Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal 9781501341601, 9781501341632, 9781501341625

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal Tim Satterthwaite

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Tim Satterthwaite, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Maria Rajka Cover image: ‘Front crawl in the sand,’ UHU magazine, July 1930 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4160-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4162-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-4161-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my father, Jerome Satterthwaite

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

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Part I  Social Modernism 1 The Idea of the Whole 2 Pattern Theory 3 Symphonies of the City

11 27 47

Part II  The Beautiful World: UHU Magazine, 1924–30 4 5 6 7 8

‘The pulse of life’ Photographic Unities ‘The beauty of technology’ Sunlit Dancers UHU in the 1930s

75 85 125 151 189

Part III  The Crisis of Modernity: VU Magazine, 1930–3 9 The Promise of Plenty 10 Utopian Patterns 11 The Crisis Years

203

Epilogue: Modern Pages

281

Bibliography Index

285

231 259

299

viii

Acknowledgements The journey of this book began in 2009, when my MA tutor at Sussex University, David Mellor, suggested I take a look at the bound copies of VU magazine in Brighton’s St Peter’s House Library. This became my MA thesis, which became the kernel of my doctoral thesis at The Courtauld Institute of Art, supervised by Gavin Parkinson. My thanks to these two eminent scholars, and to the many other people, who have helped me on the long and winding road to the completion of the book manuscript. Particular thanks to Émilie Bernard and the staff of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce; to Patrick Rössler for his invaluable endorsement of the book project; and to the late Robert Lebeck (1929–2014), who – quite literally – threw me the keys to his extraordinary archive. And thanks, most of all, to my wife, Lucy Bryson, who supported and encouraged me throughout, and brought me late-night cups of peppermint tea.

Figure 1  Page spread, Die Dame, end May 1924, pp. 4–5.

Introduction

A page spread from the women’s magazine Die Dame (The Lady), of May 1924, presents the reader with two half-page photographs, celebrating ‘Unsere schöne Welt’ (Our beautiful world) (Figure 1). The images are strikingly dissimilar: the left-hand (verso) page presents an aerial view of New York, with squat nineteenth-century tenement blocks giving way, in the middle distance, to the crystalline forms of skyscrapers; the recto image is of a little boy lazing in a garden full of oxeye daisies, his bent arm shielding his eyes from the brilliant sunlight. The paired photographs, symmetrically aligned, seem designed to tease the reader: what do these pictures have in common? What do we, the modern magazine of 1924, find beautiful? The new photo-illustrated magazines that began appearing on European newsstands in late 1924, and the years that followed, took this idea of a unified aesthetic modernity as their point of departure. Launched in the shadow of the First World War and its traumatic aftermath, the popular magazines of the 1920s traded in idealist images of leisure, communality, and consumer plenty, conveying the optimistic promise of a new, machine-age society. The ‘beautiful world’ of Die Dame’s aerial view describes the repetitious forms of Manhattan, but also the technological world beyond the image frame. The paired photographs invoke a modernist synthesis: rationalised modernity, symbolised by the geometric order of the modern city, is reconciled with the paradisiac ideal of the child in the garden. The diverse and evolving projections of this modernist utopia, in the pioneering German and French popular magazines of the interwar decades, form the subject of this book. Mapping the period from the stabilisation of the Weimar economy in 1924 to the Nazi dictatorship of 1933, the book explores the rival visions of the new society in popular modernism, and the evolution of these ideals from the 1920s into the Depression era. The new magazines were defined by the profusion and continuous variety of their photography, with pictures of exotic locations, beach resorts, and the gilded lives of film stars, sharing space with images of modern technology, engineering and architecture, and picturesque views of the historical and natural world. The physical unity

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

of the magazine, and the panoptic gaze of the camera, invoked the idea of an inclusive global modernity, built on universal values of tolerance and sociability, and the material prosperity of the machine-age future. The elements and structural mechanisms of this modernist ideal were, however, intrinsically problematic. For the traumatised postwar generation, technological modernity promised material goods and a leisured society, but had delivered industrialised slaughter; America represented the consumer ideal, but also the ‘monotonisation of the world’ and the loss of local cultures; for many critics, the price of modernity was exile from tradition and from nature itself.1 In such a context, the utopian projections of modernist magazines could be only provisional and dialectical: whilst the idealised worlds conjured in photographs and feature articles spoke to the subjective aspirations of modern readers, the magazines also captured the inherent tensions in these ideals, and their contested status. Crucially, the new periodicals responded critically to developments in contemporary culture, engaging proactively and in real time with modernism’s evolving ideas and visual forms. As this book will argue, the assimilation of the machine aesthetic into the cultural mainstream, as the naturalised visual language of modernity, was not – in Germany of 1924, at least – a foregone conclusion: the values of an alternative, organic modernism continued to assert their claim throughout the 1920s. As recorders and critical observers of the contemporary scene, popular magazines both reflected and shaped the process by which the values and aesthetics of the technological era achieved cultural ascendancy at the turn of the new decade. The historian of magazines encounters the immediate problem of abundance. For each popular title there are multiple issues over multiple years, each issue rich in visual and textual materials: the Weimar monthlies, explored in Part II, had up to 200 pages per issue, with photographs or other graphics on around three quarters of these pages. For a broad-based critical history, such as this book, the volume of source material increases exponentially with each additional title. Material on this scale is impossible to assimilate, and there is the risk of undue subjectivity on the historian’s part: it is all too easy, by selecting out particular materials, to create contingent narratives and hierarchies that support preconceived ideas, or to transform the magazines, by default, into undifferentiated source material for studies within the broader cultural history of the period. To study magazines’ internal culture – their specific ideological formations, aesthetics, and thematic hierarchies – requires robust, generalising criteria, that apply across a range of principal themes and reveal underlying commonalities over time, and between diverse materials.

Introduction

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A defining aspect of the photography of interwar magazines was its preoccupation with repetition and regularity. In the Weimar monthlies, alongside the spectacular geometries of kick-line dancers and the mathematical forms of civil engineering and architecture, photo-pages featured aerial views of modular urban landscapes and photomicrographs of self-replicating natural forms; art photographs thematised the organic and geometric visual order of the material world. The use of repetitious form was equally marked in French magazines, in which a geometric aesthetic appeared both in individual photographs and as an organising principle in page layouts; human patterns, such as the configurations of urban crowds in VU magazine (Chapter 11), served as a kind of visual shorthand in Depression-era narratives of social order and disorder. The axiomatic foundation of this book, laid out in Part I, is that the patterning aesthetic of popular magazines embodied the communitarian and collectivist ideals of the reconstruction era. Drawing on the visual culture of early twentiethcentury modernism (Chapter 3), photographers and magazine editors traced the symbolic forms of a new society in the groupings and regularities of the visual world: in the broadest terms, geometric pattern forms invoked the image of a rationalised machine-age society, and of progress towards this modernist utopia; informal and organic groupings spoke to a dream of sociability and a return to nature. The book’s intention, here, is not to impose a crude, reductive interpretation on complex images, but to describe the underlying cultural resonances of their compositional patterning, for a notional magazine reader of the interwar period.2 As the book’s figures illustrate, the pattern forms in figurative images ranged in visual intensity, and in symbolic intent, from the emphatic to the infinitely subtle and ambiguous. In the expansive terms proposed in Chapter 2, the symbolic patterning culture of modernism was universalist – embracing both skyscrapers and oxeye daisies. Alongside its thematic emphasis on visual groupings, the detailed focus of Modernist Magazines is limited to two magazines, which form the spine of the longitudinal case studies in Parts II and III. This book makes no attempt to compete, in scope, with standard works such as The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (a three-volume study of avantgarde periodicals),3 though it does have one crucial advantage. Unlike the Oxford History, and the excellent Deutsche illustrierte Presse (2016),4 which present topical chapters on individual titles, the present book is able to track the evolution of its selected magazines – occurring in dialectical relation to the crisis conditions of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Like the magazine reader who

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

becomes familiar with a favourite title over months and years, understanding a magazine’s culture requires time, and the space to explore its developing themes, ideals, and preoccupations; the extended case studies seek to capture at least some of the complexity of these collective enterprises. The focus of Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is not, however, limited to two periodicals, as its title makes clear: thematic discussions, throughout the book, place UHU and VU within their respective magazine contexts, and introduce key antecedents and contemporaneous rivals. These are the neighbouring titles on the magazine racks, when our notional German reader picks out the new issue of UHU, or, in Paris, catches up on the weekly news in VU magazine. The two titles at the heart of this book were exceptional, both in their own right, and as representative of a wider class of photo-illustrated magazines of the period. UHU, explored in Part II, was an imaginative and beautifully made monthly ‘revue’, launched by the leading German publishing house Ullstein Verlag in October 1924. The magazine was typical of a new style of progressive popular monthly of the Weimar era, presenting a mix of topical features, light fiction, and lavish photogravure illustrations, aimed at a middle-class readership: it was ‘readable in a train journey from Berlin to Hamburg’.5 UHU’s contributors, over its nine-year run, included many of Germany’s leading writers, photographers, artists and designers – Kurt Tucholsky, Kurt Szafranski, Walter Gropius, Vicki Baum, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Sasha Stone, Walter Benjamin … – a roll call which points to the intimate dialogue between avant-garde and mainstream culture at this period. The French weekly news magazine VU, launched in March 1928, was the product of an equally rich visual and journalistic culture. As Part III describes, VU was a pioneering title, without immediate competitors in its early years: Chapter 1 provides a provisional outline of the magazine’s lineage – notably, the sporting magazines La Vie au grand air and Match l’Intran. VU’s achievement lay in marrying the reportage style of German news supplements such as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung with the optimistic ideals of technological modernism. Like UHU’s communitarian visions – though without the German magazine’s cult of nature – VU’s modernist utopia was invoked in images of rationalised collectivity and social order, and in the patterned configurations of page layouts. The magazine’s progressive idealism shaped, in turn, its agonised, searching response to the Depression crisis and the rise of Hitler. As Chapter 11 describes, the collapse of the liberal modernist ideal in the turmoil of the early 1930s was inflected in the destabilised, oppositional structures of VU’s photographs and graphic designs.

Introduction

5

The language of patterning A key assumption underlying the visual readings in this book is that regular (geometric) patterns and irregular (non-geometric, informal) patterns share a basic property: the elements in the pattern seem to belong together. This ‘togetherness’ is forcefully expressed in many of the contrasting pattern forms in this book: see, for example, the flock of cranes and the aeroplane formation in Figure 6, or the irregular and linear groupings in Hannah Höch’s scrapbook (Figure 21). The premise of Modernist Magazines is that visual unities such as these had a particular cultural resonance in the interwar period, as symbolic figures of community and social order; and that the ‘strength’ (coherence and stability) and regularity/informality of these patterns informed this symbolisation. To develop this thesis demands a theory of pattern that embraces irregular and regular groupings, and accounts for their dynamic properties. In the absence of current critical theory in this area, Modernist Magazines outlines a provisional approach (Chapter 2), introduced here as pattern theory. The methodology, based in the Gestalt tradition and the present-day science of perceptual organisation, falls outside of critical orthodoxy, and will require, for its full defence, a book of its own. As presented here, pattern theory appears as a bespoke toolkit: a small set of critical terms, and a body of theoretical assumptions, on which some – not all – of the book’s visual readings are built. The burden of this book is that critical and scientific theories of visual experience need not be incompatible: that an account of the visual system’s constructive role in cognition does not negate a historicist approach to visual culture. If the reader experiences no such incompatibility over the course of this book, then the approach may perhaps have taken its first forward step. Absent from Chapter 2, and from the book as a whole, is any account of the philosophical traditions on which pattern theory builds. The defence of the theory demands a historicist treatment, relating the proposed methodology to key antecedents: Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament (1856); the formalist theories of the Vienna School – Wölfflin, Riegl, Panofsky, Sedlmayr;6 Siegfried Kracauer’s critical studies of Weimar mass culture; postwar engagements with Gestalt theory in the work of Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Arnheim, Susanne K Langer, Gyorgy Kepes, Kevin Lynch. The complex task of situating pattern theory within these fragmentary, conflicting theoretical traditions lies, clearly, beyond the scope of the present book. For better or worse, pattern theory is introduced

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here on its own merits, in the hope that the dedicated chapter provides at least adequate temporary foundations.

Magazine histories Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is a child of the digital era: the book’s primary source materials are my own digital facsimiles of magazine pages photographed, by kind permission, at the National Art Library, London, the Kunstbibliothek Berlin, and the Robert Lebeck archive. This collection was supplemented by materials in online archives: principally, the outstanding Illustrierte Presse archive containing searchable runs of the leading Weimar monthlies; the Gallica archive of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris; digitised runs of VU and Voilà on the website of the Musée Nicéphore Niépce (MNN), Chalon-sur-Saône.7 The supple advantages of digital technology, allowing the researcher to summon magazine pages at the click of a mouse, extend beyond simple convenience and economy. In the case of the present book at least, without this capacity to range freely over time and across different publications the thematic chapters could not have been written – or would have been very different. There is reason to hope, therefore, that the important books published this century in the field of magazine studies mark the dawning of spring in the digital humanities, and that many further critical texts will follow: recent titles on the modernist period include the Oxford History of Modernist Magazines and Deutsche illustrierte Presse mentioned previously; Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel’s The Making of Visual News (2017); Danielle Leenaerts’s Petite histoire du magazine Vu (2010); and Michel Hockx et al., A Space of their Own (2017), on women’s periodicals in twentiethcentury China (not cited in the present book) – a collection which suggests the possibilities, in the digital era, of a new globalised, post-colonial agenda in magazine studies.8 The foundations of Modernist Magazines lie in the new accounts of modernism that emerged in the final decades of the last century, challenging both the conventional hierarchies and conceptual paradigms of art history. Jeffrey Herf ’s Reactionary Modernism (1984), and the revisionist histories that built on this (Chapter 1), provide the essential framework for my reading of Weimar magazines in Part II.9 An equal debt, perhaps less acknowledged in the

Introduction

7

chapters that follow, is due to the pioneering work of historians such as Hanno Hardt and Bernd Weise, whose detailed scholarly accounts of the German photo-illustrated press began appearing in the late 1980s.10 The axiomatic basis of these histories, as of the present book, is that the magazines and illustrated supplements of the early twentieth century were more than mere ephemera, blithely recording the fashions and innovations of modern life. They were cultural actors in themselves, celebrating but also critiquing the forms and practices of the emerging technological society. This book seeks to capture something of this dialogue between magazines and their milieux, in the era of utopian modernism and of the catastrophic collapse of these progressive ideals.

Notes 1 Stefan Zweig, “Die Monotonisierung der Welt” (The monotonisation of the world) Berlin Börsen-Courier, February 1, 1925. See below, p. 129. 2 The metaphor of submerged “resonances” in the photographic image is insightfully developed in Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017). 3 The final volume in this series explores avant-garde European magazines of the modernist era: Peter Brooker et al., The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume III: Europe 1880-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 4 Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert, eds., Deutsche illustrierte Presse: Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016). 5 Frederick Ullstein, quoted in Sophie v. Stackelberg, “Illustrierte Magazine als Zeitschriftentyp und Historische Quelle. Der ‘Uhu’ als Beispiel,” in Fotografie und Bildpublizistik in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Diethart Kerbs and Walter Uka (Bönen: Kettler, 2004), 133. 6 For an introduction to the theories of the Vienna School in the nineteenth and twentieth century, see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 1–36, 137–242; Christopher S. Wood, The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 9–46. 7 Illustrierte Presse: www.illustrierte-presse.de (now hosted on arhistoricum.net); Gallica: gallica.bnf.fr; Musée Nicéphore Niépce archive: www.museeniepce.com/ index.php?/collections. Images described but not reproduced in this book are, in most cases, freely available on these websites.

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

8 Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel, The Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press, trans. John Tittenson (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Danielle Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu (1928-1940): Entre Photographie d’information Et Photographie d’Art (Bruxelles and New York: PIE: Peter Lang, 2010); Michel Hockx, Joan Judge, and Barbara Mittler, eds., A Space of Their Own: Women and the Periodical Press in China’s Long Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 9 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 10 Hanno Hardt, “Pictures for the Masses: Photography and the Rise of Popular Magazines in Weimar Germany,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 13, no. 1 (1989); Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie I. Die Anfänge in Deutschland, Ausgehend von einer Kritik bisheriger Forschungansätze,” Fotogeschichte 9, no. 31 (1989); Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie II. Fortschritt der Fotografie- und Drucktechnik und Veränderungen des Pressmarktes im deutschen Kaiserreich,” Fotogeschichte 9, no. 33 (1989); Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie III. Das Geschäft mit dem aktuellen Foto: Fotografen, Bildagenturen, Interessenverbände, Arbeitstechnik, die Entwicklung in Deutschland bis zum ersten Weltkrieg,” Fotogeschichte 10, no. 37 (1990); Bernd Weise, “Pressefotografie IV. Die Entwicklung des Fotorechts und der Handel mit der Bildnachricht," Fotogeschichte 14, no. 52 (1994).

Part I

Social Modernism

10 

1

The Idea of the Whole

We are convinced that this flood will never disperse. … We live in it – not like fish in water, but like the seafarer on the ocean who knows the treachery of the sea. Paul Renner, ‘Das Lichtbild’ (The Photograph), 1930 The European popular magazines of the 1920s and early 1930s built their appeal on visions of a youthful, harmonious modernity, characterised by outdoor leisure, communality, and the peaceful application of modern technology. Whilst the components of this ideal varied from title to title, and evolved over time within individual magazines, its common principle was one of tolerance: the reconciliation, or mutual coexistence, of opposing forces, ideologies, and traditions. The defining question, inflected in the utopian imagery of German popular monthlies, and addressed with explicit urgency in the 1930s editorials of VU magazine, concerned the nature of modern society: how could individuals, and nations, learn to live together, and avoid a return to civil unrest and the catastrophe of war. From this general perspective, the idealist visual culture of interwar magazines relates to broader societal hopes and fears, regarding the nature of technological modernity. Images of the natural world and traditional life published in Weimar monthlies, alongside photos of film stars and modern interiors, added picturesque variety to the magazines’ photo-pages. Such juxtapositions also, however, speak to the profound historical dilemmas in German society and cultural life in the era of mass industrialisation: the dichotomy between traditional and modern ideals, the values of an urbanised, technological present and a rural, agrarian past. Progressive French magazines, in their turn, refracted the acute societal tensions of interwar France, concerning economic modernisation, the role of women, Americanisation, the future of the built environment.

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

In their different ways, the magazines explored in this book resolved these tensions in favour of modernism, embracing the new cultural forms and modes of being that emerged from the experience of modernity. As the evolving content of these magazines reveals, however, the nature and degree of this engagement was not predetermined: in the early postwar years, in particular, the mythic ideals and visual language of popular modernism appear fluid and contingent, reflecting the play of dialectical forces that shaped its evolution. In the broadest terms, the popular magazines present a dialogue between alternative modernisms: a modernism of the machine, embracing technological and technocratic systems, and visually embodied in the geometric aesthetic; a modernism of the body, favouring the free expression of subjectivity and a renewed, spiritual connection with the natural world. The resolution of this dichotomy, in favour of the technological ideal and machine modernism, played out in the pages of Weimar magazines in the years before the Great Depression. The values of an alternative, organic modernism, and the cultural impulse to reconcile this ideal with the prerogatives of the machine age, were symbolised in photographs of natural forms and the unclothed human body, and inflected in the wider imagery of social groupings and regularities in the manmade and organic world.

Yearning for unity The force and currency of Weimar’s modernist dialectic can be glimpsed in the editorials of two magazines from the mid-1920s. For the popular science and technology monthly Die Koralle (Coral) the dilemma has an existential primacy, laid out in the editorial of the opening issue, of April 1925: Through our age runs a deep yearning to escape from the monotony and haste of our daily lives into the limitless space and freedom of mother nature. Die Koralle will lead the way. It will show how to discern the thousand forms in which the mysterious creativity of nature is expressed, and provide information in words and pictures on all the great and small, wonderful and unknown [creations] that surround us. … But Die Koralle also wants to make nature harnessed by the human spirit, the wonders of technology, accessible to the reader’s understanding.1

The striking ambivalence towards technological modernity, in a magazine aimed explicitly at a ‘cultivated, critical readership, interested in technology’,

The Idea of the Whole

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is expressed through a mythic trope, in which nature serves as compensatory palliative to the dehumanising effects of modern life.2 Modernity and the natural world are paired, more ambiguously, in the generalinterest magazine Revue des Monats (Revue of the Month), in a pithy satirical poem from the September 1928 issue. ‘Wer liest was?’ (Who reads what?), by Max Kolpe and Billie Wilder, describes the bewildering array of reading matter offered by a Berlin newsagent, including a stereotypical revue magazine,3 defined in terms of its topical interests: modern art and metropolitan glamour, the sexual revolution – ‘Man is Woman! Woman is Man! Love complexes: the erotic becomes a pastime!’ – equated, in the following line, with a modish embrace of the natural: ‘Zurück zur Natur!’ (Return to nature!).4 The connection is not selfevident: whilst erotic emancipation was, indeed, one idealist element of Weimar Freikörperkultur (nudism), this was highly contested even within the movement itself;5 in the context of ‘Wer liest was?’, the appeal to nature is simple shorthand, evoking the heterodoxy and fluidity of modern life. As the exclamation marks peppering the rhyme seem to suggest, the magazines that played out and sought to reconcile these contrasting ideals expressed the paradoxes at the heart of 1920s modernism. The historiography of the Weimar era has, traditionally, equated the progressive movement in German art and visual culture with the machine aesthetic. In part, this reflects the historical importance of the Bauhaus, and the fact that, as Walter Laqueur notes, Weimar modernism’s impact on international culture was felt most strongly in the fields of architecture and design.6 It speaks also to a tendency, handed down from the first generation of historians after the Second World War, to construct a binary opposition between modernism (rationalist, technophiliac, progressive) and Nazism (irrationalist, atavistic, reactionary).7 In this construct, the Weimar period becomes a Manichean struggle between dark and light, past and future, dictatorship and democracy. John Willett, for example, talks of a ‘contest between the modern movement in the arts and the primitive-conservative resentments with which it has long had to contend’ – a battle which the forces of progress were destined to lose. As recent historiography has underlined, this binary elides the tensions on both sides of the equation: the ambivalence of many liberal modernists towards technological modernity; the embrace of technology by some on the German right. What Willett terms ‘one of the world’s decisive battles’ was a more complex and contradictory engagement than this metaphor allows.8 Only in the crisis of the early 1930s, as the Weimar Republic neared its final collapse, did such ideological and aesthetic alignments

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

begin to emerge. In the relatively stable years before the Great Depression, the new visual culture was shaped by the subtler potentialities and conflicts playing out within modernism itself. The present book connects to a more recent, revisionist strand in Weimar historiography. Building on pivotal studies such as Jeffrey Herf ’s Reactionary Modernism (1984), critical histories have explored the ambivalence of Weimar progressives, and their opponents, on the central question of technological modernity. In its classical formulation, this is the debate over Kultur and Technik, the values of Germanic culture versus technology/rationalisation, defined as historical and philosophical antitheses. For Modris Eksteins, the terms encapsulate the fundamental dichotomy in German responses to industrial modernity after 1871: remorseless industrial expansion and rationalisation, on the one hand; the cultural reaction to this, decrying the destruction of traditional life and the urbanisation of German society, on the other. In Eksteins’s synoptic account, the euphoric response to the outbreak of war in 1914 represents the cathartic endpoint of this Drang nach vorne (push forward), a momentary reconciliation of societal tensions: ‘Technological innovation and industrial progress would, in a grand synthesis, combine with a spirit of pastoral simplicity. Society and culture would no longer be conflicting realms but an indissoluble whole.’9 The legacy of the war, from this perspective, was a profound disenchantment, with the social-cultural divide now experienced as traumatic loss. As Friedrich Meinecke wrote, in the early 1920s, of his contemporaries: ‘The deep yearning for the inner unity and harmony of all laws of life and events in life remains a powerful force in the German spirit.’10 More than a simple clash of progressives and traditionalists, Weimar’s ‘spiritual yearning’ describes a crisis within these movements, reflecting the disjunction of postwar ideals and the fragmentation of subjectivity. The paradoxical reconciliations of Kultur and Technik, on the part of Weimar’s right-wing ideologues, are described in Herf ’s Reactionary Modernism. In this account, an important strand within conservative and subsequent Nazi ideology sought to combine a völkisch romanticism, invoking a myth of return to an idealised rural past, with an embrace of the material aspects of technological modernity. The ‘reactionary modernists’ wanted Germany ‘to be more rather than less industrialized, to have more rather than fewer radios, trains, highways, cars, and planes’; their complaint was with bourgeois capitalism, and parliamentary democracy, which prevented the proper application of this technology to the task of German military and nationalistic revival.11 As Herf

The Idea of the Whole

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Figure 2  ‘Die Sehnsucht unserer Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’ (The longing of our time for a world view) UHU, November 1926, p. 3. The extended caption reads: ‘“Devotion”, an anonymous, mysterious demand which could be read one morning on many Berlin walls and house ends. In this single word an unnamed visionary reveals his yearning for a new spiritualisation of our being.’

notes, the synthesis proposed by Ernst Jünger, and by Joseph Goebbels, drew on a potent irrationalist tradition in modernism inspired by Nietzschean ideas of the will and the triumph of the spirit over reason.12 The fusion of futuristic modernity with the cult of heroic tradition – the equation of fascism – was an expression of the modernist spirit.13 The monthly revue magazine, UHU, a mass-market title with bourgeois liberal sympathies, projected an idealism far removed from the strident irrationalism of the Weimar right.14 In abstract terms, however, the same ‘yearning for … inner unity’ emerges in its editorial themes and visual imagery. The disjunction of cultural traditions and social realities, and the effects of this on modern society and individual subjectivity, are the explicit subject of an UHU article by Herman Hesse (Figure 2), ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’ (The longing of our time for a world view), published in November 1926. The article is remarkable both for its prominence – twelve photo-illustrated pages at the front of the magazine – and its humane seriousness. Hesse writes:

16

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal The new image of the earth’s surface, completely transformed and recast in just a few decades, and the enormous changes manifest in every city and every landscape of the world since industrialization, correspond to an upheaval in the human mind and soul. … Destroyed and lost for the greater part of the civilized world are, beyond all else, the two universal foundations of life, culture and morality: religion and customary morals. Our life is lacking in morals, in a traditional, sacred, unwritten understanding about what is proper and becoming between people.15

Though the war has completed the ‘death and dismantling’ of traditional culture and morality, it has also, Hesse argues, created the conditions for a spiritual rebirth. Echoing the apocalyptic teleology of the Berlin Expressionists in the prewar decade,16 Germany’s trauma becomes the catalyst for an ‘awakening of the soul, this burning resurgence of longings for the divine’; ultimately, to a utopian synthesis of modernity and the ‘longed-for occult doctrine of the new humanity’. Whilst Hesse resorts to mystical abstractions – Kultur and Technik are here reconciled through a return to a Faustian ‘underworld’ – crucially, the article locates this synthesis within a tolerant, humanistic modern age.17 Hesse’s article, in this general sense, describes the modernist philosophy common to the magazines that form the subject of this book: a progressive, socially liberal attitude to modern life, tempered by the need to find a secure, lasting ground for modern morality and subjectivity. The common driver of this project was a kind of rational optimism, an implicit assertion that Europe’s traumatic modernity did not preclude the establishment, or rediscovery, of communal values. In Hesse’s article, the reconciliation of society and culture depends on the religious impulse, as a resurgent force promoting unified morals. In the more characteristic secular mode of the revue magazines, the primary resolution was aesthetic, encapsulated in the ideal of Schönheit (beauty): the expression of health, wholeness, harmonious order, in both the natural and manmade world. In the pages of UHU, Scherl’s Magazin, or Revue des Monats, the dream of synthesis was realised, photographically, in proliferating images of an idealised actuality.

The Goethean gestalt The synthetic ideal invoked by the revue magazines, and the fragility of this synthesis, are nicely captured in a photographic spread from UHU, April

The Idea of the Whole

17

1930 (Figure 3), showing a close-up study of a magnolia flower, by Imogen Cunningham, set against the portrait of an elderly ‘Blumenfrau’ (woman in bloom). The playful pairing of the flower form and the woman’s head, and the repetitious textures of the stamens and her wrinkled skin, invokes an ideal organic unity, mediated via the benevolent technology of the camera and printed page: nature and the machine age are reconciled within an all-embracing modernity. Given the traumatic economic and political situation in Germany of 1930, this utopian moment has a particular poignancy; but the photographs also embody subtler tensions and possibilities, worked out in the pages of UHU and its rivals over the course of the preceding decade. A central paradox of Weimar-era modernism is the scepticism, on the part of many of its associated figures, about the direction and pace of technological and social change. Max Weber’s gloomy prediction of a bureaucratic future inhabited by ‘specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart’ finds a powerful echo in the Expressionist fantasies of Franz Kafka, in Freud’s theory of ‘neurotic’ cultures, and in the social and cultural critiques of the Frankfurt School.18 In Detlev Peukert’s view, similarities between the rhetoric of progressive critics (Peukert labels them ‘post-modernist’) and their conservative opponents led

Figure 3  ‘Blume und Blumenfrau’ (Flower and woman in bloom), UHU, April 1930, pp. 10–11.

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

contemporaries, and some later historians, to lump them together as part of a reactionary, anti-modernising tradition descending from Nietzsche to Hitler.19 More particularly, for our current purposes, the historical stress on the negativity of Kulturkritik has tended to obscure the constructive alternatives that critics of rationalisation proposed in this period. ‘Machine modernism’ describes the dominant cultural turn of the interwar decades, but not the only progressive response to technological modernity. As Peukert puts it, the ‘feverish intellectual climate’ of 1920s Germany ‘created almost laboratory-like conditions in which every conceivable solution to the problems of modernity could be put to the test’.20 Alongside the Weimar era’s irrationalist, anti-modern, and racialist utopias were more humane idealisms, which sought to challenge the mechanistic logic of machine-age society without destroying its productive and emancipatory potential. The historiography of this technological critique has focused, not on visual culture, but on holistic approaches in the German natural sciences, and on the ‘life reform movement’ (Lebensreformbewegung), the complex of social and cultural formations aiming to reconstruct modern society around the body and its relations to the natural world. These traditions are summarised in two landmark histories: Michael Hau’s The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany (2003) and Anne Harrington’s Reenchanted Science (1996), on the reform movement in the natural sciences.21 In Harrington’s account, holism, as epistemology, was particular to the German-speaking countries, with philosophical roots in the Kantian idea of Naturzwecke (natural purpose) and in Goethe’s development, after Kant, of a theory of Gestalt, or primal organic form.22 Goethe’s ontological division, separating organic from inert form, re-emerges in the critical oppositions of the industrial era – Kultur versus Technik, or (German) Kultur versus (French) Civilization – binaries that privileged the organic, rural character of traditional society over the soulless, mechanistic logic of industrialisation. In Ferdinand Tönnies’s highly influential Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society) of 1887, the living body/lifeless machine metaphors become reified, composing a rhetoric of existential crisis: ‘Gemeinschaft should be understood as a living organism, Gesellschaft as a mechanical aggregate and artefact.’23 This reification marks a pivotal moment in modernist culture, mapping Goethe’s symbolic opposition – living/non-living – onto the social and cultural crises of industrialisation. As Chapter 3 describes, the visual expressions of this duality – the sign of the body and of the machine – appear in the symbolic forms and motifs of avant-garde art in the early twentieth century.

The Idea of the Whole

19

According to Goethe’s holistic science, which enjoyed a significant renaissance from the end of the nineteenth century, all organic life expressed a common formative principle.24 In Goethe’s theory, the diversity of the natural world could be traced back to a small number of fundamental forms, or Gestalten; growth was the metamorphosis of these Gestalten into ever more complex organic structures – a leaf becoming a flower petal, for example. Since humans were part of this cosmic chain of being, they embodied these same Gestalten: each ‘circumscribed living being takes part in the Infinite; it has something of infinity within itself ’.25 Aesthetic sensibility was man’s intuitive response to this sublime unity, the expression of humanity’s place within a timeless natural order. For both progressive and traditionalist critics of modernity in the interwar period, the Goethean Gestalt, describing the cosmic wholeness of living things, offered a philosophical framework within which the cultural decline of industrial society could be articulated: modernity was meaningless because it lacked Gestalt, the self-creating unity of an organic tradition. The term has a notable currency in the Kulturpessimismus of conservative critics such as Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West contrasts the ‘exact, deadening procedure of modern physics’ with the ‘formative forces’ (Gestaltungskräfte) of cultural renewal.26 For the novelist Hans Reiser, the emptiness of technological Form is so complete, that it loses coherence; ‘form’, absent of culture, becomes ‘formlessness’ (Formlosigkeit):27 But what if form – that is, all known and familiar forms – is now a lie, because the present age, as a cultural epoch, has no form – creates no forms other than steel structures, machines and other technical achievements? What if the present age, both in its material manifestations and in spiritual, cultural and artistic terms, is only formlessness, disintegration, mishmash, as God-forsaken and futile as any age has ever been? … [The] casualty of this age … will have to pretend that the express-train tempo of modern life is a post-chaise canter, that the stink of petrol is like rose petals, and that a stock-exchange wizard has a fairy-tale heart of gold.28

In Reiser’s argument, the soullessness of modernity is expressed at the level of visual form, but only for the attentive, sceptical viewer who can distinguish the ‘lie’ and ‘pretence’ of ‘technical achievements’ (technische Errungenschaften) from the true Gestalt of organic and hand-crafted entities such as rose petals, horses, and carriages. What visual characteristics these items share is hard to define – Gestalt appears to be intuitive rather than quantifiable – but the belief in

20

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

its presence has significant resonance at this period. At its limit, it underlies the irrationalist essentialism of Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life), exemplified in the pseudo-scientific, and reactionary, doctrines of Ludwig Klages. Using handwriting analysis (graphology) to probe beneath the ‘masks of courtesy’ of modern civilisation, Klages and his followers would reveal nothing less than the Gestaltungskraft der Seele (the soul’s formative power), the submerged trace of an authentic, organic culture in the body’s repetitious pattern forms.29 For Klages, as for Reiser, cultural renewal depends on the critical gaze, able to distinguish the true (organic) form from the false (machine) form that seeks, insidiously, to displace it. The two critics represent an oppositional, quasi-mystical strand in German cultural theory, to which both progressives and conservatives contributed: a belief in the essential, spiritual properties of organic and traditional objects and materials. In this context, the blithe visual pairing of an old woman and a magnolia in UHU magazine, based on their organic similarities, connects to the ‘yearning’ for a humanised and spiritualised modernity – a loss that the idealist photography of Weimar magazines sought to remedy.

Spiritualised form The designer Paul Renner’s speech at the opening of the Munich exhibition Das Lichtbild (The photograph), published in the magazine Die Form in July 1930, reflects a dominant theme in German writing on photography at this period. Renner acknowledges, as his point of departure, a profound societal anxiety about the impacts of technological modernity: We of the Werkbund know what humanity has lost as a result of this mechanization. We know that an unbroken human being in the fullness of his life can only be found in a village that has hardly been touched by modern technology; that only there do people know what spring, summer, fall, and winter are.30

The modern city dweller, in Renner’s hyperbolic vision, is a fragmented, rootless individual, exiled from community and tradition, and with no living connection to the natural world. This dislocation is permanent – there can be no return to the values of a pre-industrial past – but not irredeemable. For Renner, as for other Weimar modernists, the challenge lay in creating a new synthesis,

The Idea of the Whole

21

between rationalisation and tradition, technology and nature, social order and subjectivity. As the success of exhibitions such as Das Lichtbild affirmed, Renner’s dream of a reconciled modernity would find its means of expression, and its resonant symbols, in photography. For the art historian Wolfgang Born, the technological eye of the camera, subject to the photographer’s aesthetic sense, offered a means of resisting the ‘rigid dictatorship of the machine’. Photography was both the essential medium of the ‘generation of engineers’ and the means by which the superficial objectivity of modernity could be penetrated: the camera lens offered a ‘spiritual way of seeing that intuits a hidden meaning behind the appearance of things’.31 Born’s rhetoric, echoed in other progressive writing of this period, inverts the utopian ideal of machine modernism.32 Van Doesburg’s image of an evolving, vitalised technology – ‘Every machine is the spiritualisation of an organism’33 – was recast, in Weimar photographic theory, as a figure of cultural resistance, an expression of a ‘new humanism’ defying the tyranny of scientific rationalism.34 Even among fervent advocates of mechanisation, such as Johannes Molzahn, the ideal was of a supple and subservient technology, not of a new age of rational systems: ‘The image will become one of the most effective weapons against intellectualism, against the mechanization of the spirit.’35 Photography, the product of the machine age, becomes a means of capturing its symbols, and hence mastering them. The mythic promise of Weimar-era photography achieved its fullest expression in the images and editorials of the new popular magazines. At the simplest level, the diversity and global reach of the magazines’ photography projected visions of a reconciled modernity encompassing all corners of the natural and manmade, historical and modern world. The proliferation of these images – in monthly issues running, typically, to more than 100 pages – contained the promise of an unfolding aesthetic and consumerist utopia, responsive to the needs and desires of magazine purchasers.36 As Molzahn and Born suggest, however, the idea of utopian synthesis was also expressed at the level of individual photographs, both in their content and compositional form. In the configurations of repetitious elements, in the emphasis on the regularities and symmetries of the machine age, the natural geometry of organic forms, or the informal configurations of animal and human groupings, Weimar magazines offered competing, symbolic visions of social order and communality. Photographs of wildlife, for example, typically present the collective groupings of particular species – flocks of birds, herds of antelopes

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Figure 4  Page spread from ‘Paradiese der Tierwelt’ (Paradises of the animal world), Scherl’s Magazin, April 1927, pp. 404–5.

– as in the article ‘Paradiese der Tierwelt’ (Paradises of the animal world) from the monthly Scherl’s Magazin, of April 1927 (Figure 4). In this six-page photostory, images of running wild horses, a colony of penguins, basking sea lions, and other peaceable collectives, form an eloquent opposition to the bleak pessimism of the text: The conquest of Earth by mankind was accompanied, from the earliest times, by the retreat of the animal world and the taking of some useful creatures as domestic animals. Enormous heaps of animal bones have come down to us from the stone age, which speak to the destruction of vast quantities of animals. Wherever man penetrated, the animal world had to retreat or be exterminated, as it had not learnt quickly enough the danger of man.37

As Robert Ramin’s article suggests, the symbolic resonance of the accompanying images appears to go beyond the simple depiction of a pristine natural environment. In the context of Germany’s traumatised postwar culture, the organic, self-creating groupings captured in wildlife and scientific photography spoke to an ideal of natural, communitarian social order, in opposition to the

The Idea of the Whole

23

rationalist – or destructive and tyrannical – logic of the machine age. The mythic ideal of Weimar photography was to seek a return to this lost Eden, or at least to discover traces of its continued presence in the material forms of the manmade world. The machine/nature dialectic, and its ideological dimensions, form the subject of ‘Die Einheit der Welt’ (The unity of the world), a 1927 article in Die Form, staged as a conversation between the editor, Walter Riezler, and an anonymous reader. Discussing Albert Renger-Patzsch’s photographic studies of natural, architectural, and mechanical form, Riezler extols the ‘inner efforts, the soulful vitality, the mutual power and will’ of architecture and sculpture; the sceptical reader responds by doubting that industrial objects can embody such spiritualised perfection: ‘Where technology begins, that is where the unity of living things ends.’ As Riezler’s subsequent reply illustrates, the quest for living Gestalt in the manmade world shaded, in this period, into mysticism: staircases were a ‘creation of man’s inner sense of form’, locomotives purely the product of ‘calculation’.38 The significance of Riezler’s ‘spiritualised forms’ lies in the insistent nature of this cultural critique, and its recurrence in writings from across the ideological spectrum. As the following chapter describes, the term Gestalt, referring to the coherence of perceptual and physical wholes, was central to the theories of Gestalt psychology, which were developed in Germany at this same period. Both in the unifying logic of their ideas, describing commonalities between the material world and human consciousness, and in their empirical insights into the phenomenology of perceptual grouping, the Gestaltists offer a philosophical pathway into the symbolic culture of Weimar magazines, concerned above all with the ideal of reconciliation and social order.39 A lecture by the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, from 1924 – the year of the Dawes Plan and of the launch of UHU, Das Magazin, and Scherl’s Magazin – invokes the fragile optimism of the dawning period of economic stabilisation. Blending scientific rationalism and communitarian idealism, the speech reflects the spirit of the Gestalt pioneers, and broader aesthetic and ideological currents in Weimar modernism: People speak of idealism as opposed to materialism, thereby suggesting something beautiful by idealism and by materialism something gloomy, barren, dry, ugly. Do they really mean by consciousness something opposed to, let us say, a peacefully blossoming tree? When one considers what one finds repellent in materialism and mechanism, and what seems great in idealism, does one find

24

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal the material properties of the elements to be the issue? … It cannot matter of what materials the particles of the universe consist; what matters is the kind of whole, the significance of the whole, the meaning of the whole, the nature of the whole.40

Wertheimer’s synthesis, the reconciliation of materialism and idealism, technology and nature, would find resonant echoes in the idealist photography of the revue magazines.

Notes 1 “Durch unsre Zeit geht eine tiefe Sehnsucht aus dem Einerlei und der Hast unsres Alltagsdaseins hinauszuflüchten in die unbeschränkte Weite und Freiheit der Allmutter Natur. Dieser Sehnsucht bietet sich ‘Die Koralle’ als Führerin an. Sie will die tausend Formen, in denen sich das geheimnisvolle Schaffen der Natur auswirkt, erkennen lehren und über all das Große und Kleine, Wunderbare und Unbekannte, das uns umringt, in Wort und Bild Aufschluss geben. … ‘Die Koralle’ will aber auch die vom Menschengeist gefesselte Natur: die Wunderwerke der Technik dem Verständnis des Lesers zugänglich machen.” Quoted in Voker Bendig and David Oels, “Die Koralle in der Weimarer Republik: Populäre Wissenschaft im Ullstein Verlag,” in Deutsche illustrierte Presse, ed. Rössler and Trabert, 395–6. 2 Ibid., 396. 3 For the use of the term “revue” to refer to popular magazines, see below, pp. 75–6. 4 “Man ist Weib!/Weib ist Man/Liebeskomplexe:/Erotik zum Zeitvertreib!,” from “Wer liest was?” (Who reads what?), Revue des Monats, J2, H11, September 1928, p. 1182. 5 See Chapter 7, pp. 155–60; 166–74. 6 Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-33 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974), 181. 7 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 4–5; also Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Allen Lane, 1991), 11–12, 16. 8 John Willett, The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 7. 9 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Bantam, 1989), 192. 10 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (The doctrine of raison d’état in modern history) (1924), quoted in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968), 80.

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11 Herf, Reactionary Modernism, 12. 12 Ibid. 13 Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib, “Modernity Versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, no. 22 (1981): 4–5. 14 The magazine’s title is capitalised in this book, as this is how the name appeared on the front cover. Other authors opt for Uhu; the usage “Der Uhu” (The Eagle Owl) appears in the magazine’s own editorials. 15 Herman Hesse, “Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung” (The longing of our time for a world view), UHU, J3, H2, November 1926, pp. 3–14. This translation is from Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 365. 16 See Chapter 3, below, p. 48. 17 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 366, 368. 18 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 186. 19 Ibid., 187–8. 20 Ibid., 188. 21 Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1996); Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890-1930 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003). 22 Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 5–6. 23 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), quoted in Harrington, Reenchanted Science, xviii. 24 For a critical history of Goethean science and aesthetics, see Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, eds., Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987). 25 Quoted in Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 5. 26 Quoted in Mitchell G. Ash, “Gestalt Psychology in Weimar Culture,” History of the Human Sciences 4 (1991): 398. 27 As Adrian Forty notes, the critical distinction between Form and Gestalt tends to be lost in translation, as English has only the single word ‘form’ for both terms: Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 149. 28 Hans Reiser, review of Becher, Johannes R: Hymnen, in Die schöne Literatur, 26, January 1, 1925, reproduced in Anton Kaes, ed., Weimarer Republik: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1918-1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 166–7. The translation, here, is a slightly amended version of the text in Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 168. 29 Ash, “Gestalt Psychology,” 399; Nitzan Lebovic, “The Beauty and Terror of ‘Lebensphilosophie’: Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Baeumler,” South Central Review 23, no. 1 (2006): 24.

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30 Paul Renner, “Das Lichtbild,” (The photograph), Die Form, July 1930, in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Aperture, 1989), 166. 31 Wolfgang Born, “Fotographische Weltanschauung” (Photographic world view) (1929), in Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era, 156. 32 For the recurrent trope of photography as a “spiritualised machine,” implying a subjective mastery over the technological medium, see Ute Eskildsen, “Innovative Photography in Germany between the Wars,” in Avant-Garde Photography in Germany, 1919–1939, ed. Van Deren Coke (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 36–7. 33 Cited in Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: The Architectural Press, 1960), 152. 34 Born, “Fotographische Weltanschauung,” 156. 35 Johannes Molzahn, “Nicht mehr lesen! Sehen!,” in Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre: Eine Betrachtung der Internationalen Werkbundausstellung “Film und Foto,” ed. Ute Eskildsen and Jan-Christopher Horak (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1979), 124; first published in Das Kunstblatt 12, no. 3 (March 1928). For an English translation of the text, see Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 648–9. 36 For a discussion of photographic “profusion” in the Weimar era, see Olivier Lugon, “‘Photo-Inflation’: Image Profusion in German Photography, 1925-1945,” History of Photography 32, no. 3 (2008): 220–3. 37 “Die Eroberung der Erde durch den Menschen hat bereits frühzeitig mit einem Zurückdrängen der Tierwelt und der Engliederung einiger als nutzbringend erkannter Geschöpfe in den Haustierstand begonnen. Aus der Steinzeit sind riesenhafte Hügel tierischer Knochen auf uns gekommen, die von der Vernichtung gewaltiger Tiermengen sprechen. Wohin der Mensch immer drang, stets mußte die Tierwelt zurückweichen, oder sie wurde ausgerottet, weil sie die Gefährlichkeit des Menschen nicht schnell genug begriff.” Robert Ramin, “Paradiese der Tierwelt,” Scherl’s Magazin, J3, H4, April 1927, p. 402. 38 Quoted in Pepper Stetler, “The Object, the Archive and the Origins of Neue Sachlichkeit Photography,” History of Photography 35, no. 3 (2011): 292. 39 For the contrasting conservative and progressive ideologies of holism in the Weimar period, see Mitchell G. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 18901967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3, 284–97. Gestalt psychology, in Ash’s account, offered a potential synthesis of scientific rationalism and organisism. 40 Max Wertheimer, “Gestalt Theory,” a 1924 lecture given to the Berlin Kant Gesellschaft. The translation is from Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 119–20.

2

Pattern Theory

Repetition is not undesirable – on the contrary, it is the most important factor in art. Bruno Taut, ‘Five Points’, 1929 A photo-essay from the French weekly VU, of September 1932, captures the period’s modernist preoccupation with visual order (Figure 5). The three-page layout, titled ‘Formes éternelles’ (Eternal forms), contains sets of paired images of abstracted, repetitious forms, revealing striking visual similarities across the manmade and natural world: a woman’s hair resembles a coiled skein of silk; wooden floorboards are paired with an aerial view of irrigated fields; a rowing eight matches the configuration of an asparagus branch. Abstracted from their familiar contexts, the objects reveal a fundamental commonality, described, in the accompanying article, as the expression of a universal ordering principle: Infinite diversity in nature? Perhaps. But uniformity also, when one sees certain essential forms that are found eternally the same in all kingdoms, whether vegetable, mineral, or animal. Are there profound laws that determine these? No doubt. And man himself, in his most modern inventions, always comes back to these primitive forms.1

The thematisation of repetitious form, and the assertion of an essential continuity between natural and manmade objects, connects the VU article to the visual culture of modernist magazines developed over the previous decade, and to the formalist aesthetics of the New Photography.2 Moholy-Nagy’s 1925 Bauhaus book Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), for example, includes a double-page spread which might stand as the prototype for VU’s photo-essay.3 The layout is composed of two full-page photographs (Figure 6): a ‘flock of cranes in flight’ with an explanatory caption – ‘A fine organisation of light and shade, effective in itself, apart from the picture motif ’; on the facing page, a diagonal

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Figure 5  ‘Formes éternelles’ (Eternal forms), page spread, VU, September 7, 1932, pp. 1414–15. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce (MNN), Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône. All VU images in this book are from the museum’s collection, reproduced by kind permission of MNN.

formation of sea planes, illustrating ‘[r]epetition as a space-time organisational motif, which, in such wealth and exactitude, could be achieved only by means of the technical, industrialised system of reproduction characteristic of our time’.4 For Moholy-Nagy, as for the VU authors, the photography of multiple, rhythmic forms comes replete with symbolic meaning: birds and sea planes invoke ideas of mass manufacture and mass provision, and of machine evolution; VU’s pairing of an ivy leaf, a slab of marble, and a Pyrenean valley unites the organic cosmos within a Goethean chain of being.5 The totalising aesthetic of popular magazines, in the period bookended by these two texts, provides the particular thematic focus of this book. In photopages and photo-illustrated articles, and in dynamic page designs and display advertisements, interwar magazines constructed an expansive visual culture built on multiplicity, repetition, and regularity. Like Moholy-Nagy and the VU author, my assumption is that these structural patterns – the term proposed here for non-decorative pattern forms in visual images – had a particular symbolic resonance at this period, associated with ideas of communality, equality, growth, and social order. In the harmonious configurations of crowds, architecture,

Pattern Theory

29

Figure 6  Page spread from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film (Lund Humphries, 1967), pp. 50–1.

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machines, or the natural world, magazine photographs and layouts captured the organic and mathematical structures of the material world; in the patterning culture of modernism, such configurations spoke, in complex and subtle ways, to the organicist and rationalist ideals of the future society. Key to the scope of this critical history of magazine culture is an expanded definition of pattern, taking in both regular and irregular configurations, and ranging from the spectacular, self-conscious arrays of geometric modernism to the simple visual pairings and symmetries of naturalistic photography. Whilst this expansion has epistemological value, capturing the continuity of forms, and the varying complexity, shading, and intensity of their symbolic associations, the revised term is also problematic, as it relates to scientific models of vision that fall outside of current critical orthodoxy. Before applying the proposed methodology, introduced here as pattern theory, to a critical reading of modernist magazines, the nature of this departure must first be described. The defence of pattern theory, and an introduction to its proposed methodology, form the subject of this short chapter.

