and Macke, there is still a paradisiacal purity about Marc’s forms of bodily representation, an innocence in keeping with his seeking out the inner spiritual side of nature, principally through his paintings of animals. By contrast, the Brücke artists were completely committed to representing sexualized female and male nudity as expressive of their élan vital, in their exotic studio culture or en plein air. Their art was dominated by responses to figures and objects of the tangible world. On this important final concluding point, one might well imagine Die Brücke imploring their fellow Blaue Reiter artists, in the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (a favourite of Kirchner and Heckel) to: Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth […] Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls […] Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do – back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.101

Notes 1 For an English translation of this essay see Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (London, Tate Publishing 2006), pp. 61–4. 2 In an early table of contents for the almanac, there was also an essay titled ‘Die “Wilden” Frankreichs’ by the Fauve, Henri Le Fauconnier, but it was not included in the final publication. See Ibid., p. 244. Lankheit translates ‘Die Wilden’ as the ‘The Savages’, which of course also brings to mind Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), who referred to himself and his art in these terms, and whose posthumous critical reception in Germany bestowed upon him an almost mythic status as a trailblazing artist. 3 D. Gordon, ‘On the origin of the word “Expressionism” ’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 29 (1966), p. 381. 4 In terms of not feeling restricted to participating in avant-garde circles in any one country, Kees van Dongen was not dissimilar to the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet, who was also a member of Die Brücke, and who had exhibited in Munich in the same venues used by the NKVM/Blaue Reiter, befriended Kandinsky and others in the Munich circle, and who exhibited with August Macke in Jena in 1912. 5 A. Hoberg, ‘Der Blaue Reiter auf der Sonderbundausstellung 1912’, in Barbara Schaefer (ed.),



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1912 Mission Moderne. Die Jahrhundertschau des Sonderbundes (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2012), p. 256. 6 B. Herbert, German Expressionism. Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1983), p. 184. Herbert’s often overlooked monograph raised some expectation of sustained comparative analysis and historical reinvestigation, but he persisted in treating the two circles separately. 7 P. Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1914). 8 Oswald Herzog, ‘Der abstrakte Expressionismus’, Der Sturm, 10:2 (1919), p. 29. 9 R-C. Washton Long, ‘Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism’, in Christian Weikop (ed.), Bridging History: New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), p. 13; Fechter, Der Expressionismus, p. 28. 10 Washton Long, ‘Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism’, p. 19 11 Herschel B. Chipp, ‘German Expressionism and Abstract Art: The Harvard Collections by Charles L. Kuhn; The German Expressionists by Bernard S. Myers; German Expressionist Painting by Peter H. Selz’, Art Bulletin, 41:1 (1959), p. 119. 12 Ibid., p. 121. 13 Lothar Bucheim, ‘BRÜCKE. The Fathers of German Expressionism / Die Väter des deutschen Expressionismus / Les pères de l’expressionnisme allemand’, Graphis, 14:79 (1958), pp. 412– 19, 453, 455–7. 14 Lothar Bucheim’s strong preference for Die Brücke over Der Blaue Reiter is made evident when considering the far more extensive holdings of the former in the Buchheim Museum at Bernried by Starnberger See. The Bucheim collection catalogue lists 386 works by Brücke artists compared with just 15 works by Blaue Reiter artists. See Expressionisten. Sammlung Buchheim (Feldafing: Buchheim Verlag, 1998). 15 L. Buchheim, Der Blaue Reiter und die ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’ (Feldafing: Buchheim Verlag, 1959), pp. 19–22. 16 ‘Der Unterschied […] tritt noch starker ins Licht, wenn man bedenkt, dass für Bruecke ja nichte die Residenzstadt Dresden, die Stadt des Barock, Heimat war, sondern das proletarische Viertel um den Friedrichstaedter Rangierbahnhof’, Ibid., p. 19. 17 Ibid., p. 20. 18 ‘Waehrend die Bruecke Maler kaum Kontakte zu auslaendischer Kunst hatten, waren die Maler, die sich in Muenchen zusammenschlossen, weltoffen’, Ibid., p. 20. 19 See Weikop, Bridging History, and Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (Los Angeles: LACMA with Prestel, 2014). 20 Shulamith Behr also rightly comments on the ‘male’ make-up of Brücke’s core active membership, as opposed to the more gender inclusive nature of the NKVM and the Blaue Reiter. See S. Behr, Expressionism (London: Tate, 1999), p. 32. 21 C. Weikop, ‘Brücke and Canonical Association’, in R. Heller (ed.), Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905–1913 (New York: Hatje Cantz, 2009), pp. 102–27. 22 ‘Im ausgeglicheneren geistigen Klima Muenchens’, Buchheim, Der Blaue Reiter, p. 20. 23 ‘die Bruecke Maler sich kaum mit Theorien beschaeftigen’, Ibid., p. 22. 24 Ibid., p. 20. 25 Ibid., p. 21. 26 R. Heller (ed.), Brücke: German Expressionist Prints from the Granvil and Marcia Specks Collection (Evanston: Northwestern University, 1988), p. 306. 27 K. Lankheit, ‘Bibel-Illustrationen des Blauen Reiters’, Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (Nuremberg, 1963), pp. 199–207. 28 P. Lasko, ‘The Student Years of Die Brücke and their Teachers’, Art History, 20:1 (1997), pp. 72–3.

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Christian Weikop 29 See C. Remme, ‘Die Holzschnitt-Ausstellung I Der Künstlergruppe “Brücke” 1906 in Dresden’, in M. M. Moeller (ed.), Frühe Druckgraphik der Brücke (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2005), p. 12. 30 Buchheim, Der Blaue Reiter, p. 20. 31 A. Dückers, ‘Portfolios’, in S. Barron and B. Davis (eds), German Expressionist Prints and Drawings: The Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies (Los Angeles: Prestel, 1989), p. 69. 32 See Peter Vergo, Art in Vienna (London: Phaidon, 1975), pp. 84–5. 33 For the press response to this and other Neue Secession exhibitions see A. Daemgen, ‘Die Neue Secession in Berlin’, in Liebermanns Gegner. Die Neue Secession in Berlin und der Expressionismus (Cologne: Weinand Verlag, 2011), pp. 13–83. 34 Arguably this had already occurred at the ‘New German and French Art’ Sonderbund exhibition at the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 1910, when artworks by both NKVM and Brücke members were exhibited, but not in such close proximity and in the context of a much larger international presentation. See Ausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler, Düsseldorf, 1910: vom 16. Juli bis 9. Oktober im Städtischen Kunstpalast am KaiserWilhelm-Park. Illustrierter Katalog. This catalogue is available in Digital Collections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries: http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collec​ tion/p16028coll4/id/1707, accessed 30 November 2018. 35 ‘Wir […] sammelten […] die Namen aller derjenigen, die uns als Mitkämpfer erschienen. Ich selbst kam so in Verbindung mit der Gruppe des ‘Blauen Reiters’ in München, mit Franz Marc, August Macke und Kandinsky’. M. Pechstein, Erinnerungen, ed. Leopold Reidemeister (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1960), p. 41. 36 See Lankheit, ‘The Plan of the Almanac and the Work of the Editors’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 15–23. See also Appendix ‘Documents: Facsimiles and Translations’ in the same edition, pp. 241–60. 37 For a discussion on Pechstein’s soured relations within the Neue Secession see Bernhard Fulda and Aya Soika, Max Pechstein: The Rise and Fall of Expressionism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), p. 110. 38 Cited in Ibid. 39 W. Kandinsky and F. Marc, Briefwechsel, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1983), p. 126. 40 Cited in Lankheit, ‘A History of the Almanac’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 20. 41 Cited in Heller, Brücke, p. 5. My italics. 42 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 61. My italics. 43 ‘1903 schloß sich “Brücke” zu einer Vereinigund zusammen aus der Notwendigkeit, für die Bestrebungen der neudeuschen Kunst einen Weg zu bahnen’. See M. M. Moeller (ed.), Dokumente der Künstlergruppe Brücke (Berlin: Brücke Archiv 22, 2007), p. 166. 44 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 62. 45 Ibid., p. 64. 46 C. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 209. 47 This was held at the Hans Goltz gallery in Munich from February until April 1912. 48 Cited in P. Jelavich, ‘Dance of Life, Dance of Death’, in S. Figura (ed.), German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse (New York: MoMA, 2011), p. 39. 49 R-C. Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wihelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 30. 50 Ibid. 51 ‘und in München vollkommen unbekannt war’. W. Kandinsky, ‘Der Blaue Reiter. Rückblick’, Das Kunstblatt, 14:2 (1930), p. 59. 52 Kandinsky and Marc, Briefwechsel, p. 100.



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53 ‘sehr lebendig, etwas afrikanisch, aber das macht nichts’, Ibid. The first Blaue Reiter exhibition was a touring show that had staging posts all over Europe between January 1912 and July 1914. Different artworks could be seen in different venues. Lankheit notes that Kirchner’s wood sculpture had probably already been shown at the Gereonsklub venue. 54 Kirchner to Kandinsky (Letter 203) in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Der Gesamte Briefwechsel Band I (Briefe von 1901–1923), ed. Hans Delfs (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010), p. 89. 55 ‘einer wunderbaren Kultur der Farben’, Ibid. 56 ‘9+ ½ Akte mit oder ohne Schamhaare, 5 Badende und 2 Circusbilder’. Kandinsky and Marc, Briefwechsel, p. 112. 57 Ibid., p. 116. 58 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 20. 59 ‘Ihre Anschauungen über die Brückeleute kann ich mit bestem Willen nicht teilen; ich weiß nicht, ob Sie angesichts ihrer Bilder, die ich in Berlin gesehen habe […] Schade, daß Sie das größte Porträt, das ich zur bl. Reiterausstellung nach Köln geschickt habe, nicht kennen […] Mit Impressionismus haben diese Bilder sehr sehr wenig zu tun, mit dem modernen Leben und der Großstadt sehr viel, sie sind äußerlich häßlich, vor allem Kirchner und Heckel. Aber voll tiefem Sinn und Realismus, so empfinde ich sie’. Kandinsky and Marc, Briefwechsel, p. 130. 60 Ibid., p. 150. 61 Kirchner to Marc (Letter 148) in Kirchner, Der Gesamte Briefwechsel, p. 65. 62 M. Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910–1914 (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2004), p. 73. 63 Cited in Behr, Expressionism, p. 34. 64 Cited in ibid., p. 41. 65 Ibid., p. 34. 66 A. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation – Volume 1 (1844), trans. E. F .J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1967), p. 215. 67 Cited in H. Gale, ‘Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Music’, New Englander and Yale Review, 48:218 (1888), p. 366. My italics. 68 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901/6), ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), p. 421. 69 This ground plan is reproduced in M. Hoffmann, ‘Die Brücke-Künstler auf der Sonderbundausstellung’, in H. Gerlinger und K. Schneider (eds), Gemeinsames Ziel und eigene Wege: Die Brücke und ihr Nachwirken (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2009), p. 18. 70 ‘Heckel und Kirchner haben den Auftrag, in Köln einen Kapellenraum in der Ausstellung auszumalen und sind riesig glücklich darüber’. Kandinsky and Marc, Briefwechsel, p. 173. 71 Cited in S. Partsch, Franz Marc, 1880–1916 (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), p. 63. 72 See Hoberg, ‘Der Blaue Reiter auf der Sonderbundausstellung 1912’, pp. 249–51. 73 See Heckel’s letter to Marc, c. April/May 1912, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 31. 74 See Hoberg, ‘Der Blaue Reiter auf der Sonderbundausstellung 1912’, p. 251. 75 See Heckel’s letter to Marc, c. April/May 1912, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 31. 76 Ibid., p. 32. 77 Cited in H. Strzoda, ‘Erich Heckel und seine Künstlerfreunde Franz Marc und Lyonel Feininger’, in M. M. Moeller (ed.), Erich Heckel. Aufbruch und Tradition (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2010) p. 60. 78 See Heckel’s letter to Marc, c. autumn 1912/spring 1913, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 32. 79 ‘Die Brücke tut nicht mit: Schmidt-Rottluff schrieb einen langen Brief, in dem er, bei aller

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Christian Weikop Sympathie für Waldens Unternehmen, erklärte, er müsse die ‘Interessen des Sonderbundes’ vor allem wurden!!! Auf einen solchen Blödsinn kann man überhaupt nicht antworten. Heckel ist auch voll Angst, sich im ‘Sturm’ zu kompromittieren. Er pendelt etwas zur alten Sezession hinüber. Mag er! Es geht auch ohne Brücke’. See Wolfgang Macke (ed.) August Macke und Franz Marc: Briefwechsel (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1964), p. 158. 80 See Macke’s letter to Walden, 21 April 1913, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 59. 81 See Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 244. 82 Ibid., p. 245. 83 Ibid., p. 15. 84 ‘Der schon lange gehegte Plan einer umfassenden Ausstellung, zu der eine grosser Anzahl Vertreter der neuen, internationalen Kunstbewegung eingeladen werden soll und die auch ahnlichen Bestrebungen anderer Volker und Zeiten mit einigen Werken zeigen wird, verwirklicht sich, wie wir hoffen, Ende dieses Jahr’. This report in reproduced in M. Hoffmann, Leben und Schaffen der Künstlergruppe Brücke (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2005), pp. 298–9. 85 Ibid., p. 299. 86 Heckel to Marc, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 32. 87 Cited in Hoffmann, ‘Die Brücke-Künstler’, p. 23. 88 Heckel to Marc, n.d. c. autumn 1912/spring 1913, translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, p. 33. 89 E. L. Kirchner, Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke (1913), translated in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, pp. 23–5. 90 For a full discussion of ‘modern Gothic’ see S. Simmons, ‘To Stand and See Within: Expressionist Space in Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Rhine Bridge at Cologne’, Art History, 27:2 (April 2004), pp. 250–81. 91 The Chronik cover can also be compared to Schmidt-Rottluff’s hammered and painted tin relief of 1912, which presented the artists as the Four Evangelists, and was produced for the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. 92 For a detailed discussion on the use of Worringer’s plates in the Blaue Reiter almanach, see J. Horsley, Der Almanach des Blauen Reiters als Gesamtkunstwerk (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 127–56. 93 See C. Weikop, ‘Ernst Ludwig Kirchner as his own Critic: The Artist’s Statements as Stratagems of Self-Promotion’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 48:4 (2012), pp. 406–20. 94 ‘Die instinktive Steigerung der Form im sinnlichen Erlebnis wird impulsiv auf die Fläche übertragen […] Durch die restlose Umsetzung des Erlebnisses in die Arbeit entsteht das Kunstwerk’. ‘Über die Malerei’ is reproduced in Moeller (ed.), Dokumente der Künstlergruppe Brücke, p. 123. 95 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 64. 96 Kirchner, Chronik, p. 24. 97 Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 83–9. 98 R. Lenman, Artists and Society in Germany, 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). p. 141. 99 R. Long, ‘Kandinsky’s Vision of Utopia as a Garden of Love’, Art Journal, 43:1 (1983), p. 54. 100 Ibid., p. 53. 101 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1954), p. 188.

5 Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk in Munich and Zurich: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada Deborah Lewer

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u n i ch on the eve of World War I and Zurich in the midst of it: these were the contexts in which two of the most radical and innovative attempts to redefine the spiritual, material and political parameters for a vital and expanded art practice in modernity were worked out. In this chapter, I explore some of the connections between Der Blaue Reiter in pre-war Munich and the small circle of exiles in wartime Zurich who gathered at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 and who initiated Dada. Hans Arp and Emmy Hennings were involved in both contexts, as were other, more peripheral figures. The focus of this discussion, however, is on the two men whose thinking and practice were arguably the most significant for the development of Dada, and of Der Blaue Reiter, respectively: Hugo Ball, founder of the cabaret and of Dada in Zurich, and Wassily Kandinsky. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to show how Ball’s thinking on art, dance, theatre and the role of the artist in society was significantly shaped by his encounters with Kandinsky the individual, with the almanac of Der Blaue Reiter, and with Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art), published in 1911. Of particular interest is the extent to which Ball developed, modified and eventually refuted his own notion of the artist by reference – certainly more than to any other visual artist – to Kandinsky. This was the case before, during and after the period of his involvement with Dada. More than on aesthetic questions, then, Ball’s concern was with the philosophical, theological and social concept of the artist in modernity and – in Kandinsky’s chiliastic terms – on the brink of the ‘coming epoch of the new spiritual’.1 Further significant parallels between Der Blaue Reiter and Dada in Zurich can be seen in the ways that each involved a dynamic, eclectic relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’, between Kleinkunst (or the ‘little arts’) and the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) and between tradition and modernity. But there is also a paradox, significant for the history of Dada in Zurich, which I discuss at the end of this chapter: while Kandinsky’s influence informed Ball’s initiation of Dada in 1916, it appears also to have been a factor in Ball’s renunciation, just one year later, of the

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Deborah Lewer nascent Mouvement Dada (as Tristan Tzara formalized it), and arguably of modern art itself.

Ball in Munich, 1912–1914 For Ball, theatre was the forum in which he developed the ideas that would underpin his artistic activity over his ‘Expressionist’ (1912–1915) and ‘Dada’ (1916–1917) years. Having studied at the Max Reinhardt School in Berlin in 1910–1911, he gained a post as Dramaturg at the Plauen Stadttheater for the season 1911–1912. He then moved to Munich in the summer of 1912 to take up a similar role at the financially insecure Munich Lustspielhaus, which he renamed the Munich Kammerspiele. Ball had some acting experience and played occasional small stage parts but it is clear that at this time he was interested more in production and in the theoretical aspect of theatre than in the act of performance. He also wrote plays: among his first were Die Nase des Michelangelo (Michelangelo’s Nose) of 1911 and Der Henker von Brescia (The Hangman of Brescia) of 1914. The first performance of the season in Munich was the German première of Leonid Andreyev’s Das Leben des Menschen (Life of Man, 1906–1907), directed by Eugen Robert. The piece became important to him and is an example of the relative continuity of Ball’s activities between his time in Munich and his subsequent sojourn in Zurich. Reprised in a new, sparser form from the precedent of its Munich premiere, it would feature in the repertoire at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. With Emmy Hennings (whom he met in Munich in early 1913), Ball performed, as a reading, parts of it at the cabaret on at least two occasions.2 Ball’s place in the theatre in Munich was precarious. In 1913 and 1914, in the months before the outbreak of World War I, he was still clinging to his position. He was now part of the vast and complex network that constituted the literary and artistic avant-garde in Germany’s major cities and was keen to forge a reputation in this context.3 He contributed to the small, short-lived Munich journals that sprang up, broadly in the manner of Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion in Berlin, such as Neue Kunst and Revolution. The uncertainty of his job at the impoverished Kammerspiele also spurred Ball on to explore the possibilities both for other employment and for projects and collaborations elsewhere. He was evidently driven by a powerful sense of ambition to establish himself as a vital member of the contemporary literary and theatrical milieu, confiding in a letter to his sister in May 1914: ‘Little sister, I have such a longing to become a great artist! Day and night I think of nothing else’.4 However, the most decisive impact on his thinking at this time came from his encounter with the work and the person of Kandinsky. This influence was crucial for the theoretical framework Ball was beginning to develop for a new, reformed theatre that would incorporate all the arts. Ball looked to Kandinsky’s own vision for a synthesis of the arts (poetry, theatre, music, dance, painting), articulated in his Über das Geistige in der Kunst. His exploration of their practical implications manifested itself in a variety of planned, if not realized, projects. In cultural terms, arguably yet more important, however, was the immense potential that lay in the artist as cultural and spiritual redeemer of an era of stifling materialism.



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Ball intensely admired Kandinsky, who was twenty years his senior. He was enthralled by what he perceived as the Russian’s ‘genius’ and by the bohemian circle of international artists, writers and musicians connected to Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky’s own knowledge and interests – in Russian Futurist poetry, in anarchism, in dance and more – also fed Ball’s developing ideas about art’s potential, by international and collaborative means, to redeem an enervated and chaotic culture. An indicator of the reverence in which he held the artist was that for Ball, Kandinsky’s mere presence in the city was enough to elevate Munich to the pre-eminent German city of modernity: ‘What could be better and more beautiful for a city than for it to be home to a man whose achievements are living directives of the noblest kind?’ he wrote.5 Ball’s interest was focused on Kandinsky’s theoretical writing, his editorship, with Marc, of Der Blaue Reiter almanac, and on the spiritualized concept of Gesamtkunstwerk.6 But beyond this, it is also evident that Kandinsky himself represented for Ball the ideal and embodiment of the new artist for a new age. For Ball, Kandinsky’s ‘ultimate purpose’ was ‘not merely to create works of art, but to represent art itself’.7 Having renounced the Catholicism of his childhood, Ball was drawn at this time to a compelling Nietzschean vision of art in a post-moral, post-Christian condition. Like many of the Expressionist generation, he both absorbed and fuelled the apocalyptically inflected idea that his age was on the brink of a violent rupture that would herald a radically new epoch.8 It can already be found in his unfinished doctoral dissertation on the philosopher, where Ball wrote: ‘Already in Basel Nietzsche speaks of the gap that would open up after the annihilation of morality, and in which, instead of a new religion, one will have to place a kind of philosophical artwork with aesthetic values’.9 Kandinsky now represented for Ball the possibility for the genesis of new life in art and of art’s potential creatively and metaphysically to redeem humanity. Ball’s appraisal of Kandinsky was expansive, utopian and itself abstract. He was rarely specific about Kandinsky’s own practice. Indeed, the quotidian aspects of art-making, the process of crafting a work, and even formal technique appear barely to have interested him. Rather, the evidence (in the form of his private letters, his note-taking, his retrospectively edited diaries, and his public statements) all suggest that Kandinsky was important as a source of new possibilities: for personal and cultural connections and because he embodied, for Ball, the prophetic figure of the new artist. Reflecting on his contact with Kandinsky in Munich, he wrote that ‘it was as if [the artists] were the prophets of rebirth … When we spoke of Kandinsky and Picasso, we did not mean painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds, new paradises’.10 While Dada, within a few years, broadly challenged this culture’s faith in the capacity of the artist to create, God-like, ‘new worlds’, it nonetheless retained something of the powerful concept of the artist-priest as mediator of the divine.

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Collaboration with Der Blaue Reiter In the spring of 1914, Ball began to reflect more intently on the practical potential for aesthetic synthesis in theatre. He was drawn to the ideas around the Gesamtkunstwerk emerging in Expressionist circles, particularly those in Munich around Der Blaue Reiter. He saw an opportunity to realize some of these ideas and collaborate with artists in the Münchener Künstlertheater (Artists’ Theatre), another theatre that was at risk of financial failure and in need of new life. However, he was disciplined in this – in a quite literal sense – by Marc and Kandinsky. When Ball invited the two artists, along with several others, to provide the visual stage setting for performances at the Münchener Künstlertheater in April of 1914, the artists’ responses were benevolent but also uncompromising, chastising Ball precisely for his apparent inclination to preserve traditional divisions between the arts. Marc replied ‘I have not the slightest desire to take part in a half thing’ and Kandinsky responded that ‘it is as impossible only to determine the colour scheme as it would be only to choose the instruments for an unknown symphony’.11 Ball encountered here both the challenges inherent in a collaborative, synthetic artistic scheme and an instance of the attitude and conviction of Kandinsky and Marc that Kandinsky would later account for as follows: ‘From the beginning it was as plain as day to both of us that we had to proceed in a strictly dictatorial manner: complete freedom for the realisation of the embodied idea’.12 In connection with the project, Ball also wrote a strident article for the short-lived Munich theatre journal Phöbus. It appeared under the title Das Münchener Künstlertheater, with the subheading ‘A principle illumination’. Describing it as a ‘very radical’ article, Ball intended that its interrogation of conditions for theatre in Munich would provoke and help towards establishing his position as a radical reformer of theatre.13 It was a polemical article in which he diagnosed simultaneously the decline and the emancipation of theatre. He called for ‘a break with tradition’, framing his argument in terms of psychology and psychoanalysis, and argued against mere ‘dramas’. He summarized his vision in terms that suggest he had Kandinsky, in particular, in mind: The idea was for a ‘Theatre of New Art’, so to speak: of Expressionism. Outstanding representatives of new painterly and theatrical ideas saw new goals of revolutionary significance. It was no longer a question of a reform of the decorative scheme and stage space, but one of new creation. It was no longer at all a question of ‘decoration’ and ‘staging’. Rather of a new form of the entire dramatic-scenic, theatrical expression. It was a question of setting up a repertoire that pointed simultaneously to the future and into the past, to find plays that would not only be ‘dramas’, but that would represent the birth ground of all dramatic life, and would discharge themselves from the root simultaneously in dance, colour, mime, music and word. The emphasis here should be on the word ‘discharge’ [Entladung], with which the origin of the idea in Expressionist circles is signalled. One thought of the Bacchantes by Euripedes, of The Tempest by Shakespeare … of Chiushingura [sic] (a Japanese national play), of Elektra by



Der Blaue Reiter and Dada 109 Hoffmannsthal (relocated to Haiti or Catagonia [sic]), of The Yellow Sound by Kandinsky.14

This passage makes clear the many connections between Ball’s ideas about the new modern theatre and his attraction to the compelling synthetic vision of a vitalist Gesamtkunstwerk so characteristic of the circle around Kandinsky. Ball even made further explicit attempts to work in association with the artists of Der Blaue Reiter when he developed another project – closely related to the Künstlertheater idea – for a collaborative book publication under the title, Das Neue Theater (The New Theatre). The publication was to include contributions from Kandinsky, Marc, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Alfred Kubin, the architect Erich Mendelsohn, the theatre practitioner Nikolai Jevreinov, the choreographer Mikhail Fokin and the composer (and close friend of Kandinsky’s) Thomas von Hartmann. Many of these figures had also been identified by Ball in his article as those who should – ideally – be involved in realizing the new theatre.15 Ball planned for the book’s publication in October of 1914. He considered as an alternative title ‘Expressionist Theatre’. Like Der Blaue Reiter almanac, this collection was to be published by Reinhard Piper, and Ball clearly envisaged it as of equal significance to the almanac. He wrote to Kandinsky: I have reached an agreement with Piper, that he will produce the book on similar terms to those of the ‘Blaue Reiter’ … I already think, however, that the thing (in the interests of the idea) will expand beyond the context of a brochure and could perhaps be designed as a pendant to the ‘Blaue Reiter’ (naturally only with your agreement).16 There were also plans for an ‘International Society for New Art’. (Something of the dynamics of pre-war avant-garde art circles are revealed by Ball’s assurance to Kandinsky, in this same letter, that he would not tell Walden anything of these plans). The outbreak of war and Kandinsky’s departure from Munich put a premature end to the project. It was only later, under very different conditions in wartime Zurich, that Ball was able to make another attempt at something resembling an ‘International Society for New Art’. Some years later, when he published his diaries as Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Flight out of Time), Ball remembered that the programme for the Münchener Künstlertheater was to have looked something like this: Kandinsky Gesamtkunstwerk Marc Scenes from The Tempest Fokin On ballet Hartmann Anarchy in music Paul Klee Designs for the Bacchantes Kokoschka Scenes and dramas Ball Expressionism and stage Jevreinov On psychology

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Deborah Lewer Mendelsohn Stage architecture Kubin Designs for Floh im Panzerhaus17 The outline – combining theatre, music, painting, dance and architecture – indicates the expanded sense in which Ball used and understood the word and the concept ‘theatre’, and indeed Gesamtkunstwerk as used by Kandinsky, who heads the list. At the same time, in the summer of 1914, Ball was also drawing up plans for a series of events that he wanted to put on at the Kammerspiele. He sketched his ideas on two sides of a single sheet of paper that survives to this day in his estate.18 They provide insight into a series of themed matinées that Ball wanted to stage over the theatre’s next season – that is, from September 1914 to March 1915. These notes were never published and are barely mentioned even in the specialist research on Ball, but they indicate that Ball planned seven (or actually eight mis-numbered) themed matinees to run each month as follows: I  Japanese Matinée II Kandinsky III Kokoschka IV  [Heinrich] Lautensack V  ‘Aktion’ (to include Ball’s own work as well as that of others) VI Futurists VI  [sic] Hardekopf – Hiller VII  [Paul] Claudel19 There is also a list, with projected dates, this time omitting the ‘Futurist’ matinée. Ball’s desire to integrate contemporary visual art was important in these plans and the key name – appearing in Ball’s hand-writing three times, alongside the matinée headings, is ‘Walden’.20 In July 1914 Ball visited Herwarth Walden, the influential Sturm impresario, in Berlin. The purpose of the visit was to discuss borrowing artworks from Walden to show in the foyer of the Kammerspiele during the period of the planned matinees. Aware of the value of Kandinsky’s connections, Ball asked him for ‘a few lines’ to help with access to Walden in Berlin.21 Following the visit Ball wrote to his sister: ‘I have been successful in arranging for continuous exhibitions of the Sturm (Herwarth Walden in Berlin) in our foyer from 1st September on’. He wrote that these exhibitions of Futurist, Cubist and Expressionist works would be ‘the most radical there is in the field of painting today’ and ‘our theatre will be in 1914/15 perhaps the most interesting in Germany’.22 We can only speculate on the significance these events may have had for the history of the avant-garde; Ball’s plans were foiled by the outbreak of World War I. Having seen his hopes for putting these ideas into action dashed, Ball left Munich and ended up, after a brief and traumatic excursion to see the fighting on the Front, in Berlin. By December 1914, he was enthusing over the creative vitality of Berlin and the



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artistic milieu, where he detected ‘new life’ and a new radical impetus in contrast to the Munich he had left behind. His remarks give a sense of the disappointments he had faced in Munich: Here in Berlin it is most comfortable. (Never again to Munich!) The city has initiative, energy, intellect. There are people here at the cutting edge with whom you can work things over … [Munich] is no place for a career. / Here a new life is getting going: anarcho-revolutionary (I think that’s what they call it). Contradictory (without its own contradictions). Active. ‘I want to see actions’.23 The initiatives Ball took in Munich, thwarted as they were, need to be admitted more often to studies of Dada for a number of reasons. They modify the notion, which would be expressed polemically by the Berlin Dadaists in particular, that Dada represented a thorough-going refutation of Expressionism. There are also grounds for incorporating them more fully into historical accounts of Der Blaue Reiter. Shulamith Behr has pointed out that the influence did not only go one way; Ball was also instrumental in redirecting Kandinsky’s ideas about the Bühnengesamtkunstwerk.24 Considering such pre-war initiatives also enables us to see how Ball later adapted some of these plans for an integration of the visual arts with a live performance programme and a collective publication at both the Cabaret Voltaire and, more formally, at the Galerie Dada in Zurich.