The definition of pattern Fundamental to our visual experience, both in ordinary life and in the viewing of images, is the spontaneous grouping of elements that appear to belong together, or to relate to each other in some organised way: under typical conditions, we perceive a multiplicity of leaves as belonging to a single tree, and terraced houses as forming a row, a composite visual entity. Whilst such repetitious objects may be dissimilar in form and appearance, they share a phenomenological identity. In perceptual terms, the terrace and the foliage, and other composite objects, are phenomena of visual (or, perceptual) grouping: the visual system’s organisation of the optical field into perceptual unities, based on factors such as similarity, proximity, or collinearity. The products of this cognitive process, the perceptual grouping of repetitious elements, are expressed in the viewer’s visual consciousness as regular and irregular arrays, and as the perception of an object’s mathematical regularity or symmetry. Pattern, in the expansive definition proposed here, refers to the full set of these perceptual entities. Pattern theory, concerned with the critical analysis of repetitious form, describes the theoretical assumptions underlying this definition, and the implications that flow from it.

Pattern Theory

31

In visual images, the revised definition of pattern embraces a wider class of forms than the decorative and ornamental, to include, for example, studies of geometric groupings in urban landscapes, the natural geometries of plant forms, and the informal or irregular groupings of crowds and manufactured objects.6 This diversity can be briefly illustrated through an exemplary image, from Scherl’s Magazin of January 1929 (Figure 7). The photograph, by Simon Fridland, shows a cobbled Moscow street raked by early-morning or evening sunlight, with a passing tram and figures in working clothes walking or gathered in groups at the pavement’s edge. In the elevated perspective, the diagonals of the tramlines and kerb diverge, creating a series of radiating, wedge-shaped bands bounded by the rectangular frame of the image. Pictorial elements, such as the grouped figures in the lower right corner, are configured within this dominant structural pattern, or create visual oppositions: the strong parallels of the shadows form a rival compositional scheme. Through the lens of pattern theory, the visual dynamism of Fridland’s photograph relates to the subtle interplay of its urban pattern forms.

Figure 7  ‘Moderne Lichtbildkunst: Straße in Moskau’ (Modern art photograph: Moscow street), Scherl’s Magazin, January 1929. Photographer: Simon Fridland. The extended caption reads: ‘The art photograph of today creates unexpected pictorial effects out of everyday subjects through odd perspectives and the contrasting play of light.’

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In formal terms, pattern refers to collective entities formed from the repetition of visual elements, and unitary (bounded) objects built on repetitious spatial operations (translation, rotation, reflection). Repetition, here, denotes both visual repetition (similarity) and regularity (spatial repetition), and thus includes both regular and irregular grouping phenomena. From this foundation, it becomes possible, in principle, to unify and conceptualise a kaleidoscopic variety of visual forms: pattern theory would hold, for example, that the radiating contour pattern in Fridland’s street scene shares a phenomenological identity with the texture of the cobbled street, and the grouping of the three men in the lower foreground. Abstracted momentarily of their content, and described in terms of their structural pattern forms, such images may perhaps reveal a submerged symbolic resonance, an impress of their cultural intention. As perceptual constructs, patterns, and the formal properties they embody (repetition/individuation, depth and plane, regularity/irregularity, symmetry/ asymmetry, etc.), are dynamic and ephemeral; groupings may be stable or ambiguous, visually dominant or weak, depending on the perceptual principles that are in play. Pattern includes both linear and non-linear arrays, and both overt configurations and the formal matrices that underlie compositional regularity. Patterns may be fragmentary proto-patterns containing the ‘idea’ of regularity, or they may combine with other patterns to create oppositional structures and visual conflicts. Patterning, in short, does not always produce coherent patterns, just as jazz music does not always produce melodies.

The dialogic model The axiomatic principle of pattern theory is that images are perceptually processed in the same way as other optical fields; no categorical distinction can be made between ‘ordinary vision’ and the visual perception of, for example, photography or graphic art. This position reflects current scientific orthodoxy – images are routinely used as a real-world surrogate in laboratory studies – but is inconsistent with the dominant tradition in critical theory, in which perception is discounted as a mechanistic and subordinate element in the experience of visual art.7 Drawing on scientific models, pattern theory seeks to challenge this critical orthodoxy, arguing that it fails to account for the constructive role of nonconscious cognition in the viewer’s experience of visual images.8 Conscious vision, for pattern theory, is not a simple ‘transcription’ of the optical world,

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which the mind’s higher faculties go on to interpret; it is the expression in consciousness of a meaningful perceptual process, shaped by the visual system’s autonomous simplifications, hierarchies, and inferences.9 The standard, constructivist model of vision turns on a fundamental issue, known as the inverse problem of vision: we see a three-dimensional world, yet our eyes capture only two-dimensional retinal data.10 Constructivism solves this extraordinary paradox through a theory of perceptual modelling: our visual system constructs an internal model of the visual field, drawing on retinal data, sensory memories, and heuristic principles. In cognitive terms, we do not see the world and we do not see pictures: we experience a dazzlingly detailed internal model, our visual system’s ‘best guess’ interpretation of the retinal data.11 Above all, perception is charged, as an evolutionary imperative, with making sense of optical data – hence our remarkable ability to ‘see’ objects in pictures, whether rendered in lines, dots, or patches of colour.12 The process of ‘reading’ pictures, in this primary sense, is the opposite of arbitrary: it reflects a physiological capacity for interpreting stimulus patterns as objects in the external world. If visual consciousness is structured by perception and subject to its autonomous inferences, it follows that the relationship between the visual system and the conscious mind is dialogic rather than hierarchical; the viewer’s experience of images emerges from the continuous interaction between consciousness (affect; subjective memory; the conceptual domain of aesthetic values and symbolic meanings) and perception (the internal modelling of the visual field). As the following example illustrates, this dialogic model offers a way of re-describing compositional form, capturing the dynamic tensions and hierarchies that shape visual experience. Figure 8 is a photographic study of a tropical seascape, published in the first issue of UHU (October 1924). The image shows a line of sinuous palm trees on the promenade of a hotel in Ceylon; the sloping silhouette of a balustrade divides the shore from a gentle sea that stretches to the horizon. The picture’s formal harmony is easily read, and might be described, analogously, in a conventional art-historical account. Such properties can, however, be described in more precise terms, as phenomena of visual organisation: the grouping of elements into patterns, and their configuration within the compositional scheme. The image consists of two large rectangles (sky; sea and land) configured across a central axis (horizon); the lower rectangle is formed of contiguous bands of contrasting tonality, with the white central band balanced by the two darker greys; the left-leaning trunks of the palm trees form a graceful serial pattern, whilst the star-like clusters of

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Figure 8  ‘View from a hotel window in Ceylon’, UHU, October 1924, p. 60.

the leaves create subtle, dynamic geometries that dissolve into new subjective groupings. In this formalist reading, the work is defined by its simplicity and balance: an arrangement of simple patterns, combined and overlaid without visual dissonances. UHU’s vision of a perfect world is an expression of visual order, the incorporation of fragmentary elements within a global unity. The aim of this formal deconstruction is to capture, in simple terms, the perceptual structures that shape visual reading. Rather than viewing the image as an unmediated visual surface, it is here understood as a dynamic interface, expressing the continuous dialogue between the visual system, the physical/ optical world, and the domain of consciousness. Visual groupings form, as it were, the ‘topography’ of this perceptual landscape, the salient objects to which symbolic meanings may attach. The metaphor might also be taken further: just as the beauty of a landscape is self-sufficient, the experience of images is not contained within the symbolic mode: the serenity of the Ceylon seascape reflects its perceptual simplicity and balance, as much as its mythic associations with the idea of tropical paradise. Visual organisation enters the domain both of aesthetics and of semiotics, defining the perceptual unity at the heart of visual reading.

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The Gestalt principles The psychologist Max Wertheimer’s declaration, in 1924, of ‘the significance of the whole’, strikingly anticipates the patterning aesthetic that would emerge in mass visual culture over the following decade.13 Whilst direct communication between the Gestaltists and modernist image-makers appears to have been limited, the mutual preoccupation with pattern suggests a collective cultural response to the societal imperatives of the post-1918 era.14 As Chapter 1 outlines, the groupings and regularities of Weimar magazines projected ideals of wholeness, order and communality, in symbolic reconciliation of the profound dichotomies in Germany’s social, political, economic, and cultural life. Gestalt psychology, in its turn, can be read as a comparable quest for synthesis: the Gestaltists’ idea of whole properties, as an ordering principle in both the physical world and in human perception, offered a potential foundation for a harmonising, rationalist worldview.15 While modernism’s photographic patterns revealed the modular and repetitious structures of the manmade and natural worlds, Gestalt psychology sought to define the properties of these collective wholes. In the field of visual perception, at least, the Gestalt pioneers discovered compelling evidence of grouping phenomena, and of the principles underlying this perceptual process. It is this holistic tradition, long neglected by the philosophy of art, that pattern theory seeks, in principle, to rehabilitate for critical practice. The term perceptual (visual) organisation refers to the primary processing of optical data into perceptual objects and groupings, and their placement in a spatial hierarchy. Whilst this cognitive process is spontaneous and, largely, involuntary, aspects of its underlying phenomenology can be inferred, and verified, by the viewing subject.16 For pattern theory, as for the present-day science of perceptual organisation, the foundational insights are those of Gestalt psychology – concerned, as its pioneers insisted, with the ‘concrete nature of the things themselves’.17 This empiricism is definitively expressed in the Gestalt ‘laws of organisation’, a set of principles governing the perceptual organisation of the optical field, which stand as the Gestaltists’ most enduring contribution to the science of perception.18 The principles describe the visual system’s organisation of objective stimulus data, outside of any mediation by memory or consciousness. Though these higher mental processes also influence perception, the Gestalt ‘laws’ exert a constant ‘pull’ towards normative structures – a kind of default logic for perceptual modelling.

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Whilst Gestalt psychology no longer carries scientific weight as an explanatory model of perception, its descriptions of perceptual phenomena have never been challenged. As Stephen Palmer notes, the phenomena are verified so universally by viewers of visual displays, that no formal experiment has been needed to demonstrate their veracity;19 the Gestalt laws appear as a standard topic in textbooks on perception, and are incorporated, in general terms, within the classical constructivist model of vision.20 The principles can be briefly summarised: elements in the optical field which are similar in form or colour, are close together (proximity), spatially aligned (continuation), or have the same trajectory (common fate), tend to be perceptually grouped; the visual system favours completion, and tends to fill in gaps in incomplete figures (closure); the simplest, most stable figure tends to be perceived (simplicity); perception tends to separate the object being looked at from the background against which it appears (figure/ground), with the figure appearing more substantial than its background.21 A 2007 article by Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen points to the marginal status of the Gestalt principles in current art-historical discourse. Gestalt psychology is described as an ‘outdated method’, a ‘methodological anachronism’ that ‘no longer commands much respect within the established discipline of art history’.22 In one sense, the authors are correct: Gestalt theory has been largely disregarded by art historians, and its arguments are not well known.23 At a more substantive level, however, the authors’ account is misleading: as standard textbooks of perceptual psychology, such as Blake and Sekuler’s Perception, make clear, Gestalt theory is only ‘outmoded’ to the extent that its principles are now orthodox, and have been incorporated into current theories of perception. Harvey Richard Schiffman describes the general position: Although few contemporary psychologists would describe themselves as Gestalt psychologists, this does not mean that the Gestalt approach has been rejected or abandoned. Instead, the general Gestalt theme of holistic perception has been absorbed and integrated into the mainstream of sensation and perception studies, especially in areas that emphasize the organized nature of perception.24

Far from being relics in a dusty corner of the history of psychology, the Gestalt principles are bedrock science, a foundation upon which – in theory, at least – art history can hope to build. In the Gestalt model, all elements within a visual field are organised into gestalts, perceptual ‘wholes’ that form the primary units of sensory experience.25

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This process, the spontaneous ordering of visual data into meaningful entities, is understood as an evolutionary imperative, the means by which humans and other animals orientate themselves in an unpredictable physical environment.26 Gestalt formation is dynamic and highly mutable: we continuously create new gestalts, at different scales, as the visual field changes and our attentive focus narrows in on details and expands to wider panoramas. The gestalt process thus both simplifies visual consciousness – we make the world coherent by reducing it to manageable units – and constructs it, by creating divisions in the visual field and assigning meaning to these constituent elements. As Gyorgy Kepes insists: To perceive an image is to participate in a forming process; it is a creative act. From the simplest form of orientation to the most embracing plastic unity of a work of art, there is a common significant basis: the following up of the sensory qualities of the visual field and the organizing of them.27

In the psychology literature the Gestalt principles are demonstrated with simple diagrams.28 Though the resulting visual structures are compelling, the diagrams present ideal conditions, avoiding the ambiguities and stimulus conflicts inherent in real-world situations, and in visual images. For critical theory, the following questions seem paramount: can the Gestalt principles be isolated in complex images; can their actions and interactions be observed; how might such analysis contribute to a fuller understanding of visual composition? The readings that follow, exploring dynamic photographic patterns of varying complexity, seek to address these pivotal questions. On a scale of pictorial instability, an undated 1920s photograph of an automobile plant, by Germaine Krull, may serve as our baseline (Figure 9). The image is a beautifully executed, conventional photograph of assembly lines, shot from above, in parallel perspective to the pristine geometry of cars and factory shed; the solitary workers, blurred by the slow shutter speed or attending to meticulous tasks, are diminutive attendants on a profound, constructive regularity. The implacable logic of manufacture is metaphorised in dynamic compositional forms, an array of radiating vectors passing vertically below the picture plane and puncturing the far wall at near infinity. The photograph’s symbolic character appears unequivocal: it embodies what it represents, both metaphor and metonym of Fordist industrial culture. The lucidity of Krull’s photograph, and of numerous similar photos in modernist magazines, equates to a powerful uniformity at the gestalt level.29 Emerging from bottom right is a line of car roofs, a rising series of geometric

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Figure 9 Germaine Krull, ‘Automobile assembly line’, undated, 16.1  ×  11.1 cm, Collection A. Jammes, Paris. © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

forms defined by closure and simplicity. These shapes are grouped into a dominant gestalt – the long diagonal of the assembly line – by principles which are here mutually reinforcing: the similarity of the closed forms (in shape and tonality) is reinforced by their proximity (relative to the whole picture, and to other similar forms in the adjacent assembly line) and the pronounced continuation of this series into the illusionary depth of the image. The tonal contrast of the sunlit roofs with the car bodies and surrounding factory floor creates a figure/ground separation, such that the roofs appear to stand proud of their background. The line of roofs is, in turn, grouped by similarity with the neighbouring assembly lines to the left of the picture, creating a further gestalt: a photographic pattern of diagonal rays expanding to the edges of the frame. This gestalt, and innumerable others, are contained as potential within the image, and will emerge and dissolve according to shifts in the viewer’s attention. As Rudolf Arnheim describes, the experience of the image is dynamic, expressing the tensions between rival groupings, and between figure and ground: ‘Any line drawn on a sheet of paper, the simplest form modelled from a piece of clay, is like a rock thrown into a pond. It upsets repose, it mobilizes space. Seeing is the perception of action.’30

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Gestalt theory, as it emerges from this cursory reading, offers compelling insights into the structured nature of visual experience. As the Gestalt pioneers insisted, the emphatic visual objects and groupings described earlier are not a matter of individual perception, nor of the viewer’s cultural competence: they are determined by the objective properties of the visual system. The reader can verify this by attempting to subvert the dominant configuration: by, for example, consciously grouping individual cars in one line with others in adjacent lines. Such subjective groupings may be possible, momentarily, but they are weak and unstable: the order will quickly revert to the dominant configuration, which is overwhelmingly strong in this image. Perceptual organisation dictates the parameters of visual meaning: the photograph’s semiotic potential – the symbolic register it invokes in visual reading – is constrained and shaped by the logic of perception. Photographic patterns may be characterised, in these formal terms, as exploring the interplay between the objective (physiological) properties of vision – the products of nonconscious cognition – and the relational values of enculturated consciousness. In ‘Automobile assembly line’ the perceptual logic is aligned with the semiotics of the photograph, to produce a forceful semantic unity. Other modernist photographs, by contrast, promote degrees of symbolic ambiguity, by exploiting the visual system’s capacity to create unstable or indeterminate visual groupings. The effect of this dislocation, as a final pair of examples show, is to evoke the dynamism, or instability, of technological society. A typical photomontage page from Scherl’s Magazin, December 1928, depicts the ‘Vergnügungswirbel’ (social whirl) of Metropolitan nightlife (Figure 10).31 At the geometric centre of the composition is an elegant socialite, her head and neck couched within the soft curves of a fur stole; the portrait’s symmetry, visual prominence, and centrality (compositional symmetry) create a stable, dominant gestalt – equated, symbolically, with her dominance of the social scene. Around the figure are montaged, cascading images of musicians, kick-line dancers, and pleasure-seekers, composed at different scales and without clear demarcations defining and separating one grouping from another. The fluidity and ephemerality of social life are expressed in the unstable and ambiguous configuration of pictorial elements, the blurring of bounding contours, and the disruption of spatial hierarchies. A final magazine photograph, also by Germaine Krull, takes the oppositional capacity of structural patterning to its visual limits (Figure 11). ‘Eiffel Tower’, reproduced in UHU in December 1927, plays on the abstracting effect of

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal

Figure 10 ‘Vergnügungswirbel der Weltstadt’ (Social whirl of the metropolis), photomontage page, Scherl’s Magazin, December 1928, p. 1357.

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Figure 11 ‘Eiffel Tower’, UHU, December 1927, p. 107. Photographer: Germaine Krull.

cropping and of destabilised perspective:32 there are no true verticals, and a spiralling walkway seems to hover impossibly without supporting structure. Out of this confusion of planes and contours, however, a visual order begins to emerge, in accordance with the Gestalt principle of simplicity (Prägnanz): the simplest, most stable configuration of the visual field is perceptually favoured. Two patterns are dominant here: a ‘stripe’ pattern formed of two strong parallel diagonals, in which the upper and lower halves of the photograph are grouped by similarity of shape and rotational symmetry; a rival ‘sunlight’ pattern, its rays composed of girders and steel cables, pouring down from the bright, latticed diamond in the top-right corner.33 Since the patterns cannot be reconciled, but neither dominates the other, visual unity depends on achieving a momentary equilibrium in these opposing forces. In symbolic terms, Krull’s visual synthesis describes a balance of forces, the dynamic tensions of technological modernity. For critical reading, the application of perceptual principles – explored in these brief examples – must be framed within a historicist, contextualised practice. Gestalts, as perceptual constructs, provide the scaffolding of visual experience, the structures that link the object to its relational context; they do not, of themselves, describe how meaning is invested in the object, nor the

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cultural conditions that brought it into being. Without the historical dimension, perceptual analysis can produce only mechanistic, formalist readings that reduce the image to patterns of stimuli. This equation can, however, be turned the other way. Art history cannot connect to its objects unless it captures their unique physical identity. A philosophy of art without a perceptual dimension must be incomplete, as it is from the mind’s internal models that the concept of the work is derived. Norman Bryson’s notorious claim, that ‘perceptualism’ in critical theory is anti-historicist, is diametrically wrong.34 It is precisely at the level of perceptual structure that history enters the object, and that the object works on history. Whilst the unique phenomenology of the image is not reducible to language, the dominant visual groupings and their configurations can, at least, be isolated and described. Pattern theory, the study of structural (non-decorative) patterns in visual images, takes this act of description as its point of departure.

A modernist morphology Pattern theory’s particular focus is on structural patterns within figurative images: groupings that contain and configure the principal elements of the composition. A key difference between these, and the more familiar, decorative (applied) patterns, is in the degree of complexity. In contrast to the elaborate, hierarchical orders that appear in many decorative patterns, structural patterns tend to be simple, single-order structures in which the grouped elements are configured either irregularly, or with some degree of unifying regularity.35 In pattern theory, all instances of visual grouping belong within the same general classification, so that even the simplest pairings or symmetries are defined as patterns. This ontological unity is key to the narrative argument of this book: that, in the interwar context, pattern, the expression of mutual relations, served as the symbolic figure of social order. To describe the pattern forms that are characteristic of interwar visual culture requires at least a minimal morphology. As Gombrich notes, any morphological system of patterns is inherently problematic: the more classes the morphology contains, the more exceptions it creates, so that further classes and sub-classes are then required.36 Patterns are combinatory in essence, so unitary categories are difficult to define, and may lack meaningful identity. Pattern theory proposes, therefore, just two basic classes of structural pattern:

Pattern Theory ●●

●●

43

distributive: irregular visual groupings, in which no unified governing principle determines configuration. Distributive patterns include both the irregular unities of the natural environment (shells on a beach, for example) and the informal or chaotic groupings of the human world (the ephemeral configurations of a milling crowd). geometric: groupings structured by a unifying principle of linearity. This includes both the regular geometric (Euclidean) arrays of design and architecture, and the natural geometric patterns of organic life (in plant forms, for example) or minerals (such as crystals, or the parallel strata in a rock formation). Conflicting group forms within a composition produce oppositional patterns; fragmentary arrays suggesting the ‘idea’ of regularity are termed proto-patterns.

Though the varieties of geometric regularity are limitless, two broad descriptors of geometric pattern are proposed, as relevant to the interwar context. These are the grid, describing perpendicular patterning structures; the vector pattern, for arrays composed of dynamic structural forms such as diagonals and curves. Though grids and vectors appear in both natural and regular geometric patterns, they are particularly associated with technological modernism. The morphology proposed here – distributive, regular/natural geometric, vector, grid – offers a simple framework for the analysis of structural patterning in modernist visual culture. Whilst the categories are not mutually exclusive – individual arrays combine these pattern forms in complex ways – they are intended to distinguish, in broad terms, the varieties of structural pattern that appear in the interwar period. As the following chapter describes, the origins of this patterning culture can be historically located, in the progressive art of the years surrounding the First World War.

Notes 1 Jean Montaigne, “Formes éternelles” (Eternal forms), VU, A5, No. 234, September 7, 1932, p. 1414. For economy’s sake, original texts are not given in the notes to this book, if these texts are readily available in online archives (see Introduction, note 7, p. 7). Unless stated, all translations are my own. 2 See note 25, p. 120, for a discussion of the “New Photography” and “New Vision” as classifying terms.

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3 For a critical account of this classic text, see Pepper Stetler, “‘The New Visual Literature’: László Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film,” Grey Room, no. 32 (2008): 88–113. 4 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), 50–1. 5 “Formes éternelles,” p. 1416. 6 The inclusion of irregular groupings extends the art-historical definition of pattern beyond the ornamental arrays described in, E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1979). 7 Margaret Iversen’s 1986 essay “Saussure versus Peirce” nicely illustrates how the orthodox, hierarchical model of consciousness banishes perception from critical theory: “[W]e may recognize a painting as a depiction of a landscape, but how are we to read what conception of nature or the countryside it represents? For this, a psychology of pictorial perception is useless, for we have shifted to the level of semiosis.” Margaret Iversen, “Saussure Versus Peirce: Models for a Semiotics of Visual Art,” in The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (London: Camden Press, 1986), 83–4. 8 For a theoretical account of nonconscious cognition, see N. Katherine Hayles, “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness,” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (2014): 199–201; also, N. Katherine Hayles, “The Cognitive Nonconscious: Enlarging the Mind of the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 (2016): 783–808. 9 For the concept of “perceptual intelligence,” see Irvin Rock, The Logic of Perception (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1983), 1–19. 10 Zygmunt Pizlo, “Perception Viewed as an Inverse Problem,” Vision Research 41, no. 24 (2001): 3145–61. 11 Stephen E. Palmer, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999), 23, 55–8. 12 Julian E. Hochberg et al., In the Mind's Eye: Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Films, and the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 60–6, 148–85. 13 See above, p. 23–4. 14 Roy Behrens has researched the intermittent connections between the Bauhaus and the Gestalt School in this period, confirming Paul Klee’s interest in their research, and that members of the Bauhaus teaching staff attended lectures by Gestalt psychologists. Roy R. Behrens, “Art, Design and Gestalt Theory,” Leonardo 31, no. 4 (1998): 299–303. 15 Ash, “Gestalt Psychology in Weimar Culture,” 404. 16 Visual organisation is responsive to shifts in conscious attention, and can be consciously influenced in situations of perceptual ambiguity, as demonstrated by

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the mutable perception of bi-stable images (the “duck-rabbit,” famously). Harvey Richard Schiffman, Sensation and Perception: An Integrated Approach, 5th ed. (New York: Wiley, 2000), 180–1. 17 Max Wertheimer, “Gestalt Theory,” in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Willis D. Ellis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 2–3. 18 The development of scientific models of perceptual organisation, and current research in the field, are described in two review articles marking the centenary of Gestalt psychology’s first studies: J. Wagemans et al., “A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure-Ground Organization,” Psychological Bulletin 138, no. 6 (2012): 1172–217; J. Wagemans et al., “A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: II. Conceptual and Theoretical Foundations,” Psychological Bulletin 138, no. 6 (2012): 1218–52. 19 Palmer, Vision Science, 257–8. 20 Randolf Blake and Robert Sekuler, Perception (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 184–91; Steven Yantis, ed. Visual Perception: Essential Readings (Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2000), 213–5; Vicki Bruce, Patrick R. Green, and Mark A. Georgeson, Visual Perception: Physiology, Psychology, and Ecology, 3rd ed. (Hove: Psychology Press, 1996), 103–19. See also Irving Biederman, “Recognition-byComponents: A Theory of Human Image Understanding,” Psychological Review 94, no. 2 (1987): 115, 18. 21 Adapted from Duane P. Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology, 6th ed. (Fort Worth and London: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), 334. 22 Roger Rothman and Ian Verstegen, “Arnheim’s Lesson: Cubism, Collage, and Gestalt Psychology,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (2007): 295. 23 As noted in the Introduction (p. 5), there is insufficient space in the present book to explore the history of Gestalt approaches in the philosophy of art and critical practice. 24 Schiffman, Sensation and Perception, 7–8. 25 In this book, Gestalt (leading capital) refers specifically to the theories of the Gestalt school of psychology; gestalt (lower case) is used to describe any perceptual object or grouping. 26 Gyorgy Kepes, Education of Vision (London: Studio Vista, 1965), 44. 27 Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Theobald, 1948), 15.; see also Robert Wenger, “Visual Art, Archaeology and Gestalt,” Leonardo 30, no. 1 (1997): 35–44. 28 Wertheimer’s 1923 paper also included one further “law,” that of common fate, concerning the perceptual grouping of moving objects. Palmer summarises: “All else being equal, elements that move in the same way tend to be grouped together”

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29

30 31 32

33

34 35 36

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (Palmer, Vision Science, 258). Some additional principles of grouping have been proposed by later authors, which are too technical to be included here. These new principles, and other recent developments in the field of visual organisation, are described in the two review papers noted earlier: Wagemans et al., “A Century of Gestalt Psychology, I”; Wagemans et al., “A Century of Gestalt Psychology, II.” A similar linear recession appears in Sasha Stone’s photograph of a boiler-room walkway, Schünemanns Monatshefte (J3, H8, August 1929, p. 1015), and a highangle image of the canteen in San Quentin prison, UHU, May 1931 (J7, H8, May 1931, p. 24). The subject of the accompanying articles, in each case, is the implacable uniformity of technological and rationalist systems. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 16. A free translation: the phrase translates literally as “pleasure whirl” or “pleasure vortex.” For details of the extensive magazine syndication of Krull’s industrial photographs, see Kim Sichel, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1999). The ‘sun’ figure is visually pronounced because it is set against a dark ground; also, it appears on the perceptually stable long diagonal of the image, roughly equidistant between the frame’s top and side edges, and between the top-right corner and the centre. Rudolf Arnheim discusses this principle of alignment in the opening chapter of Art and Visual Perception, relating compositional stability to the placing of elements within the picture’s “structural skeleton.” Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, 10–14. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), 45. For a discussion of hierarchical orders in decorative patterns, see Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 72–5. Ibid., 75.

3

Symphonies of the City

The time has come at last to start painting our real homeland, the big city which we all love so much … the glorious and the fantastic, the monstrous and dramatic – streets, railroad stations, factories and towers. Ludwig Meidner, ‘An Introduction to Painting Big Cities’, 1914 In her study of interwar women’s magazines, the historian Sally Stein quotes from the account of an Indiana housewife, who reads in her ‘scraps of time’, while lamenting her failure to do ‘more consecutive reading’. As Stein notes, her behaviour matches the segmented, discontinuous content of popular magazines, which encouraged readers to leaf freely back and forth through the pages, selecting items according to their personal interests and momentary inclinations.1 More specifically, for the interwar period, this abbreviated and episodic mode of reading reflected the shifting balance of textual and visual content, with magazine articles increasingly built around photographs, and text reduced to a subordinate role or displaced entirely. The predominantly visual culture of popular magazines, in Stein’s account, relates to the modernist cult of efficiency, in which Taylorist principles of scientific management were applied to domestic tasks and to individual self-improvement.2 To be a reader of the new magazines was to adopt the rationalised practice of the modern individual, the time-pressed consumer of packets of visual information. The image, in this ideal, conveyed its messages with the clarity of the written word, but with the added directness and dynamism of the technological age. It is this composite modern individual, the purchaser – male or female – of German and French popular magazines, who stands for the interwar reader in this book. The aim is not to reduce this diverse, and perhaps unknowable, readership to a unitary identity, but to define a core cultural competence that readers of this period would have shared, as initiates in the symbolic codes of mass visual culture. A key assumption, here, is that such codes were embedded in

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the patterning language of modernism; that repetitious forms conveyed symbolic resonances, evoking abstract concepts and ideals: growth and decay, dynamism and stability, uniformity and abundance, communality and fragmentation. Our notional reader, flicking through the pages of a photo-illustrated magazine, would have lit on particular scenes and narratives, but also gained fleeting, generalised impressions of an evolving, ordered and disordered social world from the structural patterns of multiple photographs and page layouts. The task of this chapter is to provide, in outline, a historical context for these modernist pattern forms, and explore their symbolic register. Pattern theory, introduced in the previous chapter, is a historicist approach: the idea of an innate symbolism of visual forms, which underpinned the theories of Vienna School theorists such as Erwin Panofsky, is rejected in favour of a post-structuralist model of arbitrary, relational visual meaning.3 The jagged vector patterning in Ludwig Meidner’s Apocalyptic Landscape, of 1913 (Figure 15), for example, is viewed not as the symptomatic expression of a kind of cultural neuralgia, but as a conventional and historically specific signifier of urban anxiety, developed by Berlin expressionists in response to cubism. Structural patterns, in this sense, were simply a part of modernism’s symbolic vocabulary – though of particular significance in interwar photography, and in the associated visual culture of interwar magazines. What symbolic resonances, then, did our magazine reader absorb from the groupings and regularities of photographic pages? In the limited space of this chapter, the scope of this question is curtailed: historically, by siting early twentieth-century modernism as our point of departure; and thematically, by focusing on visual representations of the city, defined as the locus of modernity and the dominant subject of the visual avant-garde. The distributive arrays, grids and vector patterns of twentieth-century modernism, proposed as a minimal morphology in the previous chapter, found their fullest expression, and their symbolic identity, in artists’ attempts to capture the exhilarating and traumatising life of the metropolis.

The image of the crowd The representative figure of humanity in the modernist city is the urban crowd, which both incorporates the individual and forms the mass against which individual subjectivity defines itself; as Baudelaire declares in Paris Spleen (1864):

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‘Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.’4 The crowd’s own, collective selfhood – what Gustave Le Bon called its ‘unconscious personality’ – is expressed, primarily, through its configuration:5 the varying degrees of regularity, density, uniformity, and fragmentation that distinguish the military parade from the protest march, or the ceremonial crowd from the mass of work-day commuters. The life of the city is captured in these fluctuating and cyclical human patterns, describing social relations and cultural rituals, and the interpenetration of humans and materials in a dynamic visual environment. That such pattern forms had a symbolic dimension, legible to readers of popular magazines, is apparent from the extensive imagery of the urban crowd in magazine photography. In VU magazine in particular, high-angle panoramic views of crowds, accompanied by explanatory captions, routinely functioned as self-contained news stories, allowing multiple global events to be represented on a single photographic page. A typical composite news page from December 1930 (Figure 12), for example, summarises ‘serious disorders’ in Valence with a captioned photograph of a mounted policeman facing off

Figure 12  Composite news page, VU, December 17, 1930, p. 1378.

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against a dispersing crowd; an adjacent high-angle photo, titled ’Economic Crisis’, captures a demonstration of Romanian shopkeepers, their massed ranks broken by advancing, gesticulating officers; a third photograph shows an orderly crowd of Nazi protestors at the screening of the film Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), their arms raised uniformly in the Hitler salute. In each case, meaning is concisely and economically constructed: image captions particularise the story and its local context; human patterns evoke universal archetypes and values: violence, rage, order and disorder, implacable resolve. Although the symbolisation of crowd configurations has historical roots that long predate modernism, the crowd as a kind of visual shorthand for mass society appears specific to the modernist era. Two pages from the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, reproduced in John Czaplicka’s essay ‘Pictures of a City at Work’, exemplify how, in twentieth-century visual culture, the pattern forms of urban crowds convey symbolic meanings.6 Figure 13 shows a cartoon by Bruno Paul, ‘Der-Die-Das’, from 1897. Three vignettes, ‘Der Pöbel/Die Menge/ Das Volk’ (The Mob/The Crowd/The People), offer contrasting projections of

Figure 13  Bruno Paul, ‘Der–Die–Das’, cartoon, Simplicissimus, May 8, 1897.

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the urban crowd: as a rebellious, disorganised mob; as a policed, socially mixed crowd of onlookers; as ‘The People’, the parading representatives of a municipal oligarchy. In Paul’s cartoon, the groups’ occupation of the street – the arena of power – is repressed, coerced, or enabled by the uniformed guardians of the social order, who are themselves configured as a notable species of Berlin crowd. In another Simplicissimus cartoon, published in 1911, the varieties of urban crowd now appear to have internalised their allotted roles within the social order (Figure  14). Erich Schilling’s ‘Suum cuique’ (To each his deserts) shows a morning scene of horse-riding in a Berlin park; in the frame below, the massed workers trudge sullenly forward beneath the vault of a railway station. The captions explain: The Kaiser has decreed that on beautiful days a military band should play early in the morning at the Hippodrome in the Berlin Tiergarten, so as to entertain the numerous horseback riders in the Tiergarten during their morning ride. / As stated, the proposal to accompany the numerous workers on their morning walk to work with military concerts will not be implemented.7

Figure 14  Erich Schilling, ‘Suum cuique’ (To each his deserts), cartoon, Simplicissimus, May 22, 1911.

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As Czaplicka observes, the shifting character of the Berlin crowd, in Paul’s and Schilling’s satirical typologies, is conveyed through their ‘distinct gestalt and manner of moving through the city’.8 In ‘Der-Die-Das’, the exercise of state authority, expressed in the implacable serial regularity of the assembled troops, contrasts the ragtag disorder of the riotous Pöbel. The indiscipline of the mob is emphasised in the visual dissimilarity of clothing, posture, and direction of gaze; they are defined as a group only through their huddled proximity and their mutual intent. The final frame completes the visual joke: the top-hatted Volk, in whose defence the military have been summoned, are as disparate as their proletarian opponents, and have allowed their parade to fragment into random, disorderly groupings. The legibility of human patterns is similarly exploited in the ‘Suum cuique’ cartoon – drawings which nicely illustrate how our perception of visual order does not depend on geometric regularity. As Gaetano Kanizsa insists: ‘Perceptual order is not geometrical order. In fact, most of the objects in our phenomenal world are quite stable and unambiguous even though they are not regular in a geometrical sense.’9 The images provide contrasting examples of the distributive pattern, the term proposed in pattern theory to describe irregular visual groupings. As the two drawings demonstrate, the ‘strength’ of the distributive pattern – the degree to which the elements are perceived as a group – depends on how similar and how close these elements are. In the higher picture, the horse-and-riders are oriented in all directions, their postures and sizes are individuated, and the space between each motif weakens the ‘pull’ of Gestalt proximity: the privileged Berliners, in Schilling’s sketch, retain their independence while enjoying the depicted musical benefits of group membership. This weak distributive pattern forms a satirical contrast with the workers in the cartoon’s lower frame, grouped by massive proximity, similarity of tonality and shape (note, for example, the repeated parallels of arms and shoulders), and mutual orientation (accented by the diagonal continuation of the heads in the lower right foreground). Berlin’s workers, as the disciplined, depersonalised products of the modern city, are remorselessly configured as a visual and symbolic unity. The defining property of the urban crowd, captured in the Simplicissimus cartoons and innumerable early twentieth-century news photographs, is its dynamism and fluidity: the crowd disperses and re-forms, expressing its various moods of curiosity, respect, anger, fear, or blank indifference, through

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its momentary pattern forms. Crucially, in the modernist period, these binary capacities – potency/ephemerality, expressivity/voicelessness – are conceived less in opposition to the lone individual than to the remorseless totality of the city itself. For the Jugendstil architect August Endell, in Die Schönheit der grossen Stadt (The Beauty of the Metropolis) of 1908, the melting-away of the urban crowd simply allows individual subjectivity to re-emerge: All of the people are free from each other; now they move toward each other in dense groupings; now there are gaps; the articulation of the space is always changing. Pedestrians interpenetrate, conceal each other, detach themselves again and walk freely, each emphasizing, articulating, his share of space.10

For other avant-garde modernists, by contrast, the incipient threat is that the city will engulf its human occupants altogether. Umberto Boccioni, in the ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto’ of 1910, describes how the constant dynamism of modernity collapses the perceived boundaries between people and objects: ‘Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and … the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.’11 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner argues in strikingly similar terms: ‘[A]ny objective construction is futile, since a passing taxi, a bright or dark evening dress transforms the entire laboriously achieved construction.’12 In futurist art, and in the urban expressionism of Kirchner or Ludwig Meidner, this spatial and temporal compression is expressed in varieties of jagged geometric abstraction, in which the city’s human presence is suppressed (Figure 15), or even eradicated. Meidner’s ‘An Introduction to Painting Big Cities’, of 1914, makes this suppression explicit: Are not our big-city landscapes all battlefields filled with mathematical shapes? What triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, and circles rush out at us in the streets. Straight lines rush past us on all sides. Many-pointed shapes stab at us. Even people and animals trotting about appear to us as so many geometric constructions.13

The new art of the mechanised metropolis would find its signature forms not in the fragmented, fluctuating patterns of the urban crowd, but in the material environment: the implacable geometries of buildings and mass manufacture, and the dynamic vector forms of a world in accelerating motion.

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Figure 15 Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape (near the Halansee Railway Station), 1913, oil on canvas, 81.5  ×  97 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. © Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main.

Urban geometries Two-page spreads from German monthlies of the mid-1920s illustrate the emergence in mass visual culture of the patterning language developed by avant-garde modernists in the previous decade. The layouts offer a photographic homage to Walter Ruttmann’s film Symphonie einer Großstadt (Symphony of the Metropolis), released in 1927, which depicts an ordinary working day in the life of Berlin in terms of the city’s rhythmic spatial and temporal patterns: the cyclical ebb and flow of workers, shoppers, and night-time pleasure-seekers, and their incorporation within the rationalised structures of mass production and consumption.14 The human component of Symphonie einer Großstadt is evoked in a photomontage in Revue des Monats, December 1927, captioned ‘Berlin: 10 o’clock, evening’, featuring cut-outs of cabaret artists, couples in evening dress, night-time workers, set in a dislocated, dada-esque landscape of neon lights, building façades and railway lines.15 Similar to the ‘social whirl’ photomontage from Scherl’s Magazin of the following year (Figure 10), urban life is depicted as a clamour of rival subjectivities, compressed and contained but with no unifying

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order beyond the apparent mutual quest for gratification. In Ruttmann’s film, the controlled chaos of urban life is contrasted with the constructive rationalism of the machine world, depicted in montaged sequences of clocks, pistons, typewriters, commuter trains, and so forth. This geometric order is skilfully evoked in a Scherl’s Magazin photo-story from 1928, ‘Vision der Großstadt’ (Vision of the metropolis), featuring kaleidoscopic serial patterns of duplicated urban motifs, and a night-time street scored by the interlacing vector trails of car headlights (Figure 16). Modernity, the text explains, has become a dynamic selfreplicating totality, possessing an implacable life force of its own: ‘The gigantic metropolises of today are no longer lifeless stony seas, but stony monsters, pulsating with restless life, pervaded by an endless, thundering symphony.’16 The use of geometric patterning in symbolic representations of modernity was pioneered by progressive artists in the pre-1914 decade, in the formalist experiments of cubism and associated avant-garde movements. Whilst the complex history of modernism cannot be compassed in the space of this chapter, some account of the dialogue between avant-garde art and mass visual culture is essential for a historicist reading of magazine aesthetics. The active, responsive nature of this dialogue was key to the assimilation of modernism into mainstream visual culture: German avant-garde photographers drew, for example, on the

Figure 16 Page spread, ‘Vision der Großstadt’ (Vision of the metropolis), Scherl’s Magazin, August 1928, pp. 924–5.

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experimental aesthetics of constructivism, in studies of geometric form which were then reproduced in revue magazines; the asymmetric grids of the New Typography were reflected in the page layouts of Münchner Illustrierte Presse or Match l’Intran. The image-makers of popular modernism, invoking the social and material order of the future society, inflected the symbolic patterning languages of futurism, suprematism, and De Stijl. In the broadest symbolic terms, modernist grids and vector patterns projected contrasting spatial and temporal conceptions of the social ideal. Responding both to the actualities of modern life and the promise of the machine age, modernism’s idealist visions both described the future society and were invoked within the present as responses to immediate societal imperatives:17 the need for housing, for mass industrial products, or, in more abstract terms, for an adequate aesthetic response to technological modernity. Crucially for the post-1918 period, the cult of the machine enabled a symbolic break with the past. Liberated from historical time, and from traumatic memory, Le Corbusier would be free to ‘organise the world on his drawing board’;18 Moholy-Nagy to declare the socialist dawn: ‘There is no tradition in technology, no consciousness of class or standing. … This is our century: technology, machine, socialism.’19 The geometric totality, as the figure of ideal social relations, symbolised the perfect memory-less body of the machine. The modernist utopia would, in turn, produce an ideal subjectivity, shaped by the collective will and contained within the structures of a rationalised social order. Grids and vector patterns, defined here as the essential modular forms of machine modernism, may be categorised, loosely, in terms suggested by Christina Lodder.20 In this formulation, grids were the signature form of the ‘rational utopia’, embodying stability, regularity and spatial unity, the configuration of individual elements within an expansive, harmonious whole. Vector patterns, by contrast, conveyed the dynamic, and precarious, equilibrium of bodies in motion, and were the defining form of Lodder’s ‘Dionysian utopia’, the inchoate mix of technological fantasy and will-todestruction that impelled visionaries in the years before the First World War. Onto these formulations, the Gestalt principles can also be mapped: grids (the ‘rational utopia’) are defined by closure, simplicity, similarity; vectors (the ‘Dionysian utopia’) are energised through continuation. The force of modernism’s patterning language reflects the unity of its perceptual and symbolic dimensions.

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The vector The ‘Manifesto of Futurism’, published in Le Figaro in 1909, announced the birth of a new, technological art, celebrating ‘the beauty of speed’. The futurist aesthetic, invoked in Marinetti’s imagery of rhythmic, mechanised violence – ‘machine-gun fire … the pulsating, nightly ardour of arsenals and shipyards’ – was fully expressed in the tumultuous urban visions of Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo; and schematically defined in the pattern forms of movement studies, such as Giacomo Balla’s The Speed of a Motorcycle (1913) (Figure 17).21 Moving from cubistic figuration to pure abstraction, the simplified figures of Balla’s rider and motorcycle are configured within a vibrant vector pattern of segmented curves and spirals – a compositional idea inspired, David Raizman notes, by the linear patterns of Jules Marey’s chronophotography.22 Futurism’s dynamic bursts terminate, however, not in the repose of Marey’s living subjects, but in the catastrophe of war – Balla’s patterned designs for the ‘anti-neutral suit’ appeared in the following year – or the car crash which forms the climactic centre of Marinetti’s lurid prospectus. The futurist vector, the sign of a technological utopia, was symbolic also of glorified violence, and disdain for human suffering.23

Figure 17  Giacomo Balla, The Speed of a Motorcycle, 1913, oil on canvas. © DACS, 2019.

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In the prewar context, futurism’s rejection of humanistic values proclaimed the movement’s avant-garde status. Antonio Sant’Elia’s ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’ (1914), reinventing the metropolis as a Dionysian roller-coaster ride, was a modernist hymn to the anti-natural machine: The house of concrete, glass and steel … must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss; the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many storeys down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.24

Sant’Elia’s muscular rhetoric, seeking to animate the stillness of his architectural drawings, describes a coercive, dominative ideal, in which technology overwhelms both the historical world and individual subjectivity. The ideal is reified in his drawings for the ‘Aeroplane and railway station’ of the Citta Nuova (New City) (1914), in the form of seven monumental cable-car lines ‘plunging’ diagonally into the depths of the city, as if swallowing its human occupants. Technological dynamism, graphically symbolised in the interwar by the long diagonal,25 would retain this intense duality: freedom and coercion, utopia and tyranny. For Vladimir Tatlin, the mechanised vector forms of his Monument to the Third International (1921) symbolised the inexorable, triumphant march of communism: ‘[T]he monument should be a place of the most intense movement; least of all should one stand still or sit down in it, you must be mechanically taken up, down, carried away against your will.’26 Fernand Léger, writing in the mid-1920s, offers a more ambivalent view: ‘The world is chasing intensity. Speed is the law of today. It dominates and defrauds us. … We live in a magnificently dangerous time in which people are harassed from all directions.’27 The open (unresolved) vector form, symbolising the Dionysian utopia, was also, potentially, the figure of catastrophe. A powerful counterpoint to the ecstatic dynamism of Monument is found in the work of other Soviet artists.28 In Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin (1925), the struggle towards a communist future is expressed through an oppositional structure, operating on both temporal and synchronic axes (Figure 18). The storyboard sequence illustrated here, from the scene ‘small boats in the port of Odessa’, composes a montage of dynamic oppositions, contained within individual tableaux and between sequential shots.29 The montage structure operates dramatic shifts in scale, creating equivalence between the motion of the boats and the heroic gestures of the idealised figures, whilst the conflicting

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Figure 18  Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Small boats in the port of Odessa’ sequence, assembled storyboard frames and film stills from Battleship Potemkin, 1925. Reproduced from Barba and Savarese, The Secret Art of the Performer, p. 183, by kind permission of the publisher.

dynamics create complex vector patterning in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Potemkin’s dynamism, unlike that of Monument, is held in tension, and is therefore constructive and gradualist rather than linear, suggesting dialectical progress rather than the implacable advance of the juggernaut. This juxtaposition of grouped dynamic forms is defined, in pattern theory, as an oppositional vector pattern. In Potemkin, the structure serves to configure the individual within a historical matrix, while containing and channelling the machine’s Dionysian energy. The procedure is described by Eisenstein as the ‘montage of attractions’, a juxtaposition of dissonant ‘aggressive moments’30 that obliges the viewer to consider the ‘relations between the shots, just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes etc’.31 The dynamic, dialectical form of the oppositional vector here diagrammatises the historical class struggle, expressed as a logical progression towards a communist future. For modernist film-makers and photographers, such as Walter Ruttmann and Germaine Krull, it would provide a more

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generalised symbol of construction, describing the balance of dynamic forces in industrial forms (Figures 11, 16), and in the future technological society.32

The grid The utopia towards which modernist vectors advance has at its heart the Platonic form of the square, the figure both of equilibrium and geometric replication. Malevich’s Black Square of 1915, the defining visual statement of suprematism, describes a symbolic completion that the expansive geometries of later works would seek to recapture – a metaphysical significance underlined by its corner placement in the 0.10 exhibition, the position occupied by icons in a traditional Russian home.33 The work’s resonant symbolism reflects both the extraordinary historical context of its creation, and its profound visual simplicity: the essential geometric pattern form offered a blank figure onto which the new aesthetic and social order could be projected. In pattern theory, the square’s irreducible properties can be described in terms of patterning operations: in its perpendicular orientation it expresses the gravitational equilibrium of bodies at rest, with four axial symmetries (orthogonal and diagonal),34 and rotational symmetry through a quarter turn.35 The figure of maximal perceptual simplicity is also the Ur-form of geometric pattern-making, since its essential operations – reflection, rotation, and translation (tessellation) – are all potentiated. The symbolic regularity of Black Square thus contains, and anticipates, the universe of geometric pattern forms that would emerge in modernist visual culture over the following decade.36 The machine aesthetic of the interwar period expressed the social and economic imperatives of reconstruction. If vector patterns were the symbol of a dynamic, motorised modernity, the grid was a vision of houses, and of mass production. Its potency lay in the prodigious forces to which these images spoke: overwhelming need – for security, stability and prosperity in the wake of devastating war; and miraculous supply – the promised abundance of mass production and the new consumer society. The artists and designers of the interwar years, concerned as never before with ideas of social and economic utility, took the grid both as transcendent symbol of a utopian future and as a practical template for the design of houses and commercial products. Popular magazines, for their part, celebrated the grid’s dual potential in architectural photo-pages and feature articles (Chapter 6),

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and in the wider imagery of a productive and regulated modern society (Chapter 10). In the designs and writings of European modernists, the idea of the apartment block, and the grid whose form it would embody, appear on a creative continuum, as if the geometric forms of abstract art contained, as shimmering potential, the idea of houses. Mondrian’s insistence on the architectonic implications of the new ‘plastic’ art – described explicitly as ‘preparation for a future architecture’ – affirmed the conceptual unity of neoplasticism and its applications in the manmade world:37 in Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House (1924–5), the geometric language of De Stijl duly emerges into the third dimension.38 For Le Corbusier also, the urgent need for new housing – ‘the house is the problem of the epoch. The equilibrium of society depends on it’39 – translated to a demand for geometric abstraction, architecture as ‘pure creation of the mind’.40 The modernist house, cleansed of history and of individuality (save that of the supremely rational architect), was a utopian fragment containing the blueprint for a perfect world. The grid as home works as a double symbol. In one mode it expresses the ideal of enclosure: the place of safety, stability, and permanence. In this concentrative mode, the emphasis is on the boxes of the grid, equivalent to the walls of the room; the inverse reading of this symbol, as the image of incarceration, will be readily apparent. The grid’s alternate mode, for which the term expansive is used here, describes its tendency to expand out beyond the borders of the frame through duplication, with the pattern extending to infinity; the expansive mode is symbolic of community, imagined as an ordered, non-hierarchical configuration.41 In the visual culture of interwar magazines, the expansive grid appears, typically, in the panoramic views of modernist housing projects, describing the regular configuration of individual dwellings within and between apartment blocks (Figure 43). The concentrative and expansive modes, introduced here, equate to the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ modes suggested by Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 essay ‘Grids’.42 Krauss’s terms seem to me unhelpful, firstly because they are mutually exclusive – grids, as every prisoner knows, can be both concentrative and expansive. Secondly, the terms suggest movement and volition, whereas the grid, by its very nature, demands stasis and stability. The massed ranks of marching soldiers – the brutal archetype of the grid in the 1930s – displayed discipline precisely through their ability to maintain the internal stability of the pattern. The grid is immutable and universal, the symbolic figure of ordered containment. Where modernism’s vector patterns described movement towards

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utopia (or catastrophe), the grid was a map of the promised land: for Mondrian, the synthesis of art and life; for Nuremberg’s Nazi choreographers, the end of history itself. The grid’s potential as a universal symbol reflects its fundamental presence in the manmade environment, as the basic geometric pattern form governing the disposition of motifs and frames within a perpendicular and, traditionally, symmetrical scheme.43 Its matrices appear, universally, in furniture design, in the decorative patterns of wallpapers and textiles, and in the graphic designs of books, newspapers, and posters. Tasked with designing low-cost housing projects, furniture, or industrial buildings, modernist designers turned, inevitably, to the tried-and-tested, tessellating form of the rectangle. The great departure – and the conceptual bridge between fine art and design – lay in the constructive use of asymmetry. Rejecting the constricting orders of axial symmetry in favour of the concept of ‘balance’, artists and designers discovered immense new possibilities for the simple perpendiculars of the grid, and a potent source of symbolism. Piet Mondrian’s work is exemplary of this new visual consciousness. In Composition 2 (1922) (Figure 19), for example, the dominant figure of the central square is shifted off the axis of symmetry to create continuity with the expansive (infinite) grid that stretches away beyond the frame; this matrix is disconnected at three points, so that the square remains partially detached. The grid’s translation to infinity is balanced by an equally subtle inward motion, as the terminals of perpendicular lines appear to extend inwards (Gestalt continuation), to form a lattice of invisible, ‘negative’ lines through the interior of the square. The concentrative and expansive grids are held in dynamic equipoise, so that the blank ‘mirror’ space of the square projects a calm, measured subjectivity, contained but not repressed by the expansive community which defines its relative freedom.44 Since the modernist grid contained all coordinates and was non-hierarchical, its matrix could, symbolically, configure a universe of spatially discontinuous elements. In this context, Mondrian’s notorious break with De Stijl over the use of the diagonal appears theoretically consistent, since diagonals would annul the liminal, negative lines that form the expansive grid.45 Yet the exclusion of other pattern forms also points up the fragility and defensiveness of this aesthetic utopia: by insisting on the purity of its visual order, Mondrian was, implicitly, casting the grid as a dominative, and intolerant, symbol. The grid’s adoption by the image-makers of Nazism was the full expression of this symbolic potential: in the concentrative-expansive, serial forms of mass military display (Chapter 11), it expressed submission not to an ideal of community, but to the cult of absolute power.