Ball’s reading of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst Around the time of Ball’s closest collaboration with Kandinsky and Marc, he was evidently reading at least some sections of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst. An unpublished notebook from that year also survives in Ball’s estate.25 It contains the jottings he made while reading Kandinsky’s book and others. His notes on Kandinsky’s text fill roughly two pages of the book. They are either short copied excerpts, or in some cases abbreviated or summarized excerpts, but they do not digress from or comment on the text (this is in keeping with Ball’s lifelong habit of reading and note-taking in the excerpt form). While it is impossible to know how and what Ball actually read, or even whether he was reading the book for the first time (though this is likely), his surviving notes mean that it is possible at least to draw some tentative conclusions about the focus of his interest. They can be conjectured as follows: Ball was not studying the full extent of Kandinsky’s theorization of the Geist in art and the forces of history or reading the book with particular attention to detail. Rather, he sought to grasp just some of the main premises of particular parts of its argument. If we take his notes as a rough indication of what he actually read of Kandinsky’s text, they suggest that in fact he may have all but skimmed about four fifths of the book. After just a couple of brief notes from early pages, Ball concentrated his note-taking on the final short sections of Kandinsky’s book: chapter VII on ‘Theory’, chapter VIII on ‘Artwork and Artist’ and the conclusion. This corresponds with Ball’s engagement, which, I am suggesting, was less with his

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Deborah Lewer practice, certainly less with Kandinsky’s formal aesthetic theories than with what Ball saw represented in Kandinsky and his vision for the future role of the artist: the artist redefined for the new age as redeemer, even, metaphorically, as Christ-like saviour. In Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst, the lengthy theoretical passages on colour and form, for example, appear to have concerned Ball very little. One of the passages he did copy reads as follows: The artist is no Sunday’s child in life: he has no right to live without duty, he must carry out a hard task, which often becomes his cross to bear. He must know that his every action, feeling, thought are part of that pure but firm material out of which his works arise and that because of this, he is not free in life, but only in art.26 Philip Mann comments on the extent to which Ball took the implications of Kandinsky’s theories: While Kandinsky saw a work of art as something that existed in its own right, out of inner necessity, Ball regarded it as a signpost towards a utopian world, and gave the artist a messianic role. Ball perceived the division between art and society in far more extreme terms than Kandinsky, claiming that it was the theatre alone that was capable of revitalising society.27 Notions of freedom and obligation, sacrifice and redemption in art run through much of Ball’s thinking over the next few years, as can be seen in his published diaries, Die Flucht aus der Zeit and in essays such as ‘Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit’ (‘The Artist and the Sickness of the Age’). Even after he had rejected much of Expressionism, the connection of these ideas with Kandinsky as exemplary artist remains. A point rarely addressed in the scholarship on Dada is that Ball’s interest in dance developed under Kandinsky’s influence. Dance and choreography elements feature increasingly in Ball’s own plans for the ‘new theatre’ as a direct result of his encounter with Kandinsky. Intriguingly, he seems also to have been interested in the relatively few passages in Über das Geistige in der Kunst that deal with dance. One of the longest passages he noted addresses concepts of physical movement in relation to the ‘new dance’.28 Ball also noted other remarks on dance and copied out the following passage, with which Kandinsky introduces his threefold scheme for stage composition (consisting of musical movement, painterly movement and artistic dance movement): This dance of the future, which is placed at the height of today’s music and painting, will at the same moment acquire the ability, as the third element, to bring into being stage composition, which will be the first work of monumental art.29



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Given his reading of this particular passage of Kandinsky’s, it is worth also considering Ball’s own most developed published discussion of the new dance. This was an essay he wrote a few years later in Switzerland in 1917. It articulated his response to visiting Ascona and the community at Monte Verità and encountering modern dance, eurhythmics and the dance theories of Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman. The Dadaists in Zurich had little time for the naturist colonies and sandal-wearing libertarians who retreated from modern life by gathering in the hills (there were several such groups in Switzerland at this time, many grouped around Monte Verità). Ball was certainly sceptical of them when he spent time in Ascona in the summer of 1916, writing to Tristan Tzara: You ask about Ascona. It is a village without any comforts where currently one can hardly find a room to rent. There is a horde of imbecilic nature people wandering about in sandals and roman tunics. There is no entertainment, no books, no newspapers. There is only nice weather.30 Nonetheless, the following year Ball described Laban’s and Wigman’s theories of dance as ‘an artistic communal and festival idea (Festspielidee) of rich and productive possibilities’.31 It is surely significant that Ball spoke in similar terms – in retrospect – of his involvement with the theatre in Munich: ‘Expressionist theatre, according to my thesis, is a festival idea (Festspielidee) and encompasses a new understanding of the Gesamtkunstwerk’.32 It is clear that the integration of dance within a broadly conceived communal Gesamtkunstwerk interested Ball. In this light, the overtly synthetic qualities of his painterly and musical description of the new expressive dance – of Wigman – also suggest Kandinsky’s influence. Ball wrote: From the religious point of view, Mary Wigman is a Rembrandt nature. She loves the mysticism of the surface, light, dark, the counterpoint of colours and composition; the great, genial language, transfiguration of the inner line and the sudden illumination of spiritual complexes.33 I suggest that Ball’s reading of Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst enabled him to work though fundamental ideas articulating an essentialist and transcendental concept of art: that progressive contemporary culture was on the brink of a ‘new epoch’ (Kandinsky) and that this epoch would be characterized by ‘the spiritual’. I have discussed elsewhere the significance of the concept of a creative practice that eschews the ‘bodily’ in favour of the ‘spiritual’ and how this accords closely with the core principles of asceticism underpinning Ball’s thought at key moments.34 Certainly, Hans Arp’s later comment that ‘Hugo Ball’s dream had man resurrected, in reality, from his mystifying physicality’, was, particularly apt.35 Ball’s 1914 handwritten notes on Über das Geistige in der Kunst end with his own triumphant repetition of Kandinsky’s and Marc’s slogan: ‘Es kommt: Die Epoche des großen Geistigen’ (‘It is Coming: The Epoch of the Great Spiritual’).36

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The Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich How did these ideas manifest themselves in Ball’s practice and in Dada? The Cabaret Voltaire was one arena in which this was worked out. Ball founded this modest little ‘artists’ bar’ in February 1916. It can be seen to have pursued a synthesis of Kleinkunst and Gesamtkunstwerk. Its mixed social composition and its repertoire brought into close juxtaposition ‘high’ and ‘low’, international and local cultural elements. The performances were nightly; the focus on the part of Ball, Hennings, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and others on developing the cabaret as a site for international modern art was mediated by the more prosaic demands of the casual, local, beer-drinking clientele. Musical elements performed by Ball, Hennings and invited or spontaneous guests ranged from Debussy and Skriabin to a Russian balalaika troupe and popular cabaret songs. The Cabaret Voltaire involved both ambitions for a progressive, pointedly international, pacifist and avant-garde fusion of the arts and the need to compete with the many other forms of nightly entertainment available in that ‘amusement quarter’ of Zurich. Ball and Hennings had ample experience of both – from pre-war Munich and from several months as part of a down-market varieté troupe in Zurich just before Ball founded the cabaret. In wartime Zurich and at the Cabaret Voltaire, Ball was hopeful for the prospects of a social and intellectual revolution. He sought to realize a tendency that he thought he could see emerging in recent literature – a nearing of what he called the ‘intellectual’ and ‘proletarian’ elements. In much later life, Richard Huelsenbeck, who had gone to Zurich to join his friend Ball at the cabaret, gave a thought-provoking, rarely quoted account of the significance of the cabaret’s name. For all its subjectivity (and bearing in mind its context, which is a discussion of Ball’s post-Dada polemic, Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz), the recollection sheds light on the cultural politics of the cabaret’s conception, as least as Huelsenbeck remembered them. Huelsenbeck wrote: As far as I knew Hugo Ball, his most formative experience was and remained the French Revolution. It is the reason why Ball named the cabaret, in which Dada was founded, the ‘Cabaret Voltaire’. Ball believed that Voltaire’s intellect, in contrast to the Germans’ intellect, was not only revolutionary, but also a considerably humanist intellect … Voltaire had, as Ball believed, a direct connection with the people, entirely in contrast to the German philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, Hegel, whose observations needed the recognition of authority in order to gain general acceptance.37 Early press reports drew attention to the cabaret’s ‘patron’, Voltaire, without missing the cabaret’s resemblance to its other model – Munich’s Café Simplizissimus.38 The cabaret’s first few weeks also included elements of Parisian cabaret, such as Aristide Bruant translated into German and a ‘Madame Leconte’ singing contemporary French chansons. There were numerous other elements that originated in Munich cabaret



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and theatre. Indeed, the translated Bruant songs were almost certainly Ferdinand Hardekopf’s translations of the satirical chansons sung by the earthy Bruant in the clubs of Montmartre, which were themselves already part of the rich Munich cabaret repertoire. According to Marietta di Monaco, Emmy Hennings had sung Hardekopf’s Bruant translations at a one-night cabaret at the Bunter Vogel (Colourful Bird) in Munich before the war.39 Other Munich elements included Frank Wedekind’s Donnerwetterlied (Thunder Song, 1911), which would have been very familiar to Ball from the Munich Kammerspiele and Erich Mühsam’s Revoluzzerlied, a favourite from the city’s Elf Scharfrichter (Eleven Executioners) cabaret.40 All attest to the wider influence of the cultural life of Munich on Ball. These elements were further mixed with German Expressionist and French poetry, Russian drama and many other diverse ingredients, including performers’ own pieces.41 Ball read Futurist poetry by F T. Marinetti, Paulo Buzzi and Aldo Palazzeschi.42 There was a strong Russian component in the cabaret, including the aforementioned music recitals of Rachmaninoff, Skriabin, ‘Russian marches’ and a Balalaika group. As well as bringing together Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist art and literature, the Cabaret Voltaire also drew very directly on popular, local traditions of Varieté and its ‘lower’ variant, Tingel-Tangel. Encounters between ‘high’ and ‘low’ are central to the cultural politics of modernist and avant-garde practice. Many factors suggest that the Cabaret Voltaire was indeed the likeliest of all Dada ventures to have, at least to some extent, like its patron, a ‘direct connection with the people’. But from its beginnings, it is clear that what was emerging under the new slogan of ‘Dada’ was only partially able to straddle what Andreas Huyssen has memorably called the ‘Great Divide’ between high and mass culture. Ball became worried about where the direction of what he sometimes thought of as Dada’s ‘eclecticism’ would eventually lead. When he founded the cabaret, he was beginning from hopes for an affirmative synthesis of the arts, of the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the bodily. This investment in the utopian visions of an emancipated and vital modernity surely derives, in part, from his absorption of the ideas that were current in the Blaue Reiter circle. As an example it is worth considering August Macke’s essay, Masken (Masks) in Der Blaue Reiter almanac of 1912: ‘In the cinema the professor gawps beside the servant girl. In the cabaret the butterfly-coloured dancer enchants the most infatuated couples as much as the notes sounded in the service by the organ move the believers and the non-believers’.43 Macke’s vision of the reconciliation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ is schematic, but its sentiment is characteristic of the hopes invested in a particularly Expressionist concept of synthesis. By the time he opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in February of 1916, Ball had become interested in the prospects for a social and intellectual revolution and wanted to realize a tendency that he thought he could see emerging in recent literature – a nearing of the ‘intellectual’ and ‘proletarian’ elements – (the professor and the servant-girl, to use Macke’s terms). But the experience of the cabaret seems to have confirmed the futility of this project. After the cabaret closed, having produced ‘Dadaism’, Ball stated in a letter to his fellow Dadaist, Tzara – the same letter in which he dismissed the ‘nature

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Deborah Lewer people’ of Ascona – ‘I hereby declare that all the Expressionism, Dadaism and other Isms are the worst kind of bourgeoisie’.44 The conditions of war were crucial. They represent a key distinction between Dada in Zurich and Expressionism in pre-war Munich. They also exacerbated the awareness among the Dadaists that institutionalized autonomous art had little relevance for the majority of the population, or for the individual sensitive to the temper of modernity. As Walter Serner declared in his Letzte Lockerung (Last Loosening) manifesto, ‘one can understand silk stockings, but not Gauguins’.45 But they recognized too, that dissent and the promotion merely of an alternative, parallel culture was ineffectual. Many Dadaists would become increasingly disparaging of Expressionist irrationalism and of those other members of the avant-garde, such as the Futurists in Italy, who, with an aesthetic radicalism that implied opposition to traditional, dominant culture (and indeed that Dada itself drew on), instead glorified war. The dilemma for the Dadaists was how to maximize the effects of their actions without those actions merely excluding the audience and the institutions to whom they were directed; or put another way, how to avoid retreating into metaphysics or glorifying destruction at the expense of critical aesthetics.

Kandinsky at the Galerie Dada In the final part of this chapter, I want to look at Ball’s last and most detailed response to Kandinsky. In April 1917, the Cabaret Voltaire had long since closed, and Dada’s operations in Zurich, lead by Ball and Tzara, had moved out of the bohemian milieu and into new premises, the Galerie Dada on the prestigious Paradeplatz. Here, exhibitions of works lent by Walden’s Sturm gallery were mounted. Pedagogy and cultured leisure met in the programme of lectures, tours, teas, performances and soirées. During the evening, there were exclusive candlelit discussions in the Kandinsky Saal. In April 1917, Ball gave a lecture on Kandinsky at the Galerie, scheduled to coincide with the close of a Sturm exhibition that included at least seven paintings by Kandinsky. The lecture is important, not least because it is Ball’s most sustained statement on visual art and one of the last things he wrote under the aegis of Dada. I would argue that it can also be read as a manifesto on ‘the artist’ as a redemptive figure in a world of chaos and that to this extent, it rehearses some of what Ball had read and absorbed from his pre-war reading of Kandinsky when in Munich. Once again, he emphasized that Kandinsky’s ‘idea of freedom is highly developed’ and he also reflected on aesthetic strategies for negating, transcending or circumventing the material, finite world: The artists of this age turn against themselves and against art … They dissociate themselves from the empirical world, in which they perceive chance, disorder, disharmony. They voluntarily abstain from representing natural objects – which seem to them the greatest of all distortions. They seek what is essential and what is spiritual, what has not yet been profaned.46



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These passages, in particular, express Ball’s attraction to order over chaos. As such, they encourage reflection on Dada’s so-called ‘anti-art’ beyond the mere slogan to incorporate politics and the metaphysical. They would subsequently be recalled in Ball’s reminiscences and in his statement (quoted at the outset of this chapter) that ‘it was as if [the artists] were the prophets of rebirth … when we spoke of Kandinsky and Picasso, we did not mean painters, but priests; not craftsmen, but creators of new worlds, new paradises’.47 Here, too, Ball ascribes to the ideal artist a disconnection from the material processes of art-making in favour of a purified spiritual and indeed quasi-divine creativity. The day after giving a lecture on Kandinsky at the Galerie Dada, Ball wrote in his diary: ‘The painters [are] administrators of the vita contemplativa … heralds of the supernatural language of signs’.48 For him, this vita contemplativa, ‘logically’ connected with monasticism, had as its redemptive consequence ‘a magical union with objects and, in due course, asceticism, as a conscious methodology of simplification and quietening’.49 At that decisive time for Ball’s own development, Kandinsky’s work was the last modern art with which Ball substantively engaged. That he sought in it this fundamental ‘asceticism’ gives an indication of how far his concerns with art had come and how remote they now were from the direction in which Dada was being taken under its directeur, Tzara. Ball’s doubts about visual abstract art in general and Kandinsky in particular became evident not long after the lecture. By May 1917, he was questioning the value of Kandinsky’s paintings in very different terms: ‘Abstract art –: will it bring anything more than a revival of the ornamental and a new access to it? Kandinsky’s decorative curves –: are they perhaps merely painted carpets (on which one should sit, and we hang them on the wall)?’50 This questioning seems initially to represent a paradox, emerging as it does so soon after Ball’s broadly positive lecture on the artist. It is telling, however, that Ball’s doubts appear to have stemmed from his confrontation with the physical art object – the painted canvases hanging on the wall. It is as if, having assimilated Kandinsky’s sermon on the ‘spiritual’ in art, faced with the materiality of his art Ball’s dualist concept of spirit and matter asserts itself and the work falls, profaned, almost literally, to the ground, like a carpet, a piece of furnishing, something to be sat upon. Ball may even have had in mind the acknowledgement, made by Kandinsky himself in Über das Geistige in der Kunst, of the danger of severing the ties between art and nature, and so creating ‘works that have the appearance of geometrical ornament, which would, to put it crudely, be like a tie or a carpet’: indeed, the statement appears very close to a passage Ball had recorded in his 1914 notes.51 It is instructive that – as we know from a discussion by Shulamith Behr of the reception of Kandinsky’s early works – they were already, in 1910, being compared with carpets. Marc wrote: It is a pity that one cannot hang Kandinsky’s large composition and some others beside the Mohammedan carpets in the Exhibition Park. A comparison would be inevitable and how instructive for us all! … We have no decorative work in Germany, never mind a carpet, to which we may juxtapose it. If we try with

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Deborah Lewer Kandinsky’s compositions – they will stand this dangerous test, and not as carpets, but as ‘pictures’ … The grand consequence of his colours holds the balance of his graphic freedom – is that not at the same time a definition of painting?52 In Ball’s eyes, Kandinsky’s compositions did not, in the end, ‘stand this dangerous test’ of proximity with the ornamental or with the applied art object. Ball’s questioning of Kandinsky’s ‘decorative curves’ as ‘merely painted carpets’ came at the same time that he was beginning to question abstraction itself as a category beyond aesthetics and indexed to his wider sense of dissolution in culture. It is also the last mention in his diaries of the artist. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere in connection with Ball’s asceticism, it is surely significant that the passage in which Ball voices these doubts about Kandinsky concludes: ‘It is perhaps not a question of art, but of the uncorrupt image’.53 From the experience of Kandinsky’s works in the Galerie Dada, Ball appeared to conclude that his own aesthetic and increasingly theological, gnostic criteria for a purified relationship with the word and the image could not be met or fulfilled by art.54 The last soirée to be held at the Galerie Dada was the soirée Hans Heusser on 25 May 1917. Ball was involved in preparations for the evening. His final (edited) diary entry of the Dada phase of his life begins with a passage concerning the preparations.55 Included in the programme was an item noted as ‘Fragments from the stage composition “Der gelbe Klang” (by W. Kandinsky)’, which must have been planned by Ball. Significantly, however, in the end, Ball did not take part in the evening. A few days later, he left Zurich in a state of exhaustion and cut all ties with Dada for good. There were many factors in Ball’s renunciation of Dada but a major one, I suggest, was his final loss of faith in Kandinsky. It was part of Ball’s turn away from Dada, away from Expressionism, and from art, first to politics and then, in 1920 towards the different ‘freedom’ of devout, ascetic, hierarchical Catholicism.56 My argument here has been that extending our historical view of Dada to include Munich and Der Blaue Reiter enables new insights. It sheds light on Ball’s changing engagement with modern art and the figure of the artist. It modifies an unhelpful polarization sometimes evident in the scholarship between Expressionism and Dada, where the latter is seen as a refutation and overcoming of the former. And, by extension, it also helps redress the orthodox tendency to see Dada as a beginning rather than as a continuation, or, as Michael Erlhoff has put it, ‘as the first polite coughs before the noble outburst of the surrealists’.57

Notes  1 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst [1911] (Bern: Benteli, 1952) p. 143. The phrase concludes the book and was also repeatedly used by both Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in several contexts, private and public. In his essay ‘Rückblicke’ (‘Reminiscences’), first published in 1913 by Der Sturm, which Ball read, Kandinsky wrote in conclusion to a markedly eschatological passage: ‘Here begins the great epoch of the spiritual, the revelation of the spirit.



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Father-Son-Holy Spirit’. Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Reminiscences’ [1913], in Robert L. Herbert (ed.), Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1964), pp. 19–44, p. 39. It also appears in Ball’s own notes, as discussed below.   2 Ball wrote of their reading on 29 February 1916 and called it ‘a painfully legendary play, which I love very much’. See Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, ed. Bernhard Echte (Zürich: Limmat, 1992), p. 83. See also Volksrecht, 3 March 1916, in Richard Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen. Cabarets, Ausstellungen, Berichte und Bluffs (Siegen: MuK Universität-GesamthochschuleSiegen, 1992), p. 11. Ball wrote to his sister, Maria Hildebrand, that the reading would be repeated the following week. Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 1 March 1916 in Gerhard Schaub and Ernst Teubner (eds), Hugo Ball. Briefe 1904–1927, vol. 1 (Wallstein: Göttingen, 2003), pp. 100–2, p. 102. This second reading was also announced in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.  3 On the literary avant-garde in Munich and Berlin and its significance for Dada, see Enno Stahl, ‘Boheme in München und Berlin. Literarisches Leben zwischen Expressionismus, Club Dada und Politik’, Hugo-Ball-Almanach. Studien und Texte zu Dada, Neue Folge 1, 2009/2010, pp. 11–35.   4 Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 27 May 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, pp. 48–51, p. 51.   5 Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, ed. Bernhard Echte (Zürich: Limmat, 1992), p. 17. For a discussion of Ball’s attraction to Kandinsky with an emphasis on the development of Ball’s theological and aesthetic thinking, see Deborah Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image”: Hugo Ball, Zurich Dada and the Aesthetics, Politics, and Metaphysics of Asceticism’, in Hopkins and White (eds), Dada: Virgin Microbe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).  6 On the ‘quasi-cultic’ concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Kandinsky’s theory, see Richard Sheppard, ‘Kandinsky’s Oeuvre 1900–14: The Avant-Garde as Rear Guard’, in Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), pp. 145–70.  7 Ball, Flucht, p. 17.  8 On the apocalyptic dimensions of Kandinsky’s theory and practice at this time see e.g. Reinhold  Heller, ‘Kandinsky and Traditions Apocalyptic’, Art Journal 43:1 (1983), pp. 19–26.   9 Hugo Ball, ‘Nietzsche in Basel’, in Bernhard Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball. Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit. Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 61–101, p. 98: ‘In Basel spricht Nietzsche bereits auch von der Lücke, die nach Vernichtung der Moral entstehe, und in die man statt einer neuen Religion eine Art philosophisches Kunstwerk mit ästhetischen Werten stellen müsse’. 10 Ball, Flucht, p. 16: ‘Es konnte den Anschein haben, als sei die Philosophie an die Künstler übergegangen; als gingen von ihnen die neuen Impulse aus. Als seien sie die Propheten der Wiedergeburt. Wenn wir Kandinsky und Picasso sagten, meinten wir nicht Maler, sondern Priester; nicht Handwerker, sondern Schöpfer neuer Welten, neuer Paradiese’. 11 Letter from Franz Marc to Hugo Ball in Ernst Teubner (ed.), Hugo Ball. Leben und Werk (Berlin: Publica, 1986), p. 80. Letter from Wassily Kandinsky to Hugo Ball in Ibid., p. 83. 12 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Der Blaue Reiter (Rückblick)’, in Max Bill (ed.), Kandinsky. Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Bern: Benteli, 1955), pp. 133–8, p. 136. 13 See Ball, letter to Maria Hildebrand, 27 May 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 48–51, p. 49. 14 Hugo Ball, ‘Das Münchener Künstlertheater’, Phöbus 1:2 (1914), pp. 68–74, 73–4. 15 Ibid., 74. 16 Ball, letter to Kandinsky, 26 June 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 53–4, p. 53. 17 Ball, Flucht, p. 20.

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Deborah Lewer 18 Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern, Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-C-03a. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ball, letter to Kandinsky, 26 June 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 53–4, p. 53. 22 See Ball’s letter to his sister, 29 July 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 58–60, p. 59: ‘Sie sind das radikalste was es heute auf malerischem Gebiete gibt. … Unser Theater wird 1914/15 vielleicht das interessanteste Deutschlands sein’. [Emphasis in original.] On Ball’s plans for the ‘new theatre’ in Munich, see Philip Mann, Hugo Ball: An Intellectual Biography (London: Bithell, 1987), pp. 27–49. I discuss further the connections between Dada in Zurich and Herwarth Walden in: Deborah Lewer, ‘Dada’s Genesis: Zurich’, in David Hopkins (ed.), A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell 2016), pp. 21–37. 23 Ball, letter to August Hoffmann, 18 December 1914 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, p. 36: ‘Es ist hier ganz gemütlich in Berlin. (Nie mehr nach München!) Die Stadt hat Initiative, Energie, Intellekt. Es gibt Menschen, die an der Spitze stehen und mit denen man sich auseinander setzten Kann … [München] ist kein Boden für eine Karriere. / Hier geht ein neues Leben los: anarcho-revolutionär (so heißt mans glaub ich). Widersprechend (ohne eigne Widersprüche). Aktiv. “Taten will ich sehen” ’. 24 Shulamith Behr, ‘Deciphering Wassily Kandinsky’s Violet: Activist Expressionism and the Russian Slavonic Milieu’, in S. Behr et al. (eds), Expressionism Reassessed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) pp. 174–88, p. 179. 25 Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern. Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-A-04a. 26 ‘Der Künstler ist kein Sonntagskind des Lebens: Er hat kein Recht pflichtlos zu leben, er hat eine schwere Arbeit zu verrichten, die oft zu seinem Kreuz wird. Er muß wissen, daß jede seine Taten, Gefühle, Gedanken das feine unbetastbare aber feste Material bilden, voraus seine Werke entstehen, und daß er deswegen im Leben nicht frei ist, sondern nur in der Kunst’. 27 Mann, Hugo Ball, p. 37. 28 Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 123. 29 Ibid., p. 125: ‘Dieser Tanz der Zukunft, welcher also auf die Höhe der heutigen Musik und Malerei gestellt wird, wird in demselben Augenblick die Fähigkeit bekommen, als das dritte Element, die Bühnenkomposition zu verwirklichen, welche das erste Werk der monumentalen Kunst sein wird’. 30 Ball, letter to Tristan Tzara, written in Ascona, 15 September 1916 in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 127–8, p. 128. 31 Hugo Ball, ‘Über Okkultismus, Hieratik und andere seltsam schöne Dinge’ [1917], in Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball, pp. 54–7, p. 55: ‘eine künstlerische Gemeinschafts- und Festspielidee von reichen und produktiven Möglichkeiten’. For the full text in English see Deborah Lewer, ‘Translation From the German and Introduction to: Hugo Ball, “On Occultism, the Hieratic, and Other Strangely Beautiful Things” ’, Art in Translation, 5: 3 (2013) pp. 403–8. 32 Ball, Flucht, p. 19. 33 Ball, ‘Über Okkultismus’: ‘Religiös gesehen ist Mary Wigman eine Rembrandt-Natur. Sie liebt die Mystik der Fläche, Hell, Dunkel, den Kontrapunkt der Farben und Komposition; die große, geniale Sprache, Verklärung der inneren Linie und das plötzliche Aufleuchten seelischer Komplexe’. 34 Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image” ’. 35 Hans Arp, Unsern täglichen Traum (Zürich: Arche, 1955), p. 26: ‘Der Traum Hugo Balls läßt den Menschen aus seiner rätselhaften Körperlichkeit in der Wirklichkeit auferstehen’.