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Figure 19  Piet Mondrian, Composition 2, 1922, oil on canvas, 55.6 × 53.4 cm, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York. © 2020, Mondrian/Holtzman Trust.

For artists and designers in the mid-1920s, the grid’s idealist and utilitarian properties overrode its militaristic associations. The asymmetric grid, along with other innovations in photography and graphic design, formed the new, inclusive visual language of machine modernism, embraced increasingly by advertisers and publishers as the signifier of aspirational modernity. Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography (1928) implicitly acknowledges the ideological shift among left-wing modernists that accompanied this: an accommodation, in short, with the resurgent forces of capitalism.46 The dynamic grid, for Tschichold as for the designers of the Bauhaus and the ring neuer werbegestalter (Ring of new advertising designers), was part of this new synthesis, an expression of shared faith in the technological future. In Tschichold’s account, the asymmetric page layout is the ‘rhythmic expression’ of dynamic modernity. It represents a historic liberation, freeing the designer to respond to the demands of individual content rather than submitting to the rigid orthodoxies of traditional design, based on axial symmetry: ‘The central axis

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runs through the whole like an artificial, invisible backbone: its raison d'être is today as pretentious as the tall white collars of Victorian gentlemen.’47 In contrast to this ‘inorganic’ typography of predetermined forms, asymmetry would allow designers to work ‘organically’ towards the ideal of modernist design: ‘[T]he precise and economic expression of … function.’48 Tschichold is here echoing the theories of Jeanneret (Le Corbusier) and Ozenfant, presented in L’Esprit Nouveau in 1921, that technological forms were the product of ‘machine selection’, an evolutionary process tending towards perfection.49 The model layout Tschichold provides (Figure 20), which will stand for any number of page spreads in VU magazine, for example, is thus more than a flexible and attractive way of designing pages: it is the determinist outcome of Darwinian progress, a symbol of the ascendant ‘second nature’ of technology. In the modernist imaginary, the asymmetric grid invoked the social order of a perfected, cybernetic humanity. The double nature of the modernist grid, its potentiation as utopian and tyrannical symbol, finds definitive expression in the work of Le Corbusier. In his 1922 plan for the ‘Ville Contemporaine’ (Contemporary City), an ultramodern complex of skyscrapers and urban freeways, the expansive grid has its apotheosis: the plan insists not only on the primacy of straight lines and right angles, but that all these perpendiculars be mutually aligned.50 The arrangement plays out Le Corbusier’s theory of the ‘regulating line’ – a dominant line governing alignments within an orthogonal matrix – to produce a synthesis of perceptual and symbolic order: ‘The regulating line is a satisfaction of a spiritual order which leads to the pursuit of ingenious and harmonious relations. … The regulating line brings in this tangible form of mathematics which gives the reassuring perception of order.’51

Figure 20  Model page layouts, from Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, pp. 210–1. © UC Press.

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Like Mondrian, Le Corbusier creates a unified symbolic and aesthetic totality, but its form is intrinsically repressive. The expansive grid suppresses the heterodox patterns of historical life – symbolised in the winding ‘Pack-Donkey’s Way’ – and directs the displaced elements (people) to their allotted place in a spatial and social hierarchy.52 In the ‘Ville Contemporaine’, the workers would be moved out into satellite cities;53 by the time of the Radiant City (first published 1935), the utopian dream has become more sinister: [O]ur cities are bulging with human detritus. … I knew we should have to say to them one day: there is nothing more for you to do in the city; go back to where you came from, back to the country. And in that way the cities could be cleaned up. The city must be cleared of all the dreams that have burned their wings, the miscarried lives, the dead embers of men and homes and communities that have accumulated around the city’s bright furnace and are now stifling it with their dead and sooty weight.54

The grid, as an exclusive, totalised model of social and material order, reaches its logical conclusion: the forced removal of unassimilable (non-geometric) groupings. The eradication of history, symbolised in the ‘pure’ geometric pattern, implies the suppression of the historicised individual. Le Corbusier’s motorised man, travelling the perpendiculars of a pristine mathematical world, recalls the dominative fantasies of Marinetti’s prewar generation.55

The patterned world The modernist grid and vector, at their symbolic limits, invoked fantasies of technocratic and totalitarian social control. But these were not the only cultural resonances that attached to structural patterning in the photographs and page layouts of popular magazines. As described in Chapter 1, the consensual ideal was of reconciliation and synthesis: the dream of a prosperous technological modernity built on communality and mutual tolerance. Whilst popular magazines drew on the ideas and aesthetics of the avant-garde, there were other influences that shaped their visual language: Weimar monthlies carried photographs of film stars and exotic locations supplied by commercial picture agencies, images of sunlit body culture, and picturesque views of traditional life and the natural world. In this eclectic context, grids and vector patterns were part of a broader patterning culture, embracing, in its symbolic resonances, both rationalist and organicist visions of the social ideal.

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The diversity of these pattern forms is beautifully captured in Hannah Höch’s Album, an artist’s scrapbook of magazine photographs, many from the Ullstein titles UHU, Die Dame and Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, from the years up to 1933.56 Höch’s particular fixation, here, anticipates the focus of the present book: page spreads are composed of multiple, spectacular structural patterns, arranged in formal categories: geometric human patterns (Figure 21); industrial and engineered forms; the natural geometries and distributives of volcanic clouds, mud springs, and fork lightning. The composite pages present a kind of distillation of the patterning culture of Weimar magazines, unifying the natural, manmade, and social worlds, and the organising principles of the organic and mathematical cosmos. A speech by Höch herself, at the opening of her solo exhibition in 1929, catches the Album’s inclusive, enquiring spirit, and its implicit rejection of conventional hierarchies: I would like to blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us. … I want to show that small can be large, and large small; it is just the standpoint from which we judge that changes, and every concept loses its validity, and all our human gestures lose their validity.57

Figure 21  Page facsimile from Hannah Höch, Album. © DACS, 2019.

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Höch’s subversion of hierarchies is achieved, in her collages, through absurdist juxtapositions and dramatic shifts in scale; but she is also describing a general attribute of structural patterns. Privileging the group over the individual, and revealing formal commonalities across the manmade and natural worlds, modernism’s interwar patterns embodied the ideal of a non-hierarchical, communitarian social order. It was this nebulous ideal, rather than any exclusive ideological vision, which characterised the diverse visual culture of the new photo-illustrated magazines. The case studies in Parts II and III, focus on two of the magazines that shaped and defined this visual culture. Typical, in many ways, of the popular German monthlies launched in the postwar decade, UHU’s photography explored the dialectic between modernism’s technological and organicist social ideals. Launched half a decade later, and in the different socio-economic and cultural conditions of late 1920s France, the tensions in VU would prove more existential: the magazine’s technological utopianism confronted, in its weekly news pages, the spiralling global disorder of the Depression years. The modernist pattern forms that had invoked the ideal of an ordered, egalitarian society, would, by the early 1930s, project their inverse, dystopian values, as the symbolic figures of militarism and dictatorship. Europe’s progressive popular magazines described, in real time, the collapse of the modernist utopia.

Notes 1 Sally Stein, “The Graphic Ordering of Desire: Modernization of a Middle-Class Women’s Magazine, 1919-1939,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), 145. 2 Ibid., 147. 3 For a critical introduction to Panofsky’s theory of “symbolic forms,” see Christopher Wood, introduction to Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 11–14. 4 Charles Baudelaire, “The Crowd,” Paris Spleen, trans. Martin Sorrell (Richmond: Oneworld Classics, 2010), 22. See also Carl E. Schorske, “The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1963), 111. 5 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Greenville, SC: Traders Press, 1994), 37.

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6 John Czaplicka, “Pictures of a City at Work, Berlin, Circa 1890-1930: Visual Reflections on Social Structures and Technology in the Modern Urban Construct,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles Werner Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 20–3. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Gaetano Kanizsa, Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Perception (New York: Praeger, 1979), 33. 10 Quoted in Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Haxthausen and Suhr, 52. As Müller notes, Endell’s thesis points in contrary directions, towards an aesthetic of momentary configurations, and towards the Stimmungsbild, an urban idealism achieved through the impressionistic rendering of atmospheric effects. 11 Umbro Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brain (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 28. 12 Kirchner’s account, here, is retrospective, coming from a text dated to the mid1920s. Quoted in Charles Werner Haxthausen, “‘A New Beauty’: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Images of Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Haxthausen and Suhr, 66. As Haxthausen notes, the futurists’ first exhibition opened in Berlin in the spring of 1912, half a year after Kirchner had settled there; their manifestos were published in German in Der Sturm. 13 Victor H. Miesel, ed., Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), 113. 14 Carsten Strathausen, “Uncanny Spaces: The City in Ruttmann and Vertov,” in Screening the City, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London: Verso, 2003), 15–40. 15 “Symphonie der Großstadt,” Revue des Monats, J2, H2, December 1927, pp. 166–7. 16 Hermann Treuner, “Vision der Großstadt,” Scherl’s Magazin, J4, H8, August 1928, p. 923. 17 In Ernst Bloch’s theory of utopianism as “anticipatory consciousness,” the elements of an ideal future are actualised as fragments within the present. See Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity,” in Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press; Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 53. Photography, in particular, became the means by which such fragments could be assembled and disseminated. 18 Quoted in Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 182.

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19 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “Constructivism and the Proletariat,” 1922, quoted in Clark V. Poling, “The City and Modernity: Art in Berlin in the First World War and Its Aftermath,” in Art in Berlin, 1815-1989, ed. Kelly Morris and Amanda Woods (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Fine Art, 1989), 88. 20 Christina Lodder, “Searching for Utopia,” in Modernism: Designing a New World: 1914-1939, ed. Christopher Wilk (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 31–4. 21 F. T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto,” in Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 5. 22 David Raizman, History of Modern Design (London: Laurence King, 2003), 158. 23 Marinetti’s manifestos are ostentatious in their glorification of war. In “Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility” (1914), he exults: “[T] he shining, aggressive flight of a cannonball, red hot in the sun and speeded by fire, makes the sight of flayed and dying human flesh almost negligible.” Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 155–6. 24 Ibid., 170. 25 See Chapter 10, pp. 220–2. 26 Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 65. 27 Quoted in Roxane Jubert, “Typophoto: A Major Shift in Visual Communication,” in Photo/Graphisme (Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2008), 14. 28 The plans for Monument were criticised by a number of leading artists and critics, including Trotsky himself, who upbraided Tatlin “for his impracticality, his revolutionary romanticism and symbolism”; in Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 65. 29 Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer (London: Routledge in association with Centre for Performance Research, 1991), 183. 30 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Attractions” (1923), from Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988), 87. 31 Sergei Eisenstein, “Béla forgets the scissors” (1926), from Taylor and Christie, The Film Factory, 147. See also David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 120–3. 32 The oppositional vector formed of diagonals opposed at right angles is also a grid tilted off its perpendicular axis. Where this relation to the orthogonal is emphasised, as in the slanting layout of text in modernist graphic design, this pattern form might also be termed a dynamic grid. 33 Lodder, “Searching for Utopia,” 27. Documents and photographs from “0.10 – The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures,” Petrograd 1915, are reproduced in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History (Volume 1: 18631959) (London: Phaidon, 2008), 171–86.

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34 The term ‘bilateral’ symmetry is synonymous. I prefer the term ‘axial’, as a better description of the patterning operation. 35 The Platonic forms are defined as “closed order” (rotational) patterns in Wolfgang von Wersin’s classification system: see Gombrich, The Sense of Order, 74. 36 The Platonic essentialism of Black Square returns in the symbolic geometries of De Stijl and the Bauhaus. For Gropius: “The basic building elements – throughout time and in all countries – consist of the geometric trilogy ensuring validity in all human creativity.” Quoted in David Batchelor, “‘This Liberty and This Order’: Art in France after the First World War,” in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, ed. Briony Fer, David Batchelor, and Paul Wood (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 28. See also the discussion of Black Square in Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 7–10. 37 Quoted in Andrew McNamara, “Between Flux and Certitude: The Grid in AvantGarde Utopian Thought,” Art History 15, no. 1 (1992): 60. 38 Raizman, History of Modern Design, 171. 39 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells, 3rd ed. (London: Architectural Press, 1971), 6. 40 Lodder, “Searching for Utopia,” 33. 41 For Richard Sennett, the grid is both the “ancient object of environmental process” and a global symbol of modernity: in the form of the gridiron street plan, it is the “Protestant sign for the neutral city,” the victory of Cartesian logic over geographic variability. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 46–8. 42 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 8–22. 43 As Reyner Banham notes, “[T]he symmetrical disposition of the parts of a building about one or more axes” was so fundamental to nineteenth-century architectural practice, that Julien Guadet’s masterwork Elements et Théories (1902) scarcely needs to mention it. Banham, Theory and Design, 15–16. 44 For the philosophical tensions in Mondrian’s art, see Christopher Green et al., Mondrian, Nicholson: In Parallel (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2012), 28–35. 45 See Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (London: William Heinemann, 2007), 135–42. 46 Paul Jobling and David Crowley, Graphic Design: Reproduction and Representation Since 1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 138–43. 47 Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, trans. Ruari McLean (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1995), 66. 48 Ibid., 65.

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49 See Raizman, History of Modern Design, 163; also Batchelor, “‘This Liberty and This Order’,” 26–8. 50 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 30–1; see also Norma Evenson, Le Corbusier: The Machine and the Grand Design (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 12. 51 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells, 3rd ed. (London: Dover Publications, 1986), 75. 52 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 18. 53 Fishman, Urban Utopias, 196–202. 54 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1935), quoted in Evenson, Le Corbusier, 23. 55 Le Corbusier’s cult of the motorcar, culminating in his call to “kill the street” as a place of cafes and pedestrians, is ably dissected in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 165–7. 56 A selection of page facsimiles is published in Hannah Höch and Gunda Luyken, Hannah Höch: Album (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2004); see also Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 71–121. 57 Quoted in Ralf Burmeister, “Glued, Not Cut: On the Singularity of Hannah Höch’s Scrapbook,” in Hannah Höch, ed. Dawn Ades, Emily Butler, and Daniel F. Herrmann (Munich, London, and New York: Prestel, 2014), 145.

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Part II

The Beautiful World UHU Magazine, 1924–30

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‘The pulse of life’

Illustrative photography is the world citizen’s microscope on the events that will shape history. The photographer travels the world for you, bringing it closer to you. He stands at the crater’s edge as the volcano erupts, negotiates the rapids of the Niagara, climbs to the very tip of skyscrapers, flies in an airplane over the Himalayas … make way for the photographer! Editorial, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, 14 December 1919 One of the early, visible signs of Germany’s economic recovery, following the 1923 launch of the Rentenmark, was the appearance on urban newsstands of a rash of new mass-market periodicals. In the ‘tumultuous expansion’ of 1924,1 the total number of German magazines increased, according to one study, from 3,734 to 5,061 – a rise of 35 per cent in a single year.2 Significantly, the new arrivals included a new species of publication, typically 100–200 bound or glued pages with multiple photo-illustrations and a full-colour graphic cover, and containing a lively editorial mix of culture and entertainment, popular science, travel, and lifestyle features;3 studio portraits of film stars were a stock item, and, in some titles, photos of nude or semi-clothed dancers, projecting ideals of a permissive and emancipated modern society. Appearing in weekly, fortnightly, or monthly issues, the new ‘revues’, as they were sometimes called, played a pivotal role in shaping the popular modernism of the Weimar era, as a principal medium via which the cultural forms, aspirations, and values of technological society were rehearsed and disseminated. Aimed, principally, at an urban, bourgeois liberal readership, monthly magazines such as UHU (1924–33), Das Magazin (1924–41), and Scherl’s Magazin (1924–33) offered visions of an unfolding, idealised modernity that inflected the fragile optimism of the reconstruction era.4 Hubert Miketta, the editor of Revue des Monats (1926–33), describes their typical formula in the foreword to the magazine’s first issue of November 1926:

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal The pictorial and written content will have … the quality of lightness that is indispensable for the success of a sophisticated publication. Theatre, film, fashion, sport, technology, visual arts – in short, all the great and colourful things in life … [it] will create in the reader, by its amusing and capricious treatment, that eagerness which means the death of boredom.5

If ‘lightness’ was indispensable to the new magazines’ modern ideal, for hostile critics such as Edlef Köppen it was symptomatic of their vapid, consumerist values: ‘“Please Take One”, … is the way the magazine is put together to gratify the widest possible array of readers.’6 Magazine culture was the quintessential ‘sign of our times’, the expression of the hectic, Americanised modernity that was transforming German social and economic life: The mark of our age is haste, hurry, nervousness. People have no time, indeed they flee the calm of contemplation; they reel recklessly through the streets with no intention of catching hold. The rhythm of life pounds short and hard: further, further! The consequence is in many respects superficiality. … And if there is one thing right now that could be taken to be symbolic of this, then it is the appearance of all the magazines that have been flooding Germany for just about a year. … They are spreading like pestilence.7

Köppen’s gloomy prognostications echo the Kulturpessimismus of Hans Reiser and Oswald Spengler: cultural values decline in relation to the advance of technological society.8 From this perspective, the new magazines were the common denominator of their mass readership, serving up ‘the light, not to say, easy reading’ that modern consumers demanded.9 The journalist and playwright Leo Lania, dismissing the new illustrated magazines as ‘Bilderbücher für grosse Kinder’ (picture books for big kids), predicted that the German reader would ultimately reject this ‘American fashion’ in favour of the solid respectability of the seventy-year-old weekly Die Gartenlaube: ‘[A]nd then will be the worst discovery: that in his obsession with experiencing only the new and the modern, he has forgotten to bring anything home from his reckless hunting.’10 The complaint of these traditionalist critics was not that magazines failed, in their frivolousness, to capture the essential character of modern life, but that they described the shallowness of modernity only too well. In one tangible sense, the ‘American’ character of the revue monthlies was real enough. From their inception, and increasingly over the course of the Weimar decade, the magazines were dominated by their photographic content; typical feature stories consisted of a series of photographs on a given

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theme, supported by copy text responding, often indirectly, to these images. The constant demand for photos of picturesque and exotic locations, modern lifestyles and scientific novelties, was met by an abundant supply from US agencies such as International News Photo, Associated Press, Pacific & Atlantic, and the British press agency Keystone.11 Whilst German photo agencies, such as Simon Guttmann’s Dephot, began to assert their presence from the end of the 1920s, the ratio of foreign to German photographs in the Weimar popular press remained typically between 2:1 and 3:1.12 As the later chapters in Part II describe, this internationalism reflected the magazines’ consensual modern ideal, but only underlined the arguments of cultural critics denouncing the Americanisation of German culture, and the disappearance of vernacular traditions. Whilst images of an idealised America were part of the escapist offering on which magazines built their readership, the specific visual forms of this ideal were also, inevitably, shaped by the values and perspectives of their foreign suppliers.13

The mirror of modernity The chapters in Part II are built around an extended case study of the marketleading magazine, UHU, launched by the Ullstein publishing house in October 1924. As one of the best-known and bestselling German monthlies, UHU is offered, here, as representative of the revue magazines of the Weimar period. Whilst rival titles, such as Das Magazin, Das Leben, and Revue des Monats, each had their distinctive editorial character, they also had many commonalities: in their magazine format, page extent, advertisements, and cover price; editorially, in their mix of photo journalism and light fiction, and in their topical modern themes and visual content.14 Some of this convergence was, doubtless, imitative of UHU, reflecting its dominant status and high editorial quality: the gradual shift toward photo-illustration in Scherl’s Magazin, for example, made it appear ever more similar to the bestselling title. In short, UHU is representative both as the best and most influential publication in its class, and as a significant forum in which the evolving values and ideals of interwar modernism were critically explored, and assimilated into mainstream popular culture. The longitudinal structure of Part II aims to capture the fluidity and ambivalence of this popular modernism, and the evolution of one extraordinary magazine in the febrile conditions of the Weimar era.

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Whether Edlef Köppen’s 1925 article had UHU specifically in its sights, it is not possible to say – though, given the prominence of the title and of the Ullstein publishing house, it may well have. Whatever the case, Köppen’s sketch of the new magazines’ editorial offering provides a recognisable, if tendentious, description of UHU: [A] rich abundance of illustrated material. The whole visual complex of the popular revue … Legs or bosoms of naked girls play just as inexhaustible a role as the dress of an elegant woman, the cut of a so-called gentleman’s suit. Images of famous contemporaries, photographs of boxers, horse races, domestic and foreign abnormalities join in the parade. The accompanying texts are ‘designed’ with great skill; filled with more or less witty remarks, magazines of this sort supply up-to-date commentaries on the milieu and thus contribute to the public’s ‘general education’.15

Whilst Köppen is dismissive of photo-illustrated magazines, his account nicely captures the popular character of the new medium. The visual abundance, the picturesque themes and spirited dynamics, that Köppen repudiates, were precisely those elements on which UHU’s appeal to a mass readership was based – as the inclusive tone of its advertising slogan suggested: ‘Thick as a book. Intelligent and amusing. Full of humour and vitality.’16 UHU and its competitors, in short, embraced the popular-modernist identity that their detractors foisted on them; they were constructed by, and constructive of, the new culture of Weimar modernity. A key element of this modernity, for critics on all sides of the question, was the emergence of the consumer society, the expression of a newly energised popular capitalism based on the mass production, mass marketing, and mass consumption of commodities.17 Photo-illustrated magazines were desirable items in themselves, in this new cornucopia of consumer products: the standard 1920s cover price of 1 Mark would have been affordable, at the limit, to whitecollar workers and the managerial class,18 but out of reach to most workingclass readers.19 The revue magazines were, in turn, the shop window for an everexpanding range of mass-produced commodities – objects which, like the cover price, suggest a readership with some, perhaps limited, discretionary purchasing power.20 In UHU, up to around a quarter of the contents of a typical mid-1920s issue was composed of display advertisements, mostly selling small consumable luxury items: soaps, chocolates, cigarettes, books, bras, patent medicines.21 In more abstract terms, much of UHU’s commercial success lay in ‘selling’ images of an idealised modernity – typically, a youthful blend of outdoor leisure pursuits,

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travel and tourism, dance, popular cinema – which readers could vicariously enjoy as purchasers of Ullstein’s fashionable monthly. The general nature of this transaction is poignantly illustrated in the report of a 1924 survey, carried out, ironically enough, by the German Communist Party. The wife of a KPD member unflatteringly compares the contents of the party organ, Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag), with the more enticing fare offered by the popular press: ‘I want to read something amusing off and on, like a travel report, what it is like in the summer resorts, about winter sports and such things. If one cannot go there oneself, at least one wants to imagine what it is like.’ A nonCommunist male reader adds: ‘I … want to hear something about the natural sciences, about politics, about literature, about crime, in short I want to feel the pulse of life … not always politics, politics, and more politics.’22 Between them, these two would-be consumers provide a good summary of the themes that typified the new photo-illustrated magazines. Female and male readers, invoking a generalised, and depoliticised, modernity – the ‘pulse of life’ – turned to UHU and its competitors for visual constructions of the modern ideal. For their part, the editors of these magazines sought continually to ride the contemporary wave. In a 1929 article in Die literarische Welt (Literary World), the chief editors Artur Ploch, of Scherl’s Magazin, and Friedrich Kroner, of UHU, respond to the general question: ‘Wie entsteht ein Magazin?’ (How does a magazine issue take shape?). Kroner’s airy reply is unenlightening: ‘We leaf through all the magazines full of zeal each month, hoping that the others have figured it out at last – but we still don’t know.’ Ploch, by contrast, provides a genuine insight into the responsive, dialogic process by which the themes and symbols of popular modernity were formulated: The magazine editor asks himself: What interests the modern readers? Which problems are occupying the present moment? Which things have particular resonance among the day-to-day interests [Tagesinteresse]? The topical areas [Stoffgebiete] are: sport, gymnastics, dance culture, theatre, film, varieties, the big questions of the day, scientific progress and the latest research breakthroughs, the achievements of technology, new forms in visual art, modern photography; in short, whatever is contemporary and has a connection with life.23

If the prerogative of newspapers (Zeitungen) was immediacy and proximity to quotidian events (Tagesinteresse),24 the concern of the Magazin – the brash new rival to the traditional Zeitschrift25 – lay in projections of a more abstracted actuality. As Sophie Stackelberg notes, the ‘big questions of the day’ in UHU largely excluded news events, focusing rather on generalised issues such as

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international relations, the future of Germany’s former colonies, economic development.26 Ploch’s account of photo-illustrated magazines’ hierarchised and highly selective editorial agenda describes, in short, an idealist visual and narrative construction of modernity, rather than a journalistic reflection of the chaotic contemporary scene. UHU’s historical significance lies in these projections, which describe the shifting self-image of German liberal bourgeois society; as documentary material, the magazine’s particular value is to the cultural, rather than social or political, historian of the Weimar era.

‘The new Ullstein magazine’ UHU’s commercial and popular success, in the period of relative economic stability from 1924 to 1929, is suggested by the extant data on its readership and distribution. The magazine’s sales figures had grown steadily, from around 160,000 copies per month in 1924–5 to a peak of 211,400 in October 1929 – the last issue before the Wall Street Crash – making UHU second only to Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung among Ullstein’s illustrated periodicals;27 the publisher was able to assert with some confidence, in a trade publication of 1929, that UHU was now Germany’s ‘leading magazine’ (‘das führende Magazin’).28 The editorial content and advertisements suggest an appeal to a relatively prosperous, bourgeois liberal audience,29 and a mixed female and male readership.30 UHU’s demographic is thus likely to have intersected the dominant class of cultural actors: the conspicuous consumers, trend setters, and opinion formers who collectively embodied the idea of progressive modernity. UHU, like the French magazine VU, occupied the cultural threshold at which modernism, the movement that defined the aesthetic forms of this modernity, entered the popular imagination. The years 1925–9, on which Part II focuses, were the crucial period of modernism’s assimilation into mainstream culture, and of its evolution toward the dominant, international style of the 1930s. As the Part II chapters describe, the dialectical nature of this process is reflected in the contrasting themes and compositional structures of UHU’s photography. The first issue of UHU, Das neue Ullstein-Magazin hit Berlin’s newsstands on 10 October 1924 (Figure 22). The new title had declared its modern credentials in advance, with a sophisticated pre-launch advertising campaign, described in Ullstein’s official history as: ‘[Q]uirky, recalling American propaganda methods … relying essentially on witty, illustrated adverts and posters.’31 A contemporary

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Figure 22  Front cover of UHU, issue 1, October 1924.

journalist described the impact of the saturation poster campaign: ‘Several weeks of the most persistent advertising: red birds [the UHU owl logo] on every corner and at all ends of Berlin, the most exuberant slogans – and straight after launch the entire first run of 100,000 issues sold out!’32 The publishers, from the evidence, had correctly judged their moment, and the national mood. Hermann Ullstein wrote excitedly to his wife on 11 October: ‘The demand for UHU is unstoppable. There is nothing that interests people more. I flatter myself that this was achieved through the art of propaganda.’33 The ‘new Ullstein magazine’, selling itself as the product and medium of mass modernity, had found a readership immediately receptive to its optimistic ideals and to the seductive possibilities of the new.

Notes 1 Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1982), 321.

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2 Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Deutsche Zeitschriften des 17-20 Jahrhunderts, 1973, cited in Sophie v. Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu.’ Ein Spiegel der Moderne?” (Lüneburg: Universität Lüneburg, 2002), 28. 3 Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert, Introduction to Deutsche illustrierte Presse: Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Leiskau, Rössler, and Trabert, 12. 4 Indexed facsimiles of the leading Weimar monthlies, including the complete run of UHU, are available online at: www​.illustrierte​-presse​.de. 5 “Vorwort” (Foreword), Revue des Monats, J1, H1, November 1926, p. 1. 6 Edlef Köppen, “Das Magazin als Zeichen der Zeit,” Der Hellweg 5, no. 24 (June 17, 1925). The translation is from Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 644–5. 7 Ibid. 8 See above, p. 19. 9 Wilhelm Neuhaus, “‘Unterhaltungsblätter in Deutschland und Amerika,’ Auszug aus einem Vortrage” (1927), cited in Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 26. See also Patrick Rössler, “Global Players, Émigrés, and Zeitgeist: Magazine Design and the Interrelation between the United States and Germany,” in Mapping the Magazine: Comparative Studies in Magazine Journalism, ed. Tim Holmes (London: Routledge, 2008), 52. 10 Leon Lania, “Magazine! Magazine!” (1929), in Ernst Glaeser and Helmut Mörchen, Fazit: Ein Querschnitt durch die deutsche Publizistik (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1977), 242. 11 Bernd Weise, “Photojournalism from the First World War to the Weimar Republic,” in German Photography 1870-1970: Power of a Medium, ed. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas (Köln: DuMont, 1997), 63–4; Hanno Hardt, “Sites of Reality: Constructing Photojournalism in Weimar Germany, 1928-33,” Communication Review 1, no. 3 (1996): 377–8. 12 Weise, “Photojournalism,” 58. 13 Hardt, “Sites of Reality,” 377. 14 Brigitte Werneburg, “Foto-Journalismus in der Weimarer Republik,” Fotogeschichte 4, no. 13 (1984): 29. 15 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 644. 16 “Dick wie ein Buch. Gescheit und amüsant. Voll Laune und Lebensfreude” was the strapline of advertisements for UHU that appeared in Ullstein’s newspapers in the month before the magazine’s launch. 17 Janet Ward Lungstrum offers a compelling account of Weimar visual culture as a “display window,” describing the novel spectacle of fetishised commodities in department store windows and the new mass consciousness this engendered. Janet Ward Lungstrum, “The Display Window: Designs and Desires of Weimar Consumerism,” New German Critique, no. 76 (1999), 115–60.

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18 The monthlies UHU, Das Leben, Das Magazin, Revue des Monats, Scherl’s Magazin, Tempo, Auto Magazin, all sold for 1 Mark. Schünemann’s Monatshefte, published in Bremen, was an exception, selling for 1,20 Mark. 19 Konrad Dussel, “Wie teuer war ein Magazin? Daten zur Ökonomie der Freizeit in der Weimarer Republik,” in Deutsche illustrierte Presse: Journalismus und visuelle Kultur in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Katja Leiskau, Patrick Rössler, and Susann Trabert (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 30–4. 20 Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 212–14. 21 The contents of the October 1925 issue (J2, H1, October 1925), for example, break down as follows. In a total of 146 pages, there are 31.5 pages of advertisements (25 full-page advertisements, 13 half-page), of which the main product classes are confectionery (8 advertisements), soaps (6), health products and medicines (5), magazines and books (4), cigarettes (2), lingerie (2). There are also a small number of advertisements for high-value items: cars (1), motorcycles (1), pianos (1). 22 From Bernhard Fulda, “Industries of Sensationalism: German Tabloids in Weimar Berlin,” in Mass Media, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 186. 23 “Der Magazinredakteur fragt sich: Was interessiert die modernen Leser? Welche Probleme bewegen die Gegenwart? Welche Dinge haben eine über das Tagesinteresse hinausreichende Aktuälitat? Die Stoffgebiete sind also: Sport, Gymnastik, Tanzkultur, Theater, Film, Varieté, die großen Zeitfragen, die Fortschritte und neuesten Forschungsergebnisse der Wissenschaft, die Leistungen der Technik, die Erscheinungsformen der neuren Kunst, die modern Photographien, kurz Alles, was zeitgemäß ist und Kontakt mit dem Leben hat.” Artur Ploch and Friedrich Kroner, “Wie entsteht ein Magazin? Von den Herausgebern des ‘Uhu’ and des ‘Scherl-Magazin,’” Die literarische Welt, J5, Nr. 29, 1929, p. 3. Quoted in Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 25. 24 For a discussion of the almost universal habit of newspaper reading in early twentieth-century Germany, see Gideon Reuveni, “Reading, Advertising and Consumer Culture in the Weimar Period,” in Mass Media, Culture, and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 204–13; also Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 16–17. 25 Eva Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” in Hundert Jahre Ullstein 1877-1977, ed. W. Joachim Freyburg and Hans Wallenberg (Berlin: Ullstein, 1977), 178. 26 Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 25–31; Stackelberg relates UHU to two formative traditions: American popular magazines of the early twentieth century, and the feuilleton supplements of German regional newspapers. See also Werneburg, “Foto-Journalismus,” 27–8.

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27 Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 47, 133. 28 “Der Verlag Ullstein zum Weltreklamekongress Berlin 1929,” 1929, quoted in Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 49. 29 Noack-Mosse reproduces a page of analysis of UHU reader incomes, prepared for advertisers in 1929. The summary gives the average monthly income of UHU readers as 924 Marks, and boasts: “Of around 16¼ million taxpayers, only 1½ percent, or 243,700, have a monthly income of 900 M and above. According to our statistics, 39.1 percent of UHU readers have a monthly income from 800 to 1000 M and more!” Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” 180. 30 As an example of the anecdotal evidence, UHU’s lonely hearts column, which ran from late 1930 onwards, attracted similar numbers of male and female advertisers. 31 Georg Bernhard, “Die Geschichte des Hauses,” in 50 Jahre Ullstein 1877-1927, ed. Max Osborn (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1927), 77. 32 “Einige Wochen aufdringlichster Reklame, rote Vögel an allen Ecken und Enden Berlins, Anpreisungen überschwänglichster Art – und sofort nach dem Erscheinen Ausverkauf der gesamten 1. Auflage von 100,000 Exemplaren!” HB: “Das Magazin” (October 1924), quoted in Stackelberg, “Das Ullstein-Magazin ‘Uhu,’” 41. 33 Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” 178.

5

Photographic Unities

We have in our hand the greatest gift of our time … the means of expressing our contemporary culture. So, back to photography, the only universal tongue, the optical language. Sasha Stone, ‘Back to Photography’, Die Form, 1929 The modernist identity of the Weimar revue magazines was built on their spectacular and self-conscious commitment to photography, as the defining medium of the new technological culture. Across all the leading 1920s magazines, photography increasingly dominated the editorial content, displacing both copy text and graphic illustrations, though graphics continued to appear in illustrated fiction and display advertisements. Much of this photographic content – though by no means all – was of high quality, reflecting the demands of a highly competitive marketplace; photography was also a favourite topic of discussion, with numerous feature articles on its history and contemporary culture, and on the work of leading practitioners, appearing in UHU, Scherl’s Magazin, Die Dame, and other titles. As Moholy-Nagy declares, in his 1925 Bauhaus book Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), the new mass medium, with its ‘exact mechanical procedures’, was now intrinsic to modern identity: he writes of seeing the world ‘with entirely different eyes’ and of the ‘dawn of a new life’.1 Whilst the book’s high-flown rhetoric spoke to a particular vision of the socialist utopia, its optimism also reflected photography’s central place within technological society,2 an era in which ‘[i]llustrated books, newspapers, magazines are printed – in millions’.3 A purchaser browsing these mass-produced titles in a newspaper kiosk in the late 1920s would have encountered an extraordinary wealth and diversity of images, spread across the photo-illustrated articles and stand-alone photo-pages that were the mainstay of the magazines’ editorial content. Taking July 1928 as a typical month, the purchaser of Revue des Monats, for example, was presented

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with a six-page set of blue-toned photo-pages, featuring the sunlit skin of an African tribeswoman (a ‘living bronze’); Joan Crawford in a swimming pool; a rolling wave; an austere gathering of young Talmudists; a couple on a careening motorcycle and sidecar; and ‘Das Bacchanal’, a confected fantasy of an oriental orgy credited to an unnamed ‘American film’.4 Scherl’s Magazin, in the same month, offered a five-page picture story on water spouts and fumaroles, and a full-bleed double-page photo of Blackpool beach with a man throwing scraps to a flock of seagulls.5 The elite women’s magazine Die Dame, whose range went far beyond its staple fashion and lifestyle photography, ran a feature on the American photographer Paul Outerbridge in the first of its July 1928 issues;6 the highbrow monthly Der Querschnitt, included in its poetically minded photo-pages the pairing of a newborn baby in a bath with the delicate hand of a ‘128-year-old’ man.7 Other magazines – Das Magazin, Das Leben, and a host of smaller and more specialist titles – added further to this photographic profusion in their own photo-pages and illustrated features. In terms of the quality and diversity of its photography, and its sustained commitment to progressive photographic culture, UHU magazine was the most significant and influential of all the Weimar popular monthlies. UHU’s visual content intersected many of the themes, styles, and subject areas of its rivals – portraits of film stars, the natural world, engineering and architecture, body culture and erotica – but was both more selective and more far-reaching in its editorial content. First and foremost, its selections and photographic features were governed by a coherent aesthetic approach, valorising, in general terms, the ‘straight’ photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) over constructed images and photographic fictions. In contrast to other titles, UHU made scant use of photomontage, and there were none of the theatrically staged images that set the decadent tone of Das Leben or Revue des Monats; as the final chapter in Part II describes, UHU’s recourse to photo-fiction in the 1930s was a symptom of the magazine’s decline. Until the Depression era, UHU’s faith in photographic objectivity – the implicit indexical connection between the image and its real-world referent – sustained a resonant visual idealism that raised the magazine above the level of mere commercial populism. The focus of this chapter is on aspects of UHU’s photographic culture in which this modernist idealism found perhaps its fullest expression: the scientific and avant-garde images published in the years up to 1930. The association proposed here, connecting scientific photography (photomicrography, astrophotography, and other optical technologies) to aerial photography and avant-garde image-

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making, reflects their mutual presence in the landmark German exhibitions of the late 1920s, and UHU’s photo-pages of the same period. This chapter will argue, moreover, that the parallels between these photographic modes go beyond a shared association with technological modernity: the formal similarities between avant-garde and scientific photography – the stress, in particular, on repetition and reduction – speak to the period’s modernist preoccupation with patterned images, as symbolic visions of collectivity. In the broadest sense, photomicrographs of intricate natural form, re-presented in popular culture, invoked the ideal of an organic society, emerging from the harmonious interaction of free individuals, just as images of geometric architecture or of mass production were symbolic of a rationalist social order. UHU’s photographic patterns describe, in short, variations on a fundamental theme of the postwar decade, concerning the shape of the future society. The driving force was a reaction to the collective trauma of the First World War, whose cultural memory both impelled utopian modernism, and shaped its idealist visual forms.

Beauty in variety The promise of UHU was of visual plenty. Issues of the magazine were built, typically, around graphic materials – photographic features and stand-alone pictures, cartoons, illustrations, as well as display advertisements – with the textual bias of early issues giving way, by the late 1920s, to an increasing emphasis on visual content.8 Like its rival monthlies, UHU’s character was defined by the spectacular variety of its pictorial themes, conjuring a modern ideal of leisure, exotic travel, and American glamour. The August 1927 issue, for example, includes photo-illustrated features on Lilian Gish, bathing culture, artists in their studios, a desert adventure, roads, Jack London, how ‘a camel stands up’; there are also studio photographs of Gabrielle Chanel and the film star Dorothy Mackaill, and photo-page studies of a waterfall, a Persian cat, and the electric chair. Like the all-embracing photographic exhibitions of the period, this diversity reaches, metonymically, toward a ‘total picture of modernity’, a synthetic unity composed of the myriad fragments of modern experience.9 In its stand-alone photo-pages in particular, UHU projected a photographic idealism based less on images of a particularised utopia than on profusion, the discovery of aesthetic harmony in every corner of the visual world – even, in the extreme example cited earlier, the execution chamber of Sing Sing prison

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(Figure 23).10 The compositional balance in this picture, based on the symmetry of light and dark sections, finds formal echoes on other pages: a solitary aircraft flying over sunlit ocean; a blurred, high-contrast image of a Persian cat by Umbo (Otto Umbehr). The assorted images, products of UHU’s superabundant visual culture, reflect the magazine’s unifying project: the projection of an inclusive, optimistic modernity, unified by the camera’s objective gaze and the universal human value of visual beauty. For contemporary Marxist critics such as Walter Benjamin, photography’s capacity to project an aestheticised, depoliticised vision of modernity made the medium potentially suspect. In Benjamin’s view, the very title of Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful) (1928) spoke of ‘a photography that can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists’.11 As Benjamin would, doubtless, have agreed, the indictment applies equally well to UHU: the magazine’s published images embrace the full spectrum of 1920s photography, from modernist experiments (‘any soup can’), to commercial studio images, photojournalism, and scientific photography; in none of these image classes were the underlying social and economic relations (‘human connections’)

Figure 23  ‘Der elektrische Stuhl von Sing Sing’ (The electric chair at Sing Sing), UHU, August 1927, p. 19.

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laid bare.12 UHU’s photojournalism, moreover, studiously avoided class issues and political controversies, and touched only tangentially on current events in thematic articles. In the Marxist view, UHU’s photography can be read as pure, unmodulated surface, reflecting – and reinforcing – the dominant bourgeois ideology.13 Though a Marxist reading might usefully highlight UHU’s implication within the prevailing socio-economic structure, it is of less use in describing the particular forms and meanings of individual images, and the dialectical symbolism that emerges from contrasts and contradictions. In these terms, Benjamin is wrong: photographs of ‘soup cans’ are rich in ‘human connections’, which might, at least in part, be recovered. The challenge for the present study is to discover significant continuities, tensions, and hierarchies within the endless variety of UHU’s photography, that express these connections, and point to wider dilemmas within Weimar culture.

Scientific visions The technical and aesthetic parameters of UHU’s progressive photography are strikingly exemplified in a stand-alone image from the December 1928 issue. The photo-page shows a close-up of a complex organic texture, with an explanatory caption: ‘The tongue of a cat: photomicrograph, which clearly shows the roughness (magnified 40 times) of a cat’s tongue’ (Figure 24). The image is one of a cluster of photomicrographs in UHU from this period, recording scientific revelations of hidden structures in the physical world; a photo-page from the following April, for example, captioned ‘the most sensational photograph of the year 1929’, is claimed as the first image of electrons circling the atom.14 These images underline UHU’s close involvement in Weimar photographic culture – photomicrography featured in the exhibitions Fotografie der Gegenwart (Photography of the Present Day) (Essen, 1929) and Film und Foto (Stuttgart, 1929);15 they can also be connected, at a formal and symbolic level, to many other photographs published in UHU at the same period. The pattern theory approach, describing structure primarily in terms of perceptual grouping, offers a way of capturing these commonalities, across diverse and visually dissimilar images. As UHU’s photo-pages exemplify, it was in the imagery of symbolic groupings that modernist photography created its particular aesthetic, and its most iconic images.

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Figure 24  ‘Die Zunge einer Katze’ (Cat’s tongue), UHU, December 1928, p. 55.

The identity of Figure 24, as the indexical image of a real-world object, is provided by its caption. But this is not a puzzle picture: it looks no more like a cat’s tongue after this revelation than before. The photograph’s appeal lies in its spectacular projection of scientific vision, and what the art historian Franz Roh described as the ‘elemental amazement at the wondrous forms of the microcosm’.16 The camera’s forensic eye, penetrating beneath the gross level of ordinary vision, discovers a universe of endless repetition, stretching beyond the picture frame in all directions, and, by extension, to infinity. The complexity of each individual detail – the barb and the broken, granular surface – is opposed, in perception, to the ordered simplicity of the whole. The result is a totalisation: whilst the viewer may find a (grotesque, perhaps) fascination in the detail, the picture continues to assert a powerful gestalt unity through the perceptual grouping of repetitious elements.17 Oscillating between these two basic modes of reception – the detailed view and the global pattern – the viewer’s response rehearses the dynamic structure of an ideal social order: the individual within a harmonious, non-hierarchical totality. The point, here, is not that this particular photograph comes freighted with ‘cosmic significance’ (pace Benjamin); rather, that its structural pattern form conforms to a modernist archetype with particular symbolic resonance at this period. In the terminology of pattern theory, the

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cat’s tongue image is a total array, defined as a global pattern composed of a homogenous texture – including ‘blank’ textures, such as a cloudless sky – or of recurrent duplications of a motif. In figurative images, the total array either provides the background to the figure (see, for example, Figures 32 and 36), or, as in Figure 24, becomes itself the subject. In either case, I will argue, this pattern form represents the archetypal figure of community; its many variations within modernist photography suggest the contrasting ideals of social order that found cultural expression in the Weimar era. The emergence in visual culture of photomicrography, captured in UHU’s photo-pages, reflects interwar modernism’s general fascination with pattern – as lyrically expressed in Hannah Höch’s Album (Figure 21). In this context, photography’s objective impressions of the ‘endless patterns of nature’ provided a holistic counterpoint to the rationalist geometry of machine modernism,18 revealing the miraculous self-organisation of nature, at all scales from the microscopic to the astronomical.19 In UHU’s exemplary photomicrographs, these organic patterns range from natural geometric arrays, expressing an element of regularity, to freer, distributive groupings of teeming micro-organic life.20 In symbolic terms, the photographs are representations of order – the coherent, harmonious disposition of related elements – emerging not as the product of rational systems, but as an intrinsic property of the natural world. UHU’s images suggest not only a patterned cosmos, but that fundamental patterns recur at radically different scales, implicitly confirming Goethean notions of a sublime cosmic unity.21 A page spread from January 1927, for example, titled ‘At the limits of two optically perceived worlds’, presents circular photographs of a bacterial colony and the Andromeda Nebula, in which the configurations of stars and bacilli form poetic symmetries across the page fold. The subtle juxtaposition plays on a recurrent paradox of scientific photography: that this most clinically objective visual medium is, at the same time, a spirit guide to invisible worlds, creating images whose cultural meanings shade continually into mysticism.22 UHU’s organic unities, discovered in the pattern forms of stars and microbes, are also expressed at the level of ordinary human vision, and at the panoptic scale of aerial photography. A recurrent trope, emphasised in editorial captions, is of a strange and mutable photographic ‘landscape’ composed of abstract, primal forms, such that the actual size and identity of depicted objects is difficult to read. A photograph from November 1928, for example, titled ‘Undiscovered landscapes’ (Figure 25), shows an arrangement of enigmatic, conical organic forms, with the teasing caption: ‘Not a fantastical moonscape, rather a peculiarly

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Figure 25  ‘Unentdeckte Landschaften’ (Undiscovered landscapes), UHU, November 1928, p. 11.

enlarged image of the thorns of the ordinary dog rose.’23 Like the magnified cat’s tongue, the image is a stand-alone photo-page, whose appeal, one assumes, was more aesthetic and symbolic than strictly scientific.24 To describe the nature of this response more closely requires a broader consideration of Weimar visual culture. Beyond its ambiguity and strangeness, and the Romantic resonances of its organic forms, the thorn photograph proclaims its modernity, as an image in the contemporary progressive style. The defining elements of this style are difficult to pin down: modernist photography, in the interwar period, ranged from the meticulous ‘objectivity’ of the Neue Sachlichkeit, and the experimental darkroom techniques of the New Vision, to the poetic naturalism of Martin Munkacsi or André Kertesz.25 There are, however, a number of stylistic markers – such as oblique camera angles – which would, unquestionably, have signified a modern aesthetic to contemporary viewers; these include properties which are also powerfully expressed in UHU’s scientific images. Principally, modernist photography of the Weimar period was an exercise in reduction: the paring-down of compositions to their primary figures and relationships, through the use of simplified backgrounds, and through varieties of repetition and regularity. In the

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pattern theory model, such simplifications are the products of visual grouping (pattern-making); modernist photography might, then, be described as the exploration of structural pattern forms. From this perspective, the modernist credentials of Figure 25 become clear: the image is composed of a simple, illuminated organic figure, echoed by a similar figure in deep shadow behind it, and the beginnings of a third rising at the right-hand edge; an elliptical void in the foreground repeats the curve at the base of the central cone, to suggest either its inverse, or another potential replication; the ground and ‘sky’ of this mysterious world are reduced to blank textures. ‘Undiscovered landscapes’, like the other scientific photographs described earlier, is a distilled symbolic whole, a study of the complex, dynamic unity of organic life. The questions raised by these intriguing images go to the heart of this book: how did images of organic growth, and other photographic compositions based on a patterning aesthetic, come to represent the idea of modernity; what might have been the symbolic resonances of these repetitious forms for the readership of UHU magazine?

The legacy of war The vogue for close-up photography (including photomicrography, as its extreme form) embraced divergent trends in 1920s modernism: a fascination with photographic abstraction, and a valorisation of the ‘straight’, un-manipulated image. By moving closer to the object, and thus estranging and decontextualising it, close-ups revealed the abstract forms and unities of the physical world, without the distorted angles and darkroom effects promoted by the New Vision. The ideal response to these images – what Renger-Patzsch calls ‘joy before the object’26 – was intrinsically bound up with their ‘objectivity’, implying that these abstracted real-world forms embodied a universal aesthetic to which the sensitive viewer could respond. The close-up, in short, appealed to a modernist aestheticism, which can be described in terms of its formal and symbolic properties: reduction, abstraction, totalisation, and mythic objectivity. As implied in UHU’s microbe/nebula pairing of January 1927, these properties of the modernist image were expressed across the vastly different scales enabled by camera technology. At the mid-point between the microscopic and astronomic, they also emerged in the flattened, diagrammatic landscapes of aerial photography, developed during the First World War as a reconnaissance tool, but also disseminated as part of the official photography of the battlefields.

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A historical irony of modernist photography is that the camera’s capacity for abstraction, which would achieve full expression in the avant-garde imagery of the late 1920s, had been significantly exploited a decade earlier, in photographs that avoided revealing either military secrets or the horrifying actuality of trench warfare. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry would later write, of his experiences as a pilot in the Second World War: All I can see on the vertical are curios from another age, beneath clear, untrembling glass. I lean over crystal frames in a museum; I tower above a great sparkling pane, the great pane of my cockpit. Below are men – protozoa on a microscope slide. … I am a scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment.27

This chapter’s hypothesis is that the photographic aesthetic of the 1920s was shaped, in part, by the memory, and continued reproduction, of aerial images from the previous war, used by state propaganda agencies to promote an abstracted, ritualised idea of the conflict.28 In support of this claim, a selection of UHU’s photo-pages and articles – and, at the limit, its apparent editorial exclusions – are enlisted as partial evidence. Following the publication of Ernst Friedrich’s polemical Krieg dem Kriege (War against War) (1924), illustrated with gruesome photographs of corpses and mutilated survivors, a number of nationalistic writers countered with rival photographic histories of the conflict.29 Among these militaristic accounts, and perhaps the most egregious in its patriotic revisionism, was Franz Schauwecker’s So war der Krieg (This Is How the War Was), first published in 1927. The work is extensively illustrated, principally with aerial and other battlefield photographs from official archives – images whose dissemination, during and after the First World War, reinforced the patriotic view that the German army remained undefeated in the field.30 In contrast to Friedrich’s unflinching focus on victims, and on military atrocities, Schauwecker’s war photographs are all but devoid of human casualties, who are reduced to a ghostly presence within a mythic-heroic narrative: Somewhere in the great Russian waste, with pines silhouetted sharply against the horizon, lies an expanse of ground scarcely distinguishable from its surroundings. Around this grow weeds higher than grass on the abandoned fields … and little ridges like baking trays alternate at oddly regular distances from each other. … In the middle, attached to a birch trunk, is a sign, on which it says: Here was Olechow. … These dead towns were the shattered carcasses of living towns. They lay quiet and still like ghosts in the pale sunshine.31

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The pages that follow, illustrating ‘The Landscape of War’, reflect this verbal aestheticism in a visual language of abstraction and structural patterning. A typical layout of aerial photographs, illustrating battlefields and trench systems on the western front (Figure 26), depicts the bombardment of Fort Douaumont through contrasting pattern forms: the parallel geometries of walls and ramparts are corroded, in the inset picture (‘Fort Douaumont after the shelling’), by innumerable pock-marks; on the facing page, a featureless wasteland bears the caption: ‘Here was Bullecourt (Somme).’32 In these photographs, the pitiless reductions of industrial warfare become symbolic totalisations: prototypes of the abstract compositions that appear in postwar photography. The sea of mud is Bullecourt, in the sense that this gestalt, as a total array, is unequivocally designated as the bearer of the sign: the abstracted, totalised pattern, signifying the erasure of the historical landscape, is also a symbolic figure of technological modernity, with all its vast destructive, or transformative, potential. Schauwecker’s mythic landscape, into which whole towns have disappeared, also merges with the bodies of German soldiers. In the many aerial photographs of cratered battlefields disseminated during the war, and reproduced in photographic histories, the nationalistic rhetoric of Blut und Boden (Blood

Figure 26  Page layout from Franz Schauwecker, So war der Krieg, 1927, pp. 76–7. © The British Library Board.

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and soil) was visually reified, creating a potent imagery of patriotism and sacrifice.33 In Hermann Rex’s Der Weltkrieg in seiner rauhen Wirklichkeit (The world war in its harsh reality) (1926), for example, an aerial photograph of ‘Demolished grounds around a former German artillery position at Chemin des Dames. 1917’ simply shows an expanse of shell-pocked mud: the totalised distributive pattern stands, by itself, for the sublime totality of patriotic war.34 This process of abstraction is taken to its limit in Schauwecker: layouts comprise multiple images of muddy hillocks, puddles, and blasted trees, in which diminutive soldiers appear as solitary, incidental details. Reduced to archaic, repetitious forms, and with no vestige of natural life, the ‘Landscape of War’ is an entirely human construct, yet emptied of people. As Schauwecker’s ghost narrative underlines, the earth itself is composed of, and symbolically represents, the sublimated bodies of the dead. The new aesthetic that emerged in the 1920s, popularised by magazines such as UHU, was the product of a visual culture profoundly shaped by the experience of the First World War. Ironically, given the authoritarian and traditionalist agenda of propaganda agencies such as Germany’s BUFA (Bild und Filmamt) (Photo and Film Office), it is the patriotic images of massed military hardware and marching troops, and the abstracted panoramas of aerial photography, that seem closest to a modernist aesthetic, rather than the humanist photojournalism of Krieg dem Kriege. Whilst the complex origins of Weimar visual culture fall beyond the scope of this book, some reference to the photographic legacy of the war seems indispensable. Firstly, as exemplified in Schauwecker, war photography instrumentalised techniques of visual simplification (Figure 27): the repetition of motifs (a row of identical aircraft); total arrays (skies, the textured ground around the barrage balloon); the suppression of incidental details (aerial perspectives).35 The aesthetic and symbolic unities produced by such reductions were a tool of wartime propaganda, but these same totalising techniques would also project the communitarian ideal of 1920s photography. Secondly, images of devastated battlefields, and the filigree patterns of trench systems in aerial photos, created a symbolic equivalence between the landscape and the human body that was new to photography.36 Just as UHU’s scientific photography collapsed the difference between stars and microbes, or the stem of a dog rose and the moon, aerial photographs projected a human presence into natural landscapes, whilst the human body was photographically re-imagined as an undulating physical terrain.

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Figure 27  Page layout from Franz Schauwecker, So war der Krieg, 1927, pp. 64–5. © The British Library Board.

The patterned city Aerial photography, as a visual expression of the aeronautical age, projected an intrinsically modern worldview (Figure 1). Like scientific photography, its images described a technological expansion of human perception, revealing the spectacular patterned unities of the physical world – unities which, like the organic forms in close-up photography, had both symbolic and aesthetic potential. As Félix Nadar, the pioneer of aerial photography from a hot-air balloon, wrote in 1900: The fields, like irregular chessboards, look like quilts made of multi-coloured but harmonizing patches stitched by the patient needle of the seamstress … Everything appears to us with the exquisite impression of a marvellous, ravishing cleanliness! No squalor or blots on the landscape. There is nothing like distance to remove us from all ugliness.37

It was this tendency to abstraction and pattern formation, taken with the 1920s cult of aviation, that attracted artists such as Kasimir Malevich and the postwar Italian futurists to aerial photography.38 This modernist appeal was not, however, unequivocal, at least as far as UHU was concerned. Among the aerial vistas, and

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aesthetic images of aircraft in flight, are editorial selections and commentaries that suggest a more uncertain attitude to technological culture – of which the aeroplane was the resonant, utopian symbol. Aerial photography, appearing sporadically in feature stories and photo-pages through the 1925–9 period, embodies some of the complexity and contradictions in UHU’s particular brand of popular modernism. The utopian possibilities of aviation are invoked in a feature story from the July 1925 issue. ‘In 3 Tagen nach Amerika’ (To America in three days), the account of a transatlantic crossing by airship, promises the sceptical reader a ‘return, in a certain sense, to the romantic times of sailing ships of yesteryear, with all their charm and variety’.39 This picturesque image is undercut, however, by the photoillustrations: a series of minimalist aerial views showing the Azores as rocks in an indeterminate plain, the shadow of the airship over a blurred coastline, and then, in dramatic contrast, a climactic view of New York’s Woolworth Building, seen earlier (Figure 28).40 The end point of this visual narrative is American modernity in its purest, crystalline form – capitalist vectors thrusting skyward from within the urban grid – a configuration whose geometric simplicity can be properly observed only from the aircraft’s godlike vantage point. Capturing

Figure 28 ‘Das 240 m höhe Woolworth-Gebäude’ (The 240  m-high Woolworth Building), UHU, July 1925, p. 21.

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a momentary synthesis, in which the expanded perception of the technological age reflexively describes its own rational order, the photograph projects an ideal, totalised vision of capitalist society – a social and economic model whose American incarnations represented, for many Weimar commentators, the technocratic ‘future of humanity’.41 The expansive urban grid is here the mythic form of efficient mass modernity,42 an idea whose potency may be suggested by a comparison with another aerial view from later in the same year. The article ‘Im LuftExpress’ (In the air express), from November 1925, subtitled ‘Flight today and in the future’, includes an aerial photograph of the city of Cologne, centred on the cathedral. The image is noteworthy for its caption, which takes issue with the city’s piecemeal configuration: ‘It is only the view from an aeroplane that reveals to the spectator the organic layout of the city, its beauty and also its flaws. The view from above affords new aesthetic impressions, but also unintentionally shows the arbitrariness of the city’s layout.’43 From the author’s rationalist perspective, the organic patterns of the historical city appear ‘arbitrary’,44 and hence incompatible with the coming technological society, the abundant future in which ‘one will wonder how anyone could have been afraid of flying’.45 UHU’s aerial images, capturing the contemporary association of flight with futuristic modernity, also inflect the anxieties which the machine age generated. At the heart of these were the traumatic collective memories of the First World War, and the prospect of future conflicts that the war’s images foreshadowed. The war itself, and militaristic themes in general, are notably absent from UHU’s editorial, in line with the magazine’s implicit anti-militarism. A remarkable exception to the lack of militaristic themes was the prophetic article ‘Die Technik mordet den Krieg – eine Hoffnung auf Frieden’ (Technology is killing war – a hope for peace), published in April 1926. The author’s thesis – which has a bleak familiarity for the modern reader – is that advances in technology would make future wars so devastating as to be unwinnable: the argument is illustrated with an aerial photograph of a gas attack on the western front (Figure 29) and an artist’s construction of an imaginary future aerial bombardment of Berlin. The aerial photo, showing billowing plumes of poison gas, a trench, and lines of miniscule figures, exemplifies the detached, dehumanised perspective described by Saint-Exupéry. As the blunt caption underscores, however, these abstracted pattern forms come laden with a horrifying symbolism: ‘Gas! A gas attack in the last phase of the World War, with which every new war would immediately begin, blanketing the cities of Europe with death and destruction.’46 Two pages later, the illustration shows bombers in formation over the Brandenburg Gate,

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Figure 29 ‘Gas!’, UHU, April 1926, p. 9.

again with thick palls of smoke and ant-like figures, and a further devastating caption: In a future war, there will be no distinction between the front, rear and hinterland, between army and civilian population – because all important centres will be within reach of enemy poison gas squadrons. A squadron of aircraft, which has rained liquid gas and within a few minutes has transformed a world city into a graveyard.47

The connections between the two images are thus multiple and emphatic, with the traumatic past linked to the technological future, the aircraft as detached observer becoming the machine of future mass destruction. At a formal level, both pictures depict the moment of catastrophe by means of expansive, totalising patterns: the smoke trails in Figure 29, shown (in the implied orientation) drifting westwards towards the French lines, express the mass phenomenon of the gas attack as a highly cohesive distributive array, equivalent – both perceptually and symbolically – to the geometric aircraft pattern in the bombardment image. The multiple repetitious forms of industrial warfare become, in these images, symbolic of a wider technological modernity, embracing past, present, and

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possible future; the reduction of human figures to the size of Saint-Exupéry’s ‘protozoa’ invokes a demonic social order, dedicated to the eradication of life itself. The apocalyptic visions of ‘Die Technik mordet den Krieg’ describe the extreme potential of a dehumanised technological society. Whilst the theme, and the polemical intensity, are uncharacteristic of UHU, they connect to a more general ambivalence toward the machine age, reflected in other aerial images and commentaries from the same period. Karl Scheffler’s sober assessment of the future of urban development, ‘Berlin in 50 Jahren – Perspektiven einer Weltstadt’ (Berlin in fifty years – perspectives on a world city), from June 1926, is accompanied by a photograph of a traffic jam and a cartoon of a top-hatted man leaping between car roofs (‘the man in a hurry will have to go by foot’); the courtyard of a Berlin tenement (‘the home of millions of citizens’) is contrasted with a high-elevation aerial view of a spacious suburban housing estate (Figure 30), built according to the new rationalist principles: Houses in the future will be constructed no differently from cars and aeroplanes; the craft of the future is called technology. The consequence will be that the building industry will work to standardised, typical forms … that construction will determine style, and that individual architectural fantasy will give way to a collective will and a collective fantasy.48

Figure 30  Page spread from ‘Berlin in 50 Jahren’ (Berlin in 50 years’ time) (aerial view of Erkner Housing Estate, Berlin) UHU, June 1926, pp. 50–1.

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The aerial photograph, as the visualisation of Scheffler’s brave new world, presents a global gestalt, privileging regularity and uniformity over subjectivity and differentiation. The houses, at this minute scale, show no people, no curtains or flowerbeds, nor any markers of individuality; this is in contrast to an image in the same article showing a tenement courtyard from ground level, with a standing figure in the middle distance and a family at a second-floor window, and the casements revealing a motley variety of curtains and awnings. Implicitly, by contrast, the aerial view lacks ‘spirituality’, a sense of the ‘inner efforts, the soulful vitality’ that critics such as Walter Riezler called for, and that could only be expressed at an intimate, human scale.49 The dehumanising potential of aerial photography was the explicit theme of an article published in the month after Scheffler’s piece, ‘Die Front ins Blaue – Nörgeleien im Flugzeug’ (Into the blue – Grumblings from an aeroplane), by the author Fritz Zielesch, UHU, July 1926. Zielesch’s complaint, couched in heavy irony, is precisely that the aerial perspective drains cities of their vitality, and finds only chaos and imperfection in the organic variety of building forms: O flying man, as you climb on board, leave all hope behind. You are carried away from the level of houses and streets, to gain a profound insight, from a bird’s-eye view, of the shabby state of your world! What bleak chaos, which to you seems there to be mastered by intelligent order and admirable organisation! … One has built fine things down there, but one has built them eccentrically. They are dead. You cannot see the living structure of the street, house, district and city. … There is nothing in those shapes inserted into the landscape, it’s all just a formless mish-mash, an uncivilised whole, whose parts do not belong together.50

Illustrating Zielesch’s argument are paired photographs, showing contrasting views of cities and buildings from the air and ground level. An Egyptian pyramid, reduced to flattened geometric forms, is contrasted with a view through an archway in San Gimignano, with men sitting placidly on the stone steps, magnifying the scene’s timeless tranquillity (Figure 31). The linked captions clarify the author’s point: ‘Viewed from above, the pyramids don’t appear so important any more … / … and towers cannot loom so high; to the express travellers of the future, they will no longer mean anything. (San Gimignano – for today’s Italian tourists, one of the most interesting cities.)’51 On the following page, the rhetoric intensifies: an aerial photograph of Cairo reduces ‘the most beautiful of oriental cities’ to a ‘heap of rubble’ (Schutthaufen), and Broadway, ‘the most famous street in New York’, to a ‘dark canyon’ (eine schwarze Schlucht).

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Zielesch’s article, and its picture selections, are eccentric and tendentious, yet there are significant continuities with the other 1926 articles, described earlier. In all three stories, aerial photography enables a panoptic view of the contemporary world, revealing a human landscape undergoing vast social and material change. In each case, this transformative process implies the erosion, or destruction, of historical values: of organic community, tradition, individuality, even of life itself. Finally, the articles are constructed around implicit past-present oppositions – subjectivity/objectivity, tradition/modernity, spirituality/materialism – dualities which are embodied in the pattern forms of the selected images. In ‘Die Front ins Blaue’, the shift is from a picturesque aesthetic of harmonious oppositions to a totalising aesthetic based on repetitious form. In Figure 31, for example, the traditional values associated with San Gimignano are invoked through the picturesque combination of unique (dissimilar) elements, and subtle visual pairings: the round archway, the rectangular towers, the seated men, the steps, the squat building in the middle ground. This contrasts, Zielesch implies, with the soulless culture of the machine age, based on uniformity and rationalisation, values which are symbolised in the reductions and repetitions of the aerial view. In terms of Weimar visual culture, the author’s polemic is significant, as

Figure 31  ‘San Gimignano’, photo-illustration from ‘Die Front ins Blaue’ (Into the blue) UHU, July 1926, p. 11.

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it equates modernism with a generalised patterning aesthetic, going wider than its more familiar associations with geometric form and machine repetition. For Zielesch, the visual reduction of Cairo to homogenised ‘rubble’, or of Broadway to a blank monochrome slab, are symptoms of this same technological mindset: aerial photography is exposed as a coercive medium, aimed at bringing the ‘chaotic’ historical world under the mastery of ‘intelligent order’. Whether because Zielesch’s reservations were shared by UHU’s picture editors, or for other considerations, aerial views make only rare appearances in the magazine’s photo-pages and illustrated features after 1926.52 These occasional panoramas describe either the vast processes of urban and industrial development (high-elevation views), or the aesthetic appeal of foreign cities (low-elevation).53 Aerial views featuring natural landscapes are largely absent, in contrast to the many conventional landscape studies, which were a staple of UHU’s photography. The exception is a remarkable photo-spread from March 1929, showing two pictures captured at low altitude (Figure 32): ‘KameraJagdbeute aus dem Flugzeug’ (Bagged by camera from the aeroplane) pairs an image of a lion walking beneath cliffs in the Moroccan desert with the image of a stranded ship on a Dutch seashore. The compositional similarities between the two photographs are immediately evident: the solitary figure, off centre to varying degrees in both pictures, is embedded within a variegated, textured

Figure 32 ‘Kamera-Jagdbeute aus dem Flugzeug’ (Bagged by camera from an aeroplane) UHU, March 1929, pp. 26–7.

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ground that extends out beyond the frame – the form, in pattern theory, of the total array. Unlike the anonymous view of Erkner housing estate (Figure 30), for example, the camera has come in close enough (or the figure, in the case of the ship, is of sufficient size) to create a balancing subjectivity; whilst the ship is subtly configured within the radiating pattern of the shoreline, the decentred figure of the lion determines its own dynamic, mutable presence within the totality. In symbolic terms, the two pictures describe a kind of negotiated equilibrium between the subject (the figure) and its world (the patterned ground), rehearsing the ideal relations of a communitarian social order. This archetypal configuration, strikingly captured in these atypical aerial views, was fully explored in the progressive photography of the late 1920s, showcased in the photo-pages of UHU and its rivals.

Modern perspectives In a 1927 article on avant-garde photography in Revue des Monats, the editor of Münchner Illustrierte Presse, Stefan Lorant, comically imagines a conversation between a magazine editor and an office-dwelling mouse. The obliging rodent has a proposal for the journalist, who is stumped for new ideas: ‘Why not try to see the world through the eyes of other creatures, of us mice, for example?’ From this new perspective, explains the mouse, the normal hierarchies of the optical world are brought radically into question: ‘Everything is relative. Things appear to us to be just so, and therefore they are for us what they appear to be. It all comes down to the position we are looking from; there’s no absolute rule nor unimpeachably correct way of seeing.’54 Lorant’s imaginary interlocutor thus deftly defines a modernist subjectivity, in terms of its spatial dynamism and emancipation from traditional value systems. The ‘new’, for which the editor has been desperately searching, is discovered not in modish actualities – ‘the psychology of legs’ or ‘the film star and his favourite dog’55 – but in the radical ways of seeing the world enabled by technology, and by the emergence of a new modernist sensibility. The products of this convergence, contained in a series of inset photographs, express a perfect freedom of movement – the camera lens looks down from the top of a ladder, floats over a marketplace, climbs a telegraph pole or peers upward from a beer cellar – but also an emergent unifying aesthetic. The world from the mouse’s and sparrow’s eye view appears, characteristically, as an urban totality composed of geometric and distributive visual groupings.

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Given the volume and diversity of UHU’s photography over the 1925–9 period, the notion of isolating a distinctively ‘modernist’ aesthetic is problematic: one risks simply selecting images that conform to a preconceived template. In search of more rigorous historical criteria, the discussion here focuses on images and artists defined by the magazine itself as representing the photographic avantgarde. As Patrick Rössler notes, UHU played a pioneering role in disseminating the self-styled New Photography56 – an engagement signalled, in particular, by a series of keynote articles in 1928–9, paralleling the large-scale photography exhibitions of this period. In the photographs that accompany these articles, the radical perspectives of Lorant’s modernist mouse appear alongside intimate studies of natural and manmade form – revealing, at these different scales, patterned unities within the figure, and between the figure and its environment. Discovering such unities within the everyday world, and at the level of ordinary vision, UHU’s images reach towards the symbolic synthesis described by Max Wertheimer, in which ‘idealism’ and ‘materialism’ become reconciled: ‘[W]hat matters is the kind of whole, the significance of the whole, the meaning of the whole, the nature of the whole.’57 Albert Renger-Patzsch’s essay ‘Neue Blickpunkte der Kamera’ (The camera’s new points of view), from UHU, April 1928, presents a powerful argument for photographic ‘realism’, based on the camera’s unrivalled capacity to convey the ‘magic of materials’: [T]he impressions that one takes from nature, from plants and animals, from the works of architects and sculptors, from the creations of engineers and technicians. … The structure and properties of wood, stone and metal are superbly depicted, in a way they never can be with the materials of the graphic arts.58

Declaring verisimilitude as the special property of photography, RengerPatzsch reinforces its distinction from other visual media by rejecting ‘painterly’ (malerisch) manipulations, and renouncing its pretensions to the status of art: ‘Let us leave art to the artists and seek … to make photographs that can stand on their photographic qualities – otherwise we are just borrowing from art.’59 The ‘wrong direction’ (Abwege) in modern photography is illustrated by an exemplary image, in which an elongated nude appears against an abstracted, painterly background – a picture which is ‘no longer a photograph, but wants to pretend to be a painting’. The nine photographs marshalled by Renger-Patzsch as true expressions of the ‘new points of view’ reflect some of the themes of his own photo-book Die

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Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful), published in the same year – though, notably, without this book’s studies of machines and factories. Viewed as a whole, the images construct an implicit correspondence between nature and society, in which the structural beauty of organic form, exquisitely revealed by photography, is also expressed in the manmade world. The opening page spread thus combines a large picture of mating toads, captured in their ‘vivid reality’, with a study of light through wine glasses, and a curious image of a lamplighter’s shadow across a pavement (Figure 33). The arbitrary juxtapositions, which might suggest a Surrealist-inspired irrationalism, here project a contrary ideal: the fragmentary elements of modernity are unified through the transformative power of the camera, and express their innate capacity for visual beauty.60 Crucially, this aesthetic potential is an intrinsic property of the object, photographically mediated rather than constructed by the image-maker. RengerPatzsch’s cult of objectivity belongs within the Goethean tradition: beauty in the manmade world is the echo of this same spiritual and aesthetic quality in organic life. As Ian Jeffrey observes: ‘Even in 1928, and even in the streamlined style of the New Photographers, Nature was still called on to endorse Culture.’61 This priority is respected in the sequence of photographs within the article: the

Figure 33  Page spread from ‘Neue Blickpunkte der Kamera’ (The camera’s new points of view) UHU, April 1928, pp. 86–7.

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mating toads give way, on the following page, to the head of a yawning baboon, in which each innumerable radiating hair is precisely rendered. Only on the third page spread do recognisable motifs of urban life make their appearance, with photographs of rain-washed and sun-dappled streets and of a driver’s gloved hands at the wheel of a sports car (Figure 34). In these images, the photographic transcriptions of light patterns and textures capture a natural presence within the social environment, composed of hard surfaces and the truncated forms of city dwellers. The anonymity of these figures, rather than expressing urban alienation, here describes a subtle, organic synthesis: the woman’s figure on the verso page is wrapped, bud-like, within her layers of elegant clothing;62 even the sports car interior has lost something of its ultra-modern patina, as the driver’s gloves show signs of wear – a forensic detail to which the caption makes particular reference. As the range of photographic subjects suggests, the ideal modernity that contained these pictorial fragments was defined less by technological dynamism than by the reconciliation of nature and culture, tradition and progress, past (lamplighters) and future (sports cars). Its unifying principle, of beauty, or ‘spiritualisation’, implied a contemplative resistance to the ‘rigid dictatorship of the machine’.63 Renger-Patzsch’s article is unusual among UHU’s features on progressive photography, as a programmatic statement by a leading practitioner; other

Figure 34  Page spread from ‘Neue Blickpunkte der Kamera’ (The camera’s new points of view) UHU, April 1928, pp. 90–1.

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features offer tips for amateurs,64 or, in the showcase article ‘Eine neue KünstlerGilde’ (A new artists’ guild) of October 1929, an introduction to the leading contemporary figures. The privileged status of ‘Neue Blickpunkte der Kamera’ is significant, in that its objectivist values appear to reflect the magazine’s own aesthetic priorities and preferences.65 These are signposted in a feature of September 1926, ‘Wandlungen der Photographie’ (Transformations of photography), presenting a photo-illustrated history of portraiture from the daguerreotype to the article’s present day. For the author, Peter van Tassel, this is a history of moral and aesthetic decline: When one opens the pressed, plush photo albums of our parents, with their family portraits, one can clearly trace the steady decline of photography. If it has today improved, that is to the credit of amateurs, who were the first to recognise once more the charm of the un-retouched, true-to-life portrait, and to spurn the all-too gross photographic stridency and retouching.66

Representing the implicit nadir of this downward trend is a concluding image, a portrait of the dancer Sebastian Droste by Francis Bruguière, captioned: ‘The most modern photographic portrait – with strong ‘Expressionistic’ impact.’67 For this author, Bruguière’s solarised, triple-exposed image speaks of a descent into subjectivism, the painterly self-indulgence of photography’s recent past.68 Van Tassel’s appeal, echoed by contemporaries such as Karel Čapek, is for a return to the authentic spirit of photography’s early period, before the late-nineteenthcentury decline into mannerist superficiality.69 The arguments presented by Renger-Patzsch and Peter van Tassel, defining photography as an exclusively scientific, veridical medium, invoke images of existential threat: experimental, darkroom-based photography is the ‘wrong direction’, a new symptom of the medium’s ‘steady decline’. These values are reflected, empirically, in UHU’s general photographic culture. In the many portraits published in UHU in the years up to 1930 – typically, studio photos of actresses and dancers – overt darkroom manipulations are limited to the use of soft focus and vignetted backgrounds; Bruguière’s self-conscious artifice is a unique aberration. Experimental techniques reappear, momentarily, toward the end of the period, in two photo-stories on Bauhaus photography, though even here the framing suggests a measure of reluctance: a February 1928 feature on Moholy-Nagy’s photograms runs to a mere two pages, with a single paragraph of generalised editorial;70 the format is repeated in a June 1929 feature on negative printing.71 Taken with its published criticisms of darkroom-constructed images,

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UHU’s general slant in favour of ‘straight’ photography suggests a certain sensitivity around the status of the image. The question, then, is what was at stake for the realist aesthetic that UHU espoused. The conflicting identities of Weimar modernist photography are encapsulated in the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Although UHU featured very little of Moholy-Nagy’s darkroom photography, his observational, natural-light photographs were featured more prominently than the work of any other artist, with four stand-alone photo-pages in 1928, and a further two in 1929 and 1930. These images present an antithesis to the abstract, constructivist aesthetic of the photogram, depicting banal scenes from ordinary life, captured in full daylight and, typically, at a discreet distance from the figure. The quotidian subjects, and the camera’s subtle detachment, affirm the principle of objectivity declared in Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film: ‘[I]n the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true, is explicable in its own terms, is objective, before he can arrive at any possible subjective position.’72 ‘Objective’, in the sense intended here, describes not a callous indifference to social conditions – the charge levelled at the New Photography by Walter Benjamin – but, arguably, its opposite: a full investment in communal values, and communal life, as the point of departure for cultural expression. These principles are visually embodied in the high-angle total arrays published in UHU, such as the view of seated figures in the February 1928 issue, captioned ‘In Lyon stadium’ (Figure 35). The near-vertical perspective emphasises the simple regularity of the array, composed of varied rectangular blocks within a diagonal matrix; the figures are universalised, but not depersonalised, with their postures and mutual positions suggesting both subjectivity and sociability: the pair at the top appear to be in conversation. Finally, whilst the array configures its occupants, it also permits individual expression, with each character finding their particular perch within a timeworn, companionable human landscape. Variations on this communitarian ideal appear in other Moholy-Nagy photo-pages from the same period, showing a child on a dappled expanse of lawn reaching up towards the high camera (caption: ‘Mummy, throw me down my ball’),73 and early risers in sunlight on a street junction (‘New Year’s Day morning’) (Figure 36). In each case, the total array is massively dominant, yet not oppressive of the diminutive figures who occupy its expanse. The spirited gestures of the New Year’s Day strollers, and their implicit freedom of movement, describe a utopian world

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Figure 35  ‘Im Stadion von Lyon’ (In Lyon stadium), photograph by Laszlo MoholyNagy, UHU, February 1928, p. 59.

Figure 36 ‘Neujahrsmorgen’ (New Year’s Day morning), photograph by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, UHU, December 1930, p. 63.

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in which community and subjectivity are mutually constructed, and in dynamic equipoise. Strikingly, for one of the great modernist prophets of the machine age, it is also a society freed, momentarily, from modern technology: the woman crosses the empty junction on a bicycle, with a wicker basket on her back. The perfect world conjured in these photo-pages is essentially, and impossibly, timeless: neither nostalgic for an archaic golden age, nor reconciled to the on-rush of machine modernity. It is this ‘objectivity’, the expression of visual beauty and of the communitarian ideal within the everyday, that characterises the avant-garde photography presented in UHU. The fragility of this principle, exemplified in Moholy-Nagy’s momentary configurations, also provides a context for the magazine’s ambivalent views on photographic manipulation: the objective status of the image depended on its credibility as a faithful transcription of the real world. This notion of veracity, of the photograph as a record of optical experience, is central to the keynote article ‘Eine neue Künstler-Gilde’ (A new artists’ guild), published in the wake of the hugely successful Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart (May–July 1929). In the anonymous author’s view, the popular validation of photography as an art form coincides with its new spirit of objectivity: The years since the war have given an extraordinary impetus to photography. The ‘New Objectivity’ [Neue Sachlichkeit] – so often trivialised – has here been truly advanced. The new style created new technique. After decades of stagnation, there sprang up all at once new talents, and names one had never heard of were suddenly popular. … And so, united by nothing but the same artistic attitude with regard to their objects, was established something like a secret ‘order of photographers who can see’.74

The article’s negotiated position is complex: whilst photography, as the expression of an intensified optical consciousness, embodies the rigorous spirit of the Neue Sachlichkeit, it must also avoid the ‘trivialised’ associations that the term evokes. These are captured in a wistful 1926 diary entry by the photographer Umbo: ‘Things … objectivity [Sachen … Sachlichkeit] form the ideal of our age. We no longer care about problems of the soul.’75 For the author of ‘Eine neue KünstlerGilde’, echoing other critical articles of the period, it is precisely the ability to discover the ‘soul’ of authentic culture, hidden beneath the materialist surface of modernity, that defines the new artist-photographers.76 The exemplary images that accompany the article, chosen, it appears, by the photographers themselves, present an eclectic mix of themes and styles, rather

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than the convergences that might define a coherent artistic movement. A study of a New York roofline by E. O. Hoppé, and an informal portrait of ‘Fridtjof Nansen in conversation with a female journalist’ by Erich Salomon, exemplify the subtle approaches of these practitioners, but appear otherwise unremarkable. What they do share, significantly, with the other images is a sense of temporal continuity, in which markers of modernity – the fashions and demeanour of young women, cars, modern buildings – share space with historical or timeless pictorial elements. The Neue Sachlichkeit, as presented here, describes neither an uncritical thematisation of the ‘new’ nor, in George Baker’s terms, a kind of narratological ‘antimodernism’, but a more complex, dialectical synthesis.77 This humanistic modernism, presenting an alternative idealism to that of the technological utopia, is captured in two photographic page spreads that form the centrepiece of the article. In the first of these, Kertesz’s still life ‘The fork’ appears alongside Sasha Stone’s iconic close-up of a young woman’s smiling face, titled ‘Die Sonne’ (The sun) (Figure 37). The pairing is visually compelling, in that the images are similar at the compositional level: both figures are lit from above and centrally configured, expressing axial symmetry across the rising right-left diagonal; the teeth of the fork and of the girl form a playful symmetry. Thus linked, the pairing can be read symbolically in opposite ways: either the reclining woman is reduced to a mere aesthetic object, or the fork becomes ‘spiritualised’ – even, eroticised – within an inclusive, organicised modernity. For Andreas Haus and Michel Frizot, it is the former, objectifying tendency that defines the Neue Sachlichkeit: ‘The New Vision attempted to enable man … to master the world. The New Objectivity, by contrast, gave rise to the idea that man was dominated by things.’78 Both the dichotomy, and the broad characterisation of the Neue Sachlichkeit, seem to me mistaken: Kertesz’s ‘Fork’ is not a hymn to materialism but to a universal subjectivity. The objects themselves are quintessentially timeless and humdrum; they achieve value as momentary aesthetic forms, and through their intimate symbolic connections to the human body and to social rituals. Sasha Stone’s sunlit girl, entirely at ease within the new modernity, is the inheritor of this reconciled manmade world, not the diminished subject of a commodity culture. As this chapter has argued, UHU’s visual culture reflected the continued ambivalence within progressive Weimar culture, regarding technological modernity. From this perspective, the magazine’s New Photography describes an alternative modernism, based on the reconciliation of profound social and cultural tensions: tradition becomes woven into the fabric of modernity, natural,

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and cultural worlds are mutually incorporated. The guarantee of this synthesis, and its resonant symbol, was the human figure, both clothed and unclothed – in particular, the youthful, liberated modern woman. The image of the new woman, and the patterned configurations within which she appears, are discussed in Chapter 7; here, it is important simply to note the centrality of this figure within the ideal landscapes of UHU’s modernist photography. In the broadest terms, the human subject presents a counter-figure to the machine as the origin and measure of symbolic value, proposing a humanistic, organic modernism in place of a technocratic machine modernism. The liberating potential of the technological age is embraced, but as a means to a fuller subjectivity, rather than for its totalising visions of social order. This synthetic ideal is powerfully expressed in the second photographic spread in ‘Eine neue Künstler-Gilde’, presenting total arrays by Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkacsi (Figure 38). In Moholy-Nagy’s high-angle photograph, here titled ‘Sommer!’ (Summer!), a fashionable modern woman walks into late sunlight on a sandy beach, carrying her hat so that her bobbed hair is on show. The sand is pitted with the prints of countless feet, evoking images of leisure and the new mass tourism, but also deeper symbolic resonances: human movements through a timeless natural landscape, or even – for this postwar readership – its

Figure 37 Page spread from ‘Eine neue Künstler-Gilde’ (A new artists’ guild), photographs by André Kertesz and Sasha Stone, UHU, October 1929, pp. 36–7.

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Figure 38  Page spread from ‘Eine neue Künstler-Gilde’ (A new artists’ guild), photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkacsi, UHU, October 1929, pp. 38–9.

malign inverse, the pockmarked battlefields of the western front (Figure 26). As in the other Moholy-Nagy photo-pages (Figures 35, 36), the picture symbolically enacts the relations of an ideal social order, in which subjectivity is achieved not by the outsider, in opposition to the social world, but within its universal embrace: the woman is configured, but not constrained, within an organic total array whose temporal dimensions contain the present and future, the historical and primeval past. On the facing page, Munkacsi’s ‘Par force hunting’ describes a comparable synthesis, despite the medieval associations of its pictorial theme and the complete absence of modern referents. The photograph’s paradoxical modernity is declared by its structural patterning: the reduced, elemental landscape and formal simplicity of composition.79 The total array emerges, in this spectacular photographic spread, as the signature form of UHU’s organic modernism, in which nature and human sociability, rather than the cult of technology, constitute the visual and symbolic ideal. * * * The organic unities of UHU’s scientific and avant-garde photography composed the links in a Goethean chain of being, whose forms were also manifested in the human body and expressed in aesthetic sensibility.80 Whilst Goethe’s natural

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philosophy was rarely invoked in UHU articles on photography,81 the modernist thematisation of organic patterns related, imaginatively, to this holistic tradition in German culture – and, in particular, to the revival of holistic thought in the interwar period, as described by Anne Harrington.82 From this perspective, the repetitious forms revealed in UHU’s photomicrography and astrophotography, in close-ups, and in low-elevation aerial views, embodied a cultural myth of organic unity, inscribed in the recurring elementary structures of the natural world. The total array was the symbolic expression of this ideal, projecting a utopian social order built on the harmonious balance of communality and subjectivity. In the symbolic scheme presented in this chapter, the total array, and the figure it contains, are mutually constructed: the array configures the body, the body’s subjectivity invests the array with meaning; this includes images, such as Munkacsi’s ‘Par force hunting’, in which the human figure is only an implied presence. This symbolic equivalence, in which figure and ground contain and represent each other, provides the mythic narrative for a photo-story of February 1929, titled ‘Das Gesicht als Landschaft’ (The face as landscape), featuring extreme close-ups of a man’s face by the photographer P. E. Hahn (Figure 39).83 The organic geometry of plant and animal forms (Figures 24, 25), revealed in photo-pages of the previous year, is here expressed in studies of a man’s creased forehead, nostrils,

Figure 39  Page spread from ‘Das Gesicht als Landschaft’ (The face as landscape), photographs by P. E. Hahn, UHU, February 1929, pp. 42–3.

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and puckered lips – as if to complete the final, crucial link in the organic chain of being. The landscape metaphor, previously employed in the dog rose caption (Figure 25), is developed into an elaborate visual and literary conceit, spread over four pages. Whilst the text’s pastoral and Romantic flourishes are laboured, they offer intriguing insights into the Weimar cult of the body, and its profound, and paradoxical, connections to the experience of the war: Radiant lies the face-land in the sunshine, cheerfully at peace. But when the sun is blocked out, at times the rain pours down on this landscape. Hail scours its valleys and hills, stirring the fields and stiffening them like armour against the bad weather. Or, another time, volcanic forces move the land, passions move under the surface, creasing the face-land; menacing, deep furrows are stretched, drawn and pinched by steel-hard muscles; storms of wrath, hurricanes of anger rage across all the mountains. With tremendous strength, all the forms of this mountainous land, that one calls a face, are remoulded into entirely new shapes.84

Carl Schnebel’s overwrought imagery inescapably recalls the mysticism of Blut und Boden, the fusion of earth and body, in patriotic accounts of the First World War. The photographic parallels are equally striking: where Franz Schauwecker presents an abstracted, undulating terrain into which soldiers’ bodies have melted (Figures 26, 27), Hahn’s images discover the traces of this mythic battlefield in the mature male face, projected as a pitted ‘landscape’ of ridges, voids, and denuded hillsides. The paradox of this historical body, in which the signs of organic life and of technological destruction are inextricably entwined, describes the central contradiction in UHU’s modernist vision: the magazine’s photographic utopias, invoking organicist ideals of rebirth and social harmony, were technologically mediated, and shaped by the aesthetics of technological modernity. The dialogue, and attempted synthesis, between these rival principles – a modernism of the body and of the machine – played out in images of the manmade world and of the emancipated human body, is described in the chapters that follow.

Notes 1 Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 29, 45. 2 According to estimates, in 1928, by the Verein der deutschen Zeitungsverleger (VDZV) (Union of German Newspaper Publishers), between 600 and 800 German

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regional newspapers regularly included photographs. Cited in Hanno Hardt, “Negotiated Images: The Rise of Photojournalism in Weimar Germany,” in In the Company of Media: Cultural Constructions of Communication, 1920s-1930s, ed. Hanno Hardt, Bonnie Brennen, and Matthew Killmeier (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 66. 3 Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 38. 4 Revue des Monats, J2, No. 9, July 1928, pp. 933–40. 5 Scherl’s Magazin, J4, H7, July 1928, pp. 750–1. 6 Die Dame, J55, H21, July 1928, pp. 8–10. 7 Der Querschnitt, J8, H7, July 1928, p. 467. 8 To give a typical example, the September 1928 issue (J5, H12) runs to 116 pages, of which 86 pages have some kind of graphic content. Photographs appear on 34 pages; cartoons and illustrations: 28; display advertisements: 24; 30 pages are text only. According to Stackelberg’s quantitative analysis, the pictorial content of UHU’s editorial pages increased from 33 percent in 1925 to 46 percent in 1928. Stackelberg, “Illustrierte Magazine,” 138. 9 Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2007), 58. For Oliver Lugon, it is this potential to capture and mediate “all the objects in the world” that defines the fleeting promise of Weimar-era photography. The inverse consequence of this totalising project, producing “photo-inflation” and a kind of cultural fatigue, would become increasingly clear to some commentators by the end of the 1920s. Lugon, “‘PhotoInflation,’” 221–5. 10 This single photograph accompanies a lengthy polemic against the death penalty by a senior judge, Dr. Carl Finkelnburg: “Fort mit der Todesstrafe!” (Away with the death penalty!), UHU, J3, H11, August 1927, pp. 17–23. The aestheticised image is, in this case, clearly at odds with the tone of the article. 11 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography (1931),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 526. Benjamin’s unpublished essay of 1934, “The Author as Producer,” redoubles on this criticism, accusing Renger-Patzsch, and New Objectivity photography in general, of an empty, depoliticised aestheticism: “[P]hotography … becomes ever more nuancé, ever more modern; and the result is that it can no longer record a tenement block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it. … it has succeeded in transforming even abject poverty – by apprehending it in a fashionably perfected manner – into an object of enjoyment.” Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer (1934),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Jennings, Eiland and Smith, 774–5.

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12 Benjamin’s criticism comes closer to UHU than by mere association: a number of Renger-Patzsch’s photographs were reproduced in the magazine, and he was the author of a keynote UHU article on the New Photography in the April 1928 issue – closely coinciding with the publication of Die Welt ist schön. See below, pp. 106–9. 13 In the “Author as Producer,” Benjamin calls for photographers to resist the capitalist appropriation of photography, by including a caption (Beschriftung) that “wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value”: Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” 775. Benjamin’s critical view of modernist photography here relates as much to the use of images – their presence in commercial magazines, for example – as to their visual content. For a discussion of the politics of photography in Benjamin’s 1930s essays, see Kathrin Yacavone, Benjamin, Barthes, and the Singularity of Photography (New York: Continuum, 2012), 43–5. 14 “Die sensationellste Aufnahme des Jahres 1929,” UHU, J5, H7, April 1929, p. 17. The caption suggests the contemporary interest in scientific advances, though its central claim is certainly incorrect: the first field-ion photomicrographs of atomic structure were made around 1960. See John Darius, Beyond Vision: One Hundred Historic Scientific Photographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 106–7. 15 Eskildsen, “Photography between the Wars,” 35–8. See also Bernd Stiegler, “Pictures at an Exhibition: Fotografie-Ausstellungen 2007, 1929, 1859,” Fotogeschichte 112 (2009): 9–12. 16 Franz Roh, “Der Wert der Fotografie” (The value of photography), Hand und Maschine, 1930. Translation from Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era, 161. 17 See above, p. 30. 18 The quotation is from the catalogue of the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914, cited in Eskildsen, “Photography between the Wars,” 38. 19 The cultural history of scientific photography remains largely unexplored. Frizot’s New History of Photography includes a dedicated chapter, but its scope is limited by the lack of secondary literature: Michel Frizot, “The All-Powerful Eye: The Forms of the Invisible,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Köln: Könemann, 1998), 273–84. See also Ian Jeffrey, Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography (Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, 1999), 35–8. 20 See, for example, the photo-spread in “Abenteurliches Doppelleben einer Pflanze” (The adventurous double life of a plant), UHU, J6, H2, November 1929, pp. 20–1. 21 See above, p. 18–19. 22 Giorgio de Chirico’s article “On Metaphysical Art,” published in 1919, compares the ability to perceive the “spectral and metaphysical” aspects of objects to the action of X-rays revealing “hidden bodies” inside opaque materials. Quoted in Jeffrey, Revisions, 77. 23 Caption from “Unentdeckte Landschaften” (Undiscovered landscapes), UHU, J5, H2, November 1928, p. 11.

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24 According to Eva Noack-Mosse, such photographs had a proverbial reputation among UHU’s staff, after the author Vicki Baum, who was a member of the editorial staff, satirically dubbed them “macaroni at twilight.” Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” 188. 25 The term “New Photography,” which gained currency following the publication of Werner Gräff ’s Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!) in 1929, is used by some critics to describe the movement in modernist photography privileging technically accomplished, “objective” studies of natural and manmade forms, and rejecting darkroom manipulations and photographic experimentation. For an example from the period, see Paul Renner’s “Das Lichtbild” speech, in Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era, 168; in recent critical writing, see below, note 78. “New Photography,” in these accounts, suggests a binary opposition to “New Vision,” as the two poles of modernist photography – though, in practice, such divisions are hard to sustain. For a discussion of the difficulties of defining the “New Vision,” see Patrick Rössler, “Wie das neue Sehen in die Illustrierten kam. ‘Maxl Knips,’ Sasha Stone, Das Illustrierte Blatt und die Bildermagazine der Weimarer Republik,” Fotogeschichte 121 (2011): 46–9. In this book, “New Photography” is used as a catch-all term, designating photographic styles and practitioners viewed as progressive in the late 1920s – effectively, the range of modern styles encompassed by UHU and the exhibition Film und Foto. 26 Albert Renger-Patzsch, “Die Freude am Gegenstand” (Joy before the object), Das Kunstblatt 12, no. 1, January 1928; English translation in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 647. 27 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de Guerre (1942), quoted in Mark Dorrian, “The Aerial View: Notes for a Cultural History,” Strates 13, no. 1 (2007): 3. 28 Roxana Marcoci, following Beaumont Newhall, suggests that the technique of close-up was borrowed from cinema, as close-ups were uncommon before the advent of moving pictures: Roxana Marcoci, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 13. The claim carries little weight, in itself, and would require further evidence to substantiate. The visual similarities between aerial and close-up photography, and the historical priority of battlefield photographs, suggest an alternative view, though the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. 29 For an account of the polarised public response to Krieg dem Kriege, see Dora Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War,” New German Critique, no. 76 (1999): 52–69. 30 Bodo von Dewitz, So wird bei uns der Krieg geführt: Amateurfotografie im ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Tudur Verlagsgesellschaft, 1989), 266–96. As Brigitte Werneburg and Christopher Phillips note, the photographic archives from the war remained largely hidden from view until the late 1920s, when the relaxation of

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censorship restrictions enabled their use, largely by right-wing, revisionist writers such as Franz Schauwecker. Brigitte Werneburg and Christopher Phillips, “Ernst Jünger and the Transformed World,” October 62 (1992): 44. 31 “Irgendwo in der großen russischen Einöde, Kiefern silhouettenhaft scharft am Horizont, liegt eine von der Umwelt schwach unterschiedene langgestreckte Fläche. Auf ihr wächst Unkraut höher als das Gras auf den werwilderten Feldern ringsum … und wenige backtrogartige Erhöhungen wechseln in sonderbar regelmäßigen Abständen miteinander. … In der Mitte steckt an einem aufgeplanzten Birkenstämmchen ein Schild. Darauf steht: Hier war Olechow … . Diese toten Städte waren das zerschlagene Gerippe der lebenden Stadt. Sie lagen still und regungslos gespenstisch ins grellen Sonnenschein.” Franz Schauwecker, So war der Krieg. 200 Kampfaufnahmen aus der Front, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1927), 71. 32 A series of photographs of Douaumont Fort after the 1916 shelling, which are almost identical to the images reproduced by Schauwecker, were published as a page spread in The Illustrated London News, 24 June 1916. See Robert Lebeck and Bodo von Dewitz, Kiosk: A History of Photojournalism (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001), 98. 33 Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 189. 34 Reproduced in Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds,” 73. 35 As the asymmetric layout in Figures 26–7 underlines, the picture selection of So war der Krieg took place in the context of 1920s modernism: the book should not be taken, in itself, as representative of the range of photography available to the German public in the war years. For our present purposes, Schauwecker’s partiality is useful, as his archival selections favour the universalised, proto-modernist aesthetic of state-approved images. 36 A French aviator in the First World War, looking down on the Verdun landscape after rainfall, described it in more atavistic terms, as like “the humid skin of a monstrous toad.” Quoted in Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 147. 37 Félix Nadar, Quand j’étais photographe, 1900, quoted in Frizot, “Another Kind of Photography,” 391. 38 In his treatise Die gegenstandlose Welt (The Non-Objective World) (1927), Malevich explicitly links the new suprematist aesthetic to the abstractions of aerial photography. The book includes a series of aerial views, illustrating “The environment (‘reality’) which stimulates the Suprematist.” Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World, trans. Howard Dearstyne (Chicago: Paul Theobold and Company, 1959), 22–5, 61. Marinetti’s 1929 proposal for a new school of painting, aerropittura, sets out to capture “the essential features of a landscape flattened, artificial, shifting, as though recently fallen from the sky.” Quoted in Beaumont Newhall, Introduction to The View from Above: 125 Years of Aerial Photography, ed. Rupert Martin (London: The Photographer's Gallery, 1983), 7.