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36 Schweizerische Literaturarchiv, Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern. Emmy Hennings / Hugo Ball Doppelnachlass, D-01-A-04a. 37 Richard Huelsenbeck, ‘Mit Dada, Voltaire und Rom gegen den Untertan. Richard Huelsenbeck über Hugo Ball’s “Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz” ’, Die Weltwoche, 27:3 (1971) p. 31: ‘Soweit ich Hugo Ball kannte, war und blieb sein Haupterlebnis die Französische Revolution. Es ist der Grund, weshalb Ball das Kabarett, in dem Dada gegründet wurde, das “Cabaret Voltaire” nannte. Ball glaubte, dass die Intelligenz Voltaires im Gegensatz zur intelligenz der Deutschen eine nicht nur revolutionäre, sondern eine wesentlich humanistische Intelligenz war. … Voltaire hatte, wie Ball glaubt, eine direkte Verbindung mit dem Volk, ganz im Gegensatz zu den deutschen Philosophen wie Kant, Fichte, Hegel, deren Feststellungen obrigkeitlicher Anerkennung bedurften, um allgemein akzeptiert zu werden’. 38 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 9 February 1916 in Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen, pp. 9–10, p. 9. 39 Marietta [di Monaco] [pseud.], ‘Klabund’, in Paul Raabe (ed.), The Era of German Expressionism (London: John Calder, 1974), pp. 83–8, pp. 86–7. ‘Madame Leconte’ had her debut, singing ‘French songs’ at the cabaret on its third night, 7 February 1916, and sang at the ‘French Soirée’ held at the cabaret on 14 March 1916. See Ball, Flucht, 14 March 1916, p. 86. 40 Frank Wedekind was a star performer at the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret; Munich’s first artistic and literary cabaret. The Donnerwetterlied was integrated into his Franziska, which had its première on 31 November 1912 at the Münchner Kammerspiele where Ball was working. See Echte’s notes to Ball, Flucht, p. 327, and on Mühsam’s Revoluzzerlied, Ibid., p. 328. 41 These included works by Kandinsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Franz Werfel and Jakob van Hoddis; Tzara recited Max Jacob, André Salmon and others, Arp read Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. 42 Volksrecht, 12 December 1916 in Sheppard (ed.), Dada Zürich in Zeitungen, p. 10. 43 August Macke, ‘Die Masken’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Klaus Lankheit (München: R. Piper & Co., 1965), pp. 53–9, p. 57: ‘Im Kinematograph staunt der Professor neben dem Dienstmädchen. Im Varieté bezaubert die schmetterlingfarbene Tänzerin die verliebtesten Paare ebenso stark, wie im gotischen Dom der Feierton der Orgel den Gläubigen und Ungläubigen ergreift’. 44 Letter from Ball to Tristan Tzara, 15 September 1916, in Schaub and Teubner (eds), Briefe, vol. 1, pp. 127–8, p. 127: ‘Ich erkläre hiermit, dass aller Expressionismus, Dadaismus, und andere Mismen schlimmste Bourgeoisie sind’. 45 Walter Serner, ‘Letzte Lockerung Manifest’, Dada 4/5, 1919, p. 16: ‘Seidenstrümpfe können begriffen werden, Gauguins nicht’. 46 Ball, ‘Kandinsky’, in Schlichting (ed.), Hugo Ball, pp. 41–53. 47 Ball, Flucht, p. 16. 48 Ibid., p. 152. 49 Ibid., p. 153. On Ball’s understanding of asceticism, see Lewer, ‘“The Uncorrupt Image” ’. 50 Ball, Flucht, 17 May 1917, pp. 164–5: ‘Die abstrakte Kunst –: wird sie mehr bringen als eine Wiederbelebung des Ornamentalen und einen neuen Zugang dazu? Kandinsky’s dekorative Kurven –: sind sie vielleicht nur gemalte Teppiche (auf denen man sitzen sollte, und wir hängen sie an die Wand?)’ 51 Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 115. 52 Franz Marc, ‘Zur Ausstellung der “Neuen Künstlervereinigung” bei Thannhauser’ (September 1910) quoted in Shulamith Behr, ‘Kandinsky, Münter and Creative Partnership’, in Hartwig Fischer and Sean Rainbird (eds), Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 2006), pp. 77–100, p. 91. In the notes to this essay (p. 214), Behr cites another critic’s response to one of Kandinsky’s paintings by comparison with carpets.

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Deborah Lewer 53 Ball, Flucht, 17 May 1917, p. 165: ‘Es geht vielleicht gar nicht um die Kunst, sondern um das unkorrupte Bild’. 54 On Ball’s gnosticism, see Mann, Hugo Ball. 55 Ball, Flucht, 23 May 1917, p. 166. 56 For varying perspectives on Ball’s re-conversion to Catholicism in 1920 and its impact on him, see Emmy Ball-Hennings, Hugo Balls Weg zu Gott (Munich: Kösel & Pustet 1931); Bernd Wacker (ed.), Dionysius DADA Areopagita. Hugo Ball und die Kritik der Moderne (Munich: Schöningh 1996); Michael Braun (ed.), Hugo Ball. Der magische Bischof der Avantgarde (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn 2011), especially the essays by Gerhard Deny and Michael Braun, and Mann, Hugo Ball, especially from p. 141 onwards. 57 Michael Erlhoff, ‘“Dit le bonbon”: Tristan Tzara in Zurich’, in Brigitte Pichon and Karl Riha (eds), Dada Zurich: A Clown’s Game from Nothing (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1996), pp. 104–11, p. 104.

6 Type/Face: Wassily Kandinsky and Walter Benjamin on language and perception Annie Bourneuf

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n Walter Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s on the transformations of the artwork and perception in modernity, in the texts most often cited in art history, it is the technological media of film and photography that are central. For instance, in Benjamin’s most frequently cited text, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, painting serves as film’s foil: Benjamin contrasts the masses’ ‘extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting’ to their ‘highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film’.1 An engagement with contemporary visual production may be found in Benjamin’s writings of the 1910s and early 1920s as well. But in these earlier writings, painting and the graphic arts are the focus. And when he mentions particular artists, it is most often those associated with Der Blaue Reiter: Paul Klee, August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky.2 Even the objects in Benjamin’s study around this time appear to signal his affinity with Blaue Reiter aesthetics: Gershom Scholem mentions that in 1917 these included a ‘Bavarian blue glazed tile, depict[ing] a three-headed Christ’ – a choice that resonates with the reproductions of Bavarian folk art in Der Blaue Reiter almanac (1912) – and a reproduction of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, which exemplified the spirit of Gothic art for so many Expressionist artists.3 Benjamin held the publications of the Munich group in high regard as well. In a 1920 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, Benjamin reports that he read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) and comments: ‘This book fills me with the highest respect for its author, as his pictures command my admiration. Indeed it is the only book about Expressionism without prattle; of course not from the standpoint of philosophy but rather from that of a doctrine-of-painting’.4 It seems that he had by then already acquired Der Blaue Reiter almanac, which he called ‘irreplaceable’.5 Why was Benjamin interested in Kandinsky’s prewar writings at this moment? For one, he was reading up to ‘come to terms with Expressionism’ in order to write a review (now lost) of Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918).6 Benjamin’s friend Erich Gutkind, with whom he lived for part of 1920, was likely another impetus for Benjamin’s interest.7

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Annie Bourneuf It is hardly surprising that Benjamin’s interests shifted from Macke and Kandinsky to film and photography, paralleling major reorientations in the German avant-garde. (His interest in Klee’s art, however, never ceased and it seems that his décor elaborated on his earlier interests rather than reflecting the new ones: in a 1931 letter, he remarked ironically on the ‘saintly images’ that hung on the walls of his ‘communist’s cell’: still the Bavarian three-headed Christ, plus a Saint Sebastian and the two Klees he had acquired in the early 1920s.8) Benjamin’s earlier writings on art, aesthetics, colour, painting and fantasy, which might be seen as in dialogue with Der Blaue Reiter, have received much less attention from art historians than his later writings on film and photography.9 More broadly, Sigrid Weigel has remarked that scholars have not attended enough to the fact that ‘painting, the history of art, and a discussion of modernist art play foundational roles for [Benjamin’s] way of thinking’, a relative neglect she calls ‘all the more remarkable when it comes to Benjamin’s reception by art scholars.’10 In the case of Benjamin’s writings on art from the time of his most intense interest in Der Blaue Reiter, part of the reason for their relative neglect lies in the fact that many of the writings in question are fragmentary. (Some have not survived, such as Benjamin’s ‘short essay’ on August Macke’s paintings.11) Moreover, they are cryptic and closely related to the esoteric language philosophy Benjamin developed in his crucial 1916 essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’. Whilst Benjamin’s Brechtian and Marxist orientation in the 1930s gave the concepts he developed then at least the appearance of digestibility into the theoretical apparatus of Anglo-American art history, Benjamin’s early language philosophy could hardly be less assimilable: it draws on Johann Georg Hamann’s theological understanding of language as mediating between man and God, and attacks all conventionalist understandings of language as ‘bourgeois’.12 More broadly, as Weigel writes, Benjamin’s thinking about art might well be seen, in general, as tied up with ‘the afterlife of religion’, with his dialectical mode of thinking about secularization that never allows art to be either identified with cult nor simply separate from it.13 Benjamin’s early writings on art in the vicinity of his early essay on language – whose ‘postbiblical’14 thinking is impossible to overlook, and touching on the works of the Blaue Reiter group, of artists who were themselves to varying degrees and in manifold ways involved with projects of reenchantment – pose serious difficulties for anyone who would like to find in them detachable concepts for the study of the art and art theory about which he wrote. Perhaps that is why there have been so few attempts to analyse Benjamin’s writings in relation to the art and writings of Der Blaue Reiter. My aim here is decidedly not to find in Benjamin a way of theorizing Der Blaue Reiter, but, more modestly, to illuminate both some of the more obscure passages in Benjamin’s early writings and his rather belated interest in the art and art theory of Der Blaue Reiter, one of the odder moments of the group’s afterlife. It is at once clarifying and productively estranging to see Benjamin’s writings as in dialogue with the art and writing of his contemporaries, in conversation with certain aspects of Expressionism. What might Benjamin have learned from Kandinsky? What parts of Concerning the Spiritual in Art might have been generative for him? There are several different places where such an inquiry



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might begin. Heinz Brüggemann has demonstrated that the concerns of Der Blaue Reiter provoked Benjamin’s fascination with colour – especially as it appears to children, in children’s book illustrations and elsewhere – as a nonconceptual mode of perception.15 Or one could start with Benjamin’s explicit engagement, in a fragment of 1920, with a passage of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art on ‘the eternally artistic’ element in an artwork and his reservations about Kandinsky’s conception of ‘eternal value’.16 Although these might well seem more promising starting places, as there are explicit references to Kandinsky in Benjamin’s writings on these matters, I will focus instead on the previously unprobed node of Benjamin’s and Kandinsky’s shared interest in techniques of focusing on the sensuous aspects of ordinary, postlapsarian verbal language. For Benjamin’s interest in the Expressionist artists he admired was bound up with his theory of language.17 In what follows, I will explore resonances between some of Kandinsky’s prewar writings – his essay ‘On the Question of Form’, published in Der Blaue Reiter almanac, as well as his Concerning the Spiritual in Art and a poem in Kandinsky’s book of poems and woodcuts titled Sounds (also published c. 1912) – and Benjamin’s rethinking of the relation between language and visual perception around 1920, specifically in a few of the textual fragments that the editors of his Gesammelte Schriften have gathered under the rubric ‘On the Philosophy of Language and Epistemo-Critique’.18 Passages in Benjamin’s writings seem to try out procedures Kandinsky proposes for defamiliarizing words, perceiving them as if they were incomprehensible; we can see how Benjamin may have responded to, and transformed, Kandinsky’s proposals. In an outline for a philosophical exploration of language (which at that time he planned to write as his ‘second dissertation’, as was required to pursue an academic career in Germany), Benjamin listed terms for various aspects of language (symbol, meaning, sign, representation) followed by one question: ‘How do works of art relate to these (e.g. Klee)?’19 This concern with the relation between language and the visual arts was not an afterthought. Benjamin’s 1916 essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ asserts that ‘there is a language of sculpture, of painting’ and that these are founded on ‘certain kinds of thing-languages’.20 Benjamin thinks through the relations among human verbal language, the languages of sculpture and painting, and ‘thing-­languages’ in a reading of the book of Genesis. Before man’s expulsion from paradise, writes Benjamin, verbal language, too, was in contact with ‘thing-language’, which passed from the thing into its human beholder through a receptive mode of looking. After the Fall, sculpture and painting remain in contact with thing-language although verbal language does not. Benjamin insists that all things, animate and inanimate, participate in language, for it is essential for everything (Benjamin’s examples include a lamp, a mountain and a fox) to communicate its ‘spiritual contents’ (geistigen Inhalt) to man.21 For Benjamin, the language of things is dumb, soundless and material; it is only man, who, by naming things, can translate this unspoken language into spoken language – or so it was before the Fall, when human language lost contact with thing-language.22 Benjamin’s early theory of language is extremely complex, but there is at least an affinity between his notion of things communicating their mental contents to man, and of sculpture and

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Annie Bourneuf painting as modes of receiving this communication, and Kandinsky’s notion of visual art as potentially revealing the ‘inner sound’ in all things. The moments in Kandinsky’s writing that I propose may also have been important for Benjamin’s circle around Kandinsky’s notion of the ‘inner sound’ of everyday human words, as well as of things. Referring to Kandinsky’s book of poems, Sounds, the media theorist Friedrich Kittler asserts that the ‘sounds’ of Kandinsky’s title were ‘not romantic primal sounds, but ‘inner sounds’ that remain when one has repeated words until they become senseless – a proven and oft-employed means of simulating aphasia’, a way of ‘isolat[ing] the sound images of words physiologically’.23 For Kittler, Kandinsky is not a neo-Romantic but rather an exemplary figure for the generation of writing in the wake of the media-historical shifts around 1900, the advent of phonography, film, the typewriter and psychophysics. But although Kittler draws a sharp distinction between the ‘romantic primal sound’ and the physiological ‘sound image’, they may not be so separable for Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s prewar writings insist that, in works of art, a prior spiritual content seeks to manifest itself in ‘material form’.24 As in his painting, so too in his poetry, Kandinsky appears to understand the elements of the work (whether paint or letters) as sensory stimuli that produce spiritual effects. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky turns to the poetry and drama of the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) to develop his own distinction between the abstract, immaterial, inner sound of a thing that affects the soul directly, as opposed to its material outer existence.25 Most of all, Kandinsky wants to draw attention to Maeterlinck’s device of repeating words. If a word is repeated often enough – a ‘favorite childhood game’, in Kandinsky’s words, as well as ‘a proven and oft-employed means of simulating aphasia’, as Kittler says, using the language of psychophysics – the connection between the word and the object it names is severed, such that the ‘pure sound of the word’ is revealed, which directly affects the soul, writes Kandinsky.26 In Sounds, Kandinsky tries out this device. Sometimes the effect recalls repetition in nursery rhymes or baby talk, pushed to an extreme: ‘There was a long table. Oh, a long, long table. Right / and left at this table sat many, many, many people, / people, people, / people’.27 In a passage in ‘On the Question of Form’ that parallels his discussion of word repetition, Kandinsky writes about the possibility of separating two different ‘effects’ from a printed letter: besides its function as an instrumental sign, an element of a communication system, the reader may look even at a letter of Kandinsky’s own text as a ‘thing’ with its own visual form, an arrangement of curved and straight lines that has, Kandinsky asserts, some affective dimension (it might appear ‘“gay,” “sad,” “striving,” “striking,” “defiant,” “ostentatious,” etc’.) He proposes that displacing a dash from its usual place as a punctuation mark in a text allows the viewer to separate it from its ‘practical and purposeful significance’. Displacing it still further by removing it from the page altogether and putting it onto a canvas, writes Kandinsky, would turn the reader into a viewer, preparing that viewer to feel its ‘inner sound’ – as long as the viewer does not fall back into another ‘practical-purposive’ mode of understanding it by seeing it ‘as a means



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6.1  Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Anders’ (first page) from Klänge (Munich: R. Piper, 1913).

of delineating an object’. (If viewers do see it as delineating, they may recover from the ‘practical-purposive’ by reminding themselves that a line may have an ‘exclusively purely pictorial significance’.28) Kandinsky’s poem ‘Different’, also from Sounds, thematizes this way of looking at a written sign (now a numeral – ‘a big 3 – white on dark brown’ – rather than a letter or punctuation mark) so that it loses its referential value to become a visual form (figure 6.1). While many people, the poem continues, assumed that the numeral’s top and bottom curve were the same size, actually the top is ‘just a / little, little, little / bit’ bigger than the bottom (words are repeated here, too), and although it seemed to be ‘look[ing] to’ the left, actually it is out of plumb and leans slightly to the left, so that it looked not only to the left but also ‘just a tiny bit down’ (figure 6.2).29 The close visual observation of the ‘big 3’ – which, the poem suggests, might continue still longer, discovering further nuances of proportion and position (so the last line implies: ‘But then again maybe it was different’), in counterdistinction to the glance that merely reads it – has a strange effect: such careful looking personifies the numeral, remaking it into an upright, human-like form, even endowing it with a gaze of its own. The German verb used in the poem each of the three times that the numeral is said to ‘look’ is ‘guckte’, which, implying an active, curious, penetrating look, might better be translated as ‘peeped’ or ‘peered’, and is thus usually the act of a person or other animate being.30 There is, just as in the case of ‘peep’ and ‘peer’ in English, also a sense of the verb typically used to speak of inanimate things: it can also mean to protrude, to be just visible, and in this sense is usually accompanied by a prepositional phrase indicating what is partially concealing the object, parallel to English constructions such as ‘the crocuses peeped up through the snow’, but this sense doesn’t seem applicable to the fully visible

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6.2  Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Anders’ (second page) from Klänge (Munich: R. Piper, 1913).

numeral.31 It seems rather that the numerical protagonist of Kandinsky’s short poem is not only looked at, but that it itself can actively look, rendering it an animate agent. In Benjamin’s fragments on the philosophy of language written around 1920 – during the same period when he was reading Kandinsky, as we know from the letter cited above – he proposes similar experiments in defamiliarizing written language by focusing on the graphic shape of the letters. He writes that instead of mentally intending the meaning of a word, one can, by looking at it repeatedly, focus on what he calls the ‘word-skeleton’.32 Peter Fenves is one of the few scholars who has investigated Benjamin’s idea of the ‘word-skeleton’ in depth. Fenves relates it to Benjamin’s engagement with Husserl’s phenomenology and sees the ‘word-skeleton’ as a ‘“frontal assault” on the concepts of phenomenology’.33 As Fenves explains, Husserl attempts in his Logical Investigations to disentangle expression from indication by examining, in Husserl’s words, ‘expression in the solitary life of the soul’, in line with his ‘premise … that expression owes its origin to a living subject, who, by animating certain sensible complexes, lends them meaning’.34 The point of Benjamin’s concept of the ‘word-skeleton’, according to Fenves, is to speak of the ‘general loss of meaning’ that occurs whenever one supposes, as Husserl does, that a word derives its meaning from a ‘living soul’, a ‘living speaker who gives a skeletal word ‘flesh and blood’ by using it for a determinate purpose’.35 To refuse this model of meaning, Benjamin asserts instead that everything speaks. For Benjamin, as Fenves writes: The phenomenon of language not only cannot be located in the situation of soliloquy; soliloquy has to be replaced by its opposite, namely universal loquacity. There is meaning in the proper sense of the word only when everything speaks. The theory of meaning should thus begin with panlogue rather than monologue. And so, pace Husserl, the starting point for any logico-linguistic investigation is



Kandinsky and Benjamin 129 not the elimination of the communicative character of language but its infinite expansion. Everything must be able to speak.36

Fenves does not make a connection between Benjamin’s writings on the ‘word-skeleton’ and interest in Kandinsky. Yet his analysis suggests that part of what was important for Benjamin in Kandinsky’s writings was likely Kandinsky’s vision of ‘universal loquacity’ from – to borrow Benjamin’s words on Kandinsky that I quoted above – the ‘standpoint … of a doctrine-of-painting’. Kandinsky often envisions the world as such a panlogue: ‘The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually effective beings’.37 But Benjamin does not simply take up Kandinsky’s panlogue as a weapon to wield against Husserl’s philosophical attempt to theorize language ‘in the solitary life of the soul’. Rather, Benjamin at once seems to borrow from Kandinsky’s thinking on language and, at the same time, turns it on its head. As already discussed, Kandinsky’s descriptions of the viewing of a number or a letter implicitly anthropomorphize it. In ‘On the Question of Form’, Kandinsky speaks of examining a letter as a ‘corporeal form’, a ‘being with its own inner life’ that we might see as, for instance, ‘gay’ or ‘sad’, ‘striving’, ‘defiant’, or ‘ostentatious’.38 This quasi-physiognomic viewing of the letter as expressive seems to depend on viewing it as like a human body, expressing emotion through stance and gesture. Although commonly acknowledged that Kandinsky and Marc were influenced by Wilhelm Worringer’s counterposing of abstraction against the naturalistic aesthetics of empathy, the kind of viewing that Kandinsky speaks of directing at the letter is the kind of viewing – more often associated with artworks and the natural world – that we might in fact well call empathic.39 It has been noted that whereas Worringer sought to hold abstraction and empathy apart as opposed poles of aesthetic experience, Kandinsky – who was well aware of theories of empathy developing out of Robert Vischer’s work via Theodor Lipps (and perhaps not only through Worringer’s summaries of Lipps’s thinking) – attempted to combine them.40 Vischer, who coined the term Einfühlung (literally ‘feeling-into’, translated into English as ‘empathy’) and whose work put it on the philosophical agenda, spoke of the form of an object as expressive by virtue of the viewer’s projection of his own bodily form into that of the object.41 ‘I project my own life into the lifeless form’, wrote Vischer, ‘just as I quite justifiably do with another living person’; thus, for instance, ‘In the branches of a tree we spread our arms longingly’.42 Kandinsky’s descriptions of the viewing of a written sign as expressive seem to depend on this kind of empathic viewing. Whereas Kandinsky’s writings implicitly anthropomorphize the written sign, Benjamin does so explicitly. In a passage in which he questions the philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt’s comparison of the word to the human individual, Benjamin proposes that one might instead see the word as ‘a person’s skeleton [Knochengerüst am Menschen]’, for instance.43 He speaks of the word’s graphic shape as the ‘word-skeleton [Wortskelett]’: like a human skull, ‘the word grins’.44 For Benjamin, this visual image of a word is expressionless, ausdruckslos, and meaning is not to be found in it, as opposed to the appearance of meaning in the spoken word.45

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Annie Bourneuf There are two moments in Benjamin’s and Kandinsky’s descriptions of looking at writing: first, it is perceived as a graphic image, disjoined from its ordinary task of encoding communicative sound. Second, this visual shape is anthropomorphized, seen as bearing physiognomic meaning, legible like the human body or face.46 Since reading writing is generally understood to require readers to see so differently, to switch off whatever capacities they may have for such physiognomic empathy with the thing seen, this is a peculiar move. For Kandinsky, it seems that talking about the expressive qualities of the letter serves to point out that even here, even in the case of the most instrumentalized and arbitrary sort of sign, one can see otherwise, in a way that reveals the expressive side of everything – even a letter or a ‘cigar butt’ or a ‘spent match’, to cite two more of Kandinsky’s examples of things that might seem to be nothing but ‘dead matter’ but are in fact ‘living spirit’, and thus capable of producing an effect on a receptive viewer.47 The examples he chooses are illuminating: for Kandinsky, it seems, a letter is like a spent match (not merely a manufactured everyday instrument, but one that is dead, used up, something that has entirely exhausted itself in its use) – that both can be seen as ‘living’ is, for Kandinsky, testimony to the potency of a mode of seeing that can enliven even such dead things, can view even them as ‘being[s] with [their] own inner life’.48 For Benjamin too, writing is perceived as graphic image, and then anthropomorphized so that it may be seen physiognomically. However, for Benjamin, this physiognomy is expressionless in the extreme, and this expressionlessness is figured as deadness, like the grin of a skull that is expressionless for it is not backed by any expressive subject within, and yet an object that one cannot help but read physiognomically, for it has a face. Benjamin’s analogy of the visual shape of the word to a skeleton may appear to be only a repetition of an opposition of dead letter to living spirit, yet the analogy, if read in dialogue with Kandinsky’s writings, also foregrounds the reverse movement of enlivening that occurs in the artist’s texts.49 Benjamin in these notes seems to take on Kandinsky’s terms to bend them backwards; he too posits the possibility of such anthropomorphizing viewing of the graphic shape of letters, but so as to emphasize their deathly expressionlessness – which he seems to conceive in part within Kandinsky’s terms, by inverting them. As a postscript to this speculative discussion of Benjamin’s engagement with Kandinsky’s writings, I turn to one of Benjamin’s last works, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1940). In this essay, so many years after the writings discussed above, Benjamin returns to the notion of the word as something that can be looked at anthropomorphically, even empathically, that we also find in Kandinsky. Here, in his discussion of aura’s decay, Benjamin writes that: Experience of the aura … arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.50



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In his footnote to this discussion of aura as experienced when the viewer endows that which he views with a gaze of its own, Benjamin adds: ‘words, too, can have an aura of their own. This is how Karl Kraus described it: “the closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back [Je näher man ein Wort ansieht, desto ferner sieht es zurück].” ’51 One might well think back to Kandinsky’s numeral 3, which also actively looks – but always to the left, not towards the reader. Although Benjamin cites the Austrian critic Kraus, making no mention of Kandinsky, one might see this footnote as going back to Kandinsky and to the conceit of the painter’s poem – that the characters of writing, marks made to be seen, looked at closely, might themselves acquire, or be given, the ability to see. But here the direction of the gaze of the written marks, is, so to speak, turned, rotated outwards to confront the viewer – suggesting how Kandinsky’s conceptions of language and perception might be taken in directions that Kandinsky himself did not pursue.