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39 “In 3 Tagen nach Amerika” (To America in three days), Walter Scherz, UHU, J1, H2, July 1925, p. 15. 40 UHU ran an extensive feature on the Woolworth business empire later in the same year: see below, p. 128. 41 The quotation is from a 1924 account of an American journey by the pioneering German social worker Alice Salomon. Quoted in Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 9. See also below, p. 265–7. 42 See above, pp. 54–5. 43 Picture caption from “Im Luft Express” (In the air express), UHU, J2, H2, November 1925, p. 41. 44 Le Corbusier, in Chapter 2 of Urbanisme (The City of Tomorrow) (1929), compares Paris to an “eternal gypsy encampment,” whose “chaotic” development presents an existential threat: “[T]he Great City, which should be a phenomenon of power and energy, is today a menacing disaster, since it is no longer governed by the principles of geometry.” Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 31. 45 W. Hillmann, “Im Luft Express,” 41. 46 Picture caption from “Die Technik mordet den Krieg” (Technology is killing war), UHU, J2, H7, April 1926, p. 9. 47 Ibid., p. 11. 48 Karl Scheffler, “Berlin in 50 Jahren – Perspektiven einer Weltstadt” (Berlin in 50 Years’ Time – Perspectives on a World City), UHU, J2, H9, June 1926, p. 54. 49 See above, p. 23. 50 Fritz Zielesch, “Die Front ins Blaue” (Into the blue), UHU, J2, H10, July 1926, pp. 9–10. 51 Picture captions, “Die Front ins Blaue,” pp. 10–11. 52 Whether UHU’s ambivalence towards aerial photography was shared by other magazines is a question for future research. The spectacular aerial photography in Scherl’s Magazin (see, for example, Scherl’s Magazin, J3, H12, December 1927, pp. 1350–1), and the wide dissemination of Robert Petschow’s aerial views of the German landscape (published in the photographic annual Das deutsche Lichtbild (The German photograph) in 1927, and reproduced in Das Magazin, Nr. 41, January 1928, p. 1774), point to the wide appreciation of the genre at this period. 53 The site of Australia’s new capital, Canberra, showing the parliament building and surrounding empty lots, is captured, in high-elevation view, in “Der glücklichere Erdteil” (The luckier continent), UHU, J4, H2, November 1927; a comparable view, of the vast Leunawerke nitrogen plant, appears in “Bosch,” UHU, J4, H6, March 1928. By contrast, the picture story “Bummel durch Fremde Strassen” (A stroll down foreign streets) from UHU, J4, H11, August 1928, employs low-elevation

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55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68

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aerial views to project a gentler image of the urban modernity of San Francisco and Chicago. Stefan Lorant, “Die Welt aus der Spatzen- und Mäuseperspektiven” (The world from the sparrow’s and mouse’s perspective), Revue des Monats, J1, H9, July 1927, pp. 957–8. Ibid., 956. Rössler, “Wie das neue Sehen in die Illustrierten Kam,” 49. See also above, note 25. See above, p. 24. Albert Renger-Patzsch, “Neue Blickpunkte der Kamera” (The camera’s new points of view), UHU, J4, H7, April 1928, pp. 88–9. Ibid., p. 89. This is the totalising ideal described in Oliver Lugon’s article “Photo-Inflation.” See above, note 36, p. 26. Ian Jeffrey, “Photography and Nature,” Art Journal 41, no. 1 (1981): 32. This photograph was also reproduced in Das deutsche Lichtbild, 1927, and Das Magazin, J4, Nr. 44, April 1928, p. 1771. See above, p. 21. “Halt mal still!” (Hold still, now!), Martin Munkacsi and Albert Renger-Patzsch on amateur photography, UHU, J5, H10, July 1929, pp. 18–23. Scherl’s Magazin, July 1929, published an extensive keynote article on progressive photography by Hans Windisch, editor of Das deutsche Lichtbild. “Wie der moderne Photograph sieht” (How the modern photographer sees) includes multiple images from the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition. Like UHU, the Scherl’s article promotes both the dynamic perspectives and close-ups of the New Photography, and the disciplining values of photographic objectivity. Peter van Tassel, “Wandlungen der Photographie – von Daguerre bis Bruguière” (Transformations of photography – From Daguerre to Bruguière), UHU, J2, H12, September 1926, pp. 80–1. Picture caption from “Wandlungen der Photographie,” p. 83. A contrasting view of this photographer is offered by Sebastian Droste himself, in an article for Die Dame from July 1925. For Droste, Bruguière is “the American photographer … perhaps the world’s photographer”; the article features Bruguière’s elaborate multiple-exposure studies of Droste and his dance partners. Sebastian Droste, “Photographie als Kunst” (Photography as art), Die Dame, J52, H21, July 1925, pp. 6–8. In a 1920 article, Čapek writes of “the years broadly around the 1870s, which convince you of the evil decline that set in later. A person then was a dignified subject, in whom the new miracle [of photography] found meaningful purpose.” Quoted in Witkovsky, Foto, 65.

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70 “Photogramme: Eine neue Spielerei mit lichtempfindlichen Papier” (Photograms: A new amusement with light sensitive paper), UHU, J4, H5, February 1928, pp. 36–7. 71 “Spielerein aus der Dunkelkammer,” UHU, J5, H9, June 1929, pp. 56–7. The title translates as “Baubles” or “Amusements from the darkroom.” 72 Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, 28. 73 “Mutti, wirf mir doch meinen Ball herunter,” photo-page, UHU, J4, H8, May 1928, p. 91. 74 “Eine neue Künstler-Gilde” (A new artists’ guild), UHU, J6, H1, October 1929, p. 36. The article has no by-line, lending it the status of a sanctioned UHU editorial. 75 Quoted in Witkovsky, Foto, 105. 76 See above, pp. 20–1. 77 George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (2005): 126. 78 Michel Frizot, “Figures of Style: New Vision, New Photography,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Frizot and de Veigy, 467. 79 Total-array compositions by Munkacsi featured in a series of remarkable photopages in Die Koralle and Die Dame at the end of the 1920s. “Beim Eggen” (Harrowing), Die Koralle, J5, H8, November 1929, p. 373, shows a ploughman and a team of horses on a strip of ploughed ground, beneath a vaulting sky; “Das Meer” (The sea), Die Dame, J55, H24, August 1928, p. 3, has two tiny figures in straw boaters dwarfed by a vast expanse of sunlit ocean; “Jagd” (Hunt), Die Dame, J56, H2, October 1928, p. 9, appears to be from the same series as the UHU selection; “Badestrand vor dem Gewitter” (Bathing beach before the storm), Die Dame, J57, H21, July 1930, p. 7, again places the diminutive bathers against the immensity of rolling sea and darkening sky: humanity within the sublime totality of the natural world. 80 Goethe, “Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie” (Influence of the recent philosophy) (1820), cited in Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 5. See also Timothy Lenoir, “The Eternal Laws of Form: Morphotypes and the Conditions of Existence in Goethe’s Biological Thought,” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), 17–28. 81 Robert Breuer’s 1926 article on Karl Blossfeldt’s plant studies represents an important exception. See below, pp. 140–3. 82 See above, p. 18. 83 Page spreads from this feature are also reproduced in Lebeck and Dewitz, Kiosk, 127, and Witkovsky, Foto, 98. 84 Carl Schnebel, “Das Gesicht als Landschaft” (The face as landscape), UHU, J5, H5, February 1929, p. 45.

6

‘The beauty of technology’

The North Pole voyage of the Norge, the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, and Flettner’s propeller ship are the most recent heralds of the step-by-step mechanisation of our planet. … They offer palpable proof of the victory of human consciousness over amorphous nature. This knowledge shakes the foundations of existing values and alters their form. It decisively shapes our new world. Hannes Meyer, ‘The new world’, 1926 [W]hen American steel structures have replaced the last Romanesque, the last Gothic, and the last Renaissance building, secular or sacred, then indeed will everything have perished that with throbbing heart we now call Germany. Gerhart Hauptmann, preface to Germany: Architecture and Landscape, 1924 Hannes Meyer and Gerhart Hauptmann, in their contrasting visions of the technological future, point to a fundamental dilemma of Weimar modernism: would an embrace of technology, or of an ‘Americanised’ consumer society, lead to the demise of authentic German culture, and an irrevocable separation from the natural world? In the rhetoric of these authors, the multiple terms of this dialectic appear mutually reinforcing, and irreconcilable: the opposition of technology and nature in Meyer1 becomes a battle between modernity and tradition (future and past) in the Hauptmann preface;2 or progress (modernism) and reaction, in historical writing of the post-1945 decades.3 The language of cultural crisis defined both the Weimar era itself, and the narratives of its first historians. Among Meyer and Hauptmann’s contemporaries, the crisis of Weimar modernity produced both polarisation and consensus. As this book has described, the progressive ideal of the New Photography, and of popular magazines such as UHU, was of the reconciliation of cultural dichotomies, not of an exclusive ideological or aesthetic utopia; the photographs in Das deutsche Lichtbild (The German photograph) (1927), for example, include darkroom

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experiments, and modernist studies of steel structures and factory buildings, but many more studies of plant forms, natural landscapes, and traditional architecture (Figure 40).4 As a self-proclaimed album of art photography, much of it stylistically advanced, Hans Windisch’s collection represents an implicit rebuke both to Hauptmann’s pessimism and to Meyer’s machine-age fantasies. The idealist synthesis of material modernity and organic culture, in the pages of UHU, forms the subject of this chapter. In its avant-garde photography, but also in its wider imagery of the built environment, design, and technology, UHU sought to embrace and ‘naturalise’ the modern, by invoking a kind of universal aestheticism. In this modernist conception, the quest for visual beauty (Schönheit) in manufactured objects and technological structures offered a symbolic means of reconciling modernity with nature and traditional life, and hence resolving the oppositions of Kultur/Technik, Technik/Natur. The task for photographers and critics was to define this new, machine-age beauty, and – as the author of ‘Eine neue Künstler-Gilde’ puts it – teach the modern viewer how ‘to see’.5 That the ‘beauty of technology’ was perhaps less than self-evident emerges from a remarkable set of photo-illustrated articles in the popular science monthly Die Koralle. In articles such as the photographer Emil Hoppé’s ‘Poesie der

Figure 40  Page spread from Das deutsche Lichtbild, 1927.

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Technik’ (Poetry of technology) (September 1927), ‘Das Gesicht des Zeitalter’ (The face of the age) by Paul Wiegler (September 1929), and W. M. Schering’s ‘Warum sind Maschinen schön?’ (Why are machines beautiful?) (January 1931), Die Koralle’s contributors seek to validate machine-age aesthetics, largely in historicist terms, as an expression of the contemporary ‘Zeitgeist’.6 Steel bridges, for Hoppé, embody the ‘material-bound rhythm’ (stoff-gebundenen Rhythmus) of the modern age, just as stone buildings were the ‘authentic “landmarks”’ (wahrhafte ‘Marksteine’) of classical and medieval cultures.7 W. M. Schering’s article, published four years later, reflects the growing ascendancy of the machine aesthetic in the early 1930s. Just as Rousseau and Goethe taught us to see the beauty in nature, so [o]ur active, fast-moving and restless age appreciates only one beauty, which thrills us somehow, affects us, as the expression goes. So must we say, beauty is an emotional value. … For us these technical creations are indeed no longer dead, frozen things, they are living beings, whose precise operations, whose capabilities, command our admiration.8

The beauty of technology, in these authors’ accounts, is about more than mere aesthetics: it is a demand for the cultural validation of machine-age forms and mass materials, as the authentic expression of the modern, mechanised era. The negotiation of this nebulous ideal, in UHU’s photo-pages and articles, was typically eclectic, reflecting the diversity and abundance of its photographic content. In its late-1920s issues, images of mass housing blocks, and of the rectilinear living spaces of the moderne Wohnkultur (modern lifestyle), were augmented, and modulated, by features celebrating the symmetrical curves of ceramic insulators, or an aircraft fuselage. Other stories captured the austere beauty of historical buildings and stone bridges,9 and the intricate pattern forms of religious architecture. Such picturesque excursions were more than mere nostalgia: they described the complementary elements of UHU’s holistic modernism, which sought to integrate technology and nature, progress and tradition, rationalism and spirituality.

A snapshot: October 1925 The feature articles in UHU’s October 1925 issue, marking the magazine’s first anniversary, offer a means of capturing, in summary, the confluent themes and

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narratives that would shape its modernist identity. Typical of UHU’s broad-based editorial character, the perspectives of these various authors cannot be reduced to a unified world view. Common to them all, however, is an intense preoccupation with the new, as the dominant theme in all aspects of modernity: cultural, social, scientific, and economic. The contributions of UHU’s authors and image-makers reflect the pivotal significance of their contemporary moment, in which Weimar turned toward the fragile possibilities of renewal and reconstruction. A unifying factor among the symbols of the new modernity was the principle of rationalisation, underlying both the self-formation of the modern, efficient individual and the construction of a technocratic, Americanised economy. The ideal social contract that the principle contains is represented by archetypal figures, photographically reified in two of the magazine’s feature articles. In the first, the vast power of American capitalism is personified in the patrician figure of Frank Woolworth, described as turning over ‘3 million marks a day’ and as the builder of the ‘world’s tallest building’10 – a success, the article makes clear, built on multiple duplications of a standardised business model, and on appeal to a mass consumer market.11 The totalised systems of production and consumption symbolised by Woolworth’s – as the article puts it: ‘One finds there simply everything’ – describe a consensual disciplining of the social body, through the construction and satisfaction of its aggregate desires.12 The model is utopian, as it pushes continuously toward perfection of the material and social world; and, by the same token, of the individuals who are its products and operators. This symbolic ideal is embodied in the youthful, athletic new woman, pictured, in the October 1925 issue, in the disciplined poses of ‘Rhythmische Gymnastik’ (Rhythmic gymnastics). As the article’s author, Hertha Feist, insists, the new exercise ‘systems’ represent more than a means to fitness and physical beauty; they are a preparation for the dynamic, technocratic future: Not only girls and women, who want to keep themselves youthful, attractive and healthy … the busiest men are also beginning to grasp that in our age tremendous progress is made as much by means of a purposefully [ziel- und zweckbewußt] developed body, as by the mind that is always conquering new areas of knowledge and creating the wonders of new technology.13

Like the modern department store, Feist’s self-contained, purposeful gymnasts describe an ideal unity of mind and body, reason and desire: the perfection of the body equates to an ordered, materially plentiful society. As if to complete the circle, UHU’s new woman reappears later in the magazine, as the driver and mechanic of her own convertible.14

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If the idea of America contained the promise of a technological utopia, it also crystallised anxieties about this possible future. The dilemma is articulated in a lengthy photo-illustrated feature from the October 1925 issue, which differs markedly in tone from the other articles. ‘Konfuzius oder Ford?’ (Confucius or Ford?), by the Austrian journalist Colin Ross, subtitled ‘The collision between Chinese culture and American civilisation’, describes the vivid paradox of a contemporary world caught between traditional life and modernity: In modern Chinese cities rickshaw drivers continue to claim their place, seemingly without difficulty, alongside the electric tram and the car. … Camel caravans follow the same path as the railway, and haul the same freight, and it is by no means easy to distinguish which operation is cheaper and more economical.15

Given the vast disparity in German and US living standards at this period,16 the article reads, irresistibly, as displacement – and indeed, the author acknowledges as much: ‘This is not only a Chinese, but simultaneously a European, even world problem.’17 In this context, the vehemence with which Ross rejects Americanisation is particularly striking. Henry Ford is compared, explicitly, to Genghis Khan: ‘Both represent a concentration of power, both are imperialists, aggressive in their intent’;18 America’s promotion of world ‘democracy’ is, he continues, driven purely by the need for new markets and sources of raw materials, and is ‘inevitably’ militaristic.19 The accompanying photographs highlight the incongruity of China’s encounters with modernity: a modern freighter unloads onto ‘1000-year-old’ sail-powered junks; ‘high-speed locomotives’ pass beneath the walls of a historical Peking temple. ‘Konfuzius oder Ford?’ exemplifies the Kulturpessimismus expressed by critics of modernity on the Weimar right.20 Whilst Ross’s xenophobic antimodernism is atypical of UHU, the appearance of the Kultur/Zivilisation binary at the heart of the October 1925 issue is telling. The article speaks, in broader terms, to contemporary anxieties about a loss of cultural identity in a rationalised, Americanised future – what Stefan Zweig, in a 1925 article for the Berlin BörsenCourier, termed the ‘monotonisation of the world’.21 Viewed in this light, Ross’s discordant views can be seen as shifting the issue’s editorial balance toward a more inclusive position, that both questions the dynamic certainties of technocratic modernism and insists on the prerogatives of German culture and tradition. An implicit visual response to this injunction emerges, later in the October 1925 issue, in a review article on the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition

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in Mannheim.22 Featuring reproductions of sombre works by Heinrich Davringhausen, Carlo Mense, Otto Dix, and others, the article hails the new art as expressing the contemporary zeitgeist, caught between the traumatic past and uncertain future: Here speaks a different world; children of an epoch of poison gases, of aeroplanes and radio raising their voice, which does not always sound sweet, but says what it means. This stillness is eloquent: behind it is not silence, but a roaring and crashing so vast that ordinarily we don’t hear it: the chaos of our times, overlaid with a thin, smooth layer of coloured varnish.23

The paired images that illustrate this ‘stillness’ perfectly capture its underlying tensions (Figure 41): The Widow by Otto Dix shows the figure of a veiled mourner, spectral and silent in her unending ritual; on the facing page, Georg Scholz’s The Businessman embodies the dispassionate, worldly values of the new technocracy. For the review’s author, the melancholy world view projected by the Neue Sachlichkeit artists describes an absolute truth, expressed with unflinching ‘Intensity. Clarity of conception. Severity of feeling. Strength of representation.’24 Like the 1929 article on the New Photography, the review reads as a declaration of editorial values:25 the critical realism celebrated in the paintings reflects UHU’s own humanist response to technological modernity, defined not by cultural

Figure 41  Page spread from ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ (New Objectivity), UHU, October 1925, pp. 60–1.

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pessimism, but by a dream of reconciliation and synthesis.26 This gradualist, humanising impulse would define the magazine’s engagement with modernist design and architecture.

Grid totalities UHU’s projections of technological modernity, in the years before the Great Depression, express the complex mix of optimism and ambivalence foreshadowed in the October 1925 issue. Alongside the many images celebrating the achievements and possibilities of the machine age,27 UHU’s photography suggests continued anxieties about the technological ideal. These tensions can be intuited, to some degree, in the notable absences. Most strikingly, given the decade’s global cult of aviation, and of motorised transport in general, there are relatively few idealised photographs of automobiles or aeroplanes scattered through its 1920s issues.28 Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight of 1927, for example, is recorded not in images of the aircraft and its dashing aviator, but only two years later, in a series of abstracted, sublimated backgrounds beneath the text of Brecht’s Lindbergh radio play.29 The car appears similarly downplayed as a symbol: features invoke the prospect of motoring accidents and traffic congestion,30 and the liberating possibilities of motorised leisure,31 but only rarely is the automobile presented, in itself, as an aesthetic object. A title-page photograph from April 1929 provides an unusual exception, but even here the focus is on the novel spectacle of a woman racing-car driver rather than on the machine itself, which is largely cropped out.32 The cumulative impression, from an overview of the magazine’s first five years, is of reticence; as if UHU’s communitarian social ideal remained at odds with the individualistic, consumerist modernity conjured by fetishised images of aviation and the motor car. UHU’s vision of technological modernity was constructed, more characteristically, on photographs of the built environment: skyscrapers and housing estates, modernist interiors, industrial engineering. A succession of feature stories and photo-pages, throughout the 1925–9 period, sought to capture the emergent ‘face of the new Germany’ in prestige architecture, and in the functional forms of factory buildings and mass housing projects.33 As if in declaration of this intent, a photo-set under this banner title appeared in UHU of February 1926.34 The choice of buildings is intriguing: UHU’s modernist future is here represented by Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus, completed in 1924, and a

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resonant symbol of Hamburg’s postwar economic reconstruction (Figure 42). The building’s expressionist angularity, accentuated in this symmetrical view, speaks to organic principles of growth and imaginative subjectivity – the values that functionalist modernism suppressed in favour of rationalised construction and modularity.35 On the following page, the organicist aesthetic is reaffirmed, in a photograph of the Borsig engineering company’s offices in Tegel, designed by Eugen Schmohl: the rectilinear geometry of the tower block is softened by slender mullions, jutting cornices, and a mannerist top section with arched windows and curving roof lines.36 The ‘face of the new Germany’, in this account, is subtly shaped by memories spanning the war years, recalling both the visionary fantasies of expressionist utopian architecture, and the decorative indulgences of the Jugendstil.37 Photo-pages such as ‘Das Gesicht des neuen Deutschland’ point to tensions within Weimar modernism over its defining forms and symbols: a dialectic, in the terms proposed in this book, between a modernism of the body and of the machine. In the contemporary debates, and in historiographical tradition, such binaries were subsumed within a starker opposition, pitting progressive modernism as a whole against the forces of reactionary tradition. This duality is exemplified in

Figure 42  ‘Das Gesicht des neuen Deutschland: Das Chilehaus in Hamburg’ (The face of the new Germany: The Chilehaus in Hamburg), UHU, February 1926, p. 39.

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a keynote article from the April 1926 issue, presenting the opposing viewpoints of the Bauhaus director Walter Gropius and the traditionalist architect Paul SchultzeNaumburg, titled: ‘Wer hat Recht? – Traditionelle Baukunst oder Bauen in neuen Formen’ (Who is right? – traditional architecture or building in new forms). The article provides a summary by Gropius of the Bauhaus’s architectural philosophy, and outlines the critical response of a leading conservative critic, on the value of tradition in domestic life. Whilst Schultze-Naumburg concedes the need for a ‘wholly new’ architecture for railway stations or industrial plants, this rationalist approach, he argues, should not apply to housing: Eating, drinking, sleeping, sociability, and cosy togetherness are extremely conservative things. … One would find, for example, no great transformation in the eating styles of people of similar social status between the years 1825 and 1925, but there is a great difference in the way they might have travelled from Leipzig to Berlin. … Indeed, there exists a general tendency to set domestic life in conscious opposition to the tumult of public life and the environment, into which so many people are forced every day by work and habit.38

The photographs that illustrate this timeless sociability are of elegant bourgeois residences: in a practical sense, the article presents no comparable scheme to rival the Bauhaus vision of prefabricated mass construction.39 Of more significance, for the debates on modernist architecture, is the critic’s remarkable concession of the public arena; traditionalism is here confined, defensively, to domestic space, and thus to an intimate association with the body and its rituals. Schultze-Naumburg’s arguments translate, in the selected images, to a rhetoric of pitched roofs, pediments, and sweeping curves – a semicircular bay, an arched colonnade – that are visually contrasted with the severe perpendiculars of the modern style. Ironically enough, Schultze-Naumburg’s appeal to tradition, at this symbolic level, connects to the work of organic modernists such as Alva Aalto or Hugo Häring: the curved form, invoking the human body, describes a challenge to the rationalist uniformity of straight lines.40 The geometric simplicity of the ‘modern architecture’ illustrated in ‘Wer hat Recht?’ equates to a powerful consonance of symbolism and ideology – a unity expressed, in the Bauhaus vision, as twin aspects of a functionalist doctrine.41 In Gropius’s argument, machine-age forms and construction techniques are intrinsic to technological modernity: The subjection of all aspects of building for our needs to industry and the economy, to their precision and efficient exploitation of space and material, will

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determine the form of our creations. A resolute consideration of all modern methods in the erection of our buildings must be promoted, even if the resulting forms, in diverging from the traditional, appear strange and surprising.42

‘Efficiency’, here, intends more than mere expediency. In Gropius’s radical conception, the ‘strange and surprising’ forms of modernist architecture are both the ‘beautiful’ products of a distilled, rationalist aesthetic, and the symbolic expression of modern life: ‘[T]he living environment of machines and vehicles, of their tempo and rhythm.’ Ornamentation is rejected on both counts: it ‘disturb[s] the clear contours of a building’ viewed as aesthetic object, and as the embodiment of an idea.43 Gropius’s modernist vision is actualised, in ‘Wer hat Recht?’ and in later UHU articles, in the modular grid forms of mass housing blocks and boxshaped houses. Apart from one notable exception, in the April 1926 article – a design for a skyscraper by Mies van der Rohe, based on a rounded, asymmetrical floor plan44 – feature stories and photographs of mass construction show the grid in its minimalist purity, embodying, in these multiple iterations, a new architectural orthodoxy. Gropius’s prophecy of dry-assembly houses made to order like ‘a pair of shoes’,45 is emphatically fulfilled in a nine-page article from May 1927, ‘Die Häuser-Fabrik’ (The housing factory), with text by Adolf Behne.46 Standardisation, as a rationalist principle, is here reified in the grid geometry of a Frankfurt housing project and the steel framework of a Detroit hotel, describing a universal visual and symbolic unity. In the opening image, for example (Figure 43), the simple perpendiculars of prefabricated slabs align – naturally enough – with floorboards and scaffolding, but also with the echoing forms in the neighbouring buildings; the grid’s expansive dominance is further enhanced by the absence of rival pattern forms. As in Germaine Krull’s photograph of a car assembly plant (Figure 9), the human agents appear less as the builders of this uniform world than as attendants on its autonomous, self-generating regularity – with the disembodied winch as a modern-day deus ex machina. The simple perpendiculars of ‘Die Häuser-Fabrik’ describe the universal pattern form of modernism’s geometric totality. Since the grid’s generative principle is irreducible and invariant, its built forms describe an ideal continuity; the same ‘factory’ produces both the Frankfurt housing estate and the Detroit hotel. In UHU’s feature stories, photographs recording this expansive, globalised presence are matched by images emphasising the grid’s confining, concentrative dimension, revealed in the cellular structure of a skyscraper or the exposed

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Figure 43 Photo-illustration from ‘Die Häuser-Fabrik’ (The housing factory), captioned ‘How houses are built today’, UHU, May 1927, pp. 90–1.

lower decks of an ocean liner.47 The movement between these two modes – describing, as it were, the unity of the grid’s geometric cosmos – is expressed in an extensively illustrated feature by Adolf Behne from October 1926, ‘Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen’ (The carefree room), subtitled ‘How our children will live’. The article provides a forceful statement of the minimalist credo, rejecting historicism, all forms of ornamentation (including paintings as wall decoration), and the expression of ‘personality’ in interior design. In their place, the modernist dwelling offers healthy, light-filled conditions for the new rationalist lifestyle: ‘We want nothing else but that, with a minimum of stress and a maximum of convenience, our home keeps us healthy, fresh and cheerful.’48 Stripped of their decorative clutter, and designed with the exactness and clarity of a ‘fountain pen … or telephone’, the interior now expresses ‘a new beauty, in which the relationships are as important as the objects’.49 The simple, repetitious forms of functionalist design, creating symbolic groupings, embody the gestalt unities of an ideal technological modernity.50 The photographs in ‘Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen’ describe the characteristic structural pattern forms of Weimar minimalism. Unlike the rigid uniformity

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of the Detroit hotel, the grid here typically presents as a matrix, governing the perpendicular alignments of windows, walls, and doorways, but allowing a degree of freedom in their spatial configuration. In the opening, double-page image (Figure 44), showing a ‘modern living room’ by Ernst May in general perspective, the simple regularity of the latticed window is broken from above by an asymmetric cantilevered gallery, with the top corner of the dominant grid occluded. Like Mondrian’s perpendicular compositions (Figure 19),51 asymmetry here produces a subtle dynamism, as the viewer’s perception – or the occupant’s, in the actual room – ‘completes’ the regular geometric pattern (Gestalt continuation and simplicity); visual order is fluidly constructed in the viewer’s engagement with the image, rather than constrained through axial symmetry.52 Like Moholy-Nagy’s total-array compositions (Figures 35–36, 38), the irregular placing of figures within the global pattern can be read symbolically, as describing the subject’s contained freedom within an ideal, egalitarian community. This association is implicitly invoked by Behne, for whom the spare, asymmetric interiors of Ernst May or Le Corbusier both enable, and symbolically represent, the liberating potential of rationalist modernity: ‘Our inclination toward simplicity and clarity is emphatically not puritanism or asceticism, but comes, on the contrary, from a joyful, thankful devotion to all the

Figure 44  Photo-illustration from ‘Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen’ (The carefree room), UHU, October 1926, pp. 22–3.

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richness and fullness of life.’53 A photo-illustration shows the inheritors of this modernist future playing absorbedly among the box-like forms of a children’s bedroom unit, designed by Alma Buscher of the Dessau Bauhaus. The dominance of the grid in modernist design reflected its potential as a universal template for architectural and design forms, and hence as a totalising symbol of the new modernity. Whilst this ascendancy is implicitly acknowledged across UHU’s feature stories, the grid’s minimalist aesthetic provokes a more ambivalent response: the photographic values in ‘Wer hat Recht?’ and ‘Die Häuser-Fabrik’, for example, suggest sober realism more than idealist rapture.54 Behne’s bold assertion, in ‘Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen’, of the ‘new beauty’ of grid architecture finds a significant echo in ‘Wie ein moderner Mensch wohnt’ (How a modern person lives) of May 1929, containing photos of Robert MalletStevens’s rigorously perpendicular Villa Noailles. Even here, however, the captions introduce a note of playful scepticism: ‘How a modern person lives: Even the flowers in their garden must bloom in geometrically aligned boxes.’55 The ironic inversion captures a general principle underlying UHU’s idealist photography: visual beauty was, first and foremost, a property of the natural environment (Figure 45), and of the human body. The grid, as sign and symbol of a manmade, mathematical world, presented an opposing aesthetic principle,

Figure 45  ‘Die schöne, schöne Welt’ (The beautiful, beautiful world), UHU, June 1929, pp. 78–9.

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which might, momentarily, be reconciled with the natural, but could never ultimately displace it.

The organic ideal The idea of nature as the ground of aesthetic sensibility is implicit to a keynote article of March 1926, celebrating ‘Die Schönheit der Technik’ (The beauty of technology). For the author – credited by initials only, as E. B. – the technological age heralds the ‘birth of a new art’ and a ‘new beauty’, expressed in the functionally perfected forms of sports cars or aeroplanes: Beautiful is the aeroplane, since it shed its spider’s web of wooden frames and wires, as it is now in structure and contour simply the pure incarnation of an idea. Of the idea: ‘Flight!’ … Where supreme instrumentality finds its form, there a technological object becomes a work of art.56

The author’s idealist vision recalls the concept of ‘machine selection’ or ‘evolution’, introduced by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier in L’Esprit Nouveau, with the designer-engineer imagined as the agent of a gradualist perfectibility.57 Jan Tschichold’s The New Typography (1928) continues the analogy: the ‘marvellous forms of technology’ emerge through a process which is ‘just as “organic” (in an intellectual sense)’ as that governing natural forms; as with nature, the ‘beauty’ of machines emerges from ‘the precise and economic expression of their function’.58 The organicist appeal of ‘Die Schönheit der Technik’ belongs, clearly, within this contemporary tradition, but also goes significantly further. Where, for Tschichold, the machine as ‘second nature’ is a metaphor for the functionalist ethos,59 for E. B., it describes a mystical unity: Did you see the electric D-train, a metallic thunderstorm, rush through the high forests of Bayern? The power that drives it, released by the hand of man but contained in its release, is a part of the same unfathomable mystery that makes the trees grow and the springs babble.60

The ‘beauty of technology’ is more than an analogue of the perfection found in the natural world; it is a manifestation of the same primal Naturzwecke that governs organic form and human aesthetic response.61 The ‘drop-shaped’ sports car, for this exuberant author, is the authentic ‘rigorous art’ of the age of Sachlichkeit.62

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The organic basis of technological form, as proposed by the author of ‘Die Schönheit der Technik’, is expressed in a strikingly different way in the accompanying images. Characteristically, UHU here avoids glamorised images of cars and aeroplanes, despite the clear invitation in the article. In their place, the opening spread features a cut-out of a porcelain insulator, photographed by Sasha Stone, and a row of cooling towers (Figure 46); another of Stone’s insulators appears on the following page, alongside the bulbous forms of ammonia containers in a chemicals factory. The focus on workaday objects and industrial buildings undercuts the commodity fetishism implied by the text: the notion that the desirable, charismatic products of the machine age could also supply its cultural meanings and aesthetic forms – the myth of advertising. The photographs, by contrast, describe less a displacement of the natural, as implied by machine ‘evolution’, than a symbolic return to nature: a quest for primal, organic forms and associations within the strange new landscapes of technological modernity.63 The natural geometric regularity of the insulators is echoed in the worn-looking containers and cooling towers – the caption compares them to ‘ancient Egyptian temples’; a pair of giant manual tongs is chosen for the ‘strange beauty’ of its ‘practical perfection’ (zweckmäßige Vollkommenheit). The images, taken together, form an odd collection – as if,

Figure 46  Page spread from ‘Die Schönheit der Technik’ (The beauty of technology), UHU, March 1926, pp. 54–5.

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having asserted the ‘beauty’ of technology, the editors cannot decide if this is an aesthetic, symbolic, or even a moral value: the technical perfection of a piano’s hammer action, connoting craftsmanship and high culture, shares a page spread with yet more insulators, here constructing a high-voltage plasma generator. On the article’s closing page, the grids and radial patterns of machine modernism make a belated, and bathetic, appearance: images capture the beauty of stacked fish cans and a ‘disinfection chamber’ for railway carriages. The ambiguities of ‘Die Schönheit der Technik’ reflect, in miniature, UHU’s unresolved and pluralist approach to technological modernity. The magazine’s authors covered a wide ideological spectrum, and it would be a mistake to take any one article as providing a representative view, or to view the images simply as illustrations of the accompanying texts. There are, nonetheless, significant continuities in the feature stories and photographs of the 1925–9 period. In the broadest terms, UHU’s advocacy of the functionalist modernism of the Bauhaus movement was tempered by images of a more organicised modernity: visions of sweeping curves and acute angles opposed, or moderated, the Euclidean regularities of the machine. Thus, for example, the dominance of the machine aesthetic, asserted in ‘Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen’ of October 1926, was reaffirmed in a lengthy article from the April 1927 issue, ‘Der Ingenieur als Schöpfer neuer Formen’ (The engineer as creator of new forms), with photos of a coal storage tower and a parabolic, concrete aircraft hangar (caption: ‘Pure functionality is always beautiful’).64 Photo-pages displaying the fish-like features of an aircraft carrier,65 or the expressionist grandeur of Copenhagen’s Grundtvigs Church,66 invoked alternative ideals – imaginative, organicist, individualistic, playful – whose photographic realisations momentarily countered the high-minded secularism of the Bauhaus era.67 UHU offered its most significant critical response to functionalism in architecture in two illustrated features from 1926. The response is implicit, in that neither article addresses modernist architecture head on, nor presents an alternative to the dominant functionalist paradigm – though they do explore the values and visual forms on which a renewed organic modernism might be built. ‘Grüne Architektur’ (Green architecture), from June 1926, with text by Robert Breuer, presents a series of Karl Blossfeldt’s studies of plant forms, alongside spectacular examples of similar organic structures in historical architecture: a magnified horsetail is mirrored in the dome of a Cairo mosque (Figure 47); a thirteenth-century Milanese candelabra resembles a branching stem of yellow balsam.68 The point of the comparison, as Breuer’s article underlines,

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Figure 47  Page spread from ‘Grüne Architektur’ (Green architecture), UHU, June 1926, pp. 30–1.

is not that organic pattern forms in architecture are an antique curiosity, but that Blossfeldt’s meticulous studies reveal the essential unity between human creativity – presented, here, as a universal and transhistorical faculty – and the immutable laws of organic growth: [A]n as yet unacknowledged, but nevertheless potent, law similarly governs nature and its growth and man and his works. There lives and works, if one may put it this way, the same constructive force [Bautrieb] in the blade of grass, the tree trunk and the flower, as in the brain, the nerves, and the hand of man. Beside the stone-grey lives the green architecture. Once admitted, a coherent understanding of the world’s being had to allow … that the rhythm of a tree trunk or flower head and the colour harmony of a butterfly or a bird’s plumage fulfils the most perfect laws that theoretical man has explored and applied through mathematics and optics.69

Breuer’s appeal to the holistic tradition in German natural science is made explicit, with four of Goethe’s aphorisms on the pursuit of knowledge reproduced (in traditional Fraktur script) beneath the text of the article. The first of these reads: ‘Man must persist in the belief that the incomprehensible can be comprehended. Otherwise he would not explore.’70 Like Hermann Hesse’s UHU article ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’ (The longing of our time for a worldview) of the same year,71 the burden of ‘Grüne Architektur’ is

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the inadequacy of technocratic rationalism as a ground of cultural and spiritual meaning. For Breuer, since creativity is the expression of our natural being, it follows that architectural forms should embody organic principles as much as the abstract laws of ‘mathematics and optics’. In UHU’s features on modern architecture, the dominant, modular forms of the grid invoke the ideal of an ordered, rationalised future of mass production and communal leisure. The Blossfeldt photographs, firmly placed in this architectural context in Breuer’s UHU article, describe an alternative, natural geometric order, governing the intricate forms and spatial relations of the organic world – and implicitly, for Breuer, those of an ideal, naturalised humanity. UHU’s discussion of these images forms an intriguing contrast to that of other contemporary critics. Whilst ‘Grüne Architektur’ argues for the holistic unity of nature and culture, for Walter Benjamin – writing after the publication of Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (English title: Art Forms in Nature) in 1928 – the incremental process of evolution is ‘diametrically opposed to human invention’. Significantly, Benjamin’s invention/nature polarity is gendered, describing an opposition between purposeful human activity and the ‘feminine and vegetable principle of life’:72 Benjamin, here, reflects the broad contemporary view of the Neue Sachlichkeit era, as a shift from the ‘feminine’ spirituality of expressionism to the new ‘masculine’ age of the machine.73 Similar to Benjamin’s piece, in terms of this gendered dichotomy, is Karl Nierendorf ’s preface to the book’s first edition. In this account, though art and nature are ‘intimately bound up’, they are distinguished by the time-bound subjectivity of the creative act: ‘[T]he peculiar stamp of an individually fashioned form, the newly created rather than the predetermined or repeated form.’74 Nierendorf ’s formulation, describing a harmonious opposition, allows for a normative synthesis: the modern age, in which ‘the instruments of our struggle are iron, concrete, steel, light, and ether waves’, also expresses nature’s ‘eternal … elemental’ values, but only in sport and body culture, and in the organic movements of expressive dance. Nature is incorporated into modernism not by copying its pattern forms, but through mutuality – ‘glass walls, linking the house organically with the garden’ – and by compartmentalising the natural within the feminine-gendered domain of the expressive body.75 Like the dichotomies of technology/nature and modernity/ tradition, the opposition of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is here implicitly aligned along the same common axis, relegating the feminine-organic to a subordinate and passive role, or projecting it into the past. As Chapter 7 describes, photographs of the naturalised female body, expressing the ideals of this organic

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modernism, were central to UHU’s visual culture in the late 1920s – but would ultimate give way to the masculinist culture of the Depression years. In UHU’s features on modern design and architecture, Breuer’s appeal for a Goethean holism remains substantially unanswered, whether, perhaps, for the lack of contemporary examples, or for the magazine’s closeness to the Bauhaus and its associated figures. Breuer was, however, commissioned for a second architectural story, that appeared in the 1926 Christmas issue. ‘Stätten der Andacht’ (Places of devotion), containing full-page photographs of minarets, mosques, and cathedral interiors, reflects the magazine’s diverse preoccupation with pattern, both as visual form and as the bearer of cultural meaning. The photos offer spectacular examples of natural geometric patterning – helixes, petal motifs, lattices, arabesques – forming a seamless continuation with the architectural imagery in ‘Grüne Architektur’: indeed, the same Delhi minaret is featured in both stories. The emphasis in Breuer’s text is different, however. Rather than stressing the organic origins of these pattern forms, Breuer defines the buildings as the complete and absolute expression of their culture: ‘The temples are the architectonic essence of the landscape. They are, at once, the clearest mirror of the people, of its way of life, its wisdom, and its worldview.’76 In the holistic vision presented across the two articles, the diversity of these material forms stems from a common origin, with culture defined as the expression of man’s organic being. In UHU’s visual culture, as in Weimar society, this ideal would find its expressive forms in the ritual embrace of a sunlit natural world.

Notes 1 Hannes Meyer, “Die neue Welt” (The new world), Das Werk 13, no. 7 (1926); from Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 445–6. 2 Gerhart Hauptmann, preface to Kurt Hielscher, Deutschland: Baukunst und Landschaft (Germany: Architecture and Landscape), 1924. Quoted in Brian Stokoe, “Renger-Patzsch: New Realist Photographer,” in Germany, the New Photography, 1927-33: Documents and Essays, ed. David Mellor (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), 97. 3 See above, pp. 13–14. 4 Hans Windisch, ed. Das deutsche Lichtbild (Berlin: Schultz, 1927). 5 See above, pp. 112–15. 6 For an in-depth discussion of these articles, and the technological aesthetic of Die Koralle, see Bendig and Oels, “Die Koralle,” 399–403. For the concept of the

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“zeitgeist” in architectural modernism, see Tim Benton, “Building Utopia,” in Modernism, ed. Wilk. 7 Emil Otto Hoppé, “Poesie der Technik” (Poetry of technology), Die Koralle, J3, H6, September 1927, pp. 288–9. 8 “Unserer tätigen, schnell-lebigen und unruhigen Zeit will nur eine Schönheit gefallen, die uns irgendwie mitreisst, uns affiziert, wie der Ausdruck lautet. So müssen wir sagen, Schönheit ist ein Affekt-Wert. … Für uns sind eben diese technischen Geschöpfe keine toten, starren Dinge mehr, es sind lebendige Wesen, deren exaktes Arbeiten, deren Leistungsfähigkeit uns Bewunderung abnötigt.” W. M. Schering, “Warum sind Maschinen schön?” (Why are machines beautiful?), Die Koralle, J6, H10, January 1931, pp. 438–9. 9 Karl Scheffler, “Die Sprache der stummen Dinge” (The language of speechless things), UHU, J3, H5, February 1927, pp. 30–41. 10 The accompanying image was the second photograph of the Woolworth Building in UHU, 1925. See Figure 28, and accompanying text, p. 98. 11 Frank Donald, “Wie man täglich 3 Millionen Mark umsetzt” (How one turns over 3 million marks a day), UHU, J2, H1, October 1925, pp. 2–7. 12 Ibid., p. 6. For the relationship between rationalised production and the erotics of commodity culture, see Lungstrum, “The Display Window,” 122–3. 13 Hertha Feist, “Rhythmische Gymnastik” (Rhythmic gymnastics), UHU, J2, H1, October 1925, p. 30. 14 “Was man vom Auto wissen muß” (What one must know about cars), UHU, J2, H1, October 1925, pp. 86–91. 15 Colin Ross, “Konfuzius oder Ford? – Der Zusammenstoß chinesischer Kultur und amerikanischer Zivilisation” (Confucius or Ford? – The collision between Chinese culture and American civilisation), UHU, J2, H1, October 1925, p. 21. 16 Mary Nolan records that, as late as 1932, the United States had 138 cars per thousand inhabitants, compared to only 8 per thousand in Germany. Nolan, Visions of Modernity, 110. 17 Ross, “Konfuzius oder Ford?,” p. 23. 18 Ibid., p. 22. 19 Ibid., pp. 27, 23. The article concludes with overtly racist forebodings of the “coloureds” (Farbigen) gaining supremacy over the “white race,” after they “thoughtlessly” gave away their technological know-how (ibid., p. 28). 20 As Detlev Peukert notes, the writings of progressive and reactionary critics of modernisation tended to employ many of the same metaphors. Ross’s claim of US economic “imperialism,” in this article appears to describe a nationalist rather than socialist frame of reference. Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 186–9. 21 Zweig’s article (“Die Monotonisierung der Welt,” Berlin Börsen-Courier, February 1, 1925) strikes an apocalyptic note: “[M]ore and more the fine aroma of the

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particular in cultures is evaporating, their colourful foliage being stripped with ever-increasing speed, rendering the steel-grey pistons of mechanical operation, of the modern world machine, visible beneath the cracked veneer … Let us be clear about it! It is probably the most urgent, the most critical phenomenon of our time.” Translation from Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 397. The article, “Neue Sachlichkeit – Wohin steuert die Malerei?” (New objectivity – Where is painting heading?) (UHU, J2, H1, October 1925, pp. 57–61), is credited to “Douglas Dick.” I can find no reference elsewhere to this name, and it may well be a staff writer’s pseudonym. Douglas Dick (pseud.?), “Neue Sachlichkeit,” p. 60. Ibid., p. 61. See above, pp. 112–15. Frank Trommler locates the Neue Sachlichkeit within the reformist tradition in architecture dating back to the pre-1914 period, rather than viewing it as a purely postwar reaction to the artistic excesses of expressionism. Frank Trommler, “The Creation of a Culture of Sachlichkeit,” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 477–83. See, for example, the photo-illustrated feature “Maschinen Rekorde: Was Maschinen heute leisten” (Machine records: What machines can achieve today), UHU, J4, H1, October 1927, pp. 2–11. The article, with text by John FuhlbergHorst, details the prodigious capacities of hole-borers, cigarette assembly machines, industrial presses, and so forth. The clearest contrast is with Ullstein’s elite woman’s magazine Die Dame, in which automobiles were projected as an essential element of the fashionable lifestyle throughout the period. The tone is set in the title-page photograph from Die Dame, J51, H17, May 1924, showing the actress Olga Tschechowa at the wheel of a convertible. The caption reads: “The latest fashion [Die Mode]: everyone is learning to drive themselves!” Aeroplanes, by contrast, rarely appear in Die Dame’s 1920s photography, though a title page graphic from October 1929 points the way forward: a pair of elegant socialites are shown walking away from their piloted aircraft, above the caption: “The fashionable couple of 1929/30.” For an account of the frenzied enthusiasm which greeted Lindbergh’s arrival in Europe, see Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 241–67. Though Lindbergh’s triumphal tour in May 1927 did not include a visit to Germany, a rapturous ode to the aviator by the poet Ivan Goll was published in the same month, in the Berliner Tageblatt (ibid., p. 267). Other revue magazines were less euphoric than Goll, but did include occasional photographs of Lindbergh (e.g. Das Magazin, J5, Nr. 49, September

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38

Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal 1928, p. 2631); Revue des Monats historicised the transatlantic flight in a 1928 article: “Die den Ocean überquerten” (Those who crossed the ocean), Revue des Monats, J2, H6, April 1928, pp. 622–6. Traffic congestion, as a future prospect, is discussed in “Berlin in 50 Jahren” (Berlin in 50 years’ time), UHU, J2, H9, June 1926, pp. 48–56 (see above, pp. 101–2). A November 1929 feature on motoring accidents focuses, bizarrely, on the “poet Brecht’s” collision with a tree, including photographs of the accident scene and reconstructions: “Ein lehrreicher Autounfall” (An instructive car accident), UHU, J6, H2, November 1929, pp. 62–5. The automobile, as the essential tool of the modern, emancipated “weekend,” appears in two features on youthful camping excursions: “Wochenende” (Weekend), UHU, J2, H12, September 1926, pp. 2–9; “5 Mädchen und ein Zelt” (Five girls and a tent), UHU, J3, H8, May 1927, pp. 6–11. See Chapter 7, below, pp. 163–6. “Fahrt in dem Frühling” (Drive in spring), title-page photograph, UHU, J5, H7, April 1929, p. 9. Modern buildings, typically shown in general perspective, were a common photographic subject in many of the Weimar magazines: Der Querschnitt, in particular, routinely published architectural images throughout the 1920s: see, for example, the multiple photo-pages in Der Querschnitt, J7, H6, June 1927. Among the revue magazines, Scherl’s Magazin’s discussion of modern architecture rivalled UHU in its sustained engagement and idealism. See, in particular, the six-page article on the new modernist housing estates, “Das Heim in der Sonne” (The sunlit home), text by Alfred Conrad-Hansen, Scherl’s Magazin, J3, H2, February 1927, pp. 114–9. “Das Gesicht des neuen Deutschland” (The face of the new Germany), UHU, J2, H5, February 1926, pp. 39–41. The Chilehaus image was later reused in a photomontage, in a keynote photoillustrated feature marking the tenth anniversary of the armistice: “10 Jahre Frieden, 1918–1928: Ein Film für Vergeßliche” (10 years of peace: A film for the forgetful), UHU, J5, H2, November 1928, pp. 13–21. The article makes emotive use of group images – children “sleeping instead of eating,” for example – to chart progress toward the technological “German wonder” of the article’s present day. “Das Gesicht des neuen Deutschland,” p. 40. For the continued influence of expressionism on 1920s architecture, see Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Expressionism and the New Objectivity,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (1983), 108–20. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, in “Wer hat Recht? – Traditionelle Baukunst oder Bauen in neuen Formen” (Who is right? – Traditional architecture or building

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in new forms), UHU, J2, H7, April 1926, p. 40. This translation is a slightly amended version of the text in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 444. In the final part of his statement Schultze-Naumburg introduces his racist theories of “bloodlines” and “Nordic forms” (ibid., p. 445); the incongruity, in the context of a discussion of domestic architecture, is startling. 39 Five years after the publication of the UHU article, Schultze-Naumburg was able to settle his argument with the Bauhaus once and for all, after the election, in November 1931, of a Nazi majority to the Dessau town council. According to Richard J. Evans, it was an official inspection by Schultze-Naumburg that precipitated the Dessau school’s closure. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 123. 40 For a general discussion of the organic principle in interwar architecture and design, see Benton, “Modernism and Nature.” 41 The “Bauhaus idea” is outlined in a 1928 article on “Keywords of our time:” “The Bauhaus aims to serve the contemporary development of housing, from simple domestic objects through to the complete dwelling. Through systematic research in its workshops, it sets out to discover the form of each object through its natural functions, since the modern person, who doesn’t wear historical garments, needs also dwellings that are appropriate for them and for their times.” Fritz Gorodiski, “Der Bauhaus-Gedanke” (The Bauhaus idea), from “Schlagworte unserer Zeit” (Keywords of our time), UHU, J4, H10, July 1928, p. 29. 42 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 440–1. 43 Ibid. 44 “Wer hat Recht?,” p. 33. 45 Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 440–1. 46 “Die Häuser-Fabrik” (The housing factory), UHU, J3, H5, May 1927, pp. 90–8. 47 UHU, J4, H10, July 1928, p. 59. For a discussion of the modernist grid, see above, pp. 60–5. 48 Adolf Behne, “Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen” (The carefree room), UHU, J3, H1, October 1926, p. 31. 49 Ibid., p. 34. 50 As Rosemarie Haag Bletter notes, in Behne’s own architecture functionalist design did not mean an exclusive application of rectilinear forms. In Der moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building) of 1926, Behne writes: “Rectilinear space, the straight line, is not functional but mechanistic design. If I proceed consistently from biological function, then orthogonal space is above all senseless because its four corners are dead space, useless. If I demarcated that portion of a room that is actually used, I would necessarily arrive at the curve. The ebb of organic life does not know the right angle and the straight line.” Translation from Bletter, “Expressionism and the New Objectivity,” 119.

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51 See above, p. 62. 52 Jan Tschichold describes the asymmetric layouts of the New Typography in comparable terms, as a liberation from the constricting rule of tradition. See above, pp. 63–4, and Figure 20. 53 Behne, “Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen,” pp. 31–3. 54 Note, also, the doubtful enthusiasm of a caption on p. 34 of “Das Zimmer ohne Sorgen”: “Corner of a room by the architect Le Corbusier, whose sense of space makes all ornamentation superfluous, and in this way achieves an unanticipated but perhaps, for many, all too rigorous harmony.” 55 Photo caption from “Wie ein moderner Mensch wohnt” (How a modern person lives), UHU, J5, H8, May 1929, p. 10. 56 E.B., “Die Schönheit der Technik” (The beauty of technology), UHU, J2, H6, March 1926, pp. 54–6. 57 See above, p. 64–5. The “evolution of automobile forms 1900–21” appears in L’Esprit Nouveau no. 13, 1922. Reproduced in Tim Benton, “Dreams of Machines: Futurism and L’esprit Nouveau,” Journal of Design History 3, no. 1 (1990): 23. 58 Tschichold, The New Typography, 65. 59 Ibid., 65. 60 “Die Schönheit der Technik,” p. 60. 61 See above, p. 18. 62 “Die Schönheit der Technik,” pp. 56, 58. 63 Similar articles also appear in Scherl’s Magazin at this period; see, for example: “Steinener Schwung, stählener Rhythmus” (Stone swing, steel rhythm), Scherl’s Magazin, J4, H8, August 1928, pp. 914–9. 64 “Der Ingenieur als Schöpfer neuer Formen” (The engineer as creator of new forms), UHU, J3, H7, April 1927, p. 28. 65 “Familienähnlichkeit in der Technik” (Family resemblance in technology), UHU, J5, H3, December 1928, p. 62. The same photograph was also published in Die Koralle: “Warum sind die Maschine schön?,” Die Koralle, J6, H10, January 1931, p. 437. 66 “Der neue Kirchenstil” (The new style in church building), photo-page, UHU, J5, H8, May 1929, p. 50. 67 UHU’s perspectives on modernity also included many full-page graphic illustrations and satirical cartoons, describing the absurdities, contradictions, and anxieties of an era of rapid social and technological change. Much of this was work of the highest quality: UHU’s regular artists included Walter Trier, Charles Girod, H. M. Bateman, and Erich Godal, with Jeanne Mammon as an occasional contributor. Girod’s work, in particular, exquisitely captures the isolation and alienation of Weimar urban life. There is, unfortunately, no space in the present book for a proper discussion of this topic.

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68 Das Magazin’s article “Urformen der Kunst” (Das Magazin, J7, Nr. 83, July 1931, pp. 6149–53) employs a more broad-brush comparative approach, pairing the Blossfeldt images with the Siegessäule (victory column) in Berlin’s Tiergarten, with a woman’s fan, an African sculpture, and so forth. Blossfeldt’s photographs were widely reproduced in the photo-illustrated press at this period. 69 Robert Breuer, “Grüne Architektur” (Green architecture), UHU, J2, H9, June 1926, p. 38. 70 “Der Mensch muß bei dem Glauben verharren, daß das Unbegreifliche begreiflich sei; er wurde sonst nicht forschen.” Goethe aphorism, quoted in “Grüne Architektur,” p. 38. 71 See above, pp. 15–16. 72 Benjamin, “News About Flowers (1928),” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Jennings, Eiland and Smith, 155. 73 Shearer West, The Visual Arts in Germany 1890-1937: Utopia and Despair (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 162. See also Max Brod’s 1929 article, “Die Frau und die neue Sachlichkeit” (Women and the new objectivity), translation in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 205–6. 74 Karl Nierendorf, “Preface to Karl Blossfeldt, Unformen Der Kunst,” in Germany, the New Photography, ed. Mellor, 17. 75 Ibid., 17–19. 76 “Die Tempel sind der arkitechtonische Extrakt der Landschaft: sie sind zugleich das klarste Spiegelbild des Volkes, seiner Lebensart, seiner Weisheit und seines Weltgefühls.” Weltgefühl translates literally as “world feeling,” and has no close equivalent in English. Robert Breuer, “Stätten der Andacht” (Places of devotion), UHU, J3, H3, December 1926, p. 9.

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How can beauty be immoral? … No woman has ever prudishly veiled true aesthetic forms. The cult of life, which is built on beauty, has never accepted that she stay hidden from view. Prof. G. Heimdall, ‘The Nude’, Revue des Monats, December 1926 For critics of Weimar magazine culture, such as the novelist Edlef Köppen, the superficial character of the popular monthlies was defined by their casual eroticism, the ‘legs or bosoms of naked girls’ that formed an ‘inexhaustible’ element of the magazines’ photography.1 Images of nubile dancers were, in Köppen’s view, simply part of the photographic parade, alongside the other desirable objects of modernity: the ‘dress of an elegant woman … boxers, horse races’ and so forth. Reduced to fetishised body parts, photographic nudes were pure ephemeral product, a response to consumerist demands for distraction and visual variety. Taken as a whole, Köppen’s characterisation of the revue magazines is not unreasonable. Responding to the new permissive climate and relaxed censorship regime of the Weimar Republic, the new monthlies offered images of a youthful body culture – predominantly, unclothed, and semi-clothed female dancers – projecting the ideal of an emancipated, leisured, and sexually liberated future society.2 Much of this material was, as Köppen states, mildly erotic studio photographs of ‘naked girls’, peppered among the diverse, proliferating imagery of aesthetic modernity. Marking the magazines’ self-identity as progressive, worldly, and pleasure-seeking, nude and semi-nude photographs were included in the first issues of some of the post-1924 monthlies, and had a constant – though always constrained – presence in one or other leading title throughout the Weimar era. There were, however, considerable variations in how nude photography was presented: in the prominence of nude images in the editorial mix, and in

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the aesthetic and symbolic conventions that were employed. The body culture imagery in UHU, in particular, went far beyond the commercialised eroticism of some of its competitors. Whilst the magazine published some of the formulaic nude studies that were the staple fare of titles such as Das Magazin and Das Leben, UHU was both more selective in its images and more comprehensive in its treatment, in that the nude – both female and male – was incorporated, discursively, within the magazine’s organic-modernist social ideal.

‘Hothouse flowers’ The female nudes in Weimar monthlies were embodiments of a resonant modern archetype that emerged in popular culture in the years after the First World War: the alluring, transgressive figure of the emancipated, and sexually liberated, new woman.3 For the revue magazines, trading in visions of a utopian modernity, the new woman’s eroticism was key both to her spectacular appeal, and to the construction of a normative ideal of modern femininity more in tune with the dominant, patriarchal values of Weimar society.4 At the heart of this was an implicit continuity between the fantasy figure – the pliant nudes in studio portraits – and her ‘real world’ sisters, captured in the proliferating images of modern leisure with which the revue magazines filled their pages. The exuberant gymnasts, bathers, film stars, and fashionable urbanites of Das Magazin or Revue des Monats were the idealised, youthful protagonists of a sunlit modern world. Safely cloistered in the blank, windowless interiors of the photographic studio, the new woman could also express her erotic subjectivity, in images that both incorporated the photographic nude within a ‘timeless’ classical tradition, and presented erotic display as a performative aspect of modern femininity. Though the permissive content of the revue magazines varied, the dialogue between rival titles suggests the commercial advantage – or imperative, even – of including some measure of erotic material as part of their monthly offering. Das Leben’s switch to photo-illustration, in 1926, saw the immediate inclusion of the kind of formulaic, commercial erotica pioneered by Das Magazin two years earlier. The November 1926 launch issue of Revue des Monats followed suit, with a photo-page of a young woman painting at an easel, naked except for high-heeled shoes, her modesty protected by the oversized palette on her left arm;5 the same weightless image re-appeared in Das Leben the following spring,

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alongside five other nude photo-pages in the magazine’s ‘Carnival!’ (Fasching) March 1927 issue. The seductive promise, encoded none too subtly in images like ‘Die Palette’, was of a new age of erotic liberation and permissive morality. The title page of Das Magazin’s second issue (October 1924) declared its pioneering intent with a soft-focus studio photo of a naked woman beneath a blossoming branch, captioned ‘Hothouse flowers’ (Treibhausblüten); inside photo-pages feature an ecstatic vision of the dancer Edmonde Guy clasping her breasts, and another dancer in side view, naked except for her broad-brimmed hat, stockings, and high-heeled shoes. These photographs, and articles in the same issue on the beauty of women’s backs, on leg painting, lidos, and ballet dancers, constitute an emphatic declaration of the magazine’s self-image as a worldly, hedonistic, and permissive modern title, a reputation it would continue to foster throughout the 1920s and beyond. Nude photographs, in this formula, provided an erotic frisson – appealing particularly, perhaps, to male readers – and were part of the magazine’s mythic construction of the desirable, sexually amenable modern woman. The nude photography that promoted this blithe ideal in Das Magazin and its rivals follows a set of pictorial conventions and decorums that varies little over the course of the 1920s issues. The photographs are, almost exclusively, of slender young white women, typically identified in the captions as dancers; images of black American performers, notably Josephine Baker, provide an occasional exoticised variant. Many of the photos are artfully posed figure studies from the studios of d’Ora-Benda or Frantisek Drtikol, showing female nudes in side or back view, some elaborately staged and with portentous titles such as ‘The day dawns’, ‘The sphinx’, or ‘The prisoner’: a model perched forlornly on a black box, with the ‘bars’ of the cell windows casting shadows across her naked back.6 The solemn poses and classical allusions invoke fine-art and Hellenistic traditions, as an article from the December 1926 issue of Revue des Monats explains: ‘We live in a second Renaissance. Sport is the clincher, just as it was with the Greeks seven hundred years before the birth of Christ.’ For the author, Professor G Heimdall, the female nude is both the ancient subject of art, and the expression of women’s irrepressible desire ‘sich nackt zur Schau zu stellen’ (to display themselves naked); men, in this bumptious narrative, are mere bewildered bystanders to modern women’s renewed ‘Exhibitionslust’ (exhibitionism).7 If the new woman retained her timeless role as aesthetic object, she was also the possessor of a newly assertive and self-confident sexuality: the abstract ideal

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invoked by ‘classical’ nudes was complemented, often in the same magazine issue, by the more earthy symbolism of ‘modern’ nudity. Photo-pages capturing the new ‘sex appeal’ – the term first appears in the Weimar monthlies in late 19288 – are more brazenly erotic, with images of smiling bare-breasted dancers, others coyly veiling their unclothed bodies with feathers, a banjo, or drapery, above insouciant captions: ‘Die Gretl hat ein Fuβband ein’ (Gretl has an anklet on) (Das Magazin, March 1930). The tone of these images is celebratory, playfully transgressive, and tinged with a reactionary anti-feminism: ‘Drei süße Herzchen’ (Three sweet little hearts), from Revue des Monats, January 1928, for example, shows a pouting model in a jaunty hat covering her breasts with heart-shaped boxes of chocolates;9 the March 1929 issue of Das Magazin offers ‘Illustrierte Kosenamen’ (Illustrated pet names), a four-page photo-montaged collection of naked models playing the roles of ‘mousey’ (Mausi), ‘sugar cube’(Zuckerl) (dangling from a gigantic male hand over a cup of tea), and ‘little bird’ (Vögelchen) (in a gilded cage).10 The constant in the nude photography, at this populist end of the monthly magazine market, was the projection of women’s pliability. Models in these compositions adopt, on demand, the roles of classical nude, coquette, courtesan,

Figure 48  ‘Tiefe Liebe’ (Deep-sea love), Revue des Monats, July 1928, p. 973.

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plaything, or pastoral innocent – an imagery of male heterosexual wishfulfilment that was also reflected, more mutedly, in the presentation of starlets and Hollywood celebrities in adjacent photo-pages. A final iteration, in Das Magazin and Revue des Monats, completes the dominative circuit: nude models as objects of pure erotic fantasy, in varieties of gothic or fairy-tale setting (Figure 48). In these ephemeral compositions, which include expressionistic fantasies of sexual violence, the new woman becomes the abstracted, make-believe object of male desire, her identity reduced to the supple and submissive expression of her erotic femininity.11

Radiant modernity It was against this normative background that the conflicting ideals of physical culture, sexual morality, and modern subjectivity, played out in UHU over the course of its 1920s issues. What sets the magazine apart, in historical perspective at least, was its attempts to reconcile the eroticism it shared with its rivals with the progressive ideals of Weimar body culture. In addition to studio erotica, and the imagery of outdoor leisure and athleticism that was common to all the revue magazines, UHU explored the alternative ideals of Freikörperkultur (‘free body culture’), the diverse cultural formations centred round the practices and ideologies of nudism. In its contrasting, dialectical projections of the physical ideal, UHU inflected the permissive moral climate of the Weimar era, but also wider contemporary debates and conflicts over gender roles, German nationalism, and the prerogatives of the consumer society.12 In his 1927 manifesto of body culture, Körpersinn (Body Sense), the composermathematician Wolfgang Graeser encapsulates the duality and ambivalence of Weimar responses to technological modernity: The dark, chaotic side of Western technocracy has damned the body, branded it with hell and sin. But in the luminous side, the body stands anew in unconcealed clarity. Exposed and naked is our thinking. Now we comprehend the body, uncaged and without veiling insinuations. Radiant bronze skin mirrors the light of the Olympian sun with the same pure sobriety as the sparkling pistons of newly formed machines.13

The physical body, argues Graeser, has been suppressed as the ‘dark’ inverse figure of modernity, the locus of its ‘chaotic’ erotic energies; the new ‘luminous’

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age, by contrast, reaches toward unity, embracing both technology and the idealised body as the twin ‘radiant’ products of machine-age perfectibility. Describing a symbolic movement from darkness to light, in which both prudish and erotic responses to nudity are dissipated, Graeser redefines the modern body as spectacular object, whose symbolic meanings are exposed to the sensitive viewer. Weimar body culture, in this account, seeks expression not in the distantiated modes of depiction – painting or sculpture, for example – but in performance: the body’s physical presence is demanded, both for the enactment of modernity’s secular rituals and as the visual embodiment of its new potentialities. As Tim Armstrong argues, the body’s capacities and gendered identities were subject, at this period, to radical reformulation: the body was ‘re-energized, re-formed, subject to new modes of production, representation, and commodification’.14 The spectacular displays of the youthful, unclothed and semi-clothed bodies that characterised the Weimar era were enactments of modernism’s evolving, and conflicting, social and technological ideals. As part of its idealist projections of a unified, harmonious modernity, UHU sought to bring together, and symbolically reconcile, the multiple, opposing strands of Weimar body culture. In its photo-pages and articles, erotic figure studies, declaring the new permissive culture of modernity, appear alongside naked athletes whose sunlit postures assert the de-eroticisation of the body; natural worlds provide the setting both for peaceful Edenic rituals and quasimilitarised physical training. The symbolism of these images is not reducible to a single, unified world view; rather, they represent the magazine’s ideal of a tolerant, inclusive future society, united in its quest for new forms of social order and for the expression of modern subjectivity. A particular focus of this chapter is on the symbolism of group images: how the configurations in UHU’s body culture photography related to the idea of mass society, with its equivocal potential for social harmony or fragmentation and disorder. As Colin Counsell argues of the Weimar mass display phenomenon, the variety of these human patterns expressed both the era’s ideological divisions and its profound yearning for consensus: ‘[I]n the absence of any agreed conception of the social whole, symbologies of the mass became inherently speculative, each image functioning as an implicit argument for one or other model of human communality.’15 This chapter broadens the scope of Counsell’s hypothesis to include the full range of UHU’s dance and body culture images: my assumption is that, in a contemporary visual culture built on the symbolic use

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of repetition and regularity, all figure groupings would have inflected these same resonances, with greater or less intensity. Playing on the visual similarities and spatial relations between figures, the magazine’s human patterns embodied the contrasting ideals that underlay the Weimar ‘passion for association’.16 From the companionable gatherings of outdoor leisure pursuits to the martial rituals of men’s rhythmic gymnastics, UHU’s youthful actors constructed multiple visions of the social gestalt – a proliferation which contained, in itself, the dream of an inclusive, reconciled community.

The present body In broad symbolic terms, UHU’s body culture images describe a continuity between the visual surface of the living body – Graeser’s ‘radiant bronze skin’ – and its mass visibility via technological media. As Susan Sontag observes, photography’s potency derives from a mythic sense of the image as imprint of the physical world, such that the referent and its visual representation become symbolically merged: ‘Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it.’17 In UHU’s photography, this sense of the figure’s physical actuality combines with its temporal immediacy: youthful dancers, athletes and sunbathers inhabit the continuous, unfolding present of an ideal, universalised modernity. The elements in this illusion of presence can be broadly enumerated. First, the photographed figures are performative, in that their situations and postures are overtly responsive to the camera’s gaze. Such ‘performances’ include the highly structured displays of dance troupes and mass gymnastics, but also informal groupings of beach parties or weekend camping trips, in which the subjects’ ease before the camera is part of the scene’s idealised modernity; the solitary female nudes in studio and outdoor photographs express this same awareness, either looking into the camera or appearing elegantly posed. Second, the photographed bodies are youthful – young, beautiful women; men with sculpted, gymnastic physiques – reflecting conventional ideals of physical beauty, but also projecting the unclothed youthful body as symbolic of renewal, and of the future’s unbounded, dynamic possibilities.18 Finally, the universalised presence of these emancipated bodies reflects their variety and prominence within the magazine: images depict both male and female figures, in both rural and urban settings, engaged in vigorous activity (sport and dance) or captured in repose – the ‘sleeping beauty’, for example, is a recurrent compositional motif.19

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UHU’s body images formed part of the magazine’s superabundant visual culture, built on continuous variety in pictorial themes and the poetic interplay of disparate images. Within this photographic profusion, the unclothed body functioned both as resonant symbol and as synecdoche of modernity, appearing, with no apparent incongruity, alongside the many other, contrasting projections of a perfected, reconciled world that graced the magazine’s monthly issues.20 Karl Toepfer notes a similar heterogeneity in Der Querschnitt (UHU’s highbrow literary rival),21 describing this dynamic picture show as a signifier of the new mass modernity, to which the photographic nude self-evidently belonged: [I]mages of nude women dancers … appeared side by side with pictures of sports, theatre, film, and society personalities, modernist paintings of nudes, stills from theatrical and film productions, photos of people from exotic or primitive cultures, scenes of modern urban life. … Readers apparently appreciated the idea that both nudity and dance operated within a constantly recombinable constellation or montage of modern images.22

As Toepfer suggests, the modernity of the unclothed, liberated body in magazine photographs was not subject to its context or particular posture: the display of full or partial nudity was in itself a declaration of modern values. In an UHU photo-page from December 1927, a naked young woman leaps into the air with her arms stretched wide to embrace the midday sunlight (Figure 49). The background is reduced and largely neutral – a patch of sand, monochrome strips of sea, coast, and sky – producing an emphatic focus on the woman’s body, in its performance and projection of ideal modernity. This generalised symbolic intention is reinforced in the caption: ‘Selbstverständliche Nacktheit: Der unbekleidete Körper auf den Sportsplätzen ist heute schon zu einer Selbstverständlichkeit geworden’ (Nudity as a matter of course: The unclothed body on sports grounds has become quite normal these days).23 This claim of normalisation, serving both to justify the inclusion of nude images and to affirm the photographic nude as symbolic of modernity, is taken to its limit in a photo-spread from September 1928 (Figure 50). The photographs show two female nudes, in back and frontal view, representing ‘Zwei Berufe’ (Two occupations): that of artist’s model and dancer. The figures’ insouciant air of absorption in the moment – the model confers with her male artist; the dancer, Claire Bauroff, has her eyes closed in artistic rapture – goes beyond the self-conscious, proclamatory mode of ‘Selbstverständliche Nacktheit’: going naked, these pictures imply, is just what one does in modern life. The two images

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Figure 49 ‘Selbsverständliche Nacktheit’ (Nudity as a matter of course), photoillustration from ‘Das Nackte und wir’ (The nude and us), UHU, December 1927, p. 62.

Figure 50  ‘Zwei Berufe’ (Two occupations), photo-spread, UHU, September 1928, pp. 34–5.

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of the female body here describe a remarkable distillation of the elements of UHU’s modern ideal: the aestheticisation of ‘ordinary’ life, and its technological mass-mediation; the reconciliation of this technology with the organic body, with artistic traditions and with the expression of subjectivity; a questioning of traditional proprieties and gender roles. UHU’s unveiled youthful figures, projected as the embodiment of modernism’s ideal values, are also the actors in a theatre of utopian possibilities.

Performing patterns A topical photo-story from October 1928 – the height of the magazine’s optimistic middle period – depicts a synchronised dance troupe ‘on holiday’ in the countryside.24 The photographs, by Sasha Stone, construct a light-hearted fantasy, with the Jackson Girls, a quintessential product of metropolitan modernity, as temporary residents of a traditional farm, replete with horses, haystacks, and wooden carts. The story’s humorous intent is conveyed, in part, through the incongruity of the structural patterns, which underline the dancers’ modern identity and the cheerful absurdity of their pastoral setting – Stone, here, relies on the reader’s cultural competence regarding the symbolic intention of different pattern forms. In the central double-page photo, the Girls are engaged in a series of rustic farmyard tasks (Figure 51): one pair draws water with a hand pump, others turn hay, ride a horse, tend piglets, and so forth. The individuated poses parody the picturesque conventions of genre painting, but, more particularly, the standardised modernity symbolised by kick-line dance: the Jackson Girls dress identically, even on holiday! The resulting playful tension in the image, moving between individuation and communality, is contained in the patterning: the loose informal arrays formed of the dispersed figures are strengthened by their striking similarity, favouring perceptual grouping (note, for example, the three heads forming a rising curve from the lower right corner). The Girls’ natural state of geometric order is duly restored on the following page spread, in the serial replications of the dinner table (identical place settings, identical women in uniform posture) (Figure 52); on the facing page, the Girls fully reclaim their machine-age identity – even, adventitiously, forming a near perfect triangle with their exercising bodies. ‘Als die Jackson-Girls auf Urlaub waren’, in its frivolous way, describes a key element in the utopian symbolism of synchronised dance. Moving from

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Figure 51  Photo-spread from ‘Als die Jackson-Girls auf Urlaub waren’ (When the Jackson Girls were on holiday), UHU, October 1928, pp. 36–7.

Figure 52  Photo-spread from ‘Als die Jackson-Girls auf Urlaub waren’ (When the Jackson Girls were on holiday), UHU, October 1928, pp. 38–9.

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the subjective, individuated mode to the mass configuration – and, implicitly, back again – the dancers enact an ideal social contract: the individual, as the performer/operator of a bountiful, rationalised modernity, retains agency, and can thus negotiate a space for subjectivity within the technocratic structure. In UHU’s features and photo-pages it is this ‘backstage’ view, both literal and figurative, that predominates: a typical photo-page, from March 1928, shows the Tiller Girls in a rehearsal break, chatting, reading, physically affectionate, while their legs and bodies construct informal distributive patterns.25 This implicit guarantee of subjectivity, projected in the broader photographic imagery of the synchronised dance troupes, has been downplayed in the critical historiography, which takes Siegfried Kracauer’s Weimar essays ‘The Mass Ornament’ (1927) and ‘Girls and Crisis’ (1931) as its founding texts.26 For Kracauer, synchronised dance symbolises the dissolution of subjectivity within technological modernity, a process to which the intended audience – defined as the ‘broadest mass of people’ – willingly accedes: These products of American distraction are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble girl clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics. … [I]t is only as a tiny piece of the mass that the individual can clamber up charts and can service machines without any friction. … The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflection of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires.27

In Kracauer’s reading, the Tiller Girls’ mass audience is ‘trained’ and ‘moulded’ by the performance to embrace its role as functionaries in the capitalist machine – ‘The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls’ – though what this audience is offered in return is far from clear.28 ‘The Mass Ornament’, for all its canonical status, presents a curiously lopsided argument, in which the erotics of synchronised dance, its promise of utopian order and abundance, are discounted. Similarly, in Günter Berghaus’s landmark essay ‘Girlkultur’, the experience of the Tiller Girls’ audience becomes less a fantasy of consumerism (the audience as desiring subject) than of objectification (the audience as commodity): ‘[T]he ornamental structures underlying these revues transform the everyday experience of depersonalization, drill and routine into aesthetic pleasure.’29 An insightful critique of this Kracauerian spectator is offered by Patrice Petro, in her 1989 book Joyless Streets. For Petro, the figure is a projection of the negative characteristics Kracauer associates with femininity – passivity, uniformity, and uncritical consumption – onto the newly visible, and hence dangerously empowered, female spectator; the notion of audiences passively

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colluding in their own repression speaks, suggests Petro, more to the antifeminist agenda of Weimar intellectuals than to the symbolism of synchronised dance.30 Notably, for other, less high-minded contemporary reviewers the symbolic vision created by the dance troupes was not of rationalisation per se – what Kracauer calls the ‘virtues of the conveyor belt’31 – but of the consumer plenty that this technological modernity promised to deliver. A commentary on the Tiller Girls 1928 revue, by the journalist Adam Kuckhoff, conveys the show’s mass appeal: ‘This sensual journey … never leads to a land of bad taste, but into a realm where everything is miraculous and fascinating. … Surprising scenic tricks, fantastically beautiful costumes, extreme precision of choreography … the whole is a feast for the eye.’32 Kuckhoff ’s sensory language, describing an erotics of consumerism – the spectacle, as consumable ‘feast’, is available only to purchasers – points to the crucial subjectivity missing from Kracauer’s equation.33 The transaction between audience and synchronised dancers was, however, more than a simple economic exchange. As the human pattern is performative, it operates symbolically both as subject and object, creator and construct; the viewer’s response to this double symbol involves, in varying degrees, both identification with the human figure and objectification through the mastering gaze. Photographs of female dance troupes in UHU magazine projected an abstract symbolism of technocratic order, containing the mythic promise of a dynamic and prosperous consumer society;34 the geometric human pattern both embodied this technocratic ideal as the figure of social order, and affirmed the performer/viewer’s symbolic possession of the utopian future.35 The idea of modernity as reaching toward a utopian social order plays out recurrently in UHU’s photo-illustrated features of the late 1920s. The mythic ideal is visually projected in photographic sequences, in which human patterns symbolise the alternate modes of modern social living. The story ‘WochenEnde: der wöchentliche Sommer-Urlaub’ (Weekend: the weekly summer holiday), from September 1926, celebrating the new possibilities of motorised, ‘Americanised’, leisure, composes a typical visual narrative.36 On the opening page spread, a young woman in gymnastic costume performs a high kick in the surf; on the facing page, the elements of the rural ‘weekend’ are assembled: an automobile, a tent, a relaxed group of fashionable young people. The commodity culture on which this modern ideal depends is illustrated in further images, including a double-page photo of campers by a lake, with the caption: ‘What one can bring for the weekend on a motorbike with sidecar: tent, collapsible table,

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tableware, folding canoe and two pretty female companions.’37 However, whilst the consumer items in these photographs – principally, the vehicles – represent the enabling technology of expansive modern leisure, they are not, in themselves, fetishised: the true objects of desire are the enfolding natural landscape and the exuberant companionship of its youthful occupants. This mythic narrative is spectacularly projected in four photographs on the final page spread (Figure 53) – an embracing couple at a lake’s edge turn to smile for the camera; a loaded car departs on its journey home; a mixed group in bathing suits construct geometric human patterns – thus cheerfully aligning themselves with the symbolism of the rationalised social order. Moving effortlessly from the informal (distributive) mode to the formal (geometric), UHU’s young moderns – here, including an obligatory film actor – ‘perform’ the technological modernity that defines their identity and their shared values. The modern individual, these pictures imply, is at home both in the natural world and machine-age society, and expresses both communality and an easy, companionable subjectivity. The gender identities and relations of this innocent photographic idyll are presented as relaxed and de-eroticised: males and females occupy equal positions within the modern, non-hierarchical human pattern.

Figure 53 Page spread from ‘Wochen-Ende’ (Weekend), UHU, September 1926, pp. 8–9.

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The modernity of ‘Wochen-Ende’ represents an important strand in UHU’s photographic idealism, in which the emancipatory and harmonising potential of technological society, associated with the image of America, is combined with the Germanic ideal of the return to nature, a cultural myth of central importance to prewar expressionism, and with deep roots in the German Romantic tradition.38 Stories such as ‘5 Mädchen und ein Zelt’ (Five girls and a tent), from May 1927,39 and ‘Das Amazonenboot’ (The amazon boat), from September 1927, closely follow the ‘Wochen-Ende’ template, with group images of attractive young women engaged in cooperative physical pursuits or exercises in the open air.40 As in the earlier story, the human patterning moves freely from the distributive to the geometric, as though these perfect youths are ready at all moments to perform the symbolic postures and configurations of the modern ideal – the final picture caption of ‘Das Amazonenboot’ notes: ‘Die erste Sorge nach der Mahlzeit: Schlank bleiben’ (The first concern after mealtime: staying slim).41 The quip nicely captures the contemporary character of these stories, and defines the parameters of their symbolic vision of modernity. Though the human figures appear in natural settings, their primary visual and symbolic relationship is to each other – a gestalt unity strengthened, as in ‘Als die JacksonGirls auf Urlaub waren’, by similarities of physique and clothing. Nature here provides a sunlit stage for the display of modern capacities – sociability, leisured mobility, physical culture – but remains instrumental, rather than intrinsic, to symbolic identity: these young people carry modernity with them, and return with it to the city. A photo-page from August 1926, the month before the ‘Wochen-Ende’ issue, plays on this modish embrace of the natural, to comic effect. The page, titled ‘Blühende Wiesen im August’ (Blooming meadows in August), shows photographs of bare legs pointing surreally skyward in the middle of a grassy field, as if their owners had plunged head first into the earth; the lower image reveals the backs and bent arms of a group of young women, in matching gymslips, performing shoulder stands.42 That these ‘flowers’ are not native to this soil is, of course, evident from their modern attire and uniform posture; the grouping, moreover, replicates a posed image from the previous issue, July 1926, in which identical young women with their legs in the air advertise ‘Gymnastics for ladies (“Young and beautiful”, Part 2): the latest Ullstein special issue.’43 The pairing points to a tension, and recurrent anxiety, at the heart of UHU’s modernist vision: that in attempting to reconcile Technik and Kultur – machine-age values with an organicist, communitarian idealism – Kultur becomes hollowed out; the

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natural world to which the modern individual returns becomes a mere accessory in the cult of youth and beauty. This anxiety finds its clearest expression in other strands of UHU’s body culture photography, in which images of the naked, naturalised human body, and its patterned configurations, project symbolic alternatives to the rationalist, consumerist values of the technological era.

The erotic body The history of UHU’s nude photography, described simply in terms of its variable prominence within the magazine’s visual culture, correlates strikingly with developments in the Weimar economy and the associated national mood. The male nude, represented by topless film stars and hard-bodied athletes, made a first appearance in the July 1925 issue, in a feature on open-air gymnastics;44 occasional images of topless, or fully naked, women began to appear from May 1926.45 Nude photography’s significant, though always sporadic, presence in UHU dated from the end of the following year, with the great majority of images appearing in the issues of November 1927 to May 1930. The nude’s rapid disappearance from the magazine – a valedictory female nude appears in the August 1930 issue – coincided with the collapse of the German economy and the onset of the Depression.46 That UHU’s cult of the nude was responsive to broader contemporary currents in German society is axiomatic to the visual readings in this chapter.47 Where the licensed eroticism of Das Magazin and Revue des Monats blithely and relentlessly promoted an individualistic consumer culture, UHU’s more diverse and selective approach inflected the critical resistance, in Weimar body culture, to the normative values of technological modernity. The performance of nudity in UHU presented a radically different stance vis-à-vis the machine age to that projected by girls in swimsuits – images which symbolised the domestication of the body, and of nature itself, within a rationalised social order. Nudity, by contrast, as the expression of an irreducible and universal corporeality, presented the organic body as the absolute ground of value and identity; as the element within modern experience that could not be relativised, or moulded to fit the regimental imperatives of technocratic society.48 Depicting a diversity of figures in contrasting postures and settings, UHU’s images related to a spectrum of competing ideologies, promoting erotic expressivity, the return to nature, or muscular self-improvement, as key to the ideal society. The economic crisis that

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engulfed Germany after the Wall Street Crash would make all such idealisms redundant – or, at least, the liberal bourgeois, communitarian varieties promoted in UHU. The disappearance of the magazine’s nudes marked, symbolically, the death of Weimar optimism. UHU’s female nudes, which include pastoral compositions, close-up figure studies, and photographs of nude dancers, contributed a piquant eroticism to the editorial mix, and were, clearly, part of the magazine’s popular appeal.49 How significant this erotic element was to UHU’s commercial success is less certain: the nude was one among many pictorial themes, absent from most issues of the magazine’s ten-year run, and, except for the summer 1928 issues, limited to single photo-pages and occasional feature articles.50 UHU’s nude photography presented, moreover, a more diverse mix than would have served simply for mass-market titillation; erotic appeal was only one facet of its complex, and contradictory, projections of the female body. As with all body culture images, the nude figure presented both as subject and idealized object: the occupant of varieties of aesthetic and erotic idyll, but also symbolic of the emancipation of modern subjectivity. The ideal reconciliation this implies, between the liberated, expressive body and the rationalist modernity which must accommodate this expressivity, is projected in images such as the ‘Zwei Berufe’ (Figure 50), discussed earlier. The problematic nature of such a reconciliation can be glimpsed in the rare nude group images that appeared in UHU, and inferred, negatively, from the general absence of such compositions from the magazine’s photographic culture. In Karl Toepfer’s account of Weimar Nackttanz (nude dance), the unclothed body functions as a ‘double sign’: ‘[O]n the one hand, it presents nudity as a return to an eternal primeval, and on the other hand, it regards modern identity as an unprecedented condition of nakedness.’51 This paradox, and the tensions it creates, are intrinsic to UHU’s photography of the female nude, in which the figure represents both the ‘eternal primeval’ erotic/organic body and the rational, socialised body of machine-age modernity. In one formulation, exemplified by a portrait of the dancer Etelka Marquita from December 1927 (Figure 54), overt eroticism is declared as a property of modern subjectivity:52 the dancer, embodying the sophisticated, sexually liberated new woman, meets the camera’s gaze; the ostensibly arbitrary placement of the portrait alongside the image of a bulldog – caption: ‘Ein Prachtexemplar’(A fine specimen) – underlines the fashionable urbanity of UHU’s visual culture. Modernity here incorporates the erotic through a spectacular, but carefully calibrated, permissiveness; photopages in later issues push the boundaries further, into voyeuristic fantasy,53 and

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Figure 54  Untitled photo-spread, UHU, December 1927, pp. 72–3.

full-frontal nudity (Figure 55); pubic hair is displayed for the first and only time in a figure study from February 1930.54 The ideal synthesis of ratio and eros embodied in these nude figures is staged in the literal, and symbolic, light of day; as Wolfgang Graeser declares, the modern body ‘stands anew in unconcealed clarity’, liberated from the corsets in Atget’s window display and from repressive nineteenth-century morality.55 This symbolic reconciliation is problematic, however, due to the unruly nature of desire, which continually threatens to subvert the moral consensus on which social order depends – a transgressive potential played out in UHU’s increasingly permissive photographic content. Crucially, to sustain the female nude as an emblem of modern subjectivity, she must also be configured as a socialised, communitarian figure; such human patterns are, however, notably absent from the magazine’s feminine idylls. Two key exceptions, published at the peak of UHU’s nude photography period, illustrate the tensions in this modernist synthesis.56 In ‘Tänzerinnen unter sich’ ([Female] Dancers amongst themselves), from January 1929, young women relax or exercise in the changing room of a dance studio; in each of the two informal group photos, one of the dancers is shown naked, in back view.57 The images project nudity as an assimilated element of metropolitan modernity, but only by carefully policing the scene’s erotic potential: the naked dancer has her back to the camera and to her clothed

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Figure 55  ‘Schaufenstergespenster aus dem Jahre 1910/Frische Morgenluft’ (Shopwindow ghosts from the year 1910/Fresh morning air), photo-spread, UHU, August 1929, pp. 64–5. The historical photograph (verso) is by Eugène Atget.

companions, whose eyes also are turned elsewhere; UHU’s archetypal figure of erotic modernity must, it appears, curtail her ‘eternal primeval’ energy before she can enter the social arena. A very different form of containment appears in the article ‘Kampf gegen die steifen Knochen: Von der Geometrie unseres Körpers’ (Battle against stiff joints: With the geometry of our bodies), from August 1928, featuring one extraordinary, and uniquely experimental, double-page photograph (Figure 56). The image shows three identical nude female figures practising a synchronised gymnastic posture on a sunlit grassy slope. The regular geometric human pattern, with its clear reference to contemporary kick-line dance, presents an unambiguous affirmation of machine modernity – a symbolism reinforced in the accompanying article, on Rudolf von Laban’s theories of the mathematical body: ‘Laban … finds connections everywhere between the laws of vibration, the forms of crystals, and human structure and movement.’58 In the photograph, this mechanistic vision of the body, and of technocratic social order, is forcefully combined with the elements of an organic utopia: dancing female nudes, sunlight, trees. The result is a bizarre clash of iconographies, in which the potency of the erotic idyll is contained by the denaturalised human pattern: a repressive rather than synthetic transformation. The female nude inhabits the modern, social body only at the cost of her subjectivity and her organic being.59

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Figure 56 ‘Beugungsmöglichkeiten des menschlichen Körpers’ (Flexibility of the human body), double-page photo, from ‘Kampf gegen die steifen Knochen’ (Battle against stiff joints), UHU, August 1928, pp. 26–7.

The fragility of the female nude as a communitarian symbol – there were no further female nude group images in UHU after January 1929 – reflects the general movement in Weimar culture toward the masculinised, machine-modernist ascendancy of the late 1920s. In negative terms, this dominance equates to the gradual eclipse, within UHU’s visual culture, of what might be termed organic modernism, describing the dream of a holistic, organicist modernity governed by principles of community, and of aesthetic and spiritual beauty. UHU’s bucolic female nudes relate, in particular, to the idealistic visions of the Lebensreformbewegung (life reform movement), in which varieties of physical and lifestyle discipline embodied the values and social relations of the ideal society.60 Whilst the movement’s conflicting völkisch and progressive ideologies fall beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note the mutual emphasis on community in its mythic constructs, and the crystallisations of this ideal in projections of a sunlit nudist utopia.61 In UHU’s Nacktkultur summer of 1928, this utopia was enacted not by adult female nudes – the perennial figure of erotic fantasy – but by her surrogate: the prelapsarian, peaceable figure of the naked child. The six-page photo-story ‘Maien-Sonne am Strand’ (May sunlight on the beach), from May 1928, inhabits the common ground of the life reformers’ natural Eden, located, consensually, in a pristine premodernity: the article’s subtitle imagines the photographer as a stealthy hunter, bringing home ‘Photographische Beute von einsamen Strandwegen’ (Photographic prey

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from lonely beach paths).62 The children’s nudity is a conventional signifier of innocence, so the figures can express their innate sociability without erotic transgression, and without the normative, denaturalising constraints of the regular geometric human pattern. Published during the same period as UHU’s competing, irreconcilable visions of modern nudity, the story both reaches towards a universal symbolism and declares its impossibility: organic social relations within technological modernity are the province of childhood only. The idealism of ‘Maien-Sonne am Strand’ is, however, more than a mere elegy for lost innocence. Unlike the machine-like dancers of ‘Kampf gegen die steifen Knochen’, and the pleasure-seeking moderns of ‘Wochen-Ende’, the child nudists are at home in the natural world, and thus embody the authentic Goethean gestalt; liberated from the ‘clothing’ of modern civilisation, the children enact the harmonious order of organic life, expressed both in human patterns and in the relationship of individual figures to their environment. Marking the shortlived high point of UHU’s organic modernism, the compositional values are, ironically, those of prewar pictorialist photography, with natural distributive social patterns constructing a ‘timeless’ symbolic idyll: the three naked boys on the opening page spread are perfectly identical, yet their postures are relaxed and individuated; ideal communality contains, and fosters, the expression of a

Figure 57  Page spread from ‘Maien-Sonne am Strand’ (May sunlight on the beach), UHU, May 1928, pp. 38–9.

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liberated subjectivity. Two pages later, the natural origins of this spiritualised humanity are expressed, likewise, through symbolic patterning (Figure 57): the nymph-like figure of a young girl is configured within an organic array of birch trees, whose slanting verticals echo the curves of her tapering body. The selfreplicating order found in the natural geometry of plant forms – as celebrated in Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), of 1928 – is also inscribed in the human figure, and in the organic society which technological man has left behind.63

The militarised body Paralleling its photography of the female nude, UHU published a number of features built around the spectacle of male nude gymnastics. Whilst there were a small number of half-length topless portraits of men, which project a feminised image of male beauty,64 UHU’s group photography of the male nude was exclusively confined to the gymnastic arena.65 The constraints within this theme go, in fact, even further: photographs in four stories from the years 1925–9 contain highly similar content and employ an identical visual grammar: a template established in the first of these articles, ‘Vom Umgang mit der Sonne’ (In contact with the sun), of July 1925 (Figure 58). The group photograph captures four near identical, oiled and muscular naked men, in a natural setting (here, a lakeside), performing a synchronised exercise with dumbbells; sharply defined shadows indicate a bright midday sun. The formula is repeated, to the letter, in ‘Überschätzung der Nacktheit?’ (Overestimation of nudity?) from June 1928, showing nude athletes with cabers, clubs and medicine balls, in spectacular geometric patterns.66 Curiously, in neither of the accompanying articles is reference made to the depicted rituals; rather, the authors argue in general terms for the historical pedigree and moral value of nudism (the later article), and the health-giving properties of sunlight: Light is a powerful stimulus to life, especially in the period of growth, as for plants so for humans and animals. In low-sunlight months the growth of the infant organism is held back. Light and sunshine influence the human spirit: they improve the atmosphere and increase the pleasure and power of work.67

The notion of sunlight as invigorating, and in particular as (re)generating manly, physical strength in healthy individuals, was central to the physical regime of

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Figure 58  ‘Athletische Freiluftübungen’ (Athletic outdoor exercises), photo-page from ‘Vom Umgang mit der Sonne’ (In contact with the sun), UHU, July 1925, p. 3.

Hans Suren, outlined in Der Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sunlight) (1924);68 the photographs in this massively bestselling book also closely resemble UHU’s geometric male groupings.69 Suren’s ideologically saturated readings of his own images thus provide a vital contemporary context, missing from the UHU articles. For Suren, open-air gymnastics represents a nationalist imperative: Using every means possible, with unflagging energy, a nation should be united in the will to promote the strength of its people. … Physical exercise will only make its true, noble, physical, and spiritual influences felt when it is practised in the form of gymnastics. Young people should not regard their goal to be breaking records but the power of the health and beauty of their own fully trained bodies. The photographs in this book display people as symbols of strength and health. Their bodies, governed by firm character, assure a better future. It is the duty of those with high aspirations to steel and train their bodies in such manner.70

The rigid uniformity of Suren’s male gymnastic patterns symbolises a voluntary and absolute submission to the will of the social body – a will defined unequivocally as the cause of German national renewal. The geometric array, in this ultra-masculine performance, projects a resolutely militaristic ideal: the men’s sleek, irreducible bodies, rather than declaring their supple, organic

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identity, are ‘steeled’ and ‘trained’ as tools of resistance.71 The gymnastic apparatus – including bows and arrows, spears and projectiles – bears its warlike intent almost undisguised. The paradox of the male gymnastic pattern, from which it draws its peculiar resonance, lies in the symbolic connection between the militarised nudes and the organic world within which they manifest. At one level, UHU’s male figures are denaturalised: the warrior guise, as a conventional marker of assertive masculinity, de-eroticises the body – the female nude warrior also appears in UHU, in April 1928, declaring her chaste, modern identity.72 The geometric array, maintaining the rigid separation of naked performers, further guarantees the suppression of the body’s erotic energy. Yet, as Suren insists, the ‘strength and health’ of the modern body is discovered not its machine-like capacities, but in a mystical organic union with the cosmos: There is a purity, a sacredness, in our natural nakedness. We experience a marvellous revelation in the beauty and strength of the naked body, transfigured by godlike purity shining from the clear and open eye that mirrors the entire depth of a noble and questing soul. Placed in the bright frame of exalted nature, the human body finds its most ideal manifestation.73

The symbolic ideal embodied in Suren’s photographs – and, by association, in UHU’s male gymnast images – was not of organic community, but of apotheosis: the body’s ‘ideal manifestation’ described its incorporation within the mythic body of the nation. The ‘purification’ of the masculine body in sunlight, and its muscular self-abnegation within the militarised pattern, prepared it to merge, symbolically, with the sublimated bodies of the fallen.74

The mechanised body A panoramic view of UHU’s nudist utopia, in its 1928 ascendancy, reveals the magazine’s characteristic liberal impulse toward reconciliation and synthesis. Such reconciliation can, however, only be deferred; beyond the broad thematic unities – nude figures, sunlight, natural settings – the photographs project conflicting ideals, whose multiple, shifting perspectives create, at best, an illusory sense of convergence. In terms of symbolic intention, the nude gymnasts of ‘Überschätzung der Nacktheit?’, of June 1928, are not simply adult counterparts of the elfin children in ‘Maien-Sonne am Strand’ from the

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previous month’s issue: the athletes’ ‘exalted nature’, symbolic of heroic struggle and self-sacrifice, is diametrically opposed to the maternal, nurturing Eden of UHU’s idealised childhood. The photography of the female nude is similarly conflicted, projecting both a modern, permissive sexuality and its opposing ideal: the de-eroticisation and moral emancipation of the female body through daylight nudity. The dichotomy is made explicit in a photo-spread in ‘Das Nackte und wir’ (The nude and us), from December 1927,75 showing images of a sunlit nude huntress (a mythological Diana), and stage-lit lascivious dancers, with didactic captions: ‘Modern open-air photograph: informal attitude of a body that is used to moving about in light and air./The height of fashion in nude photographs: staged pose, unnatural posture (high-heeled shoes!)’76 The unclothed modern body, in this moralistic view, can be liberated from its carnal associations, to become, potentially, the site and symbol of new class and gender identities, and of new relations with the natural world.77 UHU’s utopian nudism, declaring the chaste, abstract beauty of the youthful body, here repudiates the ‘fashionable’ eroticism which many other of the magazine’s female nudes implicitly endorse. The resolution of UHU’s conflicted symbolism of the nude was achieved not by the eventual dominance of one or other ideal, but by the diminution, and ultimate disappearance, of all nude photography from the magazine. In the broadest terms, the trend describes the displacement of UHU’s organic modernism – the tradition of expressionism and the return to nature – by a machine-modernist embrace of the technological, rationalised future.78 Sporadically throughout the 1925–9 period, and increasingly toward the turn of the decade, UHU presented this alternative idealism in its body imagery, describing a synthesis not with the natural world but with the material forms and configurations of the machine. In marked contrast to UHU’s organic utopias, nudity is all but absent from these photographs: a single image from an April 1928 feature on American slimming technology – an elaborate April Fools’ joke, as revealed in the following issue – parodically captures the incongruous presence of a naked woman in a pristine future world of lab coats and electrical devices;79 a photo-spread in the following pages reasserts the proper symbolic order, with clothed, sleeping women geometrically aligned within the expansive, logical body of the machine. The ideal reconciliation parodied in the sleeping women photograph is intrinsically authoritarian, with passive bodies moulded, and mutually configured, within the rationalist scheme; another photo from ‘Ein neuer Schlankheits-Apostel’ shows the calf of a would-be slimmer encased in

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electrified metal plates. The images evince a phenomenon described by Matthew Biro: the re-emergence in later Weimar visual culture of the ‘cyborg’, the prosthetically reconstructed or mechanically enhanced human figure. As Biro notes, these new visions of hybridised humanity express little of the ambivalence to technology found earlier in the decade – an ambivalence exemplified, in Biro’s account, by the ‘Dada cyborg’ photomontages of Raoul Hausmann, and by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.80 In the visual culture of the later Weimar period, by contrast, cybernetic imagery increasingly projected a technocratic and authoritarian myth of progress, notably in the work of reactionary modernists such as Ernst Jünger.81 Mia Fineman describes a similar normative trajectory in the work of progressive Weimar artists, with the grotesque, fragmented bodies of Otto Dix’s 1920 war cripple series re-emerging as fully formed machine-human hybrids, in works such as Heinrich Hoerle’s Monument to the Unknown Prostheses of 1930. For Fineman, Hoerle’s painting represents ‘the thorough re-integration of this technologically rehabilitated body into the postwar industrial infrastructure’, with the artist paying ironic tribute to ‘the hollow functionalism of modem man reimagined as a faceless prosthetic god’.82 In UHU’s photography of human patterns, the technological ascendancy of the late 1920s can be observed in the increasing dominance of regular geometric arrays, and – as in Hoerle’s Monument – of the grid in particular. The shift is most pronounced in the imagery of leisure, a staple theme of UHU’s photography throughout the 1920s, and the arena in which the magazine’s ideal moderns project both their communal identity and their emancipated subjectivity. Whereas holiday features from the 1924–7 period include lighthearted ‘performances’ of machine modernity, photographs from the end of the decade suggest a more resolute investment in the technological ideal. A photo-spread of November 1928, for example, titled ‘Die Großstadt braucht Hallenschwimmbäder!’ (The metropolis needs indoor swimming pools!), illustrates a ‘French invention’, in which harnessed novice swimmers, suspended from a gantry, practise movements on a chart above their heads in response to shouted instructions.83 A photo-page from two years later deposits these machine-age swimmers face down in the sand, still forming a perfect grid, and with instructors looming over them dictating the movement of their limbs (Figure 59).84 The geometric array, as the figure of rationalised leisure, represents the voluntary alignment of the modern body, and of modern subjectivity, with the totalising imperatives of the machine.

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Figure 59  ‘Crawlen im Sand’ (Front crawl in the sand), photo-page, UHU, July 1930, p. 62.

* * * The diverse iterations of the human grid in UHU’s photography of the late 1920s contained the elements of a potent symbolic synthesis. At the immediate level, as the product of UHU’s discursive engagement with contemporary visual culture, the grid’s muscular presence signified the consolidation of the technocratic modern ideal, and of machine modernism as its formal and expressive language. In the crisis conditions of late Weimar, however, the grid also increasingly projected its other resonant symbolic identity, as the structural pattern form of industrialised warfare. Whilst UHU consistently avoided militaristic imagery, and published keynote articles promoting a liberal internationalism,85 its editors could hardly have been unaware of the latent militarism of geometric human patterns – what Blaise Cendrars called the ‘tremendous unity’ of ‘swarming squadrons … German chemicals, the breechblock of a 75’.86 For some Weimar commentators at least, the militaristic resonances of synchronised dance, and of American popular culture in general, were inescapable. Alfred Polgar writes, in 1926, of the ‘magic of militarism’ of the Tiller Girls’ performances: ‘The trained precision, the straight lines, the regular rhythmic beat … the obedience to invisible

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but ineluctable orders, the marvellous ‘drill’, the submersion of the individual into the group’; Herbert Ihering goes even further, describing American cinema as ‘the new international militarism. It is advancing. It is more dangerous than Prussianism.’87 As the authors’ comparisons suggest, the pattern forms of the consumerist utopia could, all too easily, project the ideals of extreme nationalism. A photo-page from UHU, June 1930, hints at the authoritarian tendency of the new decade’s human patterns. The photograph shows four clothed athletes, male and female, cheerfully configured ‘Im Gebälk des Springturms’ (In the timberwork of the high-diving board) (Figure 60). As a vision of the sporting body, or of ideal sociability, it is quite unlike UHU’s characteristic 1920s imagery of emancipated, physicalised leisure. The constriction of the figures, and the physical dominance of the diagonal grid, recalls a memorable, and atypical, composition from 1926, of policeman gymnasts strenuously arrayed within the perpendiculars of a climbing frame.88 Like the earlier image, the principal relationship in ‘Im Gebälk’ is between the individuals and their containing form, not the social interaction of the human group; its symbolic vision of the modern body reaches implicitly towards the same masculinised, authoritarian ideal as the policemen’s performance, valorising bodily submission to an unyielding

Figure 60  ‘Im Gebälk des Springturms’ (In the timberwork of the high-diving board), photo-page, UHU, June 1930, p. 65.