Notes I am grateful to Mark Haxthausen for his suggestions on this chapter, in particular, and, more generally, for sharing so generously his thinking on Kandinsky and Benjamin. Any faults in this chapter are, of course, entirely my own. I also thank Ursula Marx of the Walter Benjamin Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, for her assistance.   1 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 36.   2 Heinz Brüggemann’s Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Phantasie (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007) is the most comprehensive study of Benjamin’s early writings as in dialogue with the art and theory of the Blaue Reiter. Brüggemann focuses on this dialogue with respect to important issues of colour and childrens’ perception, and does not discuss the particular connection I hypothesize here between Benjamin’s and Kandinsky’s writings on language and perception. See also Marcus Bullock, ‘In a Blauer Reiter Frame: Walter Benjamin’s Intentions of the Eye and Derrida’s “Specters of Marx” ’, Monatshefte, 93:2 (2001), pp. 177–95.   3 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: New York Review Books, 2001) p. 47. Scholem goes on to mention that Benjamin had made a ‘special trip to Colmar’ to see the altarpiece, and that what particularly fascinated Benjamin in its panels was ‘what he called das Ausdruckslose, their quality of expressionlessness’. On Benjamin’s idea of the expressionless, see note 45 below. See Benjamin’s statements on Grünewald in a short text titled ‘Socrates’ (1916): ‘Grünewald painted the saints with such grandeur that their halos emerged from the greenest black. The radiant is true only where it is refracted in the nocturnal; only there is it great, only there is it expressionless, only there is it asexual and yet of supramundane sexuality’. When he writes at the end of this paragraph that ‘For [human beings] genius still remains not the expressionless one who breaks out of the night, but rather an expressive, explicit one [ein Ausdrücklicher] who vibrates in the light’, one might speculate that although Benjamin’s interest in Grünewald might well be situated in relation to the Expressionist enthusiasm for the painter, his interpretation of Grünewald, on the other hand, reacts strongly against the dominant Expressionist understanding of his art. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap

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Annie Bourneuf Press, Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 52–3. On Benjamin and the Isenheim Altarpiece, see Sigrid Weigel, Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy, trans. Chadwick Truscott Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 219–24. On the Expressionist reception of Grünewald, whom the art historian Max Deri, writing in 1922, hailed as ‘The strongest, the greatest, and most agitated of the Expressionists in the European past’, see Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 16–19, and Anne Stieglitz ‘The Reproduction of Agony: Toward a Reception-History of Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar after the First World War’, Oxford Art Journal, 12:2 (1989), pp. 87–103.  4 ‘Dies Buch erfüllt mich vor seinem Autor mit höchster Achtung, wie dessen Bilder meine Bewunderung wecken. Es ist wohl das einzige Buch über den Expressionismus sonder Geschwätz; freilich nicht vom Standpunkt der Philosophie –, sondern einer Lehre-von-der-Malerei’. Benjamin, Briefe, ed. Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 229. Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 156; translation slightly altered.  5 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 488. Benjamin writes that he ordered the almanac from the publisher when he was living in Switzerland, which would imply he acquired it between 1917 and 1919.   6 Bloch later described his Marxist-messianic book as a ‘first work … of a new, utopian kind of philosophy’, whose ‘revolutionary Romanticism’ he developed in his later work. The section on ‘The Production of the Ornament’ dwells on Expressionism in the visual arts, mentioning Marc and Kandinsky. Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 27–33, 279.  7 Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 123.  8 Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 62.  9 The volume edited by Andrew Benjamin on Walter Benjamin and Art (London: Continuum, 2005), for instance, has as its explicit focus ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’. 10 Weigel, Walter Benjamin, p. 207. Weigel notes, of course, that few studies of Benjamin fail to discuss the important place of Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I and Klee’s watercolour Angelus Novus in Benjamin’s oeuvre, but these are special cases. A number of art historians have, however, drawn most productively upon two very early texts by Benjamin, ‘Painting and the Graphic Arts’ and ‘On Painting, or Sign and Mark’, both written in 1917. Signal examples include Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Piet Mondrian, New York City’, in Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 178–9, 308, and ‘The Semiology of Cubism’, in Lynn Zelevansky (ed.), Picasso and Braque: A Symposium (New York, 1992), pp. 186–7, 217; Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 174; and Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Horizontality’, in Bois and Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 93–4. Benjamin, The Work of Art, pp. 219–25; see also Doherty’s illuminating introductory essay, pp. 195–215. 11 Benjamin, Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 178. 12 ‘The human word is the name of things. Hence, it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention. Language never gives mere signs.’ Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 69. 13 Weigel, Walter Benjamin, p. xxiv. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘The Supposition of the



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Aura: The Now, The Then, and Modernity’, trans. Jane Marie Todd, in Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 3–18. 14 Weigel, Walter Benjamin, p. xxii. 15 See note 2 above. See also Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). 16 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 173. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 235. Doherty, ‘Between the Artwork and its “Actualization”: A Footnote to Art History in Benjamin’s “Work of Art” Essay’, Paragraph, 32:3 (2009) pp. 331–58. 17 I explore a related connection concerning Benjamin’s early writings on Klee and on Cubism in A. Bourneuf, Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 66–82. 18 Benjamin, ‘Zur Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik’, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 9–53. 19 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1, p. 269. 20 Ibid., p. 73. 21 Ibid., p. 62. 22 Ibid., p. 67. 23 ‘Thus Kandinsky’s poetry isolated the sound images of words physiologically with the exactness that his painting isolated colors and forms. That does not hinder Germanists from attacking him in the name of a linguistics that grew out of the same premises. But alexia seems to haunt the books of its forgotten investigators’, Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 216–17. 24 A good example of the way Kandinsky links spiritual content to the material form expressing that content may be found at the beginning of ‘On the Question of Form’: ‘the spiritual value seeks its materialization. Matter is here a reserve of supplies from which the spirit, like a cook, selects what is n e c e s s a r y’. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 235. For an illuminating discussion of how contemporary critics took up Kandinsky’s idea, often turning it against his work (as failing to communicate the spiritual), see Charles W. Haxthausen, ‘“Der Künstler ohne Gemeinschaft”: Kandinsky und die deutsche Kunstkritik’, in Peter Hahn (ed.), Kandinsky. Russische Zeit und Bauhausjahre 1915–1933 (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1984), pp. 72–89. 25 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 147. Perhaps Kandinsky elaborates this opposition between a word’s ‘external sense as a name’, its denotational aspect, on the one hand, and its ‘inner sound’, on the other, in order to emphasize the great distance between what he means by ‘language’ when he speaks of a ‘language of forms and colors’ (the title of the sixth chapter of On the Spiritual in Art) and a commonplace understanding of language as a collection of signs joined by convention to ideas; using verbal language as an example clarifies that he is interested in effect, in ‘direct influence upon the soul’ rather than reference (or ‘practical and purposive significance’, as he writes in ‘On the Question of Form’, p. 246). I thank Mark Haxthausen for sharing with me his stimulating unpublished paper on ‘Kandinsky’s “Science of Art” ’, in which he discusses how sharply Kandinsky’s thinking about language in On the Spiritual in Art diverges from that of his contemporaries. For another discussion of Kandinsky’s statements on Maeterlinck, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 121. 26 Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, p. 147. [Emphasis in original.] In all the quotations in this chapter, the emphasis is in the original text. 27 ‘Es war ein langer Tisch. Oh, ein langer, langer Tisch. Rechts / und links an diesem Tische saßen viele, viele, viele Menschen, / Menschen, Menschen, / Menschen’. Kandinsky, Sounds, trans. Elizabeth R. Napier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 128. Kandinsky asserts the

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Annie Bourneuf value of children’s drawing as a ‘guide’ for the Expressionist artist in his essay ‘On the Question of Form’ (1912), in which he speaks of the child as seeing in a manner untainted by practical instrumentality: the ‘inner sound of the object’ expresses itself in every children’s drawing because the child ‘looks at each thing with unaccustomed eyes and still possesses the unclouded ability to take in the thing as such’. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter, trans. Klaus Lankheit (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1984), p. 168. 28 Kandinsky, Complete Writings, pp. 245–7. [Emphasis in original.] 29 Kandinsky, Sounds, pp. 71–2. 30 The German is found on p. 126 of Sounds. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. ‘gucken’, http://woerterbuchnetz.de, accessed 30 November 2018. 31 A typical example of this sense of the verb, from Wilhelm Heinse, is provided in the Deutsches Wörterbuch: ‘his shorn head peeped [guckte] comically out from his scarlet cloak.’ Ibid. 32 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, p. 15. 33 Peter Fenves, The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 133. 34 Ibid., p. 135. See Edmund Husserl on ‘Die Ausdrücke im einsamen Seelenleben’, in Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1901), pp. 35–7. 35 Ibid., p. 133. 36 Ibid., p. 135. 37 Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, Complete Writings, p. 250, translation slightly modified. ‘Die Welt klingt. Sie ist ein Kosmos der geistig wirkenden Wesen’. 38 Ibid., p. 245. 39 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997). See Peg Weiss’s illuminating discussion in Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 159, n25, as well as Neil H. Donahue, Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer (University Park: Penn State Press, 1994), pp. 16–17, and Christopher Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909–1928: The Quest for Synthesis (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 67–73. See Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, intro. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994) and Juliet Koss, ‘On the Limits of Empathy’, The Art Bulletin, 88:1 (2006), pp. 139–57. 40 Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 203. On the possibility that Kandinsky may have been directly acquainted with the work of Lipps, who lectured in Munich from 1894 to 1913, see Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich, p. 159, n25 and 159–60, n29. 41 Robert Vischer, ‘On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics’, in Empathy, Form and Space, p. 92. 42 Ibid., pp. 104–5. [Emphasis in original.] 43 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, p. 26. 44 Ibid., p. 15. 45 The concept of the expressionless plays a major role in Benjamin’s writings around this moment, including his essay on ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (composed in 1919–1922) and the related fragment ‘On Semblance’, Selected Writings, vol. 1, pp. 297–356 and pp. 223–5. Explication of this wider role lies beyond the scope of this essay. See Winfried Menninghaus, ‘Das Ausdruckslose: Walter Benjamins Kritik des Schönen durch das Erhabene’, in Uwe Steiner (ed.), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) zum 100. Geburtstag (Bern: P. Lang, 1992), pp. 33–76. 46 Although much later than the prewar texts I have discussed so far, and indeed written after major shifts in Kandinsky’s artistic practice and theoretical stance, it is interesting to compare



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Kandinsky’s discussion of seeing the graphic shape of a letter anthropomorphically, as a kind of expressive body, with his 1926 article ‘Dance Curves: The Dances of Palucca’, illustrated with four photographs of the German dancer Gret Palucca, each accompanied by Kandinsky’s ‘translation’ of her gestures and bodily positioning ‘into diagrammatic form’, arrangements of straight and curved lines. Kandinsky, Complete Writings, pp. 519–23. 47 Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, Complete Writings, pp. 250, 257. For an interesting discussion of such a mode of perception as figuring not only in Kandinsky’s writings but also in contemporary writing about Kandinsky, see Riccardo Marchi’s analysis of Rudolf Leonhard’s 1912 text on Kandinsky in ‘October 1912: Understanding Kandinsky’s Art “Indirectly” at Der Sturm’, Getty Research Journal 1 (2009), pp. 60–3. 48 Ibid., p. 245. [Emphasis in original.] 49 See also 2 Corinthians 3:6 (‘der Buchstabe tötet, aber der Geist macht lebendig’ – ‘the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’.) 50 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 338. 51 Ibid., p. 354 n77.

7 Feeling blue: Der Blaue Reiter, Francophilia and the Tate Gallery, 1960 Nathan J. Timpano

It must always be slightly misleading to show the Blaue Reiter painters by themselves.1

D

u r i n g the summer of 1960, the Arts Council of Great Britain, in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy and the Edinburgh Festival Society, organized the inaugural UK exhibition devoted to the multinational, Munich-based Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (1911–1914). The show, eponymously titled The Blue Rider Group, premiered at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in conjunction with the fourteenth annual Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), before travelling in late September 1960 to its more popular and prestigious venue, the Tate Gallery in London. Of particular historical importance, The Blue Rider Group was the second post-war exhibition in Europe devoted solely to this group, preceded only by the 1949 Blaue Reiter retrospective at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich.2 According to Robert Ponsonby, then director of the EIF, The Blue Rider Group was intended to be an ‘exceptionally comprehensive’ exhibition that would ‘redress a long-standing debt’ to artists who had been ‘the prime movers of the now world-wide abstract movement’ – a point exemplified by the show’s inclusion of works by Wassily Kandinsky, including Improvisation. Gorge (Improvisation Klamm, 1914, figure 7.1), Romantic Landscape (Romantische Landschaft, 1911) and Cossacks (Cosaques, 1910– 1911).3 To redress this debt, the Arts Council invited Hans Konrad Röthel, then director of Munich’s Städtische Galerie (now the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus München), to curate the show. Röthel – a leading scholar of Der Blaue Reiter at mid-century – thus arranged for the Städtische Galerie to lend nearly half of the show’s 227 objects, including Franz Marc’s Nude with Cat (Akt mit Katze, 1910, figure 7.2), August Macke’s Promenade (1913, figure 7.3) and, as previously mentioned, Kandinsky’s Improvisation. Gorge.4 Röthel additionally provided the introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, the cover of which reproduced Kandinsky’s original woodcut for the cover of the 1912 Der Blaue Reiter almanac; the iconic print was not, however, included in the show.



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7.1  Wassily Kandinsky Improvisation. Gorge, 1914.

For Ponsonby, the exhibition – on a more generalized level – was designed to showcase underrepresented German modern art at the EIF, which had historically favoured French and British painting at past annual exhibitions. To rectify this lacuna, and to sidestep the perennial focus on French modernism at the EIF, The Blue Rider Group became the first exhibition in the history of Der Blaue Reiter to display, in a completely ahistorical fashion, the group’s artistic output exclusive of the full gamut of European avant-garde painting. As such, images by Die Brücke artists and Paris-based painters (especially Robert Delaunay, André Derain and Pablo Picasso) – all of whom had exhibited their works in 1911 and 1912 in the originary exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter – were noticeably absent from The Blue Rider Group show. These non-Munich-based artists had, in fact, been central to the foundational conception and cosmopolitanism of Der Blaue Reiter,

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7.2  Franz Marc, Nude with Cat, 1910.

including the curatorial practices that informed the almanac and the group’s historic exhibitions, a point to which I shall return later. Given the purview, organization and collaborative nature of the British showing of The Blue Rider Group, the exhibition was primed to be an overwhelming success. When the show moved to the Tate, however, critics in London unexpectedly lambasted the aesthetic quality and selection of objects for this inaugural event (see figures 7.1–7.6). Given the popularity of certain members of Der Blaue Reiter by mid-century, particularly Kandinsky, it is somewhat difficult to fathom that the group was not immediately heralded as one of the arbiters of Central European modernism in post-war London.5



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7.3  August Macke, Promenade, 1913.

One (anonymous) art critic for The Times, who had seen the show in both Edinburgh and London, derided the exhibition at the Tate, arguing that The Blue Rider Group presented viewers with a group of artists whose ideas made a far greater contribution to the history of art than their paintings. In a damning opening statement, they commented: ‘the Blaue Reiter painters are perhaps more interesting historically than artistically’, arguing further that the group amounted to nothing more than ‘a weakish, eclectic side of German Expressionism’.6 A subsequent review by Edith Hoffmann – a leading scholar of Expressionism, and an Austrian émigré who had settled in London in 1934 – later appeared in the November issue of The Burlington Magazine. Hoffmann, like the critic for The Times, saw The Blue Rider Group at the Tate and was similarly displeased with the show, arguing that it ‘was not as successful as it might have been’.7 She explained that its poor organization and choice of mediocre works by ‘the now famous group’ were ‘of greater interest to those already fairly familiar with its subject than to the uninitiated’.8 Since the exhibition was intended to introduce the art of Der Blaue Reiter as a single,

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Nathan J. Timpano yet collective group to a broader British audience for the first time – and thus without comparative works by other German Expressionists, like Die Brücke, or additional European artists, such as the French Fauves and Cubists – Hoffmann’s criticism suggests that the mission of the exhibition had essentially failed. From its inception, Der Blaue Reiter was always a diversified group comprised of artists from Switzerland, the United States, and the German, Russian, and AustroHungarian Empires. And as previously mentioned, the first and second group exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter (1911 and 1912) conspicuously included works by other European modernists, a point that sharply opposes the revised presentation of these artists in The Blue Rider Group exhibition. In contrast to the 1960 show, the curatorial practices of Der Blaue Reiter historically reinforced the group’s strong and prominent interest in international modern art, a realization that led the German art historian Wilhelm Worringer to celebrate the cosmopolitan nature of Expressionism in the early twentieth century.9 At the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter – which opened in December 1911 at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich’s Arco-Palais, and which later travelled throughout Germany, Austria-Hungary and Scandinavia until 1914 – the group included paintings by Delaunay and Henri Rousseau alongside their own. Works by Derain, Picasso and Georges Braque were likewise shown at the second group exhibition held from February to April 1912 at Hans Goltz’s Neue Kunst Galerie, also in Munich. French modernists were similarly represented at subsequent German exhibitions in which Blaue Reiter artists participated. These shows included Karl Ernst Osthaus’s well-known 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, and the 1913 First German Autumn Salon (Erster deutscher Herbstsalon), which opened in Berlin under the direction of Herwarth Walden, founder of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm (The Storm) and the avant-gardist Galerie Der Sturm.10 In these originary exhibitions, it is overwhelmingly clear that Der Blaue Reiter situated itself (and was simultaneously situated by contemporary scholars and gallerists) within a transnational, pan-European understanding of modernism. However, and in spite of Der Blaue Reiter’s conceptualization of their art within an international context, not all German scholars or artists uniformly embraced the group’s cosmopolitan definition of Expressionism. In his seminal book Expressionism (Der Expressionismus, 1914), the art critic and historian Paul Fechter famously asserted that this was a strongly ‘Germanic’ style.11 In a similar vein, the Brücke artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner argued in his Chronicle of the Artists’ Group Brücke (Chronik der Künstler-Gruppe Brücke, 1913, first published in 1948) that Die Brücke had distanced itself from the influence of contemporary foreign art, and had instead adopted a pro-nationalistic stance in order to distinguish the group’s unique, avant-garde status from other international art movements of the early twentieth century.12 Even though Kirchner’s rhetoric did not represent the aesthetics – or beliefs – espoused by all members of Die Brücke, it is important to note that none of the Blaue Reiter artists ever sought to outwardly distance themselves from French modern art, either in their group exhibitions, or their collaborative publications.13 As evidenced in the pages of the almanac, the group contrastingly



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sought to highlight and embrace works by folk artists, non-western makers and French modernists alike. Building upon the extant contemporary literature, this chapter proposes a re-evaluation of The Blue Rider Group exhibition, including a re-appraisal of the show’s curatorial agenda and the post-war reception of German art in England and Scotland prior to the show’s unveiling at the RSA. Rather than presuming that The Blue Rider Group was inherently flawed because of the museum programme, or that it only showcased ‘mediocre’ works, I suggest instead that the non-unified, cosmopolitan aesthetic of Der Blaue Reiter, as well as the organizer’s deliberate decision to eliminate comparative works by French or Francophile modern artists, was responsible for the non-laudatory praise offered by London critics at mid-century. This study consequently explores how, and to what end, a collective English (rather than Scottish) bias towards French modernism played a role in the manner in which post-war London critics responded unfavourably to The Blue Rider Group when it opened at the Tate in 1960. The negative criticism afforded to the exhibition in England may have been the result of latently held nationalistic attitudes towards German art following World War I and World War II, yet anti-German sentiments do not appear to have played a large or defining role in the unenthusiastic reception of The Blue Rider Group. Instead, a review of the critical literature reveals that the deliberate omission of French art – which every previous exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter had incorporated, including the post-war retrospective in Munich – had prejudiced London critics against the show. Rather than displaying an inherent bias against all German modern art, English critics instead revealed their truer Francophilia; and in the process, ironically judged works by Der Blaue Reiter against their French counterparts – the very artists Der Blaue Reiter had historically embraced, but who the organizers of The Blue Rider Group had ‘neglected’ to include. The unflattering criticism of The Blue Rider Group exhibition serves, moreover, as a reminder that, even in the present era, scholars of Der Blaue Reiter are asked to explain the nuances involved in the formation of a multinational, Munich-based group that unified disparate artists by way of shared intellectual ideas, rather than a single, artistic style. To the credit of the exhibition organizers, Röthel and the Arts Council reiterated this point in the exhibition catalogue, reminding readers that Der Blaue Reiter historically lacked a common aesthetic.14 In this regard, the non-fixed nature of Der Blaue Reiter as a loosely defined collective of international artists appropriately mirrors the non-fixed aesthetic of the group’s almanac, which equally lacked a central manifesto or style.15 With these notions in mind, it is perhaps more beneficial to rethink Der Blaue Reiter as an avant-garde group that blatantly defies the traditional, curatorial practices that seek to unify (or chronologically explain) the development of a style through a group’s shared, artistic output. It is not my intention, however, to argue that a problem of style exists per se within this particular German Expressionist group. Yet without a unifying aesthetic, The Blue Rider Group exhibition found itself in murky territory at the Tate Gallery: on the one hand, its organizers had adopted an ahistorical hanging that excluded French painting; but on the other hand, the artwork simply did not resemble the stronger

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Nathan J. Timpano aesthetic of French modern art, at least not according to London critics. Before delving into the specifics of this damning criticism, it will be beneficial to first review the kinds of exhibitions that British art critics had grown accustomed to seeing on the walls of their institutions prior to 1960.

German vs. French modern art in Great Britain, 1890–1960 While a review of every British exhibition ever organized around French, German or European modern art before 1960 is beyond the scope of the current study, a few important examples are worth noting when examining the preference afforded to French modern painting, particularly Post-Impressionism, in both England and Scotland prior to the mid-century. Christian Weikop has tellingly referred to this favourable bias as the ‘curatorial Francophilia’ that was promulgated by various institutions during the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.16 Historically, these Francocentric attitudes were most prevalent among art critics in London. It is equally evident that German Expressionism – whether Die Brücke, or Der Blaue Reiter – had been publicly displayed and positively reviewed in Edinburgh from a much earlier date than in the British capital.17 These realities may explain why German modern art was received with mixed attitudes throughout Great Britain between 1890 and 1960. This notwithstanding, French modern art remained a dominant force in English and Scottish art museums, galleries and exhibitions throughout this timespan. As early as 1891 and 1892, sculptures by Auguste Rodin were exhibited at the annual exhibitions of the RSA and Edinburgh’s Society of Scottish Artists (SSA), the latter of which was established in 1892 – a historical correlation that undoubtedly reinforced Rodin’s international status (at least in Scotland) as a relevant, contemporary French artist working in the late nineteenth century.18 Rodin’s sculptural works later appeared in Manchester at the twenty-fifth autumn exhibition of the Manchester Art Gallery held in 1907, the same year the RSA elected Rodin an honorary member of their Academy. By comparison, the RSA seems not to have showcased paintings by German modernists until 1911; in terms of modern sculpture, the Academy did not exhibit works by a comparable German artist, such as Max Klinger, until 1912.19 Irrespective of the ostensible preference shown to French art at the fin de siècle, the RSA (as will later be discussed) was one of the first British institutions to display works by German modernists. To put this into historical perspective, one might compare the RSA to the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, which, between 1871 and 1914, had been invested in bringing German art and culture ‘to the attention of the British public in the age following German Unification’.20 That point notwithstanding, the majority of Germanic works on view at the Fitzwilliam throughout this period were by Old Master painters, not modern artists. Images by early German ‘modernists’, like Adolph Menzel, did not enter the permanent collection until 1937 and 1943 at the behest of the English artist Charles Haslewood Shannon, and other benefactors.21 When compared to the late nineteenth century, the early twentieth century



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witnessed a sizeable increase in the number of exhibitions focused on foreign modern artists in Great Britain. The year 1908 saw the formation of the Franco-British Exhibition in London, the first international exposition to be organized and financed by two countries, and more importantly, a venue that displayed objects by British artists alongside French modernists at the Fine Art Palace. Although the exhibition was not designed to highlight contemporary art from the two countries – given that the somewhat outmoded English Pre-Raphaelites and French Realists were well represented – the exposition did showcase artists considered ‘modern’ at the fin de siècle, including J. M. W. Turner and Aubrey Beardsley from England, and Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Gustave Moreau, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro and Rodin from France.22 Two years later, in November 1910, the influential English artist, historian and art critic Roger Fry organized a show devoted to French Post-Impressionists at London’s Grafton Galleries, the first exhibition of its kind in London.23 Fry, a member of London’s prominent Bloomsbury Group and a founding editor of The Burlington Magazine, is today largely credited with introducing the British public to French Post-Impressionism: a term he coined in the catalogue for the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists.24 Within the current scholarship, Weikop has previously discussed the role that Fry and the Bloomsbury Group’s Francophilia played in legitimizing French modern art in Great Britain in the early twentieth century – a preference that seemingly precluded works by German modernists in London exhibitions of the period.25 It is all the more interesting that Fry had alternatively considered using the term ‘Expressionism’, rather than ‘Post-Impressionism’, for the title of the 1910 Grafton exhibition. His decision to abandon the former term might suggest that he had read texts by Worringer, whose influential book Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1908), provided a theoretical basis for the emerging Expressionist style in relation to new German art.26 Or, perhaps in a judgment that anticipated Fechter’s later insistence that Expressionism was founded on strongly Germanic roots, Fry ultimately adopted the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ since it was free of any Germanic connotations. If this were the case, then Fry could perhaps be credited with inadvertently establishing a nationalist division between (French) Post-Impressionism and (German) Expressionism – a curatorial distinction that unforeseeably fostered inconsistent definitions of the latter style in Great Britain during the early twentieth century.27 Interestingly, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, like The Blue Rider Group exhibition some fifty years later, was a public failure, insofar as the contemporary critical press in London was concerned.28 In this regard, it is ostensible that Londoners were resistant to any mode of modernism in 1910 which was focused on continental painters, including French or Francophile artists. Fry seems to have been cognizant of this negative criticism when he organized his next show, The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, which opened at the Grafton Galleries in 1912. Unlike the first exhibition, the second included works by contemporary British artists, such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, in an effort to cast a positivistic light on Post-Impressionist ideologies and iconographies that had been adopted and espoused by native artists.29 As such, the second exhibition was cleverly aimed at illustrating the widespread effects of Post-Impressionism beyond France. Fry’s

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Nathan J. Timpano curatorial efforts to ‘educate the British public into accepting these “Post-Impressionists” as serious artists’ seems to have taken root by 1912, since critics who reviewed The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition were now responding favourably to paintings by Cézanne, whom they had disparaged just two years prior.30 In addition to contemporary British painting, the second exhibition included works by Russian artists, though none by Kandinsky.31 A version of this exhibition later opened at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGI) in 1913, showing works by Cézanne and Matisse, and at Edinburgh’s Society of Scottish Artists (SSA), where paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh were presented to the public.32 Between 1915 and 1928, at least seven more Scottish exhibitions which were centred on French modernism – including works by Post-Impressionists, Fauvists, Cubists and the Nabis – appeared at the RSA and SSA in Edinburgh, and in Glasgow at the RGI and Alexander Reid’s modern art gallery, which Reid – a Scottish art dealer and Francophile – had tellingly named La Société des Beaux-Arts.33 When works by Expressionists first appeared in British exhibitions, it was in Edinburgh, not London. In particular, the SSA organized a show in 1928 that included works by Austrian artists associated with the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) and the Vienna Secession, as well as paintings by German Expressionists from the private collection of Sir Michael Ernest Sadler, one of the first English collectors to acquire modern paintings by Kandinsky, whom Sadler and his son, the novelist Michael Sadleir (note the altered surname) had met in Munich in 1913.34 The elder Sadler, who was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds from 1911 until 1923, had made his modern art collection available to the public in Leeds prior to World War I, though access to Kandinsky’s paintings in this little-known private collection cannot quite be compared to the presentation (or lack thereof) of German modernists in national exhibitions prior to 1928.35 Sadleir, like his father, was equally instrumental in attempting to disseminate the ideology of Der Blaue Reiter in Great Britain, and he importantly provided the first English translation of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911) in 1914.36 This interest in German modern art was short-lived, however, as subsequent English and Scottish exhibitions of the 1920s and 1930s that focused on foreign artists were almost exclusively centred on French painters. The New Burlington Galleries in London (and later, the SSA) did showcase ten paintings by Max Ernst in the summer of 1936 in their International Surrealist Exhibition, a show organized by a committee comprised of André Breton, Paul Éluard, Henry Moore, Man Ray and Herbert Read, among others. This was the first exhibition of Surrealist art in Great Britain and, given Breton’s and Éluard’s involvement, it focused primarily on French artists.37 The 1938 Twentieth-Century German Art exhibition, which opened at the New Burlington Galleries, and which travelled in 1939 to the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow, was arguably the first, major UK exhibition to present works by German modernists to the public at large.38 Rather than focusing on one particular artistic group, as The Blue Rider Group exhibition would later do, Twentieth-Century German Art assembled works from nearly all of the early twentieth-century German avant-garde groups, including