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abstract principle. UHU’s sunlit gymnasts of 1930, captioned in other photopages as ‘strong’ and ‘toughened’ (abgehärtet),89 betray the magazine’s acutely conflicted idealism:90 the geometric human pattern, the symbol of modernism’s technological utopia, simultaneously invokes the ‘tremendous unity’ of a militarised social order.

Notes 1 See above, p. 78. 2 For an overview of nude photography in Weimar popular magazines, see Patrick Rössler, “Schönheit, Natur, Lebensfreude!: Nackte Körper in der Populären Presse der Zwischenskriegszeit,” Fotogeschichte 37, no. 143 (2017): 5–17. 3 For a discursive introduction to the new woman in Weimar popular culture, see Katharina von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), and Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds., The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). For the French context, see Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003) and Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 19171927 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 4 For the position of women in Weimar Germany, see Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 34–56. 5 “Die Palette” (The palette), photo-page, Revue des Monats, J1, H1, November 1926, p. 81. 6 “Das Gefangene” (The prisoner), photo-page, Revue des Monats, J3, H1, November 1928, p. 4. 7 Prof. G. Heimdall, “Der Akt” (The nude), Revue des Monats, J1, H2, December 1926, pp. 153, 150. Similar articles on the nude in art history were published in Das Magazin: “Der Akt im Salon” (The salon nude), Das Magazin, Nr. 75, November 1930, pp. 5348–51; and Das Leben: “Der Akt in der Kunst” (The nude in art), Das Leben, J6, H9, March 1929, pp. 21–7. Ancient Greece as the ideal in Weimar body culture is an explicit theme of the UFA film Wege zur Kraft und Schönheit (Ways to strength and beauty), released in 1925.

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8 “Sex Appeal: Ein neuer Schlagwort für eine alte Sache” (Sex appeal: A new expression for an old thing), UHU, J5, H1, October 1928, pp. 72–7. 9 “Drei süße Herzchen” (Three sweet little hearts), photo-page, Revue des Monats, J2, H3, January 1928, p. 267. Articles in Das Leben from the late 1920s strike a similar note: see, for example, “Das Thermometer steigt, die Kleider fallen” (The thermometer rises, the clothes fall), Das Leben, J5, H2, August 1927, pp. 57–60. 10 “Illustrierte Kosenamen” (Illustrated pet-names), Das Magazin, J5, H55, March 1929, pp. 3289–92. 11 See, for example: “Angst vor dem Teufel” (Fear of the devil), photo-page, Revue des Monats, J1, H4, February 1927, p. 411. 12 An article based on material in this chapter has been published in New German Critique: Tim Satterthwaite, “Sunlit Dancers: The Body Culture Photography of UHU Magazine,” New German Critique 46, no. 1 (136) (2019): 197–228. 13 Wolfgang Graeser, Körpersinn (Body sense) (1927), quoted in Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1997), 31. 14 Armstrong cites Raymond Williams’s idea of consciousness as a movement between language and physicalisation: “The true range is from information and description, or naming and indication, to embodiment and performance.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977), quoted in Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. This formulation is particularly apt for the interwar period, in which dance became the medium of the “expressive” modern body. 15 Colin Counsell, “Dancing to Utopia: Modernity, Community and the Movement Choir,” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 22, no. 2 (2004): 156. 16 The phrase is from David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, 1984, quoted in Counsell, “Dancing to Utopia,” 158. 17 Susan Sontag, “In Plato's Cave,” in The Philosophy of the Visual Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 281. 18 For the resurgence of classicist ideals in interwar body culture, see Ana CardenCoyne, Reconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2–10. 19 The motif, and the “Schlafende” (sleeping woman) caption, also recurs frequently in the photo-pages of other magazines at this period. See, for example: Das Magazin, J6, H65, January 1930, p. 4364. 20 For Oliver Lugon, it is this potential to capture and mediate “all the objects in the world” that defines the fleeting promise of Weimar-era photography. The inverse consequence of this totalising project, producing “photo-inflation” and a kind of

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cultural fatigue, would become increasingly clear to some commentators by the end of the 1920s. Lugon, “‘Photo-Inflation,’” 221–5. See also: Michael Cowan, “Cutting through the Archive: Querschnitt Montage and Images of the World in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 40, no. 3 (120) (2013): 16–21. Karl Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Modern Dance, 1910-1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (1992): 87. See also: Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 39–47. Photo caption from “Das Nackte und wir” (The nude and us), UHU, J4, H3, December 1927, p. 62. The free translation, here, is an idiomatic equivalent of the German text. “Als die Jackson-Girls auf Urlaub waren,” (When the Jackson Girls were on holiday), UHU, J5, H1, October 1928, pp. 34–9. “Probenpause bei den Tiller-Girls” (Rehearsal break for the Tiller Girls), photopage, UHU, J4, H6, March 1928, p. 83. See also: “Die schwere Künst, leicht zu scheinen: Revue von der Kehrseite” (The difficult art made to look easy: Revue seen from behind), UHU, J5, H2, November 1928, pp. 69–75. The Tiller Girls appear in a conventional kick-line pose in the July 1930 issue (UHU, J6, H10, July 1930, pp. 14–15), reprising the “holiday” fantasy from “Als die Jackson-Girls auf Urlaub waren”; on this occasion, the Tiller Girls appear in (unmatched!) swimsuits in lapping waves on a shoreline. The rediscovery of Kracauer’s early critical writings by the 1960s “disciples” of the Frankfurt School is described in Karsten Witte, Barbara Correll, and Jack Zipes, “Introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament,’” New German Critique 5 (1975): 59–60. Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 75–9. Ibid., 77, 79. Günter Berghaus, “Girlkultur: Feminism, Americanism, and Popular Entertainment in Weimar Germany,” Journal of Design History 1, no. 3/4 (1988): 213. Colin Counsell argues that the synchronised dancers were symbolic objects, but that they represented erotic commodities rather than factory workers: “Their interchangeability suggest[ed] their commodification, while their pliability en masse functioned as a metaphor for sexual compliance.” Counsell, “Dancing to Utopia,” 156. As Kate Elswit notes, however, contemporary accounts by male writers, including Kracauer, describe a paradoxical desexualisation of the revue dancers. Kate Elswit, “Accessing Unison in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Art Journal 68, no. 2 (2009): 56–7.

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30 Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 65–70. 31 Siegfried Kracauer, “Girls and Crisis,” quoted in Berghaus, “Girlkultur,” 212. 32 Ibid., 213. 33 For the construction of the new woman as consumer, see Barbara Kosta, “Cigarettes, Advertising, and the Weimar Republic’s Modern Woman,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, ed. Gail Finney (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 134–51. 34 See, for example: “Ein Step der Alfred-Jackson Girls” (One step of the Alfred Jackson Girls), photo-page, UHU, J5, H4, January 1929, p. 8. 35 Nancy Nenno describes the Tiller Girls’ performances as “a screen on which fears regarding modernisation and modernity could be projected and subsequently fetishised into a pleasurable experience.” Nancy Nenno, “Femininity, the Primitive, and Modern Urban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1997), 149. Nenno’s “screen” offers an apt metaphor for the abstracted, cosmic symbolism of the human pattern, and its subjective completion by the viewer. 36 Nolan, Visions of Modernity, 108–10. For the ideal of the leisured weekend in Weimar magazines, see Angela Schwarz, “Die Erfindung Des Wochenendes in Der Presse Der Weimarer Republik,” in Deutsche illustrierte Presse, ed. Leiskau, Rössler, and Trabert. 37 “Wochen-Ende: der wöchentliche Sommer-Urlaub” (Weekend: The weekly summer holiday), UHU, J2, H12, September 1926, pp. 4–5. 38 For the return to nature as symbolic idea and artistic practice in early twentiethcentury German modernism, see Timothy O. Benson, “Fantasy and Functionality: The Fate of Utopia,” and Ian Boyd White, “The Expressionist Sublime,” in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. Timothy O. Benson (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993). See also Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 102–29. 39 “5 Mädchen und ein Zelt” (Five girls and a tent), UHU, J3, H8, May 1927, pp. 5–11. 40 The subject of young people camping and exploring nature, in the Wandervogel tradition, first appears in the second issue of UHU. “Das neue Geschlecht: Jugend in Amerika” (The new gender [or, new race]: Youth in America), UHU, (J1), H2, November 1924, pp. 2–8, with text by Fritz Zielesch, describes wholesome young people (“Erotic? Not a trace!”) escaping the “sea of skyscrapers” into the open air. The informal group images set the trend for the later stories. 41 “Das Amazonenboot” (The Amazon boat), UHU, J3, H12, September 1927, pp. 52–3.

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42 “Blühende Wiesen im August” (Blooming meadows in August), photo-page, UHU, J2, H11, August 1926, p. 82. 43 Ullstein advertisement, UHU, J2, H10, July 1926, p. 131. 44 “Vom Umgang mit der Sonne” (In contact with the sun), UHU, J1, H10, July 1925, pp. 7–9. The “militarised” male nude is discussed below. 45 UHU’s first photograph of the female nude, featuring the dancer Claire Bauroff, appeared in “Was sie tanzen” (What they are dancing), UHU, J2, H8, May 1926, p. 47. 46 “Der Schwan” (The swan), photo-page, UHU, J6, H11, August 1930, p. 68. 47 Karl Toepfer notes that nudity in commercial ballet peaked around 1927, after which Berlin audiences, apparently, grew “weary of the lack of innovation or daring in nude performance.” In avant-garde “expressive” dance, similarly, nudity had a diminished presence by 1930, though “Nacktkultur in general continued to grow in popularity.” Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Modern Dance,” 94. The movement away from spectacular nudity thus appears to have predated the Depression, as part of the broader evolution of Weimar culture. The economic crisis may have confirmed a development that was already in process. 48 David Harvey, following Foucault, argues that the “irreducibility” of the body makes it the only “site of power” from which resistance to the “faceless, rational, and technocratic” modern state can be mobilised “in the struggle to liberate human desire.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 213. As this chapter describes, the body’s “power” in the Weimar period extended beyond this erotic potential, through its symbolic association with ideas of militaristic national renewal, and the organic utopia. 49 An anecdote by Eva Noack-Mosse describes UHU’s editor Kurt Szafranski demanding of his staff, “Habt Ihr nicht noch ein paar freundliche Fotos?” (Don’t you have a few more friendly photos?), which translated to a call for added “sex appeal.” Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” 187–8. Whether UHU’s reputation for nudity differed substantially from that of rival titles is difficult to judge, on current evidence. 50 The few historiographical references to UHU have over-emphasized the magazine’s nude photography. Peter Gay offers a brief and rather dismissive pen portrait, which perhaps captures something of UHU’s contemporary reputation, though it does little justice to the magazine’s varied content: “For middle-brow tastes, mixing well-tailored essays, frivolous short stories, racy reportage, and photographs of naked girls, there was the pocket-sized monthly Uhu.” Gay, Weimar Culture, 184. Erika Esau’s account of UHU, in her 2013 essay on Der Querschnitt, only partially corrects this impression of insubstantiality: “Sporting a jaunty illustrated cover in colour, and filled with photographs of film stars, scantily clad women, and well-known celebrities of the literary world, Uhu also included jokes, vignettes, and amusing articles about art and theatre. Although primarily seen as an

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Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal entertainment magazine, its contributors included over its ten-year run Vicki Baum, Walter Benjamin, Johannes Itten, and even Albert Einstein.” Erika Esau, “‘The Magazine of Enduring Value’: Der Querschnitt (1921-36) and the World of Illustrated Magazines,” in History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Thacker, 884. For its photography alone, UHU merits a more substantial and significant place in Weimar cultural history than these accounts suggest. Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Modern Dance,” 67. For the liberal, permissive strand in Weimar Nacktkultur, see Janos Frecot, “Die Schönheit: Mit Bildern geschmückte Zeitschrift für Kunst und Leben,” Fotogeschichte 15, no. 56 (1995): 37–46. The same photograph was reproduced, more than two years later, in Das Magazin, J6, H67, March 1930, p. 4508. See, for example: “Schatten der Jalousie” (Shadows of the blinds), photo-page, UHU, J5, H9, June 1929, p. 44. “Die Sitzende” (Seated female figure), photo-page, UHU, J6, H5, February 1930, p. 40. Das Magazin and Revue des Monats were less fastidious in their displays of fullfrontal nudity in the 1928–30 period. See, for example, the “Schlafende Ariadne” (Sleeping Ariadne), in Revue des Monats, J4, H8, June 1930, p. 859; the cover of this issue is particularly striking, for its lascivious appeal. Corsets had a particular significance for German theorists of body culture. For the architect and life reformer Paul Schultze-Naumburg, writing in 1905, the distorted body shape produced by the corset was a direct cause of degeneracy in intellectual life: “One has to look at the type of those unfortunates, whose crumpled, disjointed, odd, twisted, swollen … prematurely deteriorated bodies scarcely remind one of a human body in its outer appearance, in order to understand how crumpled, disjointed, odd, twisted, and swollen … the thoughts produced by such bodies must be.” Translation from Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 39. See also the images of Freilichttanz (open-air dance) in Artur Michel’s article “Was sie tanzen” (What they are dancing), UHU, J2, H8, May 1926, p. 48. “Tänzerinnen unter sich” ([Female] Dancers amongst themselves), UHU, J5, H4, January 1929, pp. 54, 56. “Kampf gegen die steifen Knochen” (Battle against stiff joints), UHU, J4, H11, August 1928, pp. 24–9. The photographs in the article were reproduced from Paul Isenfels, Getanzte Harmonien (Danced harmonies) (1927), featuring performers from Ida Herion’s school of modern dance in Stuttgart. For a discussion of these photographs in the context of Weimar Nackttanz, see Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy, 67. The gymnastic pose in Figure 56 was quoted for the cover illustration of UHU, J6, H10, July 1930. The change from a nude to a clothed female figure nicely illustrates the more restrained attitude to female nudity at the turn of the decade.

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60 Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880-1933 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), 117–61; Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 14–50; Ash, “Gestalt Psychology,” 395–415. 61 A typical account of the period describes a prelapsarian Eden in which “a naked Volk frolicked on every river, at every lake, on every ocean’s beach, when naked youth stepped onto athletic fields for competition, and when the sun glowed, one could lay with languor in green fields or warm hammocks.” Charly Sträßer, “Der neue Kurs” (1931), quoted in Chad Ross, Naked Germany: Health, Race and the Nation (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 16. 62 Subtitle of the article “Maien-Sonne am Strand,” UHU, J4, H8, May 1928, p. 34. 63 See above, pp. 140–3. 64 See, for example: “Der Jüngling” (The youth), photo-page, UHU, J4, H10, July 1928, p. 76. 65 UHU was unusual among the revue magazines for its photography of male nude gymnastics; an intriguing exception is Der Querschnitt, which published numerous photographs of naked male athletes, notably in its summer 1928 issues. 66 “Überschätzung der Nacktheit?” (Overestimation of nudity?), UHU, J4, H9, June 1928, pp. 66–7. 67 Ernst Tobias, “Vom Umgang mit der Sonne,” UHU, (J1), H10, July 1925, p. 7. 68 Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 189–92. 69 According to Karl Toepfer, Der Mensch und die Sonne ran through 68 editions (250,000 copies) in its first year of publication: Toepfer, “Nudity and Modernity in German Modern Dance,” 68. Michael Hau gives the same figure, but as the total of copies sold by 1945: Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 189. The source for this figure is not included by either author. The book’s commercial and popular success was remarkable, in either case. 70 Preface to the first edition of Hans Suren, Der Mensch und die Sonne (1924), from The Weimar Republic Sourcebook , ed. Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 678. 71 See note 48, above. 72 “Eine Frau in der Sonne” (A woman in the sun), photo-spread, UHU, J4, H7, April 1928, pp. 72–3. Both Das Magazin and Revue des Monats published photo-pages in 1928 gleefully parodying the mythic ideal of the chaste nude female warrior: Das Magazin, J4, H46, June 1928, p. 2324; Revue des Monats, J3, H1, November 1928, p. 13. 73 Preface to Suren, Der Mensch und die Sonne, from The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, 678. 74 See above, p. 96. 75 “Das Nackte und wir” (The nude and us), photo-spread, UHU, J4, H3, December 1927, pp. 66–7. Figure 49, discussed above, comes from the same article.

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76 Photo-captions from “Das Nackte und wir,” pp. 66–7. 77 Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 176. 78 Andreas Huyssen finds a similar dichotomy in the film Metropolis, which he describes as vacillating between “two opposing views of modern technology which were both part of Weimar culture”: on the one hand, the legacy of expressionism, stressing technology’s oppressive and destructive potential, on the other, the emerging “technology cult” of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” New German Critique, no. 24/25 (1981): 223. 79 “Ein neuer Schlankheits-Apostel” (A new apostle of slimness), UHU, J4, H7, April 1928, p. 49. 80 Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 105–52. 81 Biro cites, in particular, Jünger’s book-length essay Der Arbeiter (The worker), 1932, and his photomontage book Die verändete Welt (The transformed world), of 1933: Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 97–103. The selected images from Die verändete Welt in Biro’s essay powerfully suggest the propagandist potential of machine-modernist patterns. 82 Mia Fineman, “Ecce Homo Prostheticus,” New German Critique, no. 76 (1999): 108. 83 “Die Großstadt braucht Hallenschwimmbäder!” (The metropolis needs indoor swimming pools!), photo-spread, UHU, J5, H2, November 1928, pp. 30–1. 84 A near identical photograph was published in Das Magazin, J4, H46, June 1928, p. 2313. See also, “Massenturnen der Sportstudentinnen im Berliner Stadion” (Mass exercises of sports students in the Berlin Stadium), photo-illustration from “Die Sportstudentin” (The [female] sports student), UHU, J4, H8, May 1928, pp. 58–9; also, the regimented swimmers illustrated in “Der Herr Ehrenpräsident eröffnet das Schwimmfest” (The honorary president opens the swimming gala), UHU, J6, H9, June 1930, pp. 80–1. 85 The leading article in UHU’s September 1927 issue consisted of a ten-page discussion on the unification of Europe: “V.S.E. Die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa?” (U.S.E. The United States of Europe?), UHU, J3, H12, September 1927, pp. 2–11. See also, “10 Jahre Frieden: Ein Film für Vergeßliche,” UHU, J5, H2, November 1928, pp. 13–21. 86 Blaise Cendrars, writing of his friend Fernand Léger’s “sudden revelation of the depth of the present day,” quoted in John Willett, The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, 1917-33 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 31. The original source is not cited. 87 Both quotations are from Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 180. 88 “Vom Schutzmann zum Schutzengel” (From policeman to guardian angel), UHU, J2, H12, September 1926, p. 112.

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89 “Die abgehärtete Familie” (The toughened family), title page photo, UHU, J5, H11, August 1929, p. 9. 90 The title page of the following issue, UHU, J5, H12, September 1929, continues with the theme of muscular masculinity. The photograph, captioned “Ein starker Mann” (A strong man), shows a sunlit beach with two smiling young women on the shoulders of their male companion. A photo-page from October 1930 (UHU, J7, H1, October 1930, p. 43) goes a step further, showing a male athlete holding a swimsuit-clad woman aloft by one raised arm. The caption reads: “Wie man heute die Frau auf Händen trägt” (How one takes the woman by the hand nowadays).

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UHU in the 1930s

Was ich auch gern können möchte … Mich über das ganze Elend hinwegsetzen Paul Girod, UHU, June 1932 The history of UHU magazine describes the historical arc of the Weimar Republic.1 Launched in October 1924, the month in which the new Reichsmark became the official currency, UHU’s demise closely followed the end of the Republic in March 1933. Like its monthly rivals Scherl’s Magazin and Revue des Monats, which both folded in 1933, the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship proved the final blow for a title which was already struggling to maintain its revenues.2 For UHU, the policies of the new regime had immediate impact: as an Ullstein publication, the magazine was caught up in the first convulsions of the Gleichschaltung (forced alignment) – the Nazification of German media and culture, involving a series of doomed attempts by the company’s Jewish owners to find accommodation with the Hitler regime.3 UHU magazine survived the first year of the Third Reich, and was then relaunched in larger format, in January 1934, as the Neue Monats-hefte UHU (New Monthly UHU). Its political conformity was made clear in the first issue, with an overtly propagandist article, ‘Das entscheidende Wort in entscheidender Stunde’ (The decisive word in decisive hours), including a full-page photograph of Volkskanzler Hitler saluted by Brownshirts at a Nuremberg rally.4 The correction of its editorial position failed, however, to secure the magazine’s future, and may perhaps have hastened its demise: following the departure of it chief editor, Friedrich Kroner, the relaunched UHU folded after the ninth issue, of September 1934.5 That the Nazification of the magazine may have been hard to swallow both for UHU’s editors and readers, is suggested by the occasional articles and cartoons, in the years up to 1933, in which the rise of National Socialism is addressed. These

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references are few in number, and limited to the years 1930–1; as the prospect of Hitler’s rise to power hardened into inexorable certainty, this bourgeois liberal, Jewish-owned title would, doubtless, have been wary of provoking Germany’s atavistically brutal future masters. A mildly satirical cartoon by Fritz Eichenberg, October 1931, showing Hitler receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, stands as a final dissenting gesture, in the face of the bellicose militarism of the Nazi leader.6 UHU’s clearest denunciation of Nazism appeared a year before Eichenberg’s cartoon, in an article from November 1930. ‘Kommt ein neues Mittelalter?’ (Is a new middle ages coming?), by the essayist Paul Wiegler, presents a series of proposed parallels between contemporary society and the pre-modern world: Oswald Spengler is compared to the sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno, Einsteinian relativity to Kepler’s cosmology, the electric chair to medieval torture, and so on. The lead photograph shows a gathering of grim-faced Nazi paramilitaries, their faces turned threateningly toward the camera; the caption runs: ‘Striking parallels between our times and former centuries: Like in the middle ages, when broad masses gathered behind the flag of a leader, today across the whole world great national movements have formed, answering to a fanatical creed.’ The swastika, Wiegler ominously concludes, belongs with the other emblems of twentieth-century political extremism: ‘And long is the bloody list of their victims.’7 Wiegler’s overt repudiation of Nazism, at a period when the republic faced the prospect of total collapse, was not repeated in later issues. In oblique fashion, however, UHU did manage to indicate an editorial position regarding Hitler’s rise, and to acknowledge the unease among its readers, in an intriguing singlepage article published August 1931. The piece consists of extracts from readers’ letters in response to a jarring photo-page of two months earlier: ‘Dorffrieden’ (Village peace), in the June 1931 issue, presents a typical picturesque view of a village square, with blossoming tree and fountain – except that the plinth carries a pasted Nazi campaign poster (Figure 61).8 The extracts, described as ‘particularly characteristic’ of the ‘very many’ letters sent in, suggest a widespread disquiet at the swastika’s unexplained presence: Why did you not remove the poster? You could have touched it out. Damages a beautiful picture. Please stop these silly jokes. I find your picture ‘Village peace’ rather unnecessary. In your otherwise charming ‘Uhu’ is a picture, ‘Village peace’, that I didn’t understand. Kindly ask your staff if it is included on account of the poster.9

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Figure 61  ‘Dorffrieden’ (Village peace), photo-page, UHU, June 1931, p. 53.

The hostile reactions to ‘Dorffrieden’, and the prominence of these letters in the August 1931 article, suggest an implicit contract between UHU and its readership in the post-1929 crisis period. By running what amounts to an indirect apology for the original photo-page, the magazine appears to acknowledge, and endorse, the anti-Nazism of its readers, and their desire for escape from the unsettling realities of contemporary life. Whatever the case, there were no further images related to National Socialism after this date, barring the Eichenberg cartoon of October 1931. Whilst UHU’s photography steered clear of the political turmoil of early1930s Germany, and engaged only intermittently with the economic crisis, the psychological trauma of these years was forcefully inflected in the magazine’s cartoons. Alongside the many lighter, humorous images were bleak satirical fantasies by artists such as Charles Girod and Erich Godal, which played on the acute tensions in German social life. A June 1931 cartoon by Nils Stenbock, for example, caustically satirises the hypocrisy and insularity of middle-class society: the ladies in ‘Kaffeekränzschen mit Giftpfeilen’ (Coffee circle with poison arrows) dip arrows in bottles of poison and aim them at each other, while politely ignoring the shafts piercing their own throats and chests (Figure 62);

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Figure 62  ‘Kaffeekränzchen mit Giftpfeilen’ (Coffee circle with poison arrows), UHU, June 1931, p. 97.

Godal’s ‘Die Maschine läuft schneller als die Zeit’ (The machine moves faster than the times), published two months later, shows a gigantic sharp-toothed robot rampaging through rural villages, with hapless engineers struggling to regain control.10 Charles Girod’s full-page cartoons – a regular feature of UHU since 1926 – also continued throughout this period, with their bittersweet blend of alienation, rage and melancholy romanticism: Girod’s contribution to the lighthearted collection ‘Was ich auch gern können möchte’ (What I would really like to be able to do), from the June 1932 issue, shows a despairing, impoverished family at home around a table, with a ragged figure vaulting over their heads through a hole in the wall. The caption completes the title sentence: ‘Mich über das ganze Elend hinwegsetzen’ (To leap over all this misery).11 The generalised, symbolic nature of UHU’s satirical cartoons allowed the magazine to reflect the acute anxieties of the Depression years, whilst avoiding the highly politicised actualities of contemporary social life. This compartmentalisation of UHU’s visual culture, in which photography continued to project an idealist worldview, is starkly revealed in the title pages of the New Year issues of 1931 and 1932. Typically, the magazine’s title page presented a full-page photograph of an idealised subject: the 1930 issues, for example, feature children sleeping under a

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hayrick (September), a televisual image of an English beauty queen (October), the actress Carola Neher (November). In sharp contrast, marking the close of a calamitous year of economic and political turmoil, the title page of the New Year issue, January 1931, carries a full-page cartoon, captioned ‘Silvester-Vision’ (New Year’s Eve vision): a thuggish man stands at a doorway with his fist balled tight, on the point of punching in the face a delicate, wide-eyed child with a paper crown on her head, symbolising the year 1931.12 That this shocking image caused upset among UHU’s readers is suggested by an editorial published a year later, beneath a thumbnail reproduction of the cartoon: How UHU greeted the year 1931: This page, by our artist Linnekvogel from last year’s New Year UHU, who wanted to punch the wretched year 1931 out, because he expected nothing but evil to come of it, some readers at the time did not understand! Do you understand now, why we didn’t want then to let the coming year over the threshold?13

On the title page of the same issue, the cartoon for the year 1932 shows the mythological Fates grimly measuring out the thread of the destined future, while a petitioner, hat in hand, enquires: ‘Excuse me, will the next year be better?’14

Figure 63  Title page, UHU, March 1933.

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The eloquent response to this question comes not in the January 1933 issue – there was no title-page cartoon for this New Year – but in UHU of March 1933, in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s accession to power. The titlepage photographic portrait is unique among the magazine’s ten-year run, on two counts: the image bears no caption, and – quite exceptionally – the young woman has tears in her eyes (Figure 63). UHU’s idealist photograph confronts the catastrophe of Nazism with an image of unnamed, and unspeakable, loss.

Photographic fantasies The photographic culture of 1930s UHU presents, at first glance, many continuities with the magazine of the previous decade. UHU continued to publish elegant, idealised images of the manmade and natural world, often with a modernist emphasis on reduction, compositional geometry, and visual repetition. The 1930s magazine was similarly progressive in its graphic design: the first full-bleed page layout appeared in June 1931, and the technique was used to striking effect in later issues: notably, a double-page photo of a Japanese dockside in the September 1932 issue, and a stunning image of long-horned cattle running through a cloud of dust from January 1933.15 As anticipated in UHU’s body culture photography of the late 1920s, the new decade’s popular vision of modernity was defined by ideas of technological progress and the rationalisation of urban life. The ascendancy of this ideal, and of its associated machine aesthetic, were duly reflected in articles and standalone photo-pages from the 1930–3 period. A keynote article on this theme, ‘Organisation: Die Entlastung unseres Lebens’ (Organisation: taking the load off our lives), from May 1931, exemplifies the recurrent association between the idea of technological society and symbolic images of a geometrically patterned world.16 Whilst the text, by ‘Bos’, dwells apprehensively on the dehumanising potential of modernity, the photographs project a vision of miraculous order and efficiency, in which human figures – whether prisoners, motorists, or trainee typists – are seamlessly incorporated, as the operators of a constructive, self-replicating totality. The symbolic force of these images, taken as a sequence, reflects their structural simplicity and uniformity: an entire world, it appears, can be constructed from grids and concentric circles. As if in response to this, a full-bleed, total-array photograph of parallel railway lines at a Berlin junction appears in the following issue, of June 1931;17 the July issue continues the

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Figure 64  ‘Jetzt fehlen nur noch die Gäste’ (Now all they need is guests), photo-spread, UHU, July 1931, pp. 36–7.

patterning theme, with paired, high-angle total arrays of cafe tables and parasols awaiting their guests (Figure 64). As well as publishing modernist images, the magazine retained its interest in the work of Germany’s leading progressive photographers. Just as UHU of the late 1920s had engaged with the era’s photographic events and publications – Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst (1928), Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (1928), the Film und Foto exhibition of 192918 – the magazine was similarly responsive, in the new decade, to the publication of August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (Face of our Time): a photographic feature based around other Sander portraits was published in the February 1931 issue. The framing of these images, in the article ‘Gesichter aus einer deutschen Landschaft’ (Faces from a German landscape), suggests, however, an editorial regime drained of the cultural optimism that had energised the 1920s magazine. As Leesa Rittelmann notes, the publication of Sander’s photo-book in 1929 had attracted considerable critical attention, and sharp disagreements as to the book’s symbolic intent: Face of our Time was, variously, interpreted as capturing the spiritual ‘anarchy’ of a classless, materialist modern world; as a study of the physiognomic effects of social class and profession; or as documenting the crisis of capitalism.19 Given

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the work’s critical currency – reviewers included Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Walter Benjamin – and its contested meanings, UHU’s feature is remarkable for its indifferent treatment of these closely related photographs. Sander’s name appears only as a small picture credit on the seventh page of the article; the pictures are printed, garishly, in red ink; the text, by Clara Biebig, offers a rambling physiognomic reading, using the depicted figures simply as source material on which to project imaginary social types.20 The pioneering magazine of the 1920s appears, from this 1931 article, to have suffered a collective loss of faith in the cultural significance of photography. A unifying principle of UHU’s 1920s photography was the idea of objectivity: that the image represented a faithful, lucid account of a real-world referent – even if the subject, and presentation, were idealised. Both in its images and its critical articles, 1920s UHU promoted ‘straight’ photography, as the basis of its idealist projections of modernity, and of a utopian, symbolic unity of nature and society. The photography of the crisis years, by contrast, describes a gradual shift from this inclusive, optimistic modernism toward escapism and nostalgia. Like the increasing inclusion of humorous cartoons and puzzle pages, this evolution may have been driven, in part, by falling sales: UHU’s cover price of 1 Mark, unchanged since its 1924 launch, was reduced to 90 Pfennigs in March 1932.21 The popularising shift in UHU’s editorial character at this period – coupled, perhaps, with the erosion of its modernist ideals – enabled a new kind of photography, based not on principles of objectivity, but on comforting visions of a cinematic fantasy world. From 1931 onwards, and with increasing frequency, UHU published lighthearted romantic photo-stories, extending over multiple pages. The first of these, ‘Erinnerung an glückliche Tage’ (Remembering happy days), from January 1931, simply attaches a loose, fictional storyline to assorted photographs by Hugo Block.22 With ‘Der Schnurrbart’ (The moustache), a ‘tragicomedy in 15 pictures’, from June 1931, the fiction extends into the images, which are elaborately staged confections from the Berlin photographic studio of Yva.23 The story itself is witty, and deftly constructed: husband Bob repeatedly remodels his moustache to placate his wife – achieving, on his last attempt, a Hitler moustache – before shaving it off, to their mutual satisfaction.24 Yva’s compositions perfectly replicate the visual and narrative conventions of cinema stills, with shifting locations, costume changes, dramatic lighting, and a humorous, naturalistic interplay between the two characters. Later photo-stories develop the formula, including outdoor scenes, and more elaborate storylines: ‘Drei Mädchen und ein

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Mann’ (Three girls and a man) from August 1932 has a girls’ camping holiday disturbed by the arrival of a glamorous bachelor in a motorboat;25 ‘Die Drillinge und der Eindringling’ (The triplets and the interloper), November 1932, adds a novel twist: the three sisters, we discover in the final caption, are actually images of ‘a single beautiful girl, that our photographer has skilfully brought into one frame’.26 UHU’s photo-stories, for all their apparent frivolousness, are symptomatic of the magazine’s deepening crisis of identity during the Depression years. The turn to photographic fiction eroded the categorical distinction between still photography and cinema, regarding their ‘objective’ or fictive projections of modernity – a distinction on which the magazine had based its photographic culture. UHU’s idealist photography depended on an implicit promise: that technological and social developments were directed toward the construction of a harmonious future society. Photo-pages offered glimpses of this utopian future, in all its kaleidoscopic aspects and iterations. The introduction of photo-fictions degraded UHU’s visual culture, by robbing its non-fictional images of their status as truthful documents: to borrow RengerPatzsch’s phrase, could the viewer still experience ‘joy before the object’ if the objects themselves were suspect?27 Alongside the self-evident photographic fictions in the 1932–3 issues are sentimental and romantic single images by Friedrich Seidenstücker and others, that remain ambiguous as to their staging or spontaneity:28 the couples photographed in doorways, in the April 1932 issue, could be self-absorbed lovers or posed actors;29 the magazines carelessly tipped to the floor by excited children, in a Seidenstücker photo-page from August 1932, appear all too composed, in a magazine now increasingly devoted to escapist visual fantasies.30 The failure of UHU’s optimistic modernism was also reflected in the social values that these photo-fictions projected – most obviously, in their constructions of ideal femininity. In contrast to the emancipatory idealism of the 1920s issues, in which the new woman’s mutable social and sexual identities were the sign of an expansive, tolerant modernity, UHU’s 1930s woman embodied a return to an older ideal of domesticity and patriarchal authority. The photo-stories’ fictional nature, their romantic themes and characteristic lightness of tone, enable a mythic reconstruction of femininity that appears strikingly reactionary, even misogynistic, when compared with UHU of the previous decade. ‘Eine Frau sagt Ja!’ (A woman says yes!), from June 1932, for example, advises the prospective male suitor to ignore whatever a woman says, on the grounds that: ‘If a woman

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says yes, she does so only by mistake, as scarcely has the “yes” left her lips than the “no” stands ready behind it.’31 The accompanying photographs stage stock variations of the feminine ‘yes’, illustrating the modern woman’s capricious, impulsive nature. After gossiping on the phone, in ‘Die Karpfen-roulade’ (The carp roulade) of September 1932, the self-absorbed female host is rescued from culinary disaster – and from the distractions of technology – by the timely intervention of the middle-aged housekeeper.32 The photo-story ‘Kätchen Lampe’, published in the month of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, suggests the prevailing social conservatism to which UHU of the crisis years was responding. The passage of the ‘girl from Braunschweig’ from ingénue, to movie star, to blushing bride, depicted in Yva’s playful photographic style, concludes with an abrupt final frame: the crestfallen Kätchen looks down at her bouquet, with her new husband patiently admonishing her. The caption explains: ‘A small surprise after the betrothal: “… but you can’t make any more films. I won’t have it.”’33 The ‘Kätchen Lampe’ story, in its trivial way, encapsulates UHU’s own loss of purpose: the collapse of the magazine’s consensual, progressive modernism, and of its photographic dream of a new society. UHU of the 1920s had published texts by Hermann Hesse, Bert Brecht, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, and Vicki Baum; the photography of Moholy-Nagy, Sasha Stone, and Erich Salomon; the graphic art of Walter Trier, Jeanne Mammon, and Charles Girod. The magazine’s closure marked the end of the humanistic culture of Weimar Germany.

Notes 1 Epigraph: “What I would really like to be able to do … to leap over all this misery.” 2 Jochen Hung, “The ‘Ullstein Spirit’: The Ullstein Publishing House, the End of the Weimar Republic and the Making of Cold War German Identity, 1925–77,” Journal of Contemporary History 53, no. 1 (2018): 167. 3 Ibid., 166–71; see also David Oels and Ute Schneider, eds., “Der ganze Verlag ist einfach eine Bonbonniere”: Ullstein in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015). 4 “Das entscheidende Wort in entscheidender Stunde” (The decisive word in decisive hours), UHU, J10, H1, January 1934, pp. 40–3. 5 Cläre With replaced Friedrich Kroner as chief editor in May 1934, and saw the magazine through to its closure. Noack-Mosse, “Uhu,” 190–1.

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6 From “Unglaubliche Geschichten” (Unbelievable stories), UHU, J8, H1, October 1931, p. 32, cartoons by Fritz Eichenberg. As evidence of UHU’s internationalist worldview, see “Wie wird die Erde regiert?” (How is the Earth governed?), UHU, J7, H7, April 1931, pp. 62–3. The article consists of a double-page map, dividing the world into democracies, dictatorships, colonies, and indeterminate states. In the context of the Weimar Republic’s increasing instability, the article reads as an implicit endorsement of democratic government, and of pan-European unity. Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union are coloured black, representing “states under dictatorial regimes.” 7 Paul Wiegler, “Kommt ein neues Mittelalter?” (Is a new middle ages coming?), UHU, J7, H2, November 1930, pp. 21, 24. 8 “Dorffrieden” (Village peace), photo-page, UHU, J7, H9, June 1931, p. 53. 9 “Dorffrieden” (Village peace), article, UHU, J7, H11, August 1931, p. 87. 10 “Die Maschine läuft schneller als die Zeit” (The machine moves faster than the times), full-page cartoon, UHU, J7, H12, September 1931, p. 61. 11 Charles Girod, cartoon from “Was ich auch gern können möchte” (What I would really like to be able to do), UHU, J8, H9, June 1932, p. 49. See, also, Girod’s illustrations for “Menscheits-Träume” (Mankind’s dreams), UHU, J7, H4, January 1931, pp. 38–45; and “Zeit” (Time), UHU, J8, H9, June 1932, pp. 81–5. 12 For a detailed account of Germany’s post-1928 economic crisis, see Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 120–31. 13 Editorial, UHU, J8, H4, January 1932, p. 100. 14 Title page, UHU, J8, H4, January 1932, p. 5. 15 Untitled photo-spread, UHU, J8, H12, September 1932, pp. 86–7; “Die große Herde” (The great herd), photo-spread, UHU, J9, H4, January 1933, pp. 78–9. 16 “Organisation: Die Entlastung unseres Lebens” (Organisation: Taking the load off our lives), UHU, J7, H8, May 1931, pp. 23–9. 17 “Der Quell unendlicher Freuden” (The origin of endless delights), photo-spread, UHU, J7, H9, June 1931, pp. 32–3. 18 See Chapters 4 and 5, above. 19 Leesa L. Rittelmann, “Facing Off: Photography, Physiognomy, and National Identity in the Modern German Photobook,” Radical History Review 106 (2010): 148–55. See also: Michael W. Jennings, “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Late Weimar Republic,” October 93 (2000): 32–6; Magilow, The Photography of Crisis, 92–102. 20 “Gesichter aus einer deutschen Landschaft” (Faces from a German landscape), UHU, J7, H5, February 1931, pp. 34–42. 21 The Ullstein editor Kurt Szafranski stressed, in a post-1945 interview, that the commercial appeal of the Weimar illustrated press depended on serialised novels, crossword puzzles, and jokes: Magilow, The Photography of Crisis, 54.

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22 “Erinnerung an glückliche Tage” (Remembering happy days), UHU, J7, H4, January 1931, pp. 23–9. 23 For a full account of Yva’s UHU photo-stories, see Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, “Ihr Garten Eden ist das Magazin: Zu Bildgeschichten von Yva im Uhu 1930–1933,” in Fotografieren Hieß Teilnehmen: Fotograffinen der Weimarer Republik, ed. Ute Eskildsen (Düsseldorf: Richter, 1994). 24 “Der Schnurrbart” (The moustache), UHU, J7, H9, June 1931, pp. 41–7. 25 “Drei Mädchen und ein Mann” (Three girls and a man), UHU, J8, H11, August 1932, pp. 41–7. 26 “Die Drillinge und der Eindringling” (The triplets and the interloper), UHU, J9, H2, November 1932, pp. 81–7. 27 See above, p. 93. 28 A feature on Seidenstücker’s photography was published in UHU’s January 1932 issue, confirming his status as UHU’s pre-eminent photographer of the 1930s: “Der Photograph Seidenstücker” (The photographer Seidenstücker), UHU, J8, H4, January 1932, pp. 26–33. 29 Untitled photo-spread, UHU, J8, H7, April 1932, pp. 16–7. 30 “Max mit seinem Auto ist da!” (Max is here with his car), UHU, J8, H11, August 1932, p. 87. 31 “Eine Frau sagt Ja!” (A woman says yes!), UHU, J8, H9, June 1932, p. 24. 32 “Die Karpfen-roulade” (The carp roulade), UHU, J8, H12, September 1932, pp. 74–81. 33 Photo caption, “Kätchen Lampe,” UHU, J9, H4, January 1933, p. 60.

Part III

The Crisis of Modernity VU Magazine, 1930–3

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We have in France no illustrated magazine whose approach captures the brisk rhythm of life today, a journal which explains and documents every aspect of contemporary life … VU has taken upon itself to fill this gap. Conceived in a new spirit, and realised through new technologies, VU brings to France a new formula: the illustrated reporting of world affairs. … Animated like a beautiful film, VU will be awaited each week by all its readers Editorial, VU, March 1928 The first issue of the French weekly news magazine VU (Seen), published 21 March 1928 (Figure 65), contained a two-page manifesto, outlining the scope and intentions of the new title.1 Like the Weimar monthlies launched earlier in the decade, VU’s optimistic programme, and its modern identity, reflected the ascendancy of photography in 1920s visual culture. Building on the advances in camera and print technology of the previous decades, and the rise of international picture agencies, the magazine promised its future readers ‘pages crammed with photographs’, a visual profusion which was also a promise of plenitude.2 Photography, in VU’s idealist prospectus, had attained a global presence, encompassing ‘every corner where a significant event occurs’; these fragments of ‘universal life’ were now to be brought ‘within reach of the eye’ (à la portée de l’oeil) on a weekly basis, courtesy of VU.3 As members of the new consumer society, the magazine’s reader-purchasers were promised the modern world at their fingertips. The playing out of VU’s idealist project, in the traumatic context of the early 1930s, forms the subject of the Part III case study. Launched four years after UHU, in the period of national optimism that followed the end of France’s postwar reconstruction,4 VU’s progressive vision focused resolutely on the new society of the technological future. In contrast to the ambivalence that defined the German magazine’s consensual modernism, VU’s editorial – at least, in its

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Figure 65 Front cover, VU, No. 1, March 21, 1928. © Musée Nicéphore Niépce (MNN), Ville de Chalon-sur-Saône. All VU images in this book are from the museum’s collection, reproduced by kind permission of MNN.

early years – was assertive and univocal: social harmony and prosperity equated to the peaceful application of technology, to scientific progress, and technocratic social order. In this broad sense, VU embraced an ideal that had formed only one dialectical strand of UHU’s utopian modernism: a distinction that reflects, in part, the differing social, cultural, and economic contexts of interwar Germany and France. VU’s agonised responses to the Depression crisis and the rise of Hitler’s Germany reflected both its pacifist convictions and the collapse of its optimistic vision of a reconciled machine-age society. The opening chapter of Part III explores the cultural contexts of VU’s early years, and the assumptions on which it built its editorial identity, taking the text of the ‘Remarks on a new illustrated magazine’ as its working guide. As a founding statement, the manifesto is remarkable for its clarity and perspicacity: the magazine that evolved over the following years reflected, in large measure, the conception of its launch document. As the later chapters in Part III describe, it was VU’s commitment to these foundational ideals – the evidentiary and symbolic power of photography, political inclusivity and internationalism,

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scientific progress – that lent the magazine its coherence and integrity. Key to this modernist vision was the expressive use of structural patterning: the dream of an ordered, harmonious society, and the disintegration of this ideal in the Depression years, were graphically symbolised in the geometric repetitions of images and page layouts. Built on the promise of the technological future, VU both refracted, and embodied, the crisis of modernism and the collapse of liberal democracy. The inherent tensions in VU’s editorial programme, which would become increasingly evident in its coverage of the global Depression and of Hitler’s rise to power, can be glimpsed in the totalising scope of the ‘Remarks’. Readers were promised, on the one hand, photos of the ‘most beautiful countries’, of the ‘fashionable life of the world’s capitals’, of scientific discoveries, movie stars and sporting events; on the other, images of ‘political events’ and ‘disasters’.5 VU’s universalist vision, built on technological optimism and an implicit faith in a consensual, communitarian future, depended on the potential for convergence between idealism and actuality. As Chapter 10 describes, in the brief period of French economic prosperity up to around 1931, the magazine’s patterning language reached toward just such a utopian synthesis, with the geometric forms of machine modernism finding significant echoes in VU’s photojournalism and graphic design. Chapter 11 explores how the death of this liberal optimism, in the Europe of 1932–3, was inflected in the accentuated pattern forms of VU’s photographic pages.

‘A new formula’ The central claim in the ‘Remarks’ relates to VU’s unique status in France as an illustrated magazine reporting on ‘every aspect of contemporary life’, defined as ‘political events, scientific discoveries, disasters, explorations, sporting achievements, theatre, cinema, art and fashion’.6 The assertion, at face value, has some merit: the demise of the wartime weekly J’ai vu in June 1920, and the transformation, one month later, of Le Miroir into Le Miroir des Sports, left France with no modern photo-illustrated weekly dedicated to contemporary life and current affairs – for Sophie Kurkdjan, the years up to 1928 represent a ‘black hole’ in the history of French news media.7 The dominant title remained the conservative weekly L’Illustration (founded 1843), which combined text-led topical and general-interest features with sumptuous monochrome and colour

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photographs and graphics, in conventional grid layouts. The enduring popularity of L’Illustration – a circulation of 120,000 in 1926 – reflected a popular appetite for photo-illustrated news, rather than any embrace of modernist innovation on the part of the magazine’s editors.8 As a pioneering modernist title, VU had no immediate competitors, until the launch of Voilà in 1931; unlike UHU, VU’s evolving themes and visual language were not shaped, at least in its formative years, by the continuous presence of rival magazines. Whilst VU occupied a unique position in the media landscape, its ‘new formula’ drew heavily on elements first developed in other titles: principally, French and German photo-illustrated magazines of the 1910s and early 1920s. A brief account of these innovations is instructive, revealing both the expanding technical and stylistic possibilities of photo-illustration at this period, and the symbolic applications of this new visual language. VU’s adoption of modernist techniques reflected its existential commitment to photographic communication, to the capacity of photographic images to speak lucidly and unambiguously to the magazine reader. In the 1928 ‘Remarks’, the ideal is of photography as the scientific, dispassionate documentation of modern life. As a 1932 editorial underlines however, the full burden of VU’s photography went, increasingly, beyond the simple recording of visual evidence, to the expression of universal symbolic meanings: ‘There is a photographic reality which is not ‘real truth,’ but which is truer than truth itself, a kind of poetic exaggeration of objective reality. It seems wrong, therefore, to call a camera lens an objectif.’9 According to VU’s founding editor, Lucien Vogel, the model for the new magazine was German weekly illustrated newspapers such as Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ).10 The BIZ model would account for many elements of VU’s editorial template: the full-page photographic front cover; the use, throughout, of multiple photos at different sizes, with images dominating and crowding out the text;11 the weekly mix of topical news stories, lifestyle, travel, and general-interest features; versatile page layouts, including overlapping photographs, oval frames, cut-outs, and montages. Such elements were, of course, not exclusive to BIZ, and Vogel was familiar with other German periodicals – in particular, Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), which offered a potent model for VU’s propagandist cover art of the early 1930s.12 VU’s template cannot be traced back to any single publication, but the German influence was undoubtedly significant, and gave tangible expression to the magazine’s internationalist ideals. If German photo-illustrated weeklies were the primary model for VU’s photojournalism, the magazine’s expressive use of graphic design drew on the

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modernism of early-twentieth-century French magazines. For none of the titles discussed later is there evidence of a direct formative influence on VU’s photographic and design language; taken as a whole, however, they suggest the diverse and innovative visual culture from which VU emerged. In sports titles, in particular, the ideal of a dynamic youthful modernity was expressed through forms of photographic abstraction and pattern-making that would reappear in VU’s expressive compositional language of the crisis years. The ideal of photographic objectivity and veracity, on which VU built its popular appeal, gained acute cultural resonance in the First World War, in reaction to the bourrage de crâne propagandising of the wartime press.13 Responding to the intense public demand for true accounts of the war, the news magazines Le Miroir (The Mirror) and J’ai vu (I saw/I have seen) challenged the authority of government censors by publishing clandestine photographs taken by frontline soldiers. The front cover of Le Miroir carried a regular strapline, ‘Le Miroir will pay any amount for photographs relating to the war that are of particular interest’,14 with fifteen of its sixteen its pages devoted exclusively to captioned photographs – including, on occasion, shocking images of German corpses;15 J’ai vu competed for the same material, paying a reported 80,000 francs for ‘interesting documents’ in 1916 alone.16 As Ulrich Hägele describes, J’ai vu’s photographic construction of the war went beyond this documentary realism, including modernist cut-outs on front covers, and spectacular photomontages on inside pages: a photo-page from February 1916, ‘Searching for refuge’, shows a dense montaged crowd of children in winter clothing, with the level gaze of the three foreground children appealing directly to the reader; ‘At the military driving school’, of September that year, combines photographs of vehicles on opposing gradients, to create a forceful impression of a battlefield terrain.17 As J’ai vu exemplified, documentary photos and constructed images could share magazine space without undermining either the veridical or rhetorical capacities of the medium; directly or indirectly, J’ai vu’s visual modernism would inform the expansive design language of the magazine that borrowed its name. The symbolic potential of photo-illustration found fullest expression in two remarkable French sports and outdoor-life magazines. The sports illustrated La Vie au grand air (Life in the open air) (1898–1922) pioneered the use of an art director to select photographs and design bespoke layouts, promoting continuous innovation and fluidity in the magazine’s visual formats.18 Issues in the post-1918 period are notable for their elegant, modernist page designs, built on the expressive use of cut-outs, overlays, circular and oval frames, and white-space backgrounds.