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Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter and the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity), as well as from interlocutors like Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz.39 According to Weikop, Sir Herbert Read – the influential English poet and art critic – was instrumental in championing German modern art in Great Britain during the inter-war period.40 In reviewing the critical literature on Read’s Twentieth-Century German Art exhibition, Weikop has convincingly demonstrated that contemporary critics who were accustomed to French modernism were quick to compare German artists to their French counterparts in both positive and damning critiques.41 Read maintained, furthermore, that his exhibition was not intended to serve as politicized, anti-Nazi propaganda: a point that needed to be made, given that the Nazis’ infamous Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) exhibition, which opened in Munich in July 1937, was still travelling across Germany; even so, Adolf Hitler’s condemnation of the ‘London counter-exhibition’ was eagerly discussed, as such, by the British press.42 The positive critical attention afforded to the Twentieth-Century German Art exhibition was perhaps one reason for the show’s overwhelming popularity, which caused it to be extended in London before moving to the RSA the following year. By contrast, the reality facing contemporary Germanic artists exiled in Great Britain before and during World War II was not so uniformly positive. Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 300 artists – mostly from Germany and Austria, and many of whom had been included in the Nazis’ Degenerate Art show – emigrated to Great Britain in the hope of permanently residing in their newly adopted country, or at the very least, staying there during the war years.43 This number is relatively small when compared to the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Central Europe who came to Great Britain prior to the war alone.44 A few of these refugee artists were not granted immediate freedoms, but instead, had narrowly escaped Nazi concentration camps only to find themselves in British transit or internment camps, having been labelled ‘friendly enemy aliens’.45 Shulamith Behr and Sander Gilman have recently argued, rather persuasively, that despite the tendency to gloss over this ‘multilayered, albeit tragic, history of visual culture’, the ‘exile milieu’ nevertheless greatly affected the development and nature of modern British art, as well as the broader reception of modern art in Great Britain, during the 1930s and 1940s.46 Following the 1938 Twentieth-Century German Art exhibition, the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery (now the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery) was next to launch an exhibition during the war period that highlighted German modernism, especially Expressionism. The show, titled Mid-European Art, was arranged in 1944 by Trevor Thomas, then director of the museum, and included a number of works from private collections that had been brought to Great Britain in the 1930s by German refugee artists, historians and collectors. In 1953, the Leicester Museum organized another important exhibition of German Expressionism: in this instance, a solo show devoted to graphic works by Brücke artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff from the private collection of Rosa Shapire, an art historian who fled Nazi Germany for England in 1939.47 According to reviews in the contemporary British and German critical presses, the Leicester exhibition was a public success.48 Three years later, during the summer of 1956, the Tate Gallery unveiled

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Nathan J. Timpano a major retrospective of German art titled A Hundred Years of German Painting. This was the first exhibition at the Tate to highlight German modernism (though not Der Blaue Reiter exclusively). The show was sponsored by the West German Government, and was arranged by Alfred Hentzen, then director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. According to John Rothenstein, director of the Tate from 1938 until 1964, the retrospective was meant to examine a century of German art – which was still little-known throughout the UK – beginning with Biedermeier painting and moving quickly through the late nineteenth century in order to feature works by early twentieth-century artists.49 A review of A Hundred Years of German Painting by Hans Hess appeared in the June 1956 issue of The Burlington Magazine. Hess, then assistant curator under Thomas at the Leicester Museum, was a German émigré whose father, Alfred Hess, had been an important collector of then-contemporary Expressionist art while the family was still living in Germany prior to World War II. The younger Hess was subsequently one of the few scholars residing in Great Britain who was not only an advocate of German modernism, but also a British fine arts administrator who, like Sadler and others, owned works by Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists. In his critique of the show, Hess praised Hentzen and the Tate for providing the ‘first opportunity in England to judge the contribution of German painters to the art of the last 100 years’.50 It is clear, however, that Hess was less interested in the first fifty years of German art, since he devotes the majority of his essay to the German avant-gardes, including Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, and the Bauhaus. The favouritism shown to modern art was likewise reflected in the exhibition, given that the Tate had reserved most of its gallery space for these twentieth-century movements. Despite Hess’s overall praise of A Hundred Years of German Painting and his conspicuous partiality for German modernism, he nevertheless chastised the Tate for neglecting artists like Max Pechstein (a member of Die Brücke) and George Grosz and Otto Dix (two Neue Sachlichkeit artists). Hess additionally argued that the exhibition unfortunately left viewers with the impression that ‘Expressionism found many practitioners but few masters’.51 Interestingly, Hess believed that paintings in the retrospective benefited enormously from having been hung in close proximity to the Tate’s collection of ‘corresponding French and English contemporaries’.52 ‘That such comparison has now become poss­ ible’, wrote Hess, ‘is a sufficient reason for our gratitude’.53 This closing remark was not, I believe, meant to admonish German painting, or suggest that it should adopt a deferential position in relation to French modernism, or vice versa. Rather, it reveals that German art was simply not widely available in British institutions at mid-century, and also exposes the degree to which British critics were preconditioned to compare German art to French (and to a lesser degree, British) painting. In what now seems like a prophetic statement, Hess posited that ‘the exhibition might usefully be followed up by smaller exhibitions devoted to single groups or artists’.54 The Marlborough Gallery in London partially responded to this charge, mounting a 1959 exhibition of German modern art titled Art in Revolt: Germany, 1905–1925, and a subsequent show devoted to oil paintings by Gabriele Münter, which opened in September 1960 and thus coincided



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with the opening of The Blue Rider Group at the Tate.55 However important to the historiography of exhibitions devoted to German modernism in Great Britain, these Marlborough exhibitions did not focus on a single avant-garde group, nor Der Blaue Reiter, in particular. To redress this latter point, the Arts Council and the EIF Society thus organized The Blue Rider Group exhibition.

The Francophilic critical reception of The Blue Rider Group When The Blue Rider Group opened at the RSA in the summer of 1960, it was heralded as a great success by the Festival Society, not only for the fact that it was the first exhibition of its kind in the UK to provide a concentrated study of Der Blaue Reiter, but for Röthel’s admirable selection of works and curatorial prowess. On 20 August 1960, a somewhat sympathetic art critic for The Times wrote that the RSA exhibition was not only ‘hung with exceptional clarity and care for detail’, but that the show was ‘in subject an event’, given that the last exhibition of the group – the 1949 Blaue Reiter retrospective in Munich – had taken place some eleven years earlier.56 Of all the artists represented in The Blue Rider Group – which included Albert Bloch, David Burliuk, Heinrich Campendonk, Alexej von Jawlensky, Eugen von Kahler, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Macke, Marc, Münter, Jean Bloé Niestlé, Arnold Schönberg, and Marianne Werefkin – The Times’ critic identified Kandinsky, Klee, Macke and Münter as specifically noteworthy artists, stating that Kandinsky’s and Klee’s respective works held a prominent place in the development of modern art. Klee’s In the Houses of St. Germain (In den Häusern v. St. Germain, 1914, figure 7.4), which reveals the artist’s signature, colour-field patterning of the Tunisian landscape, was one such laudable example in the exhibition. To stress the lasting legacy of Der Blaue Reiter, particularly at the Bauhaus, the critic likewise proclaimed that members of the group ‘did not find, they searched’.57 While this statement seemingly positions Der Blaue Reiter as an equally important German philosophical movement of the early twentieth century, it was not offered as an altogether positive evaluation of the group: a point made clearer when the critic later argues that paintings by Der Blaue Reiter at the RSA regrettably ‘do not represent the sort of confident, daring achievement that a comparable collection of Parisian work of the same date would provide. Nor have they the explosive impact of the “Brücke” painters’.58 This contention is striking, not only for its desire to once more compare Der Blaue Reiter to French modernists, but to equally pit Der Blaue Reiter against Die Brücke, and through blatantly hegemonic terms. The Francophilic legacy of the development of European modern art likewise found its way into the language of subsequent reviews that appeared in the London press when The Blue Rider Group moved to the Tate on 30 September 1960. The earliest of these critiques was published in The Times on opening day, and was subsequently influential in setting the tone for the less-than-positive London critiques that followed. The review, which adopted the aforementioned belief that Der Blaue Reiter was ‘more interesting historically than artistically’, was not altogether damning, as the author did concede that The Blue Rider Group was ‘an important exhibition, nevertheless, if only for the way it

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7.4  Paul Klee, In the Houses of St. Germain, 1914.

shows the context in which Kandinsky’s rapid epoch-making evolution of abstraction took place’.59 Here, one might surmise that the critic was visually responding to the artist’s movement away from figuration, evident in Riding Couple (Reitendes Paar, 1906/07, figure 7.5), and towards more abstracted, colour-based landscapes, as witnessed in Improvisation. Gorge. This praise for Kandinsky’s oeuvre is brief, as the critic was quick to offer what they believed was the overarching shortcoming of the exhibition: that it isolated Der Blaue Reiter from Die Brücke and French modern art. The critic wrote accordingly: It must always be slightly misleading to show the Blaue Reiter painters by themselves. Personal relationships kept the Munich artists together. … But they were a mixed bunch stylistically, eager to stress their international outlook,



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7.5  Wassily Kandinsky, Riding Couple, 1906.

and the only two group exhibitions that ever took place found room for Braque, Delaunay, Picasso, Derain, and all the members of Die Brücke, with no more ‘programme’ to unite them than a bright trust in the future and what Kandinsky was to call ‘the spiritual in art’. The result, with Marc and Macke picking up Parisian ideas and Klee not yet into his stride, is paradoxically to make their work look more provincial than that of the belligerently nationalist Die Brücke.60 Unlike The Times’earlier (August) review of the show, which praised Die Brücke over Der Blaue Reiter, the author here dismisses Die Brücke as both ‘belligerently nationalist’ and only slightly less provincial than Der Blaue Reiter. The belief that members of Der Blaue Reiter were ‘more interesting historically than artistically’ seems therefore

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Nathan J. Timpano to stress that the greatest contribution of the exhibition was to provide a historical or chronological examination of Expressionism’s push towards abstraction. In Hoffmann’s Burlington Magazine critique, published in November, the emphasis on the group’s early exploration of abstract painting was, in her differing opinion, one of the major weaknesses of the Tate exhibition. As such, she offered the following criticism of images in The Blue Rider Group: To see the feeble beginnings of a painter of whose later achievements one knows or appreciates very little is hardly exciting. A few more really mature, original works would have opened more eyes than a scholarly approach which only few can share. … The conviction, so widespread in this country, that the Blaue Reiter deserves attention only because it was the cradle of abstract art, while it produced few good paintings, was further strengthened by the emphasis on Kandinsky, the most intellectual member of the group, but not its greatest painter. Only a collection of the best works of the period could have shaken that belief.61 In this passage, Hoffmann derides the exhibition for being too intellectually minded, speaking only to the erudite few who were already familiar with Der Blaue Reiter and, even worse still, for presenting mediocre works to an expectant (though unapprised) public. Ironically, much of the current scholarship on Der Blaue Reiter emphasizes this very claim, offering that Kandinsky and others were deeply interested in originating and promulgating theories of art, as much as modes of art-making, and yet Hoffmann’s argument reinforces the notion that Kandinsky should be remembered as a great pioneer in the historiography of modern art, but not one of its greatest practitioners.62 These attitudes are likewise to be found in a slightly earlier review of the exhibition penned by David Sylvester, then art critic for the New Statesman. In his critique, Sylvester reveals his open disdain for Kandinsky’s paintings: Certainly the most problematical of the Blaue Reiter artists, perhaps of all modern artists, is Kandinsky. By any normal standards of good painting – any normal standards, German as well as French – Kandinsky makes it difficult for us to take him seriously as a painter. The want of presence and density in his shapes and colours gives them a slightly sickening effect. … It is as if we were in a small boat out in a rocky sea. Kandinsky talked of creating a concrete art; concreteness is the thing his art lacks most of all.63 One might presuppose that Sylvester was here referencing any number of Kandinsky’s abstracted compositions that hung in the Tate galleries, including Improvisation. Gorge, which apparently caused Sylvester to suffer, at least figuratively, from visual nausea. Sylvester, who was swift to explain what the Tate had done wrong in The Blue Rider Group, was also as quick to suggest changes that would, in his opinion, strengthen the overall exhibition. He argued that the three strongest personalities in the group



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– Kandinsky, Klee and Schönberg – be omitted entirely from the show, thus allowing the ‘Fauvist-like’ painters – Campendonk, Macke, Marc and Münter – to reveal a common French-inspired style among a group of artists that, for all intents and purposes, lacked a unified aesthetic.64 Most telling in this assessment is the understanding that Sylvester’s distaste for the exhibition was predicated on his dislike of those Blaue Reiter artists who explored abstraction and a wholly ‘Germanic’ sensibility. Instead, Sylvester favours individuals who painted in a ‘French’ or ‘Fauvist’ manner, which he ironically celebrates in a review of non-French art. Hoffmann similarly argued that The Blue Rider Group at the Tate should have presented the group ‘in its European context: one or two examples of Art Nouveau next to Kandinsky, a few paintings by Matisse, Delaunay, and the Futurists in the Marc section, a Seurat sketch close to Macke, and some Bavarian folk art in the neighbourhood of Gabriele Münter’.65 With the exception of Southern German folk painting and the Italian Futurists, each of the artists or styles that Hoffmann cites are French, and each, according to the historian, were immensely important to Blaue Reiter artists, as well as to the group’s overall position in the history of modern art. With regard to Marc’s Nude with Cat, she states that the viewer can easily discern the unmistakable influence of Matisse’s bold use of colour and line in the painting.66 Even the organic arabesques found in Marc’s Deer in the Snow II (Rehe im Schnee II, 1911, figure 7.6) are seen to reflect, in Hoffmann’s assessment, the artist’s interest in ‘Art Nouveau curves’.67 Here, I want to posit that Hoffmann deliberately chose to employ the French art nouveau, as opposed to its German equivalent Jugendstil, in order to directly connect paintings by Marc to decidedly French art, rather than German Jugendstil or the curving forms found in works by the Wiener Werkstätte. Hoffmann, like the author of the August review in The Times, does praise works by Macke, but argues that his strongest paintings were not included in the exhibition; and when she discusses a commendable canvas by Macke, such as Promenade, she maintains that the artist unequivocally reveals his debt to Delaunay and Georges Seurat, whose pointillist ‘skittle-shaped’ silhouettes she identifies in Macke’s work from 1913.68 Hoffmann’s aversion to the Tate show did not simply extend to the absence of French modern art in comparison to ‘feeble’ works by Der Blaue Reiter, but to the exhibition’s lacklustre exploration of abstraction. On this point, Hoffmann believed that the show conspicuously revealed how Kandinsky’s post-1910 paintings failed to abandon semblances of figuration, even after he had ‘discovered’ purely abstract painting.69 If we turn to Kandinsky’s own musings on this alleged conundrum, we discover that his desire was not to completely abandon representation in favour of abstract form but, rather, to merge these two seemingly contradictory approaches into a single, dialectical image. In 1914, Kandinsky offered the following explanation for his artwork: I felt dimly that a picture can be something other than a beautiful landscape, an interesting and picturesque scene, or the portrayal of a person. Because I loved colours more than anything else, I thought even then, however confusedly, of colour composition, and sought that objective element which could justify the

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7.6  Franz Marc, Deer in Snow II, 1911.

colours. … Objects began gradually to dissolve more and more in my pictures. This can be seen in nearly all the pictures of 1910. As yet, objects did not want to, and were not to, disappear altogether from my pictures.70 In this passage, Kandinsky’s words certainly help to legitimize his artistic agenda in the early years of the twentieth century. This conceptualization of Kandinsky’s oeuvre can, moreover, be discovered in Röthel’s ekphrasis of Improvisation. Gorge, in which the art historian identifies among the painting’s abstracted forms the semblances of ‘a man and a woman dressed in Bavarian costume, standing on a landing-stage, beneath which two canoes are passing, with their oars jutting up into the air’.71 Kandinsky’s and Röthel’s words respectively reveal, however unintentionally, the very crux of the artist’s exploration of modernist compositions, given that objects in his abstract paintings were not meant



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to altogether disappear from the world of representation. However, through this desire to philosophize form, Kandinsky, according to the London critic, had undermined his paintings; but as Der Blaue Reiter’s most dominant personality (Hoffmann mockingly refers to him as ‘the Great Man’ in her essay), Kandinsky was justifiably given the highest place of honour in the Tate show, and rightfully so, since he was the group’s co-founder and leading theorist.72 And yet those in the critical press, including Hoffmann, were seemingly disinterested in the history of Der Blaue Reiter, its formation, or its leadership when they uniformly concluded that The Blue Rider Group exhibition was a failed c­ uratorial project. Like Sylvester, Hoffmann devises a strategy for strengthening the exhibition, though in her version of the show, Kandinsky’s purely abstract painting would be highlighted alongside Marc’s later works (c. 1914) and Klee’s more novel and ‘interesting’ pieces.73 With regard to Marc’s oeuvre, she states that ‘real harm was done’ by the omission of his late paintings where animals and landscape merge into a single pictorial facet, arguing further that ‘no just valuation of the artist is possible’ without these canvases.74 In this hypothetical, Hoffmannian exhibition, Kandinsky’s Improvisation. Gorge, which is not a ‘purely’ abstract painting, and Marc’s Nude with Cat, which is not one of the artist’s late canvases, would not survive the historian’s editorial guillotine. The Times’ critic for the Tate venue likewise would have cut Kandinsky’s Riding Couple from the show, arguing that the painting was nothing more than a ‘fairy-tale illustration and mawkish fantasy’.75 If any of these critics – Hoffmann, Sylvester or the various reviewers for The Times – had ultimately had curatorial control, it is clear that they would have organized a completely different exhibition, and one in which Kandinsky – arguably the group’s most ­recognizable member – played a surprisingly minor role. One wonders if Hoffmann, while still a strong supporter of Expressionism and particularly the works of the Austrian Expressionist painter and playwright Oskar Kokoschka, was simply not a Blaue Reiter enthusiast, particularly when compared to her interest in other, early twentieth-century Germanic avant-garde groups. To this point, Hoffmann made only two cursory references to Der Blaue Reiter in a review published a decade earlier for the Expressionism from Van Gogh to Picasso exhibition, which had been organized in 1949 by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Of the German Expressionists represented in this Dutch exhibition, Hoffmann principally discusses Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Kokoschka, Modersohn-Becker, Emil Nolde and SchmidtRottluff. With regard to Der Blaue Reiter, she singles out Kandinsky and Jawlensky alone, reminding her readers that ‘the deepest outside influence on the Expressionists of Southern Germany did not come from France but from Russia’.76 Despite this emphatic declaration, she paradoxically shifts the focus away from Russia in her November 1960 review of The Blue Rider Group, and instead identifies a strong dialogue between the French Fauves and Jawlensky, who Peter Selz declared (as early as 1957) was never officially a member of Der Blaue Reiter in the first place.77 Based on Hoffmann’s post-war critiques of Expressionism, one might surmise that her curatorial model was essentially one in which an ‘effective’ exhibition allowed viewers to visually compare and contrast works of art created by various artists, and from differing international schools. In truth,

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Nathan J. Timpano it appears that critics like Sylvester and Hoffmann were only willing to analyse Der Blaue Reiter in relation to, or thus in direct comparison with, other modernists and the various ‘isms’ that comprise late nineteenth and early twentieth-century French painting. In this way, when London critics did praise works in The Blue Rider Group exhibition, they almost uniformly favoured those artists who had either studied in France or with French painters, and whose canvases were seen to be in dialogue with French modern art. Given that Der Blaue Reiter had historically stressed its international outlook, this criticism of the group in the London press essentially asked British audiences to consider whether or not Blaue Reiter painters could effectively be shown, as one critic put it, ‘by themselves’ – offering in the end, that they could not. In reviewing the contemporary critical literature on The Blue Rider Group exhibition, I have attempted to illustrate how the ‘curatorial Francophilia’ adopted by London critics at mid-century made them unwilling to conceive of Der Blaue Reiter as an aesthetically independent artistic group, particularly when divorced from the context of French modernism. One could paradoxically question whether this Francocentric conception of the group was, in fact, indebted to the curatorial cosmopolitanism espoused by Der Blaue Reiter from its inception. For example, in Marc’s 1911 essay ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’ (first published in the 1912 almanac, and routinely translated as ‘The “Savages” of Germany’), the artist argued that German modern artists – or ‘savages’ – who sought a deeper, mystical experience in a work of art, had, in truth, looked to the ‘liberating influence’ of modern French and Russian painters.78 If one translates ‘Wilden’ as ‘Fauves’, as recent scholars have done, then Marc’s words may suggest that Der Blaue Reiter was always meant to be analysed within the context of French modernism, particularly if one conceives of his essay as a synecdoche for the overall ideology and material output of the group.79 As a closing thought, let us contemplate whether or not The Blue Rider Group was innovative in showcasing works by Blaue Reiter artists ‘by themselves’ (and for the first time in history), or guilty of perpetuating (however unintentionally) a Francophilic understanding of Expressionism, just as Blaue Reiter artists were being introduced to Britain museumgoers. Regardless of the answer, it is clear that by isolating Der Blaue Reiter from its ‘European context’, the organizers of The Blue Rider Group did something that had never been done before: they placed traditional, curatorial parameters around a loosely defined group of artists that lacked a common aesthetic, and in so doing, inadvertently persuaded individuals to view this group as though it were a stylistically cohesive and collective movement. Believing that the exhibition’s organizers had offered the public a misperception of Der Blaue Reiter and its artistic output, London reviewers – who nevertheless revealed a continued bias for French modern art – were quick to remind their readers that Blaue Reiter artists had not lived in an aesthetic bubble, but rather, in a multicultural and cosmopolitan milieu. At the end of the day, these English critics wanted to see a ‘masterpiece’ by Matisse hanging next to a ‘mediocre’ painting by Marc. But in so doing, would they seek to transform Der Blaue Reiter into Le cavalier bleu? C’est possible.



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Notes   1 ‘Painters with Ideas: The Blaue Reiter Group’, The Times (30 September 1960), p. 16.   2 For a review of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst exhibition, see J. A. Thwaites, ‘The Blaue Reiter in Munich’, The Burlington Magazine, 91:599 (1949), pp. 290–3.  3 R. Ponsonby, ‘Foreword’, in The Blue Rider Group, exhib. cat. (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Academy, 1960), p. 3. Two slightly different versions of the catalogue were published for the exhibition. The earliest publication includes Ponsonby’s foreword and was available during the EIF, while the second version of the catalogue, which features a foreword by Gabriel White (of the Arts Council of Great Britain), was available at the Tate Gallery in the autumn of 1960. See The Blue Rider Group, exhib. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1960). Both versions of the catalogue reproduced an introductory essay by Hans Konrad Röthel, as well as the complete catalogue of works in the exhibition. In addition, Kandinsky’s Cossacks is listed as Study for Composition IV in these catalogues.   4 The Städtische Galerie lent 111 of the total 227 works to The Blue Rider Group exhibition. See ‘Catalogue’, in The Blue Rider Group, pp. 13–22.   5 In her review of the 1960 exhibition, Edith Hoffmann discusses the notoriety of Blaue Reiter members, including Kandinsky, Marc and Paul Klee. See E. Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, The Burlington Magazine, 102:692 (1960), p. 498.   6 ‘Painters with Ideas’, The Times, p. 16.   7 Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, p. 498.  8 Ibid.   9 See W. Worringer, ‘The Historical Development of Modern Art’, in R-C. Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 9–12. 10 To review works included in these respective exhibitions, see Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes Westdeutscher Kunstfreunde und Künstler zu Cöln, exhib. cat. (Cöln am Rhein: M. Dumont Schauberg, 1912); and H. Walden, Erster deutscher Herbstsalon, exhib. cat. (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1913). 11 For Fechter’s discussion of the Germanic roots of Expressionism, see P. Fechter, Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1914), pp. 21–9. 12 See E. L. Kirchner, ‘Chronik der Brücke’, in Washton Long (ed.), German Expressionism, pp. 22–6. See also T. O. Benson, ‘Brücke, French Art and German National Identity’, in C. Weikop (ed.), New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), p. 46. 13 Benson has discussed the fact that Kirchner’s fellow group members did not share his views expressed in the Chronik, which eventually led to the disbanding of Die Brücke in 1913. See Benson, ‘Brücke, French Art and German National Identity’, p. 46. 14 See H. K. Röthel, ‘Introduction’, in The Blue Rider Group, pp. 5–12. 15 I would direct the reader’s attention to Peter Vergo’s and Jessica Horsely’s respective chapters in this volume, as each of these authors discuss the nature, scope and art historical significance of the almanach. 16 C. Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism, p. 248. 17 At the mid-century, the National Galleries of Scotland had organized exhibitions that included works by Oskar Kokoschka in 1941 and 1942, and the Society of Scottish Arts displayed works by Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter in 1950. See K. Hartley, Scottish Art since 1900 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 1989), p. 175. 18 ‘Auguste Rodin HRSA’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland

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Nathan J. Timpano 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database: http://­ sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib6_1210849605, accessed 23 September 2012. 19 See Hartley, Scottish Art since 1900, pp. 171–2; and ‘Max Klinger’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database: http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib6_1213116382, accessed 23 September 2012. 20 M. Potter, ‘Cambridge University and the Germanist Bridge: The Aesthetics and Politics of Internationalism at the Fin de Siècle’, in G. Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 176. 21 See the museum records for Objects 2117, 2118 and P. 67–1943 in the Fitzwilliam Museum’s online database: http://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index​.php?qu=adol​ph​+​m​ e​nzel&Oop=OR&Fma=&Fpp=&Fmt=&Fob=&Fds=&Fdst=AD&Fde=&Fdet=AD​&O​a​a=tr​u​ e&O​at=tr​ue&do=Search, accessed 15 July 2018. 22 For a review of works in this exhibition, see I. Spielmann, Souvenir of the Fine Art Section, FrancoBritish Exhibition (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1908). 23 See C. A. Donnell, ‘The Problem of Representation and Expressionism in Post-Impressionist Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 15:3 (1975), p. 237, n1. 24 See R. Fry and D. MacCarthy, Manet and the Post-Impressionists (London: Grafton Galleries, 1910). See also Donnell, ‘The Problem of Representation and Expressionism in Post-Impressionist Art’, p. 227; and Weikop, ‘The British reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, pp. 249–50. 25 Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, pp. 248–51. 26 See W. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1908). See also R-C. Washton Long, ‘Brücke, German Expressionism and the Issue of Modernism’, in New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism, pp. 12–13. 27 See Donnell, ‘The Problem of Representation and Expressionism in Post-Impressionist Art’, p. 227; and M. Werenskiold, The Concept of Expressionism: Origin and Metamorphoses (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), pp. 13–25. Timothy O. Benson also discusses the historiography of the term ‘Expressionism’, in Benson, ‘Brücke, French Art and German National Identity’, pp. 45–6. 28 See C. Reed (ed.), A Roger Fry Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 50. 29 Ibid., p. 54. 30 Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, p. 250. Regarding the reception of Cézanne’s works, see Reed (ed.), A Roger Fry Reader, p. 54. 31 The checklist for the exhibition reveals that works by Kandinsky were not included in the show. See R. Fry, The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, exhib. cat. (London: Grafton Galleries, 1912). 32 See Hartley, Scottish Art since 1900, p. 172. 33 Ibid.; and F. Fowle, Van Gogh’s Twin: The Scottish Art Dealer Alexander Reid, 1854–1928 (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2011). 34 See T. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club (1893–1923) (Aldershot: Orage Press, 1990), p. 179. Sadler’s son, Michael Sadleir, had changed his last name so as not to be confused with his father. 35 See M. T. Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 52. 36 See Saler, Avant-Garde in Interwar England, pp. 51–2. For Sadleir’s translation of Kandinsky’s essay, see W. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadleir (London: Tate, 2006). 37 For the exhibition catalogue, which is devoid of reproductions, see The International Surrealist



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Exhibition, exhib. cat. (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1936). The exhibition later travelled in 1937 to the Society of Scottish Artists. See Hartley, Scottish Art since 1900, p. 174. 38 For the travelling schedule of the Twentieth-Century German Art exhibition, see Hartley, Scottish Art since 1900, p. 174. 39 See Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art, exhib. cat. (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1938). 40 I am grateful to Christian Weikop for bringing Herbert Read to my attention. For Read’s role in promoting German modern art in Great Britain, see Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, pp. 237–76. 41 Ibid., p. 258. 42 See H. Read, ‘Introduction’, in Exhibition of Twentieth-Century German Art, p. 6. Politicized reviews of the exhibition were printed in the summer of 1938 in newspapers such as The Daily Mirror, The Oxford Mail, and the Weekly Illustrated. See Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, p. 261. For the catalogue of works included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, see S. Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991). 43 See R. Dickson and S. MacDougall, ‘Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933–45’, in Forced Journeys: Artists in Exile in Britain c. 1933–45, exhib. cat. (London: The London Jewish Museum of Art, 2009), p. 18. 44 See S. Barron, ‘European Artists in Exile: A Reading Between the Lines’, in S. Barron (ed.), Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, exhib. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), p. 15–16. 45 See Forced Journeys, pp. 15–21; and Barron, ‘European Artists in Exile’, p. 16. 46 S. Behr and S. Gilman, ‘Forced Journeys: An Introduction’, in Forced Journeys, p. 16. 47 See J. Lloyd, ‘International Significance of the Collection’, Leicester’s German Expressionist Collection, Leicester Museums Website, pp. 19–20, online database: http://germanexpres​ sionismleicester.org/leicesters-collection/academic-reports/academic-reports-on-the-collect​ io​n/report-2-international-significance-of-the-collection/, accessed 16 July 2017. 48 See Weikop, ‘The British Reception of Brücke and German Expressionism’, p. 275, n74. 49 See J. Rothenstein, ‘Foreword’, in A Hundred Years of German Painting, exhib. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1956), p. 3. 50 H. Hess, ‘Hundred Years of German Painting 1850–1950’, The Burlington Magazine 98:639 (1956), p. 203. 51 Ibid., 204. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 See W. Grohmann, Art in Revolt: Germany, 1905–1925, exhib. cat. (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1959); and H. K. Röthel, Gabriele Münter: Oil Paintings, 1903–1937, exhib. cat. (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1960). The Marlborough Gallery also mounted additional post-war exhibitions of modern German art, including Kandinsky, the Road to Abstraction, held in 1961; and Painters of the Bauhaus, held in 1962. See H. K. Röthel, Kandinsky, the Road to Abstraction, exhib. cat. (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1961); and W. Grohmann, Painters of the Bauhaus: Albers, Bayers, Feininger, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Muche, Schlemmer, exhib. cat. (London: Marlborough Fine Art, 1962). 56 ‘Blaue Reiter Artists: Fine Exhibition at Edinburgh’, The Times (20 August 1960), p. 4. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 ‘Painters with Ideas’, The Times, p. 16.

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Nathan J. Timpano 60 Ibid. 61 Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, 498. 62 See, for example, W. Kandinsky, ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, Das Kunstblatt, 14 (1930), p. 57; W. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1911); W. Kandinsky, ‘On the Question of Form’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Documentary edition, ed. Klaus Lankheit, trans. H. Falkenstein (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 147–86; and F. Marc, ‘Aphorisms’, in The Blue Rider Group, pp. 25–6. 63 D. Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–96 (London: Pimlico Press, 2002), pp. 77–8. [Emphasis in original.] 64 Sylvester, About Modern Art, p. 77. 65 Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, pp. 498, 501. 66 Ibid., p. 501. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 W. Kandinsky, ‘The Cologne Lecture’, in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992), pp. 94–5. 71 H. K. Röthel quoted in A. Zweite, The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, trans. J. Ormrod (Munich: Prestel, 1989), p. 146. 72 Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, p. 501. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 ‘Painters with Ideas’, The Times, p. 16. 76 E. Hoffmann, ‘Expressionism at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam’, The Burlington Magazine, 91:561 (1949), p. 348. 77 For Hoffmann’s discussion of Jawlensky, see Hoffmann, ‘The “Blaue Reiter” at the Tate Gallery’, p. 501. For Selz’s discussion of the artist, see P. Selz, ‘Jawlensky Not in Group’, College Art Journal, 17:1 (1957), p. 60. 78 See F. Marc, ‘The “Savages” of Germany’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 61–4. 79 N. Wolf, Expressionism (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), p. 19; and Zweite, The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, p. 72.

8 Die Tunisreise: the legacy of Der Blaue Reiter in the art of Paul Klee and Nacer Khemir Sarah McGavran

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mo n g the principle concerns of Blaue Reiter were artistic exchanges between the so-called east and west and the relationship between the abstract and the spiritual.1 These ideas shaped the Swiss artist Paul Klee’s engagement with the arts of Tunisia. In turn, they determined his legacy for Tunisian artist, writer, filmmaker and professional storyteller Nacer Khemir. In Die Tunisreise or The Journey to Tunisia, a 2007 film directed by the Swiss filmmaker Bruno Moll, Khemir reflects on the significance of Klee’s famous Tunisian watercolours for his own diverse oeuvre. In a 2011 interview with the author at Khemir’s home in Paris, he elaborated: until he saw Klee’s Tunisian watercolours, which he believes draw from the abstract geometric forms of Tunisian architecture, ceramics and textiles, Khemir did not see Tunisian visual culture as a source for his own contemporary artistic expression. As Khemir put it: ‘Klee offered me the gift of my world.’2 In Die Tunisreise, Khemir, whose own films have won awards at international festivals, acts as a local travel guide.3 He leads viewers on a cinematic journey to the Tunisian sites and monuments that Klee and his Blaue Reiter companions, August Macke (1887–1914) and Louis Moilliet (1880–1962), visited for just under two weeks in April 1914.4 Throughout the film, Kheimr asserts that Klee intuited that the purpose of Islamic abstraction is to convey something beyond the visible world, and drew inspiration from it while in Tunisia and for the rest of his career. Bruno Moll, who makes television documentaries and independent films, remains off screen as director. As Moll explained to me during an in-person interview in Bern in 2011, he found it difficult to see the visual connections between Klee’s art and contemporary Tunisia.5 His inability to identify with Klee and Khemir adds critical distance to this multi-layered film. Khemir has claimed an affinity with the Swiss Klee in the film, in his writings, and in an interview with the author at his Paris home in 2011.6 Scholars criticized the idea of affinity between modern artists and non-western art and locales in the wake of the exhibition Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 on the grounds that formal similarities do not necessarily

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Sarah McGavran convey similar intentions.7 Khemir’s affinity for Klee runs in the opposite direction – from North Africa to Europe – he nevertheless assumes a sense of shared purpose and understanding across time and cultures. As I shall explain in further detail below, the framework of modernist primitivism from which this criticism arose nevertheless helps historicize Klee’s Tunisian journey and Khemir’s reception thereof. Primitivism may be understood as the process wherein artists adapt the aesthetics of African and Oceanic art in order to critique academic art, and the social and economic institutions that supported it. Indeed, by claiming that Klee drew inspiration from the Islamic and Bedouin visual cultures of Tunisia to develop a new style, Khemir indirectly claims that Klee’s work was primitivist. This chapter argues that Der Blaue Reiter’s interest in non-western art shaped Klee’s engagement with the cultural production of Tunisia and therefore provides a historical basis for Khemir’s contemporary work and self-fashioning. In turn, Khemir’s interpretation of Klee’s Tunisian watercolours and related works suggest new avenues of scholarly inquiry about Klee’s art and writings, both of which are often considered within the framework of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which emphasizes the dominance of the European colonizer and pertains to the Holy Land, the Middle East and North Africa.8 However, the Tunisian journey was the brief touristic encounter of German-speaking artists with a French colony, and the documentary evidence suggests that the artists’ contact with Tunisians was limited.9 Thus, Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theory, which emphasizes the uneven cultural exchange and interaction between European colonizers and colonized peoples over time, is more helpful here.10 Khemir also provides a concrete example of inverse cultural exchange, from west (Klee) to east (Khemir), but one that took place over a much longer period than did Klee’s short trip to Tunisia in 1914. Khemir’s affinity for Klee stems from his perception, which he reiterates throughout Die Tunisreise, that Klee intuited that the purpose of Islamic abstraction is to convey something beyond the visible world. Evoking the spiritual was indeed one of Klee’s aims. In his Schöpferische Konfession (Creative Credo, 1920), he asserted that ‘art does not reproduce the visible, but rather makes visible’.11 Furthermore, art ‘allows you to cast aside the pall and imagine moments of the divine. To always look forward to the end of the day, when the soul returns to the table to nourish its hungry nerves and to replenish its empty vessels with new wine’.12 As Khemir explained to me, in Islamic art, the most important ideas cannot be represented literally. To represent visually that which is invisible, forms must be simplified to the point of abstraction. For Khemir, Klee’s work evokes the spiritual because of ‘the apparent poverty of his tools … the great simplicity of his language’.13 During our interview, Khemir also explained why he thought Klee saw potential in Tunisian visual culture where other modernists did not. He says that Klee was unfettered by nationalism and xenophobia, and therefore considered Tunisians as equals who had something to teach him about his own art: ‘Westerners always look at Orientals in the same way. [Generalizing] is a way to get past their own [spiritual] poverty, to assert their superiority. You have to be somebody conscious of your own self to […] look at people



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you meet as equal. It’s universal, his universal side, a universal consciousness. He was advanced in his humanity’.14 By universal, Khemir means that Klee was open to and able to assimilate influences from various cultures into his work. Klee’s art is therefore of utmost interest to Khemir, who likewise wishes to convey the invisible, or the spiritual, through art. As discussed below in further detail, Khemir goes a step further than Klee. His films mediate between disparate cultures by instigating cross-cultural dialogues about the diversity of Islam. Die Tunisreise juxtaposes documentary material with works of art, clips from Khemir’s films and his commentary on the Tunisian journey, calling into question the notion of affinity across divergent historical and cultural contexts. Additionally, Macke’s photo­ graphs of colonial Tunisia, lingering close-up shots of Klee’s Tunisian and Orientalthemed watercolours and footage of contemporary Tunisia underscore the temporal divide that separates Klee and Khemir. The director Moll’s juxtaposition of this material distinguishes his own perspective from that of Khemir. In this way, he calls into question Khemir’s interpretation of Klee as unique in his reception of Islamic and Tunisian art and architecture.

Beyond orientalism The words ‘Oriental’ and ‘Orientalist’ are used here in the sense of Edward Said’s influential 1978 study Orientalism, which the scholars discussed below have justifiably criticized. Khemir has adapted the late Palestinian scholar’s definition of the term, although he claims that he does not engage directly with scholarly discourses.15 Said argued that when Europeans represented the ‘Orient’ as an irrational dream world, such representations suggested that its people could not rule themselves, which became a means to justify colonial rule by the ‘Occident’.16 Said also observed that the idea of the ‘Oriental’ journey as a process of self-discovery for the western tourist shared colonialism’s exploitation of economic and cultural resources without regard for its inhabitants.17 Over the last four decades, scholars like John Mackenzie have observed that Said generalized about both the east and the west and did not historicize his argument.18 Bhabha has also criticized Said’s emphasis on the unequal power relations between Europe and its colonies.19 He proposed instead that cultural exchange is always reciprocal, no matter how uneven.20 The significance of this body of theory cannot be underestimated. It has provided Klee scholars with a rubric for analysing the artist’s Orientalist posturing in his diaries. At the same time, the frameworks of Orientalism and post-colonial theory sometimes lead scholars to return to the same questions again and again. In Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art, Jenny Anger argues that Klee presented his Tunisian journey as Orientalist self-discovery similar to that of his romantic precursor Eugène Delacroix, who had journeyed to Morocco and Algeria in 1832.21 The 2009 Zentrum Paul Klee exhibition catalogue In Search of the Orient (Auf der Suche nach dem Orient) also focuses on Klee’s self-fashioning. On the one hand, exhibition co-curator Michael Baumgartner

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Sarah McGavran examines the critical reception of the myth of Klee’s affinity with the ‘Orient’ in the 1920s.22 On the other, Christoph Otterbeck distinguishes fact from fiction in the artist’s diaries and meticulously kept oeuvre catalogue, which Klee also altered in late 1921 in order to include several of the Tunisian watercolours that he had previously regarded as mere sketches.23 Khemir’s reception of Klee encourages re-evaluation of the historical circumstances surrounding this body of work and a broadening of the theoretical scope so that it is possible to move beyond the issue of the artist’s revised diaries and oeuvre catalogue.

A cinematic journey Die Tunisreise is an essay film, a genre based on literary and photo essays. Unlike documentary films, it combines still and moving images to present a historical subject from personal and subjective viewpoints. This multivalent approach allows for several layers of meaning.24 Like Klee and Khemir, the film’s director, Moll, aims to convey intangible ideas. During approximately ten days of shooting in Tunisia, roughly the same length of time that Klee and his companions spent there in 1914, Moll filmed scenes of urban and rural Tunisia. These were shot in order to create visual metaphors for Klee’s theories of abstraction in his surroundings and designed to reinforce Khemir’s contention that these ideas originated in Tunisia.25 For example, in one scene a voice-over reads Klee’s assertion that one must study nature closely but avoid becoming caught up in the details. Moll uses the distinct properties of the medium of film to invite close looking but to make it impossible to fixate on minutiae: the camera zooms in on and pans across blurry, bright yellow flowers blowing in the breeze on the Tunisian shoreline. He also uses still shots of picturesque architecture bisected by bold shadows that evoke Klee’s abstracted geometric forms, as in Before the Gates of Kairuan, 1914 (figure 8.1). This device replicates the artist’s gaze for cinemagoers, helping them to view these sites as if they were seeking out motifs to paint as well. Klee’s diary entries from April 1914 determine Khemir’s itinerary in Die Tunisreise: from Tunis to Kairuan, the fourth holiest city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Since Moll was aware that Klee later revised his diaries, he selected freely from other entries, which ultimately span the years from 1898 to 1918, and from the artist’s other published writings on abstraction. For Moll the diaries are to be understood as fiction, not as falsified historical documents, as art historians have so often treated them.26 The passages chosen by Moll in turn prompt Khemir’s personal reflections on Klee’s work and on the broader relationships between Europe and the ‘Orient’. Along the way, Khemir points out the art, architecture, ceramic painting and metalwork that may have inspired Klee, as well as discussing the arts of Islam more generally. For example, in one scene in the old city of Tunis, he moves away some items from a market stall to reveal ceramic tiles painted with two lively figures standing under a tree. It is particularly important for him that viewers recognize that there is a tradition of figuration within Islamic art. In the film, he says he thinks Klee must have understood this since his abstract



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8.1  Paul Klee, Before the Gates of Kairuan, 1914, 216. Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee.

landscapes of Tunisia, such as Before the Gates of Kairuan (1914), often include representational elements. Khemir thereby attempts to dispel a common misconception about Islamic art and provides a point of comparison between the visual culture of Tunisia and Klee’s watercolours. The following lines from Klee’s Tunisian diaries are significant for Khemir, who refers to them in his film: My head full of impressions from yesterday evening. Art/Nature/Self. Got to work right away and painted watercolours in the Arab quarter. Grasped the synthesis of built architecture and pictorial architecture. Not yet pure, but still enticing, [the work conveys] the mood and excitement of travel, and something of the Self.27 For Khemir this passage demonstrates that Klee did not merely use objects of ‘Oriental’ art as props in exotic scenes, a practice that characterizes much of the nineteenth-century academic Orientalist traditions of painting by artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and to which I will return below. Rather, he claims that Klee adapted the architecture of the medina as a compositional model. Khemir’s on-camera observations suggest that Klee’s approach was not Orientalist but rather primitivist in that it adapts non-western

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8.2  Paul Klee, View Towards the Harbour of Hammamet, 1914, 35. Bern: Private Collection.

abstraction to restructure compositions and challenge art and the institutions that it upheld: the church and state. In this way, the primitivist approach stands in stark contrast to Orientalist painting, which is characterized by realism. In order to visualize the ways in which the Tunisian landscape and architecture may have inspired Klee in his new surroundings, Moll juxtaposes what are often generic shots of contemporary Tunisia with close-ups of the artist’s watercolours. For example, Moll shoots a shimmering aqua sea and dusty blue sky as abstract fields of colour without any other visual references that might anchor them in a particular time and place. These liquid blues then provide a visual link to Klee’s watercolour View Towards the Harbour of Hammamet (1914, figure 8.2), which is rendered in a palette of sheer cobalt, aqua and pink. In my interview with him, Moll revealed that during the brief period of filming, it was in fact difficult to recognize the Tunisia Klee portrayed.28 Moll said that the visual similarities between the live action shots and Klee’s paintings and writings are so general because the Swiss filmmaker failed to see the connection himself. He told me that it was not so much what Klee saw in Tunisia that informed his art, but what took place in the artist’s imagination.29 To alleviate his sense of dissatisfaction, Moll incorporated clips from Khemir’s films, which are set in a generalized ‘Orient’, to help to fill in the gaps



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between what Klee could have seen, what he wrote about and what he painted. Moll explained that these additional scenes from Khemir’s films allowed him to show locations that he did not receive permission to film himself and, indeed, that are often forbidden to the western viewer in general: courtyard gardens, the interiors of mosques and the faces of veiled women.30 Moll’s montages of Khemir’s films and Klee’s watercolours establish further points of contrast. In one instance, Moll pairs a close-up, panning shot of the crenelated walls of Kairuan with a voice-over from Klee’s diaries of the artist’s first impressions of the city; after arriving in the afternoon, he had tea and went out to explore the city: Then a great delirium, which culminated at night with an Arab wedding. Nothing separate or distinct, only the entirety. And what an entirety! One Thousand and One Nights as an extract with 99% of the content true to reality. What an aroma, how permeating, how intoxicating, how enlightening at the same time. Authentic dishes and stimulating beverages. Escalation and intoxication. The burning of scented wood.?Homeland? [sic]31 An enchanting song from Khemir’s feature film Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul (2005), in part a re-imagining of One Thousand and One Nights, accompanies this evocative description of the intoxicating scents and tastes of the so-called Orient, as if it were the very music Klee himself had heard at the Arab wedding. Moll then splices in an almost surreal scene from Bab’Aziz, a film about a young girl and her grandfather, who wander the desert in search of a gathering of Sufi dervishes. The clip shows Ishtar discovering three mysterious veiled women in a courtyard of an isolated desert abode. When Ishtar lifts the veil of the woman seated in the centre, she sings. After the song is finished, the little girl lowers the woman’s veil and runs back inside, past a whirling dervish. She then exits the building and climbs to the roof in order to view the extraordinary events from a tiny domed skylight (figure 8.3). After this heady display, Moll cuts to Klee’s Before the Gates of Kairuan, in which a tiny white dome rises unassumingly from the desert landscape. It is as if one has been awakened from an Orientalist dream by a bright ray of sunlight. The sounds of early morning

8.3  Film still from Nacer Khemir, Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul, 2005.

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Sarah McGavran birds chirping reinforce this impression. Ultimately, the scene from Bab’Aziz and Klee’s watercolour share the formal element of the dome, which indeed has spiritual connotations in both the east and the west. However, the mood of the film and the watercolour are very different. Thus, Moll underscores the similarities between the Khemir’s cinematic fantasy worlds and the Swiss artist’s imaginative writings but indirectly questions whether Klee’s abstract watercolours share the Orientalist propensity towards fantasy. The soundtrack of Die Tunisreise likewise emphasizes the cultural and temporal divides separating Klee and Khemir. The voice-over reads Klee’s diaries in the original German, Khemir speaks French and the characters in his own movies speak Tunisian Arabic, classical Arabic and Farsi. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Suites provide the soundtrack for the scenes about Klee, who was also an accomplished violinist, while the song of a Tunisian nay, or reed pipe, player and the muezzin’s call to prayer accompany the shots of contemporary Tunisia. Music that evokes traditional Arab melodies brings Khemir’s fantasy world to life. In this way, Moll conveys his own scepticism about the mysterious communion between Klee and Khemir. At the same time, he suggests that their common aim, to convey something beyond the visible world, unites them across time and space.

Der Blaue Reiter and Islamic art As Die Tunisreise relies heavily on Klee’s diaries, the artist comes across as an isolated genius without any substantial ties to a specific cultural milieu. However, what Khemir believes is Klee’s insightful interpretation of Islamic and Tunisian art and architecture is unthinkable outside the context of Der Blaue Reiter. These artists were committed to  artistic exchange and crossover, between European and non-western art and between the members of the group.32 However, whereas Khemir says he thinks that Klee intuited the significance of Tunisian visual culture because he was ‘advanced in his humanity’, it is also likely that the Swiss artist also learned about non-western art from his fellow artists in the Blaue Reiter. The 1912 publication Der Blaue Reiter proposed that modern artists should draw inspiration from a range of ‘primitive’ arts – which were uninhibited by the teachings of the official academy – including folk art, children’s drawings, Oceanic sculpture and even the popular arts of the ‘Orient’, presented in the form of Egyptian shadow puppets. However, the formative influence of Der Blaue Reiter’s primitivism has often been overlooked with respect to Klee’s Tunisian and Oriental-themed works, in part because they have been considered within the framework of Orientalist art since the early 1980s.33 Additionally, in his diaries, Klee downplayed the significance of August Macke and Louis Moilliet, his travelling companions and fellow members of Der Blaue Reiter, in order to assert his own artistic individuality. He claimed that travelling to Tunisia was a spiritual homecoming that allowed him to discover his individual artistic style and distinctive palette: ‘I leave work behind. It penetrates me so deeply and mildly, I feel it and become more confident, without strain. Color has me. I don’t need to chase after it. It has me forever, I know it. That is the significance of this happy hour: color and I are one. I am



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a painter’.34 This passage, which is preceded by a description of Klee’s tourist activities – shopping and drinking tea in Kairuan – conveys the notion of a special affinity between the artist and an unfamiliar landscape. Throughout the film and in his other interviews and writings, Khemir reinforces Klee’s assertion of a mysterious connection to Tunisia and asserts his own affinity with Klee as an artist who traverses national and cultural borders to arrive at a more universal and spiritual art. Khemir says in the film that Klee’s work showed him how his culture could be modern, with emphasis on the word modern. Nevertheless, it was artists who would found Der Blaue Reiter who came to see Islamic art as a basis for modern European art in Munich in 1910. That year, Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke and Franz Marc saw Islamic art displayed as if it were modern European art at the groundbreaking Exhibition of Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art.35 The uncluttered installation was inspired by the aesthetic programme of the Deutscher Werkbund.36 According to its curator, Friedrich Sarre, this was a strategy to rectify public conceptions of Islamic art as colourful fantasy or as commercial goods sold at the bazaar. As such, it was a direct counterpoint to displays of Islamic and North African art in exhibitions of decorative art and at world’s fairs and colonial exhibitions.37 Around the time of the 1910 exhibition, Wassily Kandinsky was refining his ideas about abstract art as a harbinger of the spiritual. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky argued that while colour had psychological resonance, the artist imbued the work of art with spiritual significance by arranging colour harmoniously on the canvas.38 Similarly, in their catalogue entries, the curators of the 1910 exhibition in Munich emphasized composition, while black-and-white reproductions of individual works set against white backgrounds complemented their specific focus on design over colour. The masterpieces exhibited in Munich were historical objects from the eighteenth century or before. Isolating the works of art against a plain background was profoundly significant: it asserted that Islamic art had a place in the modern world. Moreover, previous exhibitions of Islamic art had presented it as fodder for designers.39 Conversely, the organizers explicitly stated in the 1910 exhibition guide that the works should provide inspiration to modern artists. Its aim was to demonstrate ‘that the creations of Mohammadean art have earned an equal place next to those of other cultural epochs, and that, in its colour harmony, in its ornamental grandeur it is especially suited to provide modern art with new stimuli and possibly to show it a new path’.40 As a result of a combination of the curators’ emphasis on composition, the innovative display and the direct appeal to modern artists, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and August Macke, soon to become founding members of Der Blaue Reiter in late 1911, came to see Islamic abstraction as exemplary to their own concerns. Marc made the direct connection between Kandinsky’s abstract paintings and the art on view at the 1910 Munich exhibition: It is too bad that Kandinsky’s great Composition (II) and a few others cannot be hung next to the Mohammedean carpets at the exhibition grounds. A comparison

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Sarah McGavran would be unavoidable and how instructional for us all! Wherein lies our astonished wonderment at this Oriental art? Does it not playfully show us the limit of our European definitions of painting? Its arts of color and composition are thousand-fold more profound and put our conventional theories to shame. In Germany there is hardly a decorative object, let alone a carpet, that we can hang next to these. If we try it with Kandinsky’s Compositions, they would hold up to this dangerous challenge, and not as carpets, but rather as ‘images’. What artistic intuition this rare painter has recovered! The great significance of his colors balances out the freedom of his drawing – is this not at the same time a definition of painting?41 In Marc’s estimation, the Oriental carpets at the Munich exhibition transcended the category of decorative arts, just as Kandinsky’s abstract compositions defied conventional notions of painting. Marc hailed Oriental carpets as modern because, like Kandinsky’s artwork, they challenged traditional European ideas about what art could be. In other words, neither decorative objects nor conventional oil paintings but only the most innovative recent painting could hold its own against these carpets. By orchestrating the composition according to colour relationships, both the carpets and Kandinsky’s compositions struck a balance between intuition and intellect. Recall that the German word Geist, the driving concept in Kandinsky’s book, for which there is no precise English equivalent, incorporates both of these terms. Thus, just a year before the founding of Der Blaue Reiter, Marc argued that both Kandinsky’s paintings and Oriental carpets exemplified the spiritual in art. In 1910, Klee divided his time between Munich and Bern, and it is unknown whether he attended the exhibition. He never referred to the 1910 exhibition in his writings, but as Klee expert Michael Baumgartner points out, he could have known the massive two-volume catalogue or heard about the exhibition from Kandinsky, Marc or his travelling companion August Macke.42 Before joining Der Blaue Reiter, Klee’s primitivism had encompassed children’s art and folk art. Given the founding members’ positive reception of Islamic art in the 1910 exhibition and the enthusiasm they expressed for non-western art in Der Blaue Reiter in 1912, it is plausible that the group set the precedent for Klee’s engagement with Tunisian architecture, art and visual culture. Khemir says that the work of Klee’s companions is less relevant to him because their scenes of everyday life are more naturalistic. In the interview in 2011, he explained that Macke focused on the anecdotal and that the journey did not change his essential mode of representation, whereas he thinks that in Tunisia Klee adapted a new mode of composition grounded in Bedouin and Islamic abstraction. Specifically, ‘as soon as Klee arrived in Tunisia he began to use geometric forms to make his watercolours. He left the world of appearances from the very beginning’.43 Yet Macke was killed in battle in late September 1914, and therefore had little time to develop his numerous Tunisian sketches and watercolours in the ways that Klee subsequently did. However, in his Tunisian diaries, Klee also minimized Macke’s artistic endeavours. He contrasted his own revelatory experience of painting in the Arab quarter in Tunis with Macke’s ostensible materialism:



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‘Macke extols the allure of spending money’.44 Nevertheless, Klee’s postcard to Moilliet from a year before the journey tells a different story. It demonstrates that the artist originally conceived of the Tunisian journey as a study trip where the artists would inspire one another. In fact, he refused to go alone.45 Louis Moilliet, who had been to Tunisia twice before, painted little on the 1914 trip. Macke’s enthusiasm for non-western art, and especially for Islamic textiles, however, could have reinforced Klee’s budding interest in non-western art. In the years between the 1910 Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art exhibition and the 1914 journey, Macke made paintings, sketches and textile designs that were inspired by the Persian miniatures and textiles he had viewed in Munich.46 Likewise, Klee had considered using carpet designs as models for abstract paintings in the months before the trip.47 In Tunisia, both artists experimented with the aesthetics of Tunisian textiles. Nonetheless, Khemir’s view that Klee assimilated a more general aesthetic that evokes the various types of Tunisian art and architecture is prescient. As Khemir observes, Macke’s work from the Tunisian journey represents the scenic views and local sitters typically represented in Orientalist tourist photography. For example, in Vendor with Jugs, 1914 (figure 8.4), Macke reconciles the representation of space derived from Robert Delaunay’s Orphic Cubism with the format of certain Tunisian textiles, in which motifs and patterns are set within ‘medallions’ that constitute the architectural space of the vendor’s stall (figure 8.5). The irregular grid suggests both alleys in the medina hung with carpets for sale and the vendor’s stall bursting with ceramics. Macke thereby represents daily life in a rapidly modernizing Tunisia, where cramped stalls bursting with tourist wares testify to a European presence that usually remains outside of the frame in Orientalist painting. Khemir dismisses Macke and Moilliet in order to reinforce Klee’s persona of the isolated artistic genius, which he himself has adapted. In a text published on the website of Fama Film, the original producer for the televised version of Die Tunisreise, Khemir explains that the geometric structures of Klee’s works resemble various forms of artistic production in Tunisia, from textiles and embroideries to garden plans.48 Indeed, the irregular, grid-like composition of Klee’s Before the Gates of Kairuan may derive from any of these examples, or from the seemingly off-kilter, cramped architecture of the medina. In contrast to the slick, realistic aesthetic of academic Orientalist painting, both Macke and Klee synthesize the colourful Orphic Cubism of Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) with Tunisian cultural production in order to foreground their own presence and subjectivity. Klee’s writings also conjure the persona of the artist-traveller who has found revelation in the ‘Orient’, while his abstract watercolours complicate this notion. Before the Gates of Kairuan bears the marks of having been made on site, as the slightly diagonal strip of blank paper at the left was likely created by the band that held the support to the drawing board. Its composition is divided horizontally into the slim strip of foreground, the patchwork landscape in the middle ground, and the bluish-purple sky. Vertical divisions within the landscape and sky create a tension between a nascent sense of depth and the flat surface, as in Cubism, while fields of earthy brown in the distance

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8.4  August Macke, Vendor with Jugs, 1914. Munster: Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kunstgeschichte, Inv. Nr. KdZ 2120 LM.

interrupt the sense of atmospheric perspective. The landscape takes up the largest part of the picture plane and harbours the greatest aesthetic interest. Klee punctuates each section of mauve, blue and ochre with dashes and wavy lines that evoke both striations in the sand and decorative elements that enliven fields of colour like symbols on a Berber carpet. Furthermore, as in Macke’s Vendor with Jugs, the deployment of tiny, simplified animals at the top right pay homage to Tunisian textiles and ceramics, which display



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8.5  Unknown artist, Gafsa Oasis, Tunisia, nineteenth century. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of Norman J. Caris, 98.272.

similar motifs. Despite this field of intense visual activity, the uneven diagonals at the centre create a path that leads the eye to the tiny white dome of the marabout, or saint’s tomb, and beyond. Before the Gates of Kairuan and other works like it are abstract enough for Khemir to argue that the Swiss artist drew primarily from Tunisian visual culture to restructure his compositions, although they are also indebted to modern European art.

Khemir’s creative resistance Khemir writes that until he saw a reproduction of one of Klee’s paintings, he conceived of objects of Tunisian visual culture, such as Bedouin carpets and embroideries, as merely functional. He does not remember the title of the painting by Klee that so inspired him, only that the embroidery of a young Bedouin woman later reminded him of that painting

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Sarah McGavran by Klee, and ‘in this way Paul Klee revealed to me from a distance (in time and place) the underlying source of my physical surroundings’.49 Seeing these works from Klee’s perspective led him to consider Tunisia’s art and culture more broadly as sources of inspiration for his own work. He elaborates further that Klee’s organization of space bespeaks what he thinks is a specifically ‘Arab-Muslim nature’, in which symbols and signs convey realities that cannot be seen with the naked eye.50 Khemir sees in Klee’s process the potential for creative resistance to oppression. In my interview with him, he explained that: During the time that we had a form of dictator, each time I could I thought that if I could change things how could I do it? I’m not a political man, but I could imagine giving a child the best imagination. And to open him to the world and to what is around him. You have to take the environment as a basis. That’s where Klee helped me. Because he looked at my environment with the gaze of an artist and with it he showed me what is beautiful in my surroundings.51 For Khemir, the intellectual and creative ability to see and interpret one’s own milieu is a form of freedom. Klee’s work from the Tunisian journey and after are what Khemir says enabled him to find satisfaction in making art from and about his own surroundings. In turn, Khemir hopes that his films and books will do the same for others. Thus, the visible world also plays an important role in Khemir’s oeuvre, just as it did in Klee’s art and in that of Der Blaue Reiter. After the revolution in Tunisia in January 2011, Khemir’s project has become more urgent. Although he asserts that he does not make art to prevent wars, he still believes that visual literacy can help promote cultural understanding, because images provide immediate access to other cultures regardless of differences in language. He further argues that learning how to view images develops critical thinking, whereas mass media stifles creativity and reinforces stereotypes. Khemir is therefore finding ways to teach children in Tunisia visual literacy: not as a didactic lesson, but as the language of the twenty-first century, and as a source of the discovery of images in the world. Then the image can be seen as a source of humanity. It’s not a joke, it’s not a spectacle. It’s the only way to arm the child with sensibility, thanks to the richness of the emotion conveyed by the images of the world.52 In this way, Khemir hopes to expand his own practice of making art that aims to bridge cultures, which was itself initiated by his early encounters with the work of Klee. Viewing images with an open mind can help raise cross-cultural awareness, not only in post-revolutionary Tunisia, but also in the rest of the world. He therefore challenges art historians to create a more inclusive canon to further this cross-cultural dialogue: ‘To create a balance we have to work at art history […] There is a new reading of [Muslim] tradition that demands a lot of [scholarly] work’.53



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Khemir’s weapons are cultural. Like Klee, who continued to make Tunisian- and ‘Oriental’-themed art during World War I, Khemir has produced art in times of war and upheaval. Both Klee and Khemir initially tried to distance themselves from the chaos of war. For example, in contrast to his Blaue Reiter colleague and friend, Franz Marc, who embraced World War I as an agent of cultural cleansing, Klee perceived it as destructive to culture as well as to life.54 Drafted by the German army as a non-combatant in 1916, Klee nevertheless cultivated a detached persona and claimed to dwell in a different reality. Most famously, in a contrived diary entry published in the 1920 catalogue of his first retrospective exhibition at Hans Goltz’s Munich gallery, he claimed: ‘I cannot be understood in this realm at all. Because I dwell just as comfortably with the dead as the unborn. Somewhat closer to the heart of creation than usual. And not nearly close enough’.55 Similarly, during the First Gulf War, Khemir told an interviewer: ‘I don’t live in reality, and my friends are perpetually surprised that I constantly talk about elsewhere’.56 In both statements, there is a tension between the inevitable ties to one’s historical context and the psychological distancing from it that helps construct the myth of the timeless artistic persona. Khemir vacillates between his claim that he is distanced from the everyday and having openly political artistic aims. He hopes his films will counter media representations of Islam as violent and fundamentalist. In Die Tunisreise, Moll intersperses shots of Khemir and his assistants setting up a haunting installation of plaster-covered sheep skeletons on the beach (see figure 8.6). Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that this ghostly herd of sheep symbolize the fundamentalist’s loss of individual identity. The strong sense of self so evident in Klee and Khemir’s projects takes on a political edge: it allows them to resist insularity and engage with cultures different from their own. On screen in Die Tunisreise, the Tunisian artist and filmmaker elaborates that Islam has been under double attack – by the west and by fundamentalists from within. In keeping with the genre of the essay film, Khemir’s explanation underscores his

8.6  Yla Margrit von Dach, photograph of Nacer Khemir’s sculptural installation shown in Die Tunisreise, 2007.

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Sarah McGavran subjectivity, as both personal experience and global political events have informed his viewpoint. He says that his father, who was named after the prophet Mohammed, was sent into exile by French colonizers. In a published interview, he expanded on this point allegorically: If you are walking alongside your father and he suddenly falls down, his face in the mud, what would you do? You would help him stand up, and wipe his face with your shirt. My father’s face stands for Islam, and I tried to wipe Islam’s face clean with my movie, by showing an open, tolerant and friendly Islamic culture, full of love and wisdom … an Islam that is different from the one depicted by the media in the aftermath of 9/11.57 For Khemir, both the west and the east have forgotten the world of Islam that he believes Klee understood and represented so well. Whilst the passage above highlights Khemir’s subjectivity, he nevertheless adapts a more omniscient perspective when directing his own films. For example, references from disparate epochs and cultures merge into a unified image of Islam in Bab’Aziz. In the interview for the press book about the film, Khemir explained that he adapted the film’s narrative framework of a story within a story from One Thousand and One Nights: as Ishtar and her grandfather wander the desert, he tells her the story of a prince. In turn, this secondary story line was inspired by a twelfth-century Persian ceramic painting of a prince gazing into a pool of water. The dialogue draws from thirteenth-century Persian and Arab-Andalusian Sufi poets, while the footage itself was filmed in Tunisia and Iran. Khemir added that in one scene a character looks out of a window from a palace in Tunis onto a landscape in Iran.58 Thus, Khemir’s syncretic filmic vision, which collapses time and space, conveys his conception of the Islamic world as ‘moving like the desert, never really different and never quite the same’.59 This equation of vastly different cultures and epochs upholds the Orientalist convention of a generalized, timeless ‘Orient’. Khemir reacts strongly to the question of Orientalism in his films, commenting that ‘simple minded people say my films are Orientalist’.60 At first glance, however, his imagery often resembles the work of that nineteenth-century arch-Orientalist Jean-Léon Gérôme, with its fantastic and exotic scenes rendered in jewel-like tones. Yet his work is distinct because he foregrounds its very artificiality. Khemir told me: ‘You don’t know the miniatures … just as in miniatures, there are no shadows in my films … whereas in Orientalism it is all about shadows […] You have to be an expert to see these points. To do films without shadows is to say that it is not reality. It’s the same in miniatures’.61 To elaborate, Orientalist paintings are rendered according to the laws of linear perspective and modeled in light and shade, often with strong shadows, as if they were objective views of unfamiliar locales. In my own comparison between Gérôme’s Dance of the Almeh, 1863 (figure 8.7), and a still from Khemir’s Bab’Aziz (figure 8.8), these differences are scarcely discernible on



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8.7  Jean-Léon Gérôme, Dance of the Almeh, 1863. The Dayton Art Institute, gift of Mr. Robert Badenhop, 1951.15.

first sight. For example, the soldiers in Gérôme’s painting watch a scantily clad, languid belly dancer, who gazes alluringly at one of the soldiers in her audience. Khemir’s much more fully clothed dancer strikes a more active and deliberate pose, doing her best to attract his attention, while he, however, remains lost in thought. To reiterate, during my interview with him, Khemir did concede that ‘you have to be an expert to recognize the differences’.62 Khemir’s counter-representations of negative images of Islam in the media sometimes over-simplify to make their point, just as Edward Said’s Orientalism was a polemic

8.8  Film still from Nacer Khemir, Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul, 2005.

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Sarah McGavran response to formalist scholarship on what was often highly politicized cultural production. Khemir would be a compelling case for post-colonial studies, as his project could be analysed as a cultural hybrid, or it could be argued that he presents himself and his culture according to ‘western’ expectations. At the same time, after reading Said and the subsequent post-colonial scholarship of Homi Bhabha, one might expect Khemir to criticize Klee. Yet Khemir’s reception of Klee serves as a reminder that even as theory can open up new paths of inquiry, it too can lead to preconceptions. Klee scholars who are interested in Orientalism tend to focus on his diaries, but Khemir suggests that the artist’s reception of the Islamic and Bedouin aesthetics of Tunisia merits further exploration and thereby returns the focus to the works of art themselves. Additionally, an art historical approach that also encompasses broader themes of tourism is necessary to understand artistic exchange between modern European artists and the ‘Orient’. If the scant historical record makes it difficult to analyse artistic exchange between Klee and Tunisian artists and artisans, it is certainly possible to study his experience and those of his travel companions within the wider framework of early twentieth-century tourism.63 Said argued that Europe defined itself against its idea of the ‘Orient’ and emphasized the dominating influence of the European colonizer. Yet Khemir and Moll’s film visualizes the complexity of cross-cultural exchange, as conceived by Homi Bhabha and other post-colonial scholars. Die Tunisreise demonstrates the ways ‘outside’ perspectives become integral to processes of self-reflection and self-definition. Klee’s travelling companion Macke was particularly articulate about this. In ‘The Masks’, his essay for Der Blaue Reiter almanac, Macke argued that artistic progress was contingent upon the mixing of styles from different times and places: ‘Artistic styles can die out from incest. The crossing of two styles yields a third, new style. The Renaissance and classical antiquity, that pupil of Schongauer and Mantegna – Albrecht Dürer. Europe and the Orient’.64 By juxtaposing three distinct visions of Tunisia, those of Klee, Khemir and Moll, Die Tunisreise demonstrates that the crossing of hybrid cultures is not as seamless as Macke made it out to be. The significance of images and stories changes as they travel back and forth until sometimes, as for Moll, they become unrecognizable. Nevertheless, for Khemir, the non-believer Klee’s early twentieth-century representations of Tunisia and its arts, which were firmly grounded in the ideals of Der Blaue Reiter, open a forgotten window onto his culture. At the same time, Khemir’s affinity to Klee, which I have argued is possible because Klee was influenced by the primitivism of Der Blaue Reiter, serves a political purpose. Like Klee, Khemir traverses national and cultural borders to achieve an art that transcends the everyday, but with the political aim of bridging the so-called east and west.



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Notes  1 Although renowned post-colonial scholar Homi Bhabha has rightly argued that ‘east’ and ‘west’ and ‘Europe’ and the ‘Orient’ are polarizing terms, they are used here for the sake of brevity and ultimately for lack of more satisfactory language. For more on this dichotomy, refer to Bhabha, The Location of Culture ([1994] London: Routledge, 2006 rpt), pp. 28–9 and 101–5.   2 Interview with Nacer Khemir, conducted in person at the artist’s home in Paris, June 2011. I would like to thank Dr Barbara Caen for her assistance translating my interview questions for Khemir, and Bénédicte de Chalain for her simultaneous interpretation of the interview.   3 Films in Khemir’s ‘Desert Trilogy’ have won awards in the Middle East. In 1984, Les baliseurs du desert (Wanderers of the Desert) won the Grand Prix of the Festival des Trois Continents and was an official selection at the Valencia Film Festival and the Carthage Film Festival. Le collier perdu de la colombe (The Lost Collar of the Dove) received the Special Jury Prize at Locarno, and Best Artistic Contribution and Best Screenplay at the Namur International Festival of French Speaking Film in 1991. Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul (2005), was honored at the Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, Iran and the Muscat Film Festival in Muscat, Oman and was voted Best Feature Film at the Kazan Golden Minbar Film Festival. In recent years, Khemir has written and directed five more films: the documentary André Miquel: An Encounter with the Arabic Language (2010), Sheherazade: Or Words against Death (2012), Yasmina and the Sixty Names of Love (2013), Looking for Muhyiddin (2014) and Whispering Sands (2018). For an excellent introduction to Khemir’s films and writings, see Roy Armes, ‘The Poetic Vision of Nacer Khemir’, Third Text 24:1 (2010), pp. 69–82. Die Tunirsreise and many of Nacer Khemir’s films are available for purchase on DVD on the website of his distributor, Trigon Film: www.trigon-film.org.   4 Along with fellow artists August Macke and Louis Moilliet, Klee travelled from Marseilles to Tunisia on 6 April 1914. The artists spent the first few days in the capital city of Tunis and in the suburb of Saint-Germain, which was primarily an Italian settlement. From there they travelled to the picturesque artists’ colony at Sidi-Bou-Said and to the ancient site of Carthage. They then went further south to Hammamet, then a small fishing village, and then on to Kairuan. On 19 April, Klee spent a final morning in Tunis before returning to Europe via Palermo, Italy. Macke and Moilliet departed on 22 April.   5 Khemir, interview with the author, 2011.   6 For another example, see Nacer Khemir, ‘Textauszüge’, Fama Film AG, www.famafilm.ch/ filme/die-tunisreise/textauszuege-nacer-khemir, accessed 23 February 2011.   7 See the exhibition catalogue: William Rubin (ed.), Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 2 vols (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984). The most notable debate was between art critic and professor of Art History Thomas McEvilley and the exhibition’s curators William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, whose heated exchange of letters was published in Artforum in 1984. For documentation of the debates on primitivism, see Jack Flam and Miriam Deutsch (eds), ‘The Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 Primitivism Exhibition and its Aftermath’, in Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 311–413.   8 See, for example Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.), Die Tunisreise. Klee, Macke, Moilliet (Münster: LWLWestfälisches Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte; Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1982); Ute Gerlach-Laxner and Ellen Schwinzer (eds), Paul Klee. Reisen in den Süden, ‘Reisefieber praecisiert’ (Hamm: Gustav-Lübcke-Museum; Ostfildern-Ruit: Gerd Hatje, 1997); Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 56, 120–35.

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Sarah McGavran  9 Klee purchased four watercolours in the Arab quarter in Tunis, which are housed today at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Additionally, Frau Dr Ernst Jäggi – Klee and Moilliet’s hostess in Tunis and St. Germain – recalled many years after the Tunisian journey that the artists had painted Easter eggs with the servant Ahmed; she claimed that both Klee and Macke were especially fascinated by the servant’s style of painting and that they kept the eggs he had painted. Frau Dr Jäggi as told to W. Holzhausen, ‘The Visit to Tunisia’, in G. Busch (ed.), August Macke: Tunisian Watercolors and Drawings, trans. N. Guterman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1959), p. 20. 10 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 2–3. 11 ‘Die Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht Sichtbar’. Paul Klee, Kasimir Edschmid (ed.), Schöpferische Konfession (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1920), pp. 28–40, reprinted in Christian Geelhar (ed.), Paul Klee. Schriften, Rezensionen und Aufsätze (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1976), p. 118. All translations from the German are my own. 12 ‘sie verhelfe dir, die Hülle abzulegen, dich auf Momente Gott zu wähnen. Dich stets wieder auf Feierabende zu freuen, an denen die Seele zur Tafel geht, ihre hungernden Nerven zu nähern, ihre erschlaffenden Gefäße mit neuem Saft zu füllen.’ Paul Klee, ‘Schöpferische Konfession’, in Ibid., p. 122. 13 Khemir, interview with the author, 2011. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 2–3. 17 See Said’s discussion of nineteenth-century British and French travel writers in Said, Orientalism, pp. 177–81. 18 John Mackenzie, ‘The “Orientalism” Debate’, in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 1–19. 19 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 28–9 and 101–5. 20 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 21 Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 56. 22 Michael Baumgartner, ‘Paul Klee und der Mythos vom Orient’, in Michael Baumgartner and Carola Haensler (eds), Auf der Suche nach dem Orient (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee, 2009) pp. 130–43. 23 Christoph Otterbeck, ‘Zweimal Orient – und zurück’, in Baumgartner and Haensler (eds), Auf der Suche nach dem Orient, pp. 170–85. 24 This definition of essay film is from N. Alter, Chris Marker, Contemporary Film Directors, ed. James Naremore (Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 17–20. 25 Moll, interview with the author, 2011. 26 Ibid. 27 ‘Den Kopf voll von den nächtlichen Eindrücken des gestrigen Abends. Kunst/Natur/Ich. Sofort ans Werk gegangen und im Araberviertel Aquarell gemalt. Die Synthese Städtebauarchitektur/ Bild-architektur in Angriff genommen. Noch nicht rein, aber ganz reizvoll, etwas viel Reisestimmung und Reisebegeisterung dabei, eben das Ich’. Paul Klee, diary entry 926 f, 8 April 1914, in Paul-Klee-Stiftung Bern and W. Kersten (eds), Paul Klee Tagebücher 1898–1918, Textkritische Neuedition (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje; Teufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1988), p. 340. 28 Moll, interview with the author, 2011. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 ‘Zunächst ein grosser Taumel, der nachts beim Marriage arabe kulminiert. Nichts Einzelnes,



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nur das Ganze. Und was für ein Ganzes!! Tausend und eine Nacht als Extract mit 99% Wirklichkeitsgehalt. Welch ein Aroma, wie durchdringend, wie berauschend, wie klärend zugleich. Speise, reellste Speise und reizendes Getränk. Aufbau und Rausch. Wohlriechendes Holz verbrennt.?Heimat? [sic]’. Paul Klee, diary entry 926 n, 15 April 1914, in Paul-KleeStiftung Bern and Kersten (eds), Paul Klee Tagebücher, p. 350. 32 F. Marc, ‘Die “Wilden” Deutschlands’, in W. Kandinsky and F. Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter, Jubiläiumsedition (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2004), p. 30. 33 See, for example E. G. Güse, ‘Vor der Tunisreise’, in Güse (ed.), Die Tunisreise, pp. 18–27. More recently, Klee’s work has been presented as the culmination of European Orientalist production that began with Giovanni Bellini in the late fifteenth century in Baumgartner and Haensler (eds), Auf der Suche nach dem Orient. 34 ‘Ich lasse jetzt die Arbeit. Es dringt so tief und mild in mich hinein, ich fühle das und werde so sicher, ohne Fleiss. Die Farbe hat mich. Ich brauche nicht nach ihr zu haschen. Sie hat mich für immer, ich weiss das. Das ist der glücklichen Stunde Sinn: ich und die Farbe sind eins. Ich bin Maler’. Paul Klee, diary entry 926 o, 16 April 1914, in Paul-Klee-Stiftung Bern and Kersten (eds), Paul Klee Tagebücher, p. 350. 35 The significance of this exhibition was reevaluated at exhibitions and in publications on the occasion of its centennial. See A. Lermer and A. Shalem (eds), After One Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition ‘Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered (Leiden: Brill, 2010) and C. Dercon, L. Krempel and A. Shalem (eds), The Future of Tradition – The Tradition of Future: 100 Years after the Exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art in Munich (Munich: Haus der Kunst/Prestel, 2010). 36 A. Lermer, ‘Orientalising Munich: Local Conditions and Graphic Design for the Munich 1910 Exhibition’, in Lermer and Shalem (eds), After One Hundred Years, p. 181. 37 F. Sarre, ‘Vorwort’, in Fredrik Robert Martin and Friedrich Sarre (eds), Die Ausstellung von Meisterwerken muhammedanischer Kunst, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1912), p. iii. 38 W. Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst. Insbesondere in der Malerei [1911]. New revised edition edited by J. Hahl-Fontaine (Bern: Benteli Verlag, 2004), pp. 70–1. 39 For example, in the preface to the English edition of the catalogue for the exhibition of Oriental carpets that took place in Vienna in 1891, Arthur von Scala wrote that the exhibition and its accompanying publications sought to revive the decorative arts traditions in Europe. Arthur von Scala, ‘Preface’, in Caspar Purdon Clarke (ed.), Oriental Carpets (Vienna: Österreichisches Handelsmuseum, 1892), pp. i–ii. 40 ‘Sie [die Ausstellung] will zeigen, dass den Schöpfungen der muhammedanischen Kunst ein ebenbürtiger Platz neben denen anderer Kulturperioden gebührt, dass sie in ihrer Farbenharmonie, in ihrer ornamentalen Größe vor allem geeignet ist, dem modernen Kunstschaffen Anregungen zu geben und ihm vielleicht neue Wege zu weisen’. Ausstellung München 1910. Amtlicher Katalog (Munich: Rudolf Mosse, 1910), p. 13. 41 ‘Es ist schade, daß man Kandinskys grosse Komposition (II) und manches andere nicht neben die muhammedanischen Teppiche im Ausstellungspark hängen kann. Ein Vergleich wäre unvermeidlich und wie lehrreich für uns Alle! Worin besteht unsere staunende Bewunderung vor dieser orientalischen Kunst? Zeigt sie uns nicht spottend die einseitige Begrenztheit unserer europäischen Begriffe von Malerei? Ihre tausendfach tiefere Farben- und Kompositionskunst macht unsere konventionellen Theorien zuschanden. Wir haben in Deutschland kaum ein dekoratives Werk, geschweige denn einen Teppich, den wir daneben hängen dürfen. Versuchen wir es mit Kandinskys Kompositionen – sie werden diese gefährliche Probe aushalten, und nicht als Teppiche, sondern als “Bilder”. Welche künstlerische Einsicht birgt dieser seltene Maler! Die grosse Konsequenz seiner Farben hält seiner zeichnerischen Freiheit die Waage – ist diese nicht zugleich eine Definition der Malerei?’ F. Marc, ‘Zur Ausstellung der “Neuen Künstlervereinigung” bei Thannhauser’, special edition of ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’

180

Sarah McGavran (Munich 1910) rpt. in K. Lankheit (ed.), Franz Marc Schriften (Cologne: DuMont, 1978), pp. 126–7. 42 Baumgartner, ‘Paul Klee und der Mythos vom Orient’, p. 137. 43 Khemir, interview with the author, 2011. 44 ‘Macke lobt den Reiz des Geldausgebens’. Klee, diary entry 926 f, 8 April 1914, in Paul-KleeStiftung Bern and Kersten (eds), Paul Klee Tagebücher, p. 340. 45 Paul Klee to Louis Moilliet, postcard, 19 May 1913 (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee). 46 Several of Macke’s textile designs are reproduced in Güse, ‘Vor der Tunisreise’, in Güse (ed.), Die Tunisreise, pp. 24–6. 47 Through the careful examination of exhibition lists, Anger has determined that Klee’s Carpet, 1914, was painted and exhibited before the Tunisian journey in April 1914. Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art, p. 63. 48 Nacer Khemir, ‘Textauszüge’, Fama Film AG, www.famafilm.ch/filme/die-tunisreise/​ tex​tauszuege-nacer-khemir, accessed 23 February 2011. 49 ‘Auf diese Weise enthüllte Paul Klee mir auf Distanz (von Zeit und Raum) die eigentliche Quelle meines plastischen Universums’. Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Khemir, interview with the author, 2011. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Klee and Marc articulated their differing positions in a series of letters while Marc was on the front. Klee copied the better part of his letter to Marc from 10 May 1915 as a diary entry, in which he acknowledged that although both he and Marc agreed that art should stem from the self that is in tune with or connected to the rest of creation, they differed on how to access it. Marc thought that it was through engagement with worldly events and participation in war, while Klee believed strongly that this pure self could only be found by transcending the war art: Klee, diary entry 961, 1915, in Paul-Klee-Stiftung Bern and Kersten (eds), Paul Klee Tagebücher, p. 370. For more information on their exchange of ideas, see Michael Baumgartner, Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy and Katja Schneider (eds), Franz Marc–Paul Klee: Dialog in Bildern (Wadenswil: Nimbus, 2010). K. Förster (ed.), Franz Marc–Paul Klee: Der Briefwechsel (Wadenswil: Nimbus, 2010). 55 ‘Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht Fassbar. Denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten, wie bei den Ungeborenen. Etwas näher dem Herzen der Schöpfung als üblich. Und nach lange nicht nahe genug’. Klee, untitled text in ‘Katalog der 60. Ausstellung der Galerie Neue Kunst Hans Goltz’, special issue Der Ararat (May–June 1920), p. 20. 56 ‘Ich lebe nicht in der Realität, und meine Freunde sind stets erstaunt darüber, dass ich dauernd von Anderswo rede’. B. Jaeggi and W. Ruggle, ‘“Wenn man nicht in etwas verleibt ist, fehlt dem Leben das Ziel”: Ein Gespräch mit Nacer Khemir’, trans. W. Ruggle, in W. Ruggle and B. Jaeggi (eds), Nacer Khemir. Das verlorene Halsband der Taube (Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1992). 57 N. Omarbacha, ‘An Interview with Nacer Khemir’, from the press book for Bab’Aziz: The Prince who Contemplated his Soul (2005) rpt. Spirituality and Practice: Resources for Spiritual Journeys, www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/features.php?id=17822, accessed 23 February 2011. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Khemir, interview with the author. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 See the second chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation, Sarah McGavran, ‘Belated Orientalisms: Klee, Matisse and North Africa, c. 1906–30’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Washington University in St.



Paul Klee and Nacer Khemir 181

Louis, 2013). Roger Benjamin has also noted that tourism was an important context in which to consider the Tunisian journey. Benjamin, ‘The Oriental Mirage’, in Benjamin (ed.), Orientalism: Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), p. 25. 64 ‘Auch Stile können an Inzucht zugrunde gehen. Die Kreuzung zweier Stile ergibt einen dritten, neuen Stil. Die Renaissance der Antike, der Schongauer- und Mantegnaschüler Dürer. Europa und der Orient’. A. Macke, ‘Die Masken’, in Kandinsky and Marc (eds), Der Blaue Reiter, p. 56.

Index

Index

abstract-expressionism 77–8, 79, 80 abstraction Der Blaue Reiter 12, 46, 66, 129 The Blue Rider Group exhibition 136, 147–8, 149–50, 151 empathy and 26, 129 Gabriele Münter 37, 39 Islamic 159, 160, 167, 168 Marianne Werefkin 40, 46 Paul Klee 162–3 Wassily Kandinsky 1, 2, 17, 20, 23, 29n.3, 30n.10, 35, 118, 129 activism 28 Wassily Kandinsky 19 alt deutsche Buchillustration, Die (Worringer) 97 American “Abstract-Expressionists” 80 Amiet, Cuno 100n.4 anarchism 16–28, 30nn.10,13 Andreyev, Leonid 106 Anger, Jenny 161, 180n.47 anti-academic values 75, 81, 99 Apollon (journal) 6–7, 92 Arp, Hans 105, 113, 114 Art Bulletin (journal) 80 Art in Revolt: Germany, 1905–1925 (exhibition, 1959) 146 art museums, German: display practices 56–7 art nouveau 151 Arts Council of Great Britain 136, 141, 147 asceticism: Hugo Ball 113, 117, 118 Ascona: Hugo Ball 113

aura: objects 130–1 ‘avant-garde’, concept of 15, 34–5 Bab’Aziz (film) 165–6, 174–5 Ball, Hugo 105–18 Die Flucht aus der Zeit 109–10 Barr, Alfred H., Jr. 78–9 Baumgartner, Michael 161–2, 168 Beckmann, Max 87 Behr, Shulamith 92, 101n.20, 111, 117, 145 Behrens, Peter 55, 56–7, 60, 62 Belyi, Andre 33n.63 Benjamin, Walter 123–31 art: significance to 123–5 Berdiaev, Nikolai 17, 18, 31n.15 Berlin Die Brücke studios 88–90 Expressionism 93, 110–11 Berlin Secession 35, 76, 87, 95, 99 Bhabha, Homi 160, 161, 176, 177n.1 biblical subject matter 82 Blaue Reiter, Der Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke and 95–8, 99 establishment of 2–3, 4–5, 28n.1, 35, 51, 55 Folkwang Museum and 52, 55–6, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67–8 Gesamtkunstwerk 7–9, 20 Hugo Ball 107 Max Pechstein 87–8 Walter Benjamin 123

Blaue Reiter, Der influence on Walter Benjamin 123–31 Islamic art 166–8, 176 Blaue Reiter, Der, Exhibition of the Editors of: First (1911–12) 2, 5, 40, 42, 90, 103n.53, 140 Blaue Reiter, Der, Exhibition of the Editors of: Second (1912) 3, 5, 42, 88, 90, 140 Blaue Reiter, Der, Franz Flaum, Oskar Kokoschka, Expressionisten (exhibition, 1912) 76 Blaue Reiter, Der, und die ‘Neue Künstlervereinigung München’ (Buchheim) 80–1 blauen Reiterreiterin, das 36, 43, 46 Bloch, Ernst 11, 132n.6 Bloomsbury Group: Francophilia 143 Blue Rider Group,The (exhibition, 1960) 136–40, 141–2, 146–54 Böcklin, Arnold 83 Breton, André 144 Bruant, Aristide 114–15 Brücke, Die Blaue Reiter and 9, 66, 75–100, 137, 147, 148–9 cosmopolitanism 81–2 internationalism 81–2, 99 nationalism 140 women 34 Brüggeman, Heinz 125, 131n.2 Brummer, Joseph 58, 59 Buchheim, Lothar 80–2, 83, 85, 98, 101n.14 Bühnengesamtkunstwerk: Hugo Ball 111 Bulgakov, Sergei 17–18, 31nn.15,27 Bürger, Peter 15, 29n.3 Burlington Magazine,The 139, 143, 146, 150 Burljuk, David 65–6 Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich) 105, 106, 111, 114–16 Café Simplizissimus (Munich) 114 carpet designs, Islamic, as models 169 carpets, Wassily Kandinsky’s works compared to 117–18, 167–8 Cassirer, Paul 95 Chipp, Herschel B. 80 Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter and 95–8, 99 Cloisonnism 39 Cohen, Milton 92 colonialism 55, 57, 60, 161 colour August Macke 63, 66, 92, 169 Folkwang Museum 53–4, 56–7, 58

Index 183 Franz Marc 66, 71n.21, 151 Gabriele Münter 37 Julius Meier-Graefe Marianne Werefkin 40, 42, 44 Paul Klee 164, 165–6, 169, 170 Walter Benjamin 125 Wassily Kandinsky 17, 19, 22–3, 25–6, 66, 148, 151–2, 167, 168 communitarianism 16, 17–18, 27 composition 167–8, 169 stage 7–8, 26, 64–5, 112–13 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky) see Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art Craig, Edward Gordon 63 Cubism 16, 30n.11, 169–70 Cubism and Abstract Art (Barr) 79 cultural understanding: visual literacy 172–3

Dada 105–6, 107, 111, 112, 114–18 dance 61, 62, 134n.46 Hugo Ball 112–13 Das Leben des Menschen (Andreyev) 106 Degenerate Art (exhibition, 1937) 145 Delacroix, Eugène 161 Delaunay, Robert absence from The Blue Rider Group exhibition 137, 140, 148–9, 151 Orphic Cubism 169 Denis, Maurice 58, 60 Derain, André: absence from The Blue Rider Group exhibition 137, 140, 148–9 Deutsche Expressionisten. Zurückgestellte Bilder des Sonderbundes (exhibition, 1912) 94 Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 83 Deutscher Wurkbund 167 Developmental History of Modern Art (MeierGraefe) 59–60, 60–1, 62 Dickerman, Leah 1, 12 disharmony 8, 19, 20, 22, 23, 116 see also dissonance; harmony dissonance 8, 21–2, 27, 28, 55, 62, 64–5 see also disharmony diversity, law of 3–4 Dongen, Kees van 76, 100n.4 Dresden: Expressionism 77–8, 79, 81, 82, 88 Dumont, Louise 62–3 Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus 62–3, 73n.44

184

Index Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) 136, 137 Einstein, Carl 55, 67, 74n.59 Éluard, Paul 144 empathy, abstraction and 26, 129 Erbslöh, Adolf 2 Ernst, Max 144 erotic works: Die Brücke: Kandinsky’s view 91, 100 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (exhibition, 1913) 42, 91, 95, 140 ethnography 57, 58, 99 Exhibition of Masterpieces of Mohammadan Art (1910) 167–8, 169 ‘Exotics and Expressionists’ (Folkwang Museum) 67 expressionism abstract- 77–8, 79, 80 criticisms of 11 Post-Impressionism vs 143 use of term 75–6 Expressionism fromVan Gogh to Picasso (exhibition, 1949) 153 Expressionismus, Der (Fechter) 75–6, 77–8, 140, 143 expressionlessness 131n.3, 134n.45 ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ Expressionism 77–8 Fauvism 52, 76, 144, 150–1, 153, 154 Fechter, Paul 75–6, 77–8, 140, 143 Fenves, Peter 128–9 film Walter Benjamin 123, 124, 126 see also Tunisreise, Die (film) Fine Art Palace (London) 143 Fischer, Otto 42 Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge) 142 Flaum, Franz 76 Flucht aus der Zeit, Die (Ball) 109–10, 112 Folkwang Museum (Hagen) 52–6, 57–61, 62, 63–4, 65, 66, 67–8, 69nn.3,7 form 153 August Macke 63–4 Der Blaue Reiter 51, 56, 62 diversity of 4 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 98 Franz Marc 64 illusion of space 22–3 Robert Vischer 129 Wassily Kandinsky 3–4, 5–6, 8–9, 20, 23, 64, 67, 133n.24 see also specific forms

Formprobleme der Gotik (Worringer) 76 fragment, the 56 Franck, Maria 35 Franco-British Exhibition (1908) 143 Frankfurt School 11, 28 freedom 27 Franz Marc 88, 168 Hugo Ball 112, 116, 118 Nacer Khemir 172 Wassily Kandinsky 8, 17, 19, 20, 23, 108, 116, 168 French modernism British attitudes 141, 142, 143–4 Der Blaue Reiter and 140–1 British attitudes 141–2, 147–9, 150–1, 153–4 French modernism Freyer, Kurt 66 Fry, Roger 71n.17, 143–4 Gaiger, Jason 11 Galerie Arnold (Dresden) 88 Galerie Commeter (Hamburg) 90 Galerie Dada (Zurich) 111, 116–18 Galerie Hugo Helbig (Munich) 83 Gallen-Kallela, Akseli 82, 84–5 Gauguin, Pierre 37, 48n.23, 60, 98, 100n.2 Folkwang Museum 53, 58, 59, 67, 71n.22 Pape Moë 66 Geist 111, 168 see also spiritual, the Genesis: language: Walter Benjamin 125 geometric forms Paul Klee 159, 162, 168, 169 Wassily Kandinsky 33n.44, 117 George, Stefan 36 Gereonsklub, Der (Cologne) 34 German Art of the Twentieth Century (exhibition, 1957) 80 German Expressionist Painting (Selz) 79–80 German Expressionists (Myer) 79–80 German Painting and Sculpture (exhibition, 1931) 78–9 Germany: economic and social justice movements 16–17, 27–8 Gérôme, Jean-Léon 163, 174–5 Gesammelte Schriften (Benjamin) 125 Gesamtkunstwerk 7–9, 19, 60 August Macke’s theory of 62 Der Blaue Reiter 55–6, 59, 61, 65, 67 Folkwang Museum 53, 55–6, 59, 61, 65, 67

Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky’s approach to 65, 66 Hugo Ball 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114 Kleinkunst and: Der Blaue Reiter and Dada 105, 114 see also monumental art; synthesis Gilman, Sander 145 Gogh, Vincent van 94 Portrait of Dr. Gachet 51, 52, 64 Gordon, Donald 80 Gorgo, Goddess of the Animals 66 Gothic Der Blaue Reiter 20, 26–7, 64 Die Brücke 97 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 97 Folkwang Museum 59, 64 Isenheim Altarpiece 123 Paul Fechter 76 Sonderbund (exhibition) 93 William Worringer 26–7, 76, 97 Grafton Galleries (London) 143–4 Graphik des Deutschen Expressionismus (Buchheim) 80 Graphis (journal) 80 Grimm’s Fairy Tales 52, 53 Grünewald, Matthias 123, 131n.3 Gutkind, Erich 123 Hamann, Johann Georg 124 Hardekopf, Ferdinand 115 Harleben, Otto Erich 61 harmony 8, 27 see also disharmony Hartmann, Thomas von 4, 21, 22, 61 anarchism 22 Heckel, Erich 82, 89–90, 92, 94–5 Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke 96–7 Sonderbund (exhibition) 93, 94, 96–7 Heller, Reinhold 80, 82 Hennings, Emmy 105, 114, 115 Hentzen, Alfred 146 Herbert, Barry 101n.6 Herzog, Oswald 77 Hess, Alfred 146 Hess, Hans 146 Hoffmann, Edith 139–40, 150, 151, 152, 153–4 Höppener, Hugo 83 Huelsenbeck, Richard 114, 121n.37 HundredYears of German Painting, A (exhibition, 1956) 80, 145–6 Husserl, Edmund 128–9

Index 185 images: visual literacy 172 In Search of the Orient (exhibition, 2009) 161–2 ‘inner sound’ 126–7, 133nn.25,27 Innere Notwendigkeit 20, 22, 23 ‘intensive’ and ‘extensive’ Expressionism 77–8 interiority 58, 71n.22 internal necessity 6, 7, 8, 20, 98 ‘International Society for New Art’ 109 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936) 144 internationalism 6–7, 60, 61, 67, 140, 141, 148–9, 154 Die Brücke 81–2, 99 Islam, representations of 173–6 Islamic abstraction 159, 160, 167, 168 Islamic art and architecture 161, 162–3, 166–76 Ivanov, Viacheslav 17–18, 23, 26, 28, 31n.15, 33n.63 Jäggi, Ernst 178n.9 Jansen, Franz Matthias 34 Jawlensky, Alexej 35, 37–9, 40, 42, 48n.23, 153 Jugendstil 36, 83, 84, 85, 151 Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry 59 Kandinsky, Wassily All Saints’ Day II 24 anarchism 16, 17–18, 19, 23, 28, 30n.10 Arnold Schoenberg and 64, 65 August Macke, differences from 61–2, 64, 66, 92 The Blue Rider Group exhibition 136, 137, 138, 147–8, 148–9, 150–3 Die Brücke erotic works, views on 91, 100 colour 151–2, 167, 168 CompositionV 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, 17, 18, 23–6, 65 Concerning the Spiritual in Art 1, 7–8, 16, 20, 98, 123, 124–5, 126, 144, 167 English translation 144 influence on Hugo Ball 105, 106, 111–13, 117 influence on Walter Benjamin 123, 124–5, 126 ‘Different’ 127–8, 131 Drawing (1913) 79 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 83, 85, 91 establishment of Der Blaue Reiter 2–3, 4, 5, 15–16, 35, 51, 55 Folkwang Museum and 55, 64, 65, 66 Franz Marc, differences from 61, 66 on Die Brücke 90–1 Improvisation. Gorge 136, 137, 148, 150, 152–3

186

Index Kandinsky, Wassily (cont.) influence on Hugo Ball 105, 106–14, 116–18 internationalism 6–7 Lothar Buchheim on 81 Lyrical 52, 53 Michael Sadler’s collection (Leeds) 144 Moonrise 83, 84 The Night 83, 86 NKVM 1, 2, 86–7 ‘On Stage Composition’ 8, 26, 65, 98 ‘On the Question of Form’ 5–6, 8–9, 17, 23, 64, 98, 133nn.24,27 influence on Walter Benjamin 125, 126–7, 129 On the Spiritual in Art 21, 22–3 Reminiscences 92 Riding Couple 148, 149, 153 Second Exhibition of the Editors of Der Blaue Reiter 3–4, 5 sensual experience 92, 98 Sonderbund (exhibition) 94 Sound of Trumpets 24, 25 Sounds 125, 126, 127–8 spiritual in art 168 Thomas von Hartmann, relationship with 22 Über das Geistige in der Kunst see Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art Walter Benjamin and 123, 124–31 TheYellow Sound 26, 61, 65 Kanoldt, Alexander 2 Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum (Hagen) 69n.7 Karl–Max Seifert showroom (Dresden) 83, 84 Khemir, Nacer 159–61, 161–6, 167, 168, 169, 171–6, 177n.3 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 81 August Macke and 92, 99 Chestnut Tree in Moonlight 83, 85 Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke 82, 96, 97, 98, 99, 140 Folkwang Museum 58, 67, 68 Franz and Maria Franck 88–9 Franz Marc and 88–9, 90–1 Rest 77 Sonderbund (exhibition) 93, 96–7 Summer 78 Two People 85 Wassily Kandinsky and 83, 85, 91 Kittler, Friedrich 126, 133n.23 Klee, Paul 149, 150–1, 153 Before the Gates of Kairuan 162–3, 165–6, 169–71

In the Houses of St. Germain 147, 148 Schöpferische Konfession 160 Tunisia 147, 159–61, 161–7, 168–72, 174, 176, 177n.4, 178.n.9 View Towards the Harbour of Hammamet 164 Walter Benjamin and 123, 124, 125 World War I 173 Klimt, Gustav 86, 88 Koehler, Bernard 93–4 Kokoschka, Oskar 75–6 Kollwitz, Käthe 36, 144–5 Koren, Vasily: Scene from RevelationVIII 25 Kovno 40 Kraus, Karl 131 Kropotkin, Piotr 17–18 Kubin, Alfred 35 Kulbin, Nikolai 21–2, 32n.40 Kuniyoshi, Utagawa: Two ChineseWarriors of the Han Dynasty 51, 52 Künstlergemeinschaft Brücke (Buchheim) 80 Kunstsalon Fritz Gurlitt (Berlin) 90, 92 Kunstsalon Maximilian Macht (Berlin) 87 Laban, Rudolf 113 Landauer, Gustav 17–18 language philosophy: Walter Benjamin: influence of Wassily Kandinsky 124, 125–31 Lankheit, Klaus 28n.1 Lasker-Schüler, Else 17, 36, 43–6, 50n.45 Le Fauconnier, Henri 100n.2 Leicester Museum and Art Gallery 145, 146 Lenbachhaus (Munich) 12 letters as sensory stimuli 126, 129–30, 134n.46 Liebermann, Max 35 Lindemann, Gustav 62–3 Lipps, Theodor 129 Little Red Riding Hood (play, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus) 63 Long, Rose-Carol Washton 77–8, 99–100 lubki 3, 20, 61 Lukács, Georg 11, 15, 28, 29n.3, 56 Macke, August 3, 35, 51, 62–3, 149 Chronik der Künstlergruppe Brücke and 97 differences from Wassily Kandinsky 61–2, 64, 66, 92 Erich Heckel and 95 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 92, 99 Folkwang Museum and 55, 63–4, 65, 66 Masks (essay) 4, 5, 62, 63–4, 99, 115, 176 Promenade 136, 139, 151

Sonderbund (exhibition) 93–4 Tegernsee Landscape 63 Tunisia 159, 161, 166, 168–9, 177n.4, 178n.9 Vendor with Jugs 169, 171–2 Walter Benjamin and 123, 124 Macke, Elisabeth 35, 94–5 Macke, Helmut 63 McLellan Galleries (Glasgow) 144–5 Maeterlinck, Maurice 21, 23, 62, 126 Mallarmé, Stéphane 56 Manchester Art Gallery 142 Manet, Edouard 56, 60, 63, 143 Manet and the Post-Impressionists (exhibition, 1910) 143 Mann, Philip 112 Marc, Franz 2, 17, 63 Arnold Schoenberg and 64–5 Blaue Reiter bible 82 The Blue Rider Group exhibition 136, 138, 149, 150–1, 152, 153 Deer in the Snow II 151, 152 differences from August Macke 61–2, 64 differences from Wassily Kandinsky 61, 66 on Die Brücke 90–1 Else Lasker-Schüler and 43 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and 88–9, 90–1 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (exhibition) 95 establishment of Der Blaue Reiter 2–3, 5, 15–16, 35, 51, 65 Folkwang Museum and 55, 63, 64, 65 Hugo Ball and 108 Nude with Cat 136, 138, 151, 153 nudes 100 Sonderbund (exhibition) 94 spiritual in art 168 ‘Spiritual Treasures’ 57, 59, 66 ‘The “Savages” of Germany’ 75, 87–8, 98, 154 ‘Two Images’ 64 on Wassily Kandinsky’s works and carpets 117–18, 167–8 Marc, Maria 88–90 Märchen 83–5 Marlborough Gallery (London) 146–7, 157n.55 Marxism 16, 17, 18 masks 61, 63, 64, 73n.46 Bayaka Mask, Folkwang Museum 67, 68, 74n.59 mass culture, high culture and: Cabaret Voltaire 115 Matisse, Henri 20, 76, 82, 93, 144, 151, 154 Folkwang Museum 58, 59, 63, 71n.17

Index 187 meaning, theory of Friedrich Nietzsche 100 Walter Benjamin 128–30 Mehretu, Julie 12 Meier-Graefe, Julius 57, 59–61, 62, 66, 72n.28 messianic Expressionism 82 Meunier, Constantin 53, 54 Mid-European Art (exhibition, 1944) 145 Minne, Georg 53, 54, 60 Moderne Gallery Thannhauser (Munich) 2, 40, 86–7, 90, 140 Moilliet, Louis 159, 166, 169, 177n.4 Moll, Bruno 159, 161, 162, 164–6, 173, 176 monumental art 7–8, 9, 20, 23, 112 see also Gesamtkunstwerk; synthesis Munch, Edvard 40–2, 82, 98 Münchener Künstlertheater 108, 109–10 Münchner Künstlerinnenverein 36 Munich cabaret: influence on Cabaret Voltaire 114–15 Expressionism 79, 81, 82, 90, 93, 116, 141 Hugo Ball in 106–11, 116 significance for women artists 36–7 Munich Kammerspiele 106, 110, 115, 121n.40 Munich Secession 81, 86–7, 92, 99 Münter, Gabriele 2, 6, 35–6, 37–9, 91, 146–7 Portrait of MarianneWerefkin 37, 38 Museum of Modern Art (New York) 78–9, 80, 159–60 Museum Penzberg (Bavaria) 88–9 music Der Blaue Reiter 4, 8–9, 21, 64 Wassily Kandinsky and Arthur Schopenhauer 92–3 musical painting 60 Myer, Bernard 79–80 Nationalgalerie (Berlin) 56–7, 58 nationalism Die Brücke 140, 148–9 Expressionism and 76, 88, 99, 140 natural law 16, 18, 19–20, 21–2, 27 Negro Sculpture (Einstein) 55, 67, 74n.59 Neo-Impressionism 17 Neue Bild, Das (Fischer) 42 Neue Galerie (Berlin) 59 Neue Kunst gallery (Munich) 3 Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) 1–2, 34–5, 42, 75, 81, 86–7, 98 Folkwang Museum exhibit 55

188

Index Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) (cont.) Marianne Werefkin 37, 42 membership card 85 Neue Kunstsalon, Der (Königinstrasse 44, Munich) 90 Neue Kunstsalon Hans Goltz (Munich) 42, 140, 173 Neue Secession 35, 47n.3, 75, 87–8, 94–5 Neumann, Hans 83 New Burlington Galleries (London) 144–5 New Statesman (journal) 150–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 60, 81, 88, 93, 99–100, 107, 119n.9 Nolde, Emil 58, 59, 84–5, 87, 153 nudes: Wassily Kandinsky’s views 91, 92–3, 100 Obrist, Hermann 83 Ofili, Chris 11–12 ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ (Benjamin) 124, 125 ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (Benjamin) 130–1 ‘On the Philosophy of Language and EpistemoCritique’ (Benjamin) 125 One Thousand and One Nights 165, 174 Oppenheimer, Olga 34 Orientalism 160, 161, 163–4, 165–6, 169, 174, 175–6, 179n.33 Osthaus, Gertrud 58–9, 69n.7 Osthaus, Karl Ernst 52–3, 55, 57–8, 59, 60, 61, 65, 67, 68, 71n.22, 140 Otterbeck, Christoph 162 pairings: Der Blaue Reiter 51–2, 56, 65–6 panlogue 128–9 Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern Art (Anger) 161, 180n.47 peasant culture 18, 19, 28, 42, 99 Pechstein, Max 76, 83, 85, 90–1, 95–6, 99, 146 Neue Secession 87–8, 94 ‘Phalanx’ association 81, 83, 84 Phöbus 108–9 photography: Walter Benjamin 123, 124 Picasso, Pablo 59, 93 absence from The Blue Rider Group exhibition 137, 140, 148–9 Piper, Reinhard 2–3, 4, 96, 97, 109 politicians, Kandinsky’s view of 16 Ponsonby, Robert 136, 137 post-colonialism 160, 161, 176

Post-Impressionism 57–8, 71n.17, 75, 142, 143–4 ‘primitive’ art 6, 52–6, 57–60, 61, 63, 65, 66–7, 68, 99 Die Brücke 97 primitivism 159–60, 163–4, 166, 168, 176 Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art (exhibition, 1984) 159–60 Programm (Die Brücke) 88 Read, Christopher 15 Read, Sir Herbert 145 refugee artists: Germans in Britain 145 Reiche, Richard 93–4 Reid, Alexander 144 religion: Walter Benjamin 124 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 60 repetition 8, 23, 67, 126, 127 Reventlov, Franziska zu 36 Riha, Sidi 89 ritual 55–6, 57, 60, 62, 66 Rodin, Auguste 142 Rosefeldt, Julian: Manifesto 28 Röthel, Hans Konrad 136, 141, 147, 152–3 Rousseau, Henri 3, 59, 140 Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (RGI) 144 Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) (Edinburgh) 136, 142, 145, 147 Russia in Cabaret Voltaire 115 economic and social justice movements 16– 17, 18, 27, 28 Edith Hoffmann 153 Marianne Werefkin 40, 44–5 Sacharoff, Alexander 61 Sadleir, Michael 144 Sadler, Sir Michael Ernest 144 Said, Edward 161, 175–6 Sarre, Friedrich 167 Saturn (journal) 44 Schiefler, Gustav 96–7 Schmidt, Paul Ferdinand 90 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 83, 95, 99, 104n.91, 145 Schoenberg, Arnold 4, 8, 21, 55, 64–5, 66, 91, 150–1 ‘The Relationship to the Text’ 64 Self-Portrait,Walking 5 Scholem, Gershom 123, 131n.3 Schopenhauer, Arthur 92–3

Schwabing, Munich 36, 83 Schwarz-Weiß catalogue 91, 92 Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition,The (exhibition, 1912) 143–4 Selz, Peter 79–80, 153 sensual, the: Die Brücke 82, 87, 92, 93, 98 sensuous, the: language 125, 126 Serner, Walter 116 Seurat, Georges 60, 63, 151 shadows: Orientalism 174 Shapire, Rosa 145 Signac, Paul 17–18, 27 In the Time of Harmony 17, 19 Société des Beaux-Arts, La (Glasgow) 144 Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) (Edinburgh) 144, 155n.17 Soloviev, Vladimir 18, 31n.27 Sonderbund (exhibition, 1912) 65, 82, 90, 93–5, 96–7, 140 ‘sound, inner’ 126–7, 133nn.25,27 spirit, abstract 6, 7 spiritual, the Arnold Schoenberg 8, 64 August Macke 62, 63, 64 Folkwang Museum 57, 58, 62, 67 Franz Marc 59, 62, 64, 66, 100, 168 Gustav Lindemann 63 Hugo Ball 105, 106, 107, 113, 116–17 Julius Meier-Greif 60 Karl Ernt Osthaus 67 Nacer Khemir 160, 161, 167 Paul Klee 160, 161, 166, 167 Walter Benjamin 125, 130 Wassily Kandinsky 2, 6, 7, 35, 118n.1, 126, 133n.24, 167, 168 on Arnold Schoenberg 8 heterogeneity 61, 62 nudes 100 pairings 51, 56, 64, 66 Walter Benjamin and 129, 130 see also Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art Städtische Galerie (Munich) 136 stage composition 7–8, 26, 64–5, 112–13 stage design: August Macke 63 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) 153 Sturm, Der (journal) 17, 75–6, 77, 78, 79, 94 Sturm, Der gallery (Berlin) 3, 17, 42, 76, 94, 116 Sylvester, David 150–1, 153–4 Symbolism 16, 17, 20, 27, 30n.10, 83, 126 symbols 46, 172

Index 189 synaesthesia 60, 61, 62, 68 synthesis 2, 8, 39, 55, 56, 60–1, 98, 115 August Macke 63, 115 Hugo Ball 106, 108–9, 114, 115 see also Gesamtkunstwerk; monumental art Tappert, Georg 87 Tate Gallery (London) 80, 136, 140, 141, 145–6, 146–7, 147–54 Taut, Bruno 17 textiles, Islamic 159, 169, 170–1 Thannhauser, Moderne Gallery (Munich) 2, 40, 86–7, 90, 140 theatre August Macke 62–3 Hugo Ball 106, 108–10, 111, 112, 114–16 Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger) 15, 29n.3 Theosophy 16, 27, 30n.10 ‘thing-language’ 125 Thomas, Trevor 145 Times,The 139, 147, 153 total work of art see Gesamtkunstwerk tourism: European artists and the ‘Orient’ 176, 180n.63 Tschudi, Hugo von 56–7, 58, 59, 71n.17 Tunisia 147, 159–61, 161–76 Tunisreise, Die (film) 159, 160, 161, 162–6, 167, 169, 173–4, 176 Twentieth-Century German Art (exhibition, 1938–9) 144–5 Tzara, Tristan 114, 116, 117 Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Kandinsky) see Kandinsky, Wassily: Concerning the Spiritual in Art universalism: Paul Klee 160–1 van de Velde, Henry see Velde, Henry van de van Gogh, Vincent see Gogh, Vincent van Velde, Henry van de 52–3, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69n.7 Ver Sacrum (journal) 88 Vienna Secession 88, 144 Vischer, Robert 129 Voltaire: influence on Hugo Ball 114 von Tschudi, Hugo see Tschudi, Hugo von Wagner, Richard 7, 8, 55, 60–1 Walden, Herwarth 91, 94–5 Hugo Ball and 109, 110 marriage 44 Protest für Kandinsky 65

190

Index Walden, Herwarth (cont.) Der Sturm (journal) 17, 75–6, 77, 78, 79 Der Sturm gallery 3, 17, 42, 76, 94, 116, 140 war 173, 180n.54 see also World War I Wedekind, Frank 115, 121n.40 Weigel, Sigrid 124, 132n.10 Weikop, Christian 142, 143, 145 Weiss, Emil Rudolf 54–5 Werefkin, Marianne 35, 36–9, 39–40, 42, 43, 48n.28 Else Lasker-Schüler and 43–6, 50n.45 influence of Edvard Munch 40–2, 82 Return Home 40–2 Self Portrait 40, 41 Wigman, Mary 113 With, Karl 58, 67 Wolfskehl, Karl 36 women Der Blaue Reiter 34–6, 39, 43, 46

Brücke group 34 portrayal of: Gabriele Münter 37–9 woodcuts Der Blaue Reiter 4, 51, 62, 91, 136 Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke 83–5, 91, 92, 97, 98–9 pairing 5, 20 ‘word-skeleton’, the 128, 129, 130 ‘Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, The’ (Benjamin) 123 World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 93 World War I 67, 76, 105, 173 Worringer, Emmy 34 Worringer, Wilhelm 20, 26–7, 76, 97, 129, 140, 143 written signs as visual forms 126–31 Zentrum Paul Klee (Bern) 161–2, 178n.9 Zurich 105, 106, 109, 111, 114–18 Zurückgewiesener der Secession Berlin (exhibition, 1910) 94