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Particularly striking, for the history of modernism, is the visual and thematic equation between the idealised sporting body and the new technologies of the automobile and aviation – an equation defined, initially at least, in terms of France’s victory and sacrifice in the war. The issue of 15 March 1919, which announced the magazine’s relaunch as a ‘luxurious revue’ (la revue de grand luxe), features on its title page a cut-out of a champion swimmer in mid-air with his arms spread wide like aeroplane wings, above the caption: ‘Norman Ross went to war as an aviator.’ Inside pages underline this idealist synthesis, with athletics stories – ‘The Records of 1914’; ‘Future Olympiads’; and a roll call of dead athletes (‘Those whom sport gave to France: a martyrology of sportsmen’) – interwoven with features on ‘mechanical sports’: ‘Towards a practical aviation’ and ‘The automobilism of tomorrow’, including cutaway diagrams of engines and sports car chassis.19 The utopian possibilities of this body-machine synthesis are made explicit in an introductory text by Tristan Bernard, ‘La Société Nouvelle’ (The  new  society), in which the author recounts a journey to an athletics competition in a ‘rather overworked old banger’ (tacot passablement surmené): And as we were overtaken by a little brand-new car. … ‘There’, said the old sportsman, ‘the new society’. The New Society, that’s us, the sporting types. … The day will come when its importance will be so overwhelming that it will be able to impose its principles on the old society. ‘Its first principle is to have excellent fuel to drive the motor,’ added the old sportsman, coming back to his driving comparisons. ‘This old type of fuel, that we called Hate, is only good for being ‘stationary’ or going backwards. To reach proper speeds, to climb powerfully the most abrupt slopes, talk to me about our own fuel, which is called competition!’20

Whilst La Vie au grand air’s venture into the elite market was a commercial failure – the magazine folded in 1922 – its synthesis of technological modernism with a masculinist cult of competitive sport was forcefully emulated by Match l’Intran (1926–40), the weekly sports supplement to the right-wing daily newspaper L’Intransigeant. The magazine’s early issues, until around 1930, are defined by an extraordinary visual idealism, expressed in full-page photographic compositions – sometimes three or four in a single issue – which represent perhaps the purest statement of utopian modernism of any popular magazine of the period. A typical photo-page, from April 1927, presents portraits of famous racing drivers in a graphic of pistons, gears, and factory chimneys, above photographs of the land-speed record-winning car, and – a whimsical addition – filmic sequences of tumbling divers (caption: ‘a picturesque dive’) (Figure 66). Montage pages extol

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Figure 66  ‘Récords d’auto’ (Automobile records), Match l’Intran, April 5, 1927, p. 15.

Figure 67  ‘C’est le printemps …’ (It’s spring …), Match l’Intran, March 29, 1927, p. 2.

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the geometric ‘beauty of lines’ in mechanical and civil engineering, in sports and dance configurations, and in the idealised movements of the athletic male and female body:21 a recurrent device involves the superimposition of graphics onto the human figure to define the aesthetic shape and line of movement.22 Freely combining images of the sporting body and of the manmade and natural world, Match l’Intran presented a totalised machine-age utopia, whose sign was the universality of geometric and distributive pattern forms (Figure 67). The magazine’s vectors and serial patterns, invoking the ideal of a youthful, physicalised modern culture, were the immediate precursor of VU’s dynamic arrays.

‘A beautiful film’ The defining image in the 1928 ‘Remarks’, of VU unfolding ‘like a beautiful film’, describes a recurrent ideal of modernist magazines. For the art historian Jean Selz, writing in 1937, the ‘little paper cinema that is the magazine’ creates ‘explosive’ visual meanings, which the reader absorbs ‘like a spectator: effortlessly’.23 BIZ’s editor, Kurt Korff, in his 1927 history of the magazine, describes a less passive reader, but emphasises similarly the dynamic compression and visuality of modern life, and the expressive power of the film medium: It is no accident that the development of the cinema and the development of the BIZ run roughly parallel. To the extent that life became more hectic, and the individual was less prepared to leaf through a magazine in a quiet moment, to that extent it became necessary to find a sharper, more efficient form of visual representation, one which did not lose its impact on the reader even if he only glanced fleetingly at the magazine page by page.24

VU’s invocation of film, at the very moment of cinema’s move into talking pictures,25 associated the magazine with the glamorous ideal of America – the home of Korff ’s ‘efficient’ modern consumer.26 At a more tangible level, VU’s design and content, defined by its promise of photographic abundance, self-consciously referred to the camera techniques and viewing experience of cinema: photographic sequences convey movement and temporality,27 or, through multiple viewpoints, capture an object’s dimensions and spatial environment (Figure 68). On the magazine page, these composite layouts mimic the movement sequences and jump cuts of film, but also reveal a dimension that

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Figure 68  Page spread from ‘À pied sous la mer’ (On foot beneath the sea), VU, August 24, 1932, pp. 1352–3.

‘moving pictures’ suppress: the serial pattern forms that underlie the cinematic illusion. VU’s filmic arrays, presenting a kind of cinematic slow-motion, display the photographic motifs of a time-based pattern, in which people and objects are replicated like the commodities on a factory production line; the modern world becomes a geometric succession of identical images undergoing incremental change. Significantly, by replicating and thus amplifying the motif, the array here constructs the figure not of the social body, but its subjective counterpart: the modern hero as individualist. VU’s composite arrays of celebrated individuals include Wilhelm Furtwängler, Roman Navarro,28 and a rambunctious Benito Mussolini (Figure 69). As well as providing a model of photographic seriality, cinema also informed VU’s distinctive use of visual contrast and variety. A stock element of the magazine was the composite news page, containing assorted domestic or international images featuring current events and the lives of celebrities, with brief explanatory captions. As Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy note, VU’s model was the weekly cinema newsreel, in which assembled clips of picturesque events composed the image of a dynamic, technologically mediated world.29 Crucially, the master narrative of the newsreel, and of VU’s composite pages, was of a progressive, unified modernity, captured by the panoptic eye of the

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Figure 69  ‘Mussolini Diplomate’, page spread, VU, January 27, 1932, pp. 122–3.

camera. This mythic unity is described by Marshall McLuhan, as characteristic of the ‘mosaic or participational form’ of news media. In McLuhan’s account, the ‘elimination of time and space’ in the technological era permits the construction of a ‘collective image of … communal life’, in which fragmented modernity can be made whole; the ‘private’ and ‘exclusive’ medium of the book is replaced by the ‘communal’ and ‘inclusive’ forms of print and broadcast media.30 VU’s photographic mosaics, capturing the infinite variety of modern life, also described its interconnections and mutualities. The inclusive aura of the composite page is enhanced by a paradoxical quality of VU’s superabundant visual culture: the tendency of unconnected, ostensibly dissimilar images to form adventitious groupings. A typical news page from June 1930 exemplifies the paradox (Figure 70): the photograph of a nationalist march in India subtly connects to an image lower on the page, of Düsseldorf murder victims, due to the Gestalt continuity of the marching lines and the similarity (in form and tonality) of the men’s dark faces with the holes in the skulls; formal conventions, such as the symmetrical arrangement of the skulls and circular portraits, add further structural patterns. The ‘collectivity’ of VU’s modernist mosaics has, in short, multiple and overlapping dimensions: symbolic (the ‘news page’ as unifying principle); thematic (the two aviator stories); perceptual (visual groupings and regularities).

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Figure 70  Composite news page, VU, June 4, 1930, p. 528.

‘A free tribune’ The editorial culture of VU magazine refracted the complex moral, ideological, and political dilemmas of France’s interwar decades.31 As a broad-based generalinterest title aimed at a mass readership, the magazine resisted political labels; in contrast to France’s notoriously partisan daily newspapers,32 VU insisted on the impartiality of its reporting, and the political balance of its opposing contributors.33 VU’s claims of ideological neutrality were repeatedly disputed by contemporaries, and were waived by the magazine itself as far as its campaigning issues of pacifism and anti-Nazism were concerned.34 Such claims were, however, more than mere rhetoric: the notion of objectivity was central to VU’s ideal of photographic truth, and became the rationale for its searching, dialectical enquiries into the world’s rival political and economic systems.35 Whilst VU, of the crisis years, was vocal and impassioned in its communitarian values, it was far less confident in how these ideals might be realised – an uncertainty shared by many contemporary commentators on France’s societal predicaments. The ‘objectivity’ of VU’s political reporting is given due prominence in the 1928 ‘Remarks’, with a declaration that the magazine’s star reporter, Henri Bidou,

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will report each week ‘purely objectively and without political bias, on the stories that make history’.36 A banner editorial of two years later provides a more secure foundation for this claim, describing the editorial mechanism that underpins VU’s objectivity: VU is the only big French illustrated magazine that knows how to see, and to show its readers, the different aspects of all the most important problems of our epoch, which are here freely exposed and illustrated by leading figures from opposing viewpoints. All those who want to keep up with what is happening throughout the world, and analyse the complex elements of modern life, must see and read VU.37

The statement projects the ideal magazine as an inclusive space, in which truth and balance emerge through disputation, and in which readers of all ideologies find their views represented. In broader terms, this is also the image of VU’s modernist utopia, a future society unified through the operation of communal, harmonising structures, with the ‘problems of our epoch’ resolved through consensus and deferral. Key to the ideal society, as to the magazine, is the application of technology: the ‘complex elements of modern life’ are mastered through the visualising techniques of the new technological media.38 The mythic mechanism, in this context, is visual truth: photography as a meticulous and dispassionate witness to contemporary life. Thus, in the VU editorial, the repeated emphasis is on seeing, rather than reading, as key to the experience and interpretation of modernity – a priority guaranteed, unambiguously, in the magazine’s name. In a cultural climate tainted by distrust of traditional media, VU’s photographic documents offered the ideal of an evidential consensus, serving to frame and legitimise the arguments of its opposed contributors. The guarantee of VU’s peaceful, progressive modern age lay in its democratised, scientific objectivity. In the historiography of VU, the magazine’s claims of editorial balance are discounted. Pierre-Jean Amar identifies ‘a very marked left-wing political engagement’;39 more tentatively, Frizot and de Veigy note that the editor, Lucien Vogel, ‘could be seen as having left-wing sympathies’;40 Danielle Leenaerts contrasts the title’s ‘progressive orientation’ with the bourgeois conservatism of the BIZ.41 Such characterisations fail, however, to capture the full complexity of their subject.42 On the one hand, VU was, unquestionably, a vocal advocate for some left-wing causes – principally, pacifism and international disarmament;43 in its treatment of the French economic crisis, images and articles project a

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generalised humanitarian concern for the conditions of the unemployed and working poor.44 On the other hand, the magazine routinely celebrated the gatherings of the leisured rich, and the gilded lives of film stars and aristocrats: cover photographs in the 1928–31 period include the Prince of Wales, George V, King Charles of Romania, the infant Prince Leopold of Belgium, the deposed Queen of Spain – even France’s defunct monarchy is represented, in a glum wedding portrait, from April 1931, of the uncrowned Dauphin and his bride.45 To this parade of faded royalty, with its air of bourgeois nostalgia for the pre-1914 world,46 can be added the magazine’s blithe depictions of French colonialism, culminating in the spectacular coverage of the Paris Exposition Coloniale Internationale in VU’s special issue of 3 June 1931.47 As Herman Lebovics notes, the Surrealists’ attempted boycott of the Exposition – inviting visitors to listen out for ‘the echoes of distant firing squads’48 – was sharply at odds with the dominant ‘colonial vision’ of French modernist art, and with the popular mood:49 an estimated eight million visitors attended the exhibition over its six-month duration.50 From this perspective, VU’s images of a consensual, ‘civilising’ French colonialism (Figure 71), rehearsed in multiple photo-illustrated stories over the 1930–3 period, describe a centrist political positioning, and a forceful identification with the myth of a demilitarised ‘Greater France’ – the

Figure 71  ‘Civilisation’, page spread, VU, December 3, 1930, pp. 1284–5.

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patriotic ideal to which the Exposition Coloniale was explicitly devoted. VU’s naturalisations of the imperial project, including such chauvinistic offerings as G. R. Manue’s ‘La conquête patiente et glorieuse de notre empire colonial’ (The patient and glorious conquest of our colonial empire) from VU 168, allowed the magazine to square the circle: to promote a patriotic and politically inclusive ideal of French modernity, without compromising its self-proclaimed pacifist and internationalist identity.51 Alongside its embrace of French colonialism, a fuller characterisation of VU’s politics must also account for its sympathetic approach to Mussolini, and to fascist Italy in general. In contrast to the magazine’s resolute anti-Nazism, VU’s articles and editorials of the early 1930s appear remarkably sanguine about France’s southern neighbour, even after the establishment of the German dictatorship.52 Central to this affirmative stance are repeated expressions of confidence in Mussolini’s benevolence and statesmanship, with VU’s authors prepared, it appears, to take fascist rhetoric at face value.53 A page spread from the 1933 ‘VU En Italie’ special issue, for example, shows the Duce on horseback, captioned by a quotation: ‘I believe only in this evolution: to organise the nation, then groups of nations, which will one day become the European state, then finally the whole world … says Benito Mussolini.’54 On the facing page, VU’s leading reporter, Henry Bidou, contrasts the Italian dictator – a man of ‘real kindness’ who has ‘learnt from suffering to have pity on those who suffer’ – with the ‘charlatan’ and ‘puppet’ (pantin) Hitler, who ‘has no ideas but worn-out inanities, without a line of action or perspective’.55 Far from opposing the fascist takeover on democratic principle, Bidou argues that dictatorship may, in times of crisis, bring national salvation. The pointed analogy is to Napoleon’s 1799 coup d’état: Dictators are not necessarily men gifted with particular virtues. They are men to whom, in a tragic hour, the destiny of peoples has been entrusted. Bonaparte may feel shame on 18 Brumaire. His behaviour that day matters little. He follows his destiny through thick and thin. The French people have chosen him. Once in power, the first consul, whose genius is universal and whose capacity for work is extraordinary, begins the task of constructing shelter, departments and officers for this people in disarray. This is his great work, even more than his victories. … The work of Sulla did not survive because it was only a restoration of the past. That of Mussolini, under the sign of an ancient empire, of the axe of fascism, and of the old virtues, is turned entirely toward the future.56

To read Bidou’s eulogy as a call for a French dictatorship would be to overstate the case: the article’s hyperbolic enthusiasm was part of a broader engagement,

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in VU’s ‘Grande Enquête’ (Great Enquiry) series on the global crisis, with the possibilities of contrasting political, economic, and social models.57 Nonetheless, VU’s willingness, in the early 1930s, to entertain the idea of fascism suggests, at the least, a lack of confidence in parliamentary democracy as adequate to the scale of France’s problems. The magazine’s marked favouritism toward the Italian dictator – including fawning interviews such as Emil Ludwig’s ‘Entretiens avec Mussolini’ (Interviews with Mussolini), and occasional cover photographs of the dictator’s children58 – can be described in existential terms, as the expression of a willed optimism in the face of the unfolding European catastrophe. The fantastic ideal, of a peaceful Europe united under Mussolini’s benevolent leadership, is explicitly articulated in Ludwig’s article: ‘Napoleon tried it. Briand tried it. Briand is dead, and, paradoxically, it is on you that the mantle falls. … Mussolini, founder of Europe: you could be the greatest man of the century!’ I tried for a long time to convince him, as this cause is for me a religion.59

The fanciful nature of Ludwig’s proposal, in the turbulent conditions of 1932, points to the unifying imperative at the heart of VU’s politics: the image of Mussolini as benevolent statesman symbolised the increasingly forlorn hope of a peaceful future, a prospect to which all other considerations were secondary. VU’s complex, and contradictory, ideals – its various strands of technophilia, pacifism, socialism, colonialism, consumerism, and even the cult of Mussolini – share a common foundation as potential elements of a modern, humanist consensus. VU’s pacifism was, at base, an appeal for social order, of which war was the demonic antithesis. Accordingly, Lucien Vogel’s editorial ‘Conclusion’ to the ‘Grande Enquête’ series, in VU 282, reaches less toward social democracy than, more indiscriminately, to any political or economic model that might deliver order and prosperity – be it Soviet communism, Italian fascism, or the ‘state capitalism’ of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The common principle, in each case, is the state as social regulator. Vogel’s despairing implication is that the price for stability may be democracy itself: State capitalism or socialism? But what is the difference? No one has been able to explain this to us. … Finally, one can affirm that it is not necessary for the victory of socialism that it has the support of socialists and their collaboration. Their historic role was not to create socialism; capitalism is doing that by itself. Their mission was to take power, and everywhere they have failed to do so. But the taking of power

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is absolutely an aim in itself: the existence of fascism and Russian socialism proves it. So now, what are the French going to do?60

As Vogel’s final, open question underlines, VU’s political character was complex and evolutionary: significantly, in 1936, it was a committed supporter of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, a stance which led to Vogel’s removal as editor.61 In the traumatic context of the early 1930s, VU’s repeated declarations of editorial balance describe less a political neutrality than a consistent, reflexive movement toward reconciliation: a ‘socialism,’ in the broadest sense, defined not by ideology, but by the ideal of a harmonious society built on machineage prosperity. As the magazine’s approach to Mussolini suggests, this vision contained a latent authoritarianism, a readiness, in extremis, to privilege social order over the defence of liberal democracy.

‘Advertising … in modern life’ Among the enticements to VU’s future readers, in the ‘Remarks’, is the promise of advertisements. The terms of this inclusion are striking, in that advertising is projected as a naturalised category, allocated ‘the place that it occupies in modern life’ alongside the other elements of VU’s visual universe: ‘political events, scientific discoveries, disasters … art, fashion’ and so forth.62 This acknowledgement of advertising’s new status reflects the contemporary context: the stabilisation and renewed prosperity of capitalist economies at the end of the 1920s, and the dominance of the American, consumerist ideal. The equation of advertising with ‘modern life’ also reflects the increasing involvement of avantgarde artists and photographers in commercial work, and a new willingness among modernist critics, including key figures on the radical left, to embrace the cultural value, and artistic potential, of the advertising medium.63 The director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, writing in 1928, described the emergence of a ‘truly social, collective, mass art: the only one we now have. … Little by little an artistic attitude is hammered into the mass soul by poster hoardings’;64 Jan Tschichold, in 1931, praised the ‘supernatural clarity’ of contemporary advertising photography.65 The two perspectives point to the modernist appeal of the medium: a means of faithfully representing the object world of technological modernity; a demotic art form, expressing the collective ‘soul’ of the modern age.

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It is this modernist consensus, a mutual investment in the technological and consumerist ideal, that emerges in the display adverts and editorial pages of VU magazine.66 Where advertisements share space with editorial, the characteristic effect is of consolidation rather than contrast: a page layout from August 1933, for example, twins a publicity photo of film stars Brigitte Helm and Jean Gabin in open-top cars with a similar graphic image advertising Castrol oil; the facing page shows an advert for Rolleiflex cameras, endorsed by the photographer Jean Moral.67 Advertisements, in turn, echo the layouts and photographic styles of VU’s editorial pages; a 1932 advert for Dunlop tennis balls, for example, employs the pared-down aesthetic of the New Photography, and fills the back-cover slot occupied, in other issues, by editorial images.68 VU’s advertisements provide valuable, if indirect, evidence about the magazine’s readers: their broad socio-economic bearings, the classes of consumer goods these readers may have purchased, and, by extension, the kind of ideal modernity to which they aspired.69 The defining product, in these terms, was the automobile: advertisements for cars (principally, French-made saloons) and associated items (engine oil, tyres) form a staple element of VU’s advertising content; the magazine’s editorial interest in car ownership and auto manufacture – a boom industry in France until the economic crisis70 – included an annual October issue devoted to the Salon de l’Automobile. VU’s readers, as actual or aspirant participants in technological modernity, were also offered such ultramodern accessories as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and electrical kitchen appliances. The mass ownership of radio sets, stemming from the early 1930s, is evidenced by a stream of advertisements for rival makes; like the automobile, this consumer phenomenon was marked, editorially, by a special issue, of September 1932.71 Finally, the reader of VU was a prospective buyer of smaller luxury items such as watches, jewellery, cameras, and of beauty products, chocolates, factorymade shirts. The ideal consumers of this abundance of modern goods were the operators and beneficiaries of the technological society: a socio-economic order that, in France at least, had yet to come into being. By the end of the 1920s, the efforts of technocratic reformists to rationalise French industry had petered out;72 on the demand side, the increasing prevalence of cars and domestic radios was not matched, in the interwar period, by the take-up of other consumer items. Specifically, as Robert L. Frost notes, French businesses largely failed to create a mass market for the new labour-saving devices of the modern lifestyle: mass consumerism, on the American model, only properly took off in the post-1945

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period.73 For Frost, the manufacturers’ real success was at the symbolic level, in their propagandising of a popular, machine-age modernism. More than actual products, French consumers bought ‘the image of the comfortable, consumerist family’ based on the ‘liberatory possibilities of a technologically transformed social and political order’. Technology, in this utopian future, promised not only efficiency and material abundance, but also social and political reconciliation: The new order put in place by the modernists would be a synthetic one that would supersede the tired set of dichotomous divisions that had marked French society. It would include a new middle class with an agenda for growth and consumption beyond the great class divide and a new woman who was simultaneously a worker, a housekeeper, and a prolific parent.74

In their projections of this modernist synthesis, VU’s advertisements were ideologically aligned with the magazine’s editorial ideals. The corollary of this was a common visual language: the idealism of adverts and articles was embodied in the shared motifs and pattern forms of the emerging modernist visual culture. As a reification of the qualities of its associated product, advertising draws on the viewer’s cultural competence to express a distilled, emphatic meaning: the symbolic intent of the typical display advertisement is, by its nature, lucid and unambiguous. For the historian of modernism, advertisements thus present, potentially, a lexicon of generalised symbolic forms current within a given visual culture. In VU’s advertisements of the years 1930–3, certain recurrent structural pattern forms appear to be symbolically coded in this way, functioning as readymade signifiers of cultural ideals. Most significant, in this regard, is the long diagonal, describing an ‘ascending’ (bottom left to top right) or ‘descending’ (top left to bottom right) diagonal vector passing through the centre of the image frame. In the years up to 1933, and particularly in the pre-1931 period, long diagonals appear in adverts for everything from automobiles and electrical goods, to shirts, decaffeinated coffee, and suntan oil. The pattern’s energetic symbolism is nicely captured in an advertisement for Peugeot cars from May 1930; a tapering diagonal vector zigzags through heavy traffic, beneath a graphic legend in modernist sans-serif: ‘You are losing precious minutes. The trip would be three times quicker if you had a Peugeot 5CV.’75 In VU’s advertisements, the long diagonal pattern, as symbol of a dynamic, consumerist modernity, configures the essential products of the modern lifestyle (Figures 72–74), and even the consumer herself (Figure 75). The mutually

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Figure 72  Advertisement for Café Sanka, VU, April 16, 1930, p. 328.

Figure 73  Advertisement for Noveltex shirts, back cover, VU, December 16, 1931.

Figure 74  Advertisement for Inno­ vation wardrobes, VU, October 29, 1930, p. 1131.

Figure 75  Advertisement for Huile de Chaldée, VU, October 16, 1930, p. 729.

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reinforcing signifiers – modernist brand names (‘Noveltex’, ‘Innovation’); the sunbather’s insouciant fashion sense (swimsuit and flat-heeled pumps) – declare the promise of a benevolent future devoted to individual needs and desires.76 For the drinker of Café Sanka, for example, this is a world freed from the debilitating side effects of coffee: Coffee, your delicious coffee … also hides a thorn, a thorn poisonous for those with cardiac and nervous conditions: caffeine. By removing it, today’s science offers you, in Café SANKA, the joy of drinking and offering to others the most exquisite coffee, rendered entirely inoffensive.77

The long diagonal, in these 1930–1 adverts, projects a vibrant optimism about the progress of technological modernity. Intriguingly, in this light, the pattern appears both less frequently in VU after the onset of the French economic crisis, and also expresses its inverse values, as the figure of steadfast immobility or of decline. Thus, in the subdued special issue for the 1933 Salon de l’Automobile, it re-emerges in the form of a crossed-diagonal oppositional vector pattern, in advertisements for safety windscreen glass and Philips headlamp bulbs – beneath the headline: ‘SECURITÉ’.78 Most strikingly, in a one-off advertisement for Unic shoes from November 1932, the descending diagonal represents a graph of the deflation in shoe prices over the 1931–2 period – a trend dubiously attributed, in the copy text, to the modernisation of the production process.79 Just as VU’s editorial contents spoke to the consumerist dreams of its display advertisements, so advertising variously inflected the growing pessimism of the magazine after 1931 – as if, by acknowledging the economic crisis, it might somehow be turned to commercial advantage. An advert for the nutritional drink Ovomaltine, from December 1931, shows a married couple on a sofa, with the husband gazing anxiously into the middle distance, above the legend: ‘You won’t fear the future if you look after your strength.’80 This anxiety becomes ever more prevalent in advertisements from 1932–3; at the limit, even such a quintessentially modern accessory as the refrigerator is defined in negative terms, as a defence against food poisoning. One advert shows a prostrate mother attended by her worried child – ‘You’re poorly, Mummy’ (Tu n’en peux plus, Maman). The copy text reads: For some time now her strength has abandoned her, she suffers from stomach pains. Even though she’s still young, she feels spent, lacking in spirit. She wonders what is wrong with her.

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Quite simply, this: she is eating foods that she buys fresh, naturally. But with the sometimes mild, damp and changeable autumn weather, her provisions spoil in the house. … Bacteria and moulds proliferate on her foodstuffs, causing changes that are, for a long time, invisible and odourless; her constitution, however robust, finally succumbs.81

Though the Frigidaire purchaser is saved from food poisoning by hygienic technology, science is also implicated in this modern dilemma, as the producer of knowledge, and hence of consumer anxiety: microbiology, newly spectacularised through photomicrography, was a definitive science of the machine age.82 Like the Ovomaltine advert, the mother’s distressed, averted gaze projects a remarkable absence of confidence in the virtues of the product, and by extension, in the technological world to which the product belongs. In these symbolic terms, the dispirited advertising of 1932–3 – stressing defensive values of security, stability, thrift – relates to VU’s broader existential crisis in the Depression years: an emergent conviction that the world’s proliferating political, social, and economic crises were, at a fundamental level, the fault of modernity itself; that, far from progressing toward a social utopia, the machine age led only to social breakdown, and even, ultimately, to war. Chapters 10 and 11 describe how this modernist dilemma was played out, in part, in the structural pattern forms of VU’s photography and graphic design. The common property of these patterns was the symbolism of social order, though the symbolic values attaching to particular pattern forms varied according to the content and context of the image. This polyvalent capacity can be illustrated by a comparison of two final advertising images, from VU of 1931 and 1932. In the later advertisement, for Radiola radios, a photograph of a crowd of men is cropped to fit the silhouette of a diagonally slanted talking head. The legend reads: ‘The public demanded it of us’, declaring the manufacturer’s fine-tuned responsiveness to the requirements of the modern consumer.83 The crowd pattern, as the figure of universalised man, can, however, be turned the other way, to express the loss of individuality within mass modernity. A singular advertisement from the Salon de L’Automobile issue of September 1931 (Figure 76), for the Syndicat de la Carrosserie Française (French Union of Coachbuilders), shows a descending long diagonal composed of the same modern crowd as the Radiola advert. This is intersected, Bauhaus-fashion, by a circle, filled with serried rows of identical vehicles; the legend, forming an opposing diagonal vector, declares: ‘Neither you, nor your car, need to be anonymous’;84 the accompanying text contrasts the

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Figure 76  Advertisement for the Syndicat de la Carrosserie Française (French Union of Coachbuilders), VU, September 30, 1931, p. 2252.

rationalised uniformity of factory-line products with the bespoke, personalised creations of independent coachbuilders. For VU’s advertisers of the early 1930s, structural pattern forms operated as conventional signifiers of machine modernity. The construction of contrasting positions vis-à-vis this modernity – as liberating or repressive – relied on this cultural competence: the crowd and car patterns in Figure 75 operate as convenient visual shorthand for the idea of a society built around mass production, mass provision and collective, rationalised endeavour. As the following chapters describe, this symbolic potentiation of pattern was key to VU’s visual culture: its utopian projections of the future society, and its responses to the traumatic collapse of the modernist ideal.

Notes 1 “Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré” (Remarks on a new illustrated magazine), VU, A1, No. 1, March 21, 1928, p. 11. A freer translation of the full text, but retaining

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the original layout, appears in Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine That Made an Era (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 300–1. 2 For the concept of photographic “profusion” in interwar visual culture, see note 9, p. 118. 3 “Remarques,” pp. 11–12. 4 On Armistice Day 1927, the French minister of public works, André Tardieu, declared that the reconstruction of France’s war-damaged estate was nearly complete. This was over-optimistic, but it reflects a general sense across Europe at this period that a new postwar era was now in prospect. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 8–9. 5 “Remarques,” pp. 11–12. VU’s global coverage was made possible by the systems of photographic distribution that came of age in the interwar period. For a discussion of VU’s extensive use of picture agencies, see Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 16. 6 “Remarques,” p. 11. 7 Sophie Kurkdjan, Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff: Parcours Croisés de deux Éditeurs de Presse Illustrée au Vingtième Siècle (Paris: Institut Universitaire Varenne, 2014), 382. 8 Claude Bellanger, ed., Histoire Générale de la Presse Française (Vol III, 1871 à 1940) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 597. 9 Carlo Rim, “Défense et Illustration de la Photographie,” VU, A5, No. 214, April 1932, p. 587. Translation from Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 302. 10 Kurkdjan, Lucien Vogen et Michel de Brunhoff, 375. 11 Gervais and Morel, The Making of Visual News: A History of Photography in the Press, 52–5. 12 Ibid., 67. See also Andrés Mario Zervigòn and Patrick Rössler, “‘Die AIZ sagt die Warheit’: zu den Illustrationsstrategien einer ‘anderen’ deutschen Avantgarde,” in Deutsche illustrierte Presse, ed. Leiskau, Rössler, and Trabert. 13 The phrase translates literally as “skull cramming,” and has no close equivalent in English: “brainwashing” is the usual, if unsatisfactory, translation. For the influence of this legacy in promoting the later distrust, among French pacifists, of journalistic exposés of the Nazi regime, see Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years (London: SinclairStevenson, 1995), 20. 14 A near complete digitised run of Le Miroir is available online at Gallica: https://gallica​.bnf​.fr/. 15 Gervais and Morel, The Making of Visual News, 46–7. 16 Ulrich Hägele, “Montage, Groteske, Propaganda. Die Vorgeschichte der Avantgarde: Medieninnovation in der französischen Illustrierten J’ai Vu ... 1914 bis 1920,” Fotogeschichte 32, no. 123 (2012): 5.

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17 “Chercher un refuge pendant que leur patrie est en exil” (Searching for refuge while their homeland is in exile), J’ai vu, February 8, 1916, p. 19; “À l’école des conducteurs d’automobiles militaires,” J’ai vu, September 23, 1916, p. 615. These pages are reproduced in Hägele, “Montage, Groteske, Propaganda,” 7, 9. 18 Gervais and Morel, The Making of Visual News, 38. 19 La vie au grand air, March 15, 1919, pp. 1–12, 22–3. A semi-complete digitised run of La vie au grand air is available online at: https://gallica​.bnf​.fr/. 20 Tristan Bernard, “La Société Nouvelle” (The new society), La Vie au grand air, March 16, 1919, p. 4. 21 See, for example, Match l’Intran, November 9, 1926, p. 15; November 16, 1926, p. 12; February 1, 1927, p. 15. 22 For example, Match l’Intran, February 15, 1927, p. 15; March 29, 1927, p. 15; April 26, 1927, p. 15. 23 Quoted in: Gervais and Morel, The Making of Visual News, 45. 24 Ibid., 45. 25 The first feature-length talking picture, The Jazz Singer, was released in 1927. 26 For a general discussion of Americanism and anti-Americanism in 1920s Europe, see David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 13–141. 27 See, for example, “Quatres attitudes de Furtwaengler” (Four of Furtwaengler’s stances), VU, A3, No. 114, May 21, 1930, p. 470. 28 “Ben Hur en Smoking” (Ben Hur in a smoking jacket), photomontage of the actor Roman Navarro, VU, A6, No. 267, April 26, 1933, p. 663. 29 Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 8. 30 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Abingdon and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 228–32. 31 The quotation is from the introduction to “Fascistes Antifascistes: La France vous acceuille – Complotez ailleurs!” (Fascists, Anti-fascists: France welcomes you – Take your plotting elsewhere!), VU, A3, No. 100, February 12, 1930, p. 123. The editorial states: “VU … is a free tribune, which, without prejudice of any kind, pursues only one goal: to interest its readers.” 32 James F. McMillan, Dreyfus to De Gaulle: Politics and Society in France, 1898-1969 (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), 88. 33 For the divergent political bearings of VU’s contributors, see Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu, 36. 34 Penelope Mary Rook, “Vu as a Forum for Photographers, 1928–1934,” Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London (The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2011), 42–3. 35 See Chapter 11, below, pp. 260–7. 36 “Remarques,” p. 12.

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37 Editorial page announcing an increase in VU’s page count, VU, A3, No. 133, October 1, 1930, p. 1011. 38 See also above, pp. 21. 39 Pierre-Jean Amar, Le Photojournalisme (2000), quoted in Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu, 21. 40 Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 8. 41 Leenaerts, Petite histoire du magazine Vu, 25. 42 VU’s contemporary reputation as a left-wing title was established, in particular, by its bestselling special issue, “Au Pays des Soviets” (VU, A4, No. 192, November 18, 1931). See Chapter 11, pp. 261–4. 43 See below, pp. 267–73. 44 VU ran numerous articles between 1930 and 1933 on the effects of the Depression in Europe and America. For a typical photo-illustrated story on unemployment in France, see “du travail ou du pain: pathologie du chomage” (Work or bread: pathology of unemployment), VU, A5, No. 202, January 27, 1932, pp. 99–100. 45 Front cover, VU, A4, No. 161, April 15, 1931. 46 The cultural nostalgia of the reconstruction era is brilliantly captured in the opening chapters of Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia. 47 VU’s coverage of the Exposition was not confined to the special issue (VU 168): the inauguration of the festival was captured in VU 165 (May 13, 1931), and further stories appeared in VU 166 and 167. 48 Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 94–6. 49 The phrase is from James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 196–7. See also Chapter 5 of Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia. 50 Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire, vol. 1: La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 561. 51 “La conquête patiente et glorieuse de notre empire colonial” (The patient and glorious conquest of our colonial empire), VU, A4, No. 168, June 3, 1931, pp. 799–802. 52 Golan argues, though without citations, that the pro-Italian sympathies of the immediate post-armistice period faded after the establishment of the Italian dictatorship in 1923 (Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia, 9). The evidence of VU suggests that, at the least, this repudiation was not universal. The cult of fascism among the French avant-garde is explored in: Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909-1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 53 See, for example, Hélène Gosset’s article following the “trial of the intellectuals” – members of the dissident Justice and Liberty organisation. “VU chez Mussolini,” VU, A4, No. 282, June 17, 1931, pp. 873–4.

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54 Henri Bidou, “Le Fait Mussolini” (The Mussolini phenomenon), VU, A6, No. 282, August 9, 1933, p. 1182. 55 Ibid., p. 1183. 56 Ibid., pp. 1182–3. “18 Brumaire” in 1799 was the coup d’état which brought Napoleon to power as First Consul of France; “Sulla” refers to the Roman general and statesman Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138–78 BCE), who revived the dictatorship but later resigned his autocratic powers and restored Rome’s constitutional government. 57 See below, pp. 261–7. 58 The wedding of the Duce’s daughter, Edda Mussolini, provides the front cover of VU 311, April 30, 1930; Mussolini’s sons, Vittoria and Bruno, appear on the back cover of VU 190, November 4, 1931. 59 Emil Ludwig, “Entretiens avec Mussolini” (Interviews with Mussolini), VU, A5, No. 251, October 26, 1932, p. 1724. Aristide Briand, the French negotiator of the Locarno Treaties and co-winner of the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize with Gustav Stresemann, died in March 1932. 60 Lucien Vogel, “Conclusion,” VU, A6, No. 282, August 9, 1933, p. 1273. 61 See below, p. 283. 62 “Remarques,” p. 11. 63 Maud Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity,” in Montage and Modern Life, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge: MIT Press), 46–51. 64 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, Das Kunstblatt, June 1928, quoted in Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 150. Hartlaub was the curator of the Mannheim Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition of 1925. See above, pp. 129–31. 65 Ibid., 150, 42. 66 Walter Adamson describes a similarly symbiotic, and symbolic relationship between the avant-garde journal L’Esprit Nouveau and its industrial and commercial advertisers: Walter L. Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2007), 217. 67 VU, A6, No. 282, August 9, 1933, pp. 1174–5. 68 Advertisement for Dunlop tennis equipment, back cover, VU, A6, No. 280, July 26, 1933. 69 VU’s photographic archive and records, which may have included documentation on the magazine’s readership, disappeared after the abrupt closure of the magazine in the summer of 1940, following the German conquest of Paris. 70 Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 84.

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71 “Radio,” special issue, VU, A5, No. 235, September 14, 1932. For the rise of radio culture in interwar France, see Rebecca Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 72 Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France, 59–64. 73 Robert L. Frost, “Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 1 (1993): 129–30. 74 Ibid., 111. 75 Advertisement for Peugeot 5CV cars, back cover of VU, A3, No. 113, May 14, 1930. 76 For the related symbolism of the long diagonal in Italian futurism, see above, pp. 57–8. 77 Copy text from advertisement for Café Sanka coffee, VU, A3, No. 109, April 16, 1930, p. 328. 78 For the oppositional vector pattern in Russian constructivism, see above, pp. 58–9. 79 Advertisement for Unic shoes, VU, A5, No. 245, November 23, 1932, p. 1835. For a concise account of the deflation of the early 1930s, see Tom Kemp, The French Economy, 1913-39: The History of a Decline (Harlow: Longman, 1972), 100–10. 80 “Vous ne redouterez pas l’avenir si vous veillez sur vos forces,” advertisement for Ovomaltine, VU, A4, No. 196, December 16, 1931, p. 2753. 81 Copy text from advertisement for Frigidaire refrigerators, VU, A5, No. 242, November 2, 1932, p. 1743. 82 See also above, pp. 90–3. Domestic reformers of the 1920s, such as Jean Labadie, promoted the idea of the “scientific kitchen,” with electrical appliances enlisted in the battle against germs and bacteria. See Roxanne Panchasi, Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2009), 24–30. 83 Advertisement for Radiola radios, VU, A5, No. 238, October 5, 1932, p. 1585. 84 Advertisement for the Syndicat de la Carrosserie Française, VU, A4, No. 185, September 30, 1931, p. 2252.

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[T]he works of today, untainted by the past, primary shapes which identify the countenance of our time. Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, 1928 A little-known article by Le Corbusier, from 1926, points to the symbolisation of geometric patterns in modernist visual culture. Key to the article, on the psychology of form, is an accompanying set of sketches – scarcely more than doodles – which are captioned according to the symbolic meanings that these contrasting contours and shapes are taken to express: ‘incoherence, violence, disequilibrium’ for diagonal vectors and jagged or meandering curves; ‘diverse sensations’ for serial patterns; ‘coherence, determination, equilibrium, wellbeing’ for the Platonic forms and solids.1 Rather than proposing a symbolic interpretation of these various forms, the article confidently defines their meanings as a universal human property. Le Corbusier’s modernist conception, boldly extrapolated into a general law of civilisation, draws on the self-affirming visual language of the machine age.2 This chapter explores the symbolism of pattern in VU’s photography and page layouts, focusing on the geometric forms of the grid, symbolic of scientific order and rationality, and the vector pattern, invoking the dynamism of the technological future. As described in Chapter 3, modernist prototypes of these pattern forms included the vectors and serial geometries of pre-1914 futurism, describing a vertiginous, violent progress from a superannuated past into a mechanised future: the dynamic, in Christina Lodder’s term, of modernism’s ‘Dionysian utopia’.3 For visionaries of the postwar decade, by contrast, the rupture with Tschichold’s ‘tainted’ past impelled a cult of the new, a continuous present shaped by the emergent forms and ideals of technocratic modernity. The grid, as the resonant symbol of Lodder’s ‘rational utopia’, symbolised not a movement toward the ideal society but its realisation in the present, through the application of universal scientific principles.4

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Like the geometric compositions in Match l’Intran,5 VU’s machine-age patterns are associated with the motifs of an ideal modernity: technological innovations; flight; the new woman; leisure and tourism. In the magazine’s optimistic early years, before France’s descent into economic crisis, VU developed a distinctive photographic and design language, in which the disparate elements of modern life were configured so as to reveal their underlying visual and symbolic unity: the expression, in Ernst Bloch’s formulation, of an ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of the utopian future.6 Images capturing the repetitious forms of technology and the urban environment, and the formal and incidental patterns of human sociability, were harbingers of a new geometric age, promising social order, prosperity, and modern leisure.

A snapshot: VU, spring 1930 The VU issues of spring 1930 reflect the general mood of optimism in French national life at this period.7 Until at least 1931, when France’s export industries entered into a catastrophic decline, the global Depression appeared, to many commentators, to have miraculously bypassed the French economy;8 as the financial columnist of Le Temps declared in August 1930: ‘Whatever the cause of world depression, France can face it with relative serenity.’9 A contemporary account by the British journalist H. H. Tiltman describes a similar air of detached equanimity among working people: ‘I left the country without having met a single man, employer or official, worker or workless, who was seriously perturbed by the crisis. Which is a remarkable fact. Perhaps God is a Frenchman after all.’10 In the VU of spring 1930, this optimistic spirit was expressed in projections of a dynamic and well-ordered French modernity, set against contrasting images of calamities and social tensions in the wider world. A brief selection from three consecutive issues from this period, VU 111–13, may serve to illustrate this play of symbols, and to introduce the magazine’s principal themes and preoccupations, which are well represented within their pages. VU 111, published on 30 April 1930 when the magazine was two years old, stands as a testament to the perspicacity of its founding editor, Lucien Vogel. Vogel’s magazine, now an established title, very much fulfilled the promise of the ‘Remarks on a new illustrated magazine’ of the opening issue.11 Whilst some minor details had changed – the promised ‘Comic Pages’ and ‘Illness of

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the Month’ had been dropped – VU was now playing out the ‘beautiful film’ of modern life proclaimed in its manifesto. Central to this promise were pages ‘crammed with photographs’, picture stories composing dynamic juxtapositions of glamour, technology, politics, sport, arts, travel, and studies of French society – a dizzying compression of actuality, its edges sharpened by weekly doses of disaster. The metanarrative of VU, 1930, described the emergence of a unified social order built on technological progress, and underpinned by moves toward international disarmament. Which socio-economic and political models might best deliver this new society was a question which remained, however, unresolved. Thus, on the cover of VU 111, 30 April 1930, the wedding of Mussolini’s daughter – ‘Un grand mariage Romain’ (A grand Roman wedding) – is framed like any other royal or celebrity liaison in other issues; Mussolini himself appears two issues later, in the ceremonial trappings of the ‘modern dictator’.12 VU’s ambivalent attitude to the Duce13 – in marked contrast to its visceral anti-Nazism – was of a piece with its insecure response to both the Soviet Union and the United States, described in a searching article in VU 115, ‘Aurons nous à choisir: USA? URSS?’ (Will we have to choose: USA? USSR?).14 This ideological self-interrogation would continue, with moments of great intensity, up to the point of Vogel’s removal as editor, in the autumn of 1936, over the magazine’s support for the Spanish Republican cause.15 The leading inside page in VU 111, titled ‘Cette Semaine’ (This week), exemplifies the visual and thematic abundance promised by the 1928 manifesto (Figure 77).16 The page is divided horizontally into two half-page photographs; a third, semicircular photo is inset, overlapping the corner of the higher main picture – an example of the stacking technique used in many of VU’s page layouts. Whilst the images are, ostensibly, unrelated – the Queen of the Belgians at the Exposition d’Anvers; the Prince of Wales climbing into a light aeroplane; the aftermath of an air crash showing the charred bodies of the aristocratic victims – their juxtaposition is jarring. Viewed as a whole, the composite news page embodies the ‘collective image of … communal life’ proposed by Marshall McLuhan, a ‘mosaic’ of spectacular events composing a symbolic unity.17 At the level of narrative and visual detail, however, the images are equally constructive of mutual oppositions: in this case, a bleakly ironic symbolic coupling of privilege and disaster. The photomontage layout here embodies the form’s dialectical nature, as the expression of mythic synthesis, but also of fragmentation and complexity18 – exemplifying what Siegfried Kracauer called the ‘mosaic … of

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Figure 77  ‘Cette Semaine’ (This week), composite news page, VU, April 30, 1930, p. 390.

individual observations’, from which a ‘true image’ of conflicted modern life might emerge.19 As described in the following chapters, it was in VU’s composite news pages, in particular, that the forces fragmenting the utopian project found visual expression: the pessimistic narrative projected by these chaotic compressions was often at variance with the tone of other stories in the same issue. VU’s photographic fascination with disaster was countered by visual projections of an ideal modernity, built on scientific principles and rationalist values. This optimistic modernism is expressed in the dynamic geometries of advertisements and page layouts, but also at the level of individual pictures, which reflect and serve to naturalise the self-conscious patterning of the magazine’s page designs. Scattered throughout the pages of VU are photographs in which symmetries, repetitions and geometric alignments create ‘accidental’ patterns, seemingly lifted from a beneficent, well-ordered modern world. In VU 111, a dispirited report on naval disarmament talks is followed by a composite news page, featuring a rail accident but also a photo of the neatly arranged bath chairs of patients at an outdoor service in Lourdes.

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The photograph, shot from a high angle above the crowd, presents a slanting grid-form composition recalling contemporary images of mass-manufactured automobiles;20 originals of this patterning archetype appear in the following issue (VU 112, 7 May 1930) in an article on the French car industry, showing the modular forms of factory buildings, machine tools, and auto assembly lines. As VU’s images exemplify, the modernist grid served both as a spectacular pattern form and, more subtly, as a compositional matrix governing the configuration of motifs. A typical example appears in VU 113 (14 May 1930), in a photograph of spectators at a religious festival in Bruges (Figure 78). The image is, again, taken from an oblique camera angle, to create a skilful geometric composition: the spectators are evenly sorted (two per window) and symmetrically configured within the frame of the window grid; the tapering verticals give the building and its occupants a skyward impetus, subtly evoking the idea of flight – VU’s abiding obsession at this period.21 Like the Lourdes invalids, the structural patterning configures elements of the past and present within a mythic landscape of machine-age modernity, whose sign was a universe of wondrous, geometric order.

Figure 78  ‘Les Fêtes du Saint-Sang’ (Festival of the Holy Blood), VU, May 14, 1930, p. 442.

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Figure 79 Page spread from ‘L’Ecole Populaire Moderne’ (The modern popular school), VU, April 30, 1930, pp. 404–5.

The utopian ideal in VU’s photography described a myth of synthesis: that the anxieties and conflicts of contemporary life would be reconciled in a shimmering technological future. In VU of spring 1930, this temporal duality was exemplified in images of children, presented as the docile inhabitants of a benign, regimented world. In ‘L’École Populaire Moderne’ (The modern popular school), from VU 111, the disciplining regularities of the traditional classroom are displayed alongside images of modern educational techniques: the boys exercising on a sports ground – ‘not rigid gymnastics but a true physical culture which relaxes these older youths between workshop sessions’ – compose the same simple grid form as the refectory tables, swimming pools and tiled floor in neighbouring photographs (Figure 79); on the following page, youths aligned in identical posture at their workbenches then become subjects in a laboratory, where their heights and lung capacities are scientifically recorded.22 The ideal, here, is not of a punitive, disciplinarian culture, but of the children’s socialisation within the collective structures of the new modernity: implicitly, the functional, modernist environment correlates to the harmonious sociability of its child occupants. An article on housing projects in Vienna, from VU 142, December 1930, makes this equation explicit:

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We visited the new localities built according to modern principles, which are a real novelty, and in no way resemble the gloomy workers’ districts. … Not one, simple as they are, is concerned with ornamentation. True models of practical beauty, these buildings occupy only 50 percent of the ground, to permit the laying out of courtyards, gardens, outdoor swimming pools, and to allow the sunlight to reach every dwelling. … [T]he child, in Vienna, is king. There is no sacrifice the municipality will not demand for him. No child is born in Vienna without the city offering its help. Long before he comes into the world, a comprehensive service of premarital medical consultations assures a ‘good birth’.23

Like the earlier story, the construction of Vienna’s modernist utopia is illustrated with images of its ideal inhabitants: well-behaved children geometrically arrayed on daybeds or brushing their teeth in communal washrooms.24 Central to the optimistic vision of VU, spring 1930, was a belief in technocratic solutions to France’s deep-seated social and economic problems and class divisions. This transition from an unstable, politically divided actuality to a reconciled machine-age order, is graphically symbolised in VU 112 (7 May 1930), in paired articles forming the opening page spread: ‘1er Mai: Révolution’ (1st May: Revolution), with photos of political demonstrations in Paris, Berlin, and London; on the facing page, ‘1er Mai: Mobilisation’, celebrating the work of the new Maison de Santé du Gardien de la Paix (police hospital): ‘[T]he staff were … mobilised on Workers’ Day: an entirely peaceful mobilisation, as was the 1st of May itself.’25 The contained dynamism of the layout, with its stacked geometric image frames and photographic abundance, is mirrored in the visual content: groups of uniformed nurses attend to their physical tasks, stooping over patients or loading the drum of a vast ‘sterilisation machine’. Technology, turned to constructive uses, becomes a mechanism of social organisation, and a means of reconciling warring classes: as noted in the article, the spur for the hospital’s foundation was a lack of dedicated facilities for police officers injured in the 1927 riots following the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.26 The dream of VU 1930 was of a benign totalisation: articles on cosmetic surgery, or Dutch horticulture, point to the subjugation of nature, and the incorporation of traditional life, within a universal, rationalist modernity.27 This utopian promise was, of course, intrinsically fragile, since it rested on the virtuous application of technology, and an associated international repudiation of militarism. The optimistic projections of the spring 1930 issues were energised by the presence, both explicit and implicit, of their demonic alternatives:

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economic and political upheaval, military conflict. A news image from the final inside page of VU 111 encapsulates this stark, life-and-death duality: the GrafZeppelin, completing its tour of European capitals, is shown hovering over the rooftops of Paris. The caption reads: THE RAID OF THE ‘GRAF-ZEPPELIN’ Fifteen years ago, we went down into the cellars. Now we climb on to the roofs. The German airship Graf-Zeppelin has completed a raid across Europe, overflying the major capital cities. It circled for around an hour above Paris. It is shown here passing in front of the Arc de Triomphe.28

On the magazine’s back cover, titled ‘While the naval disarmament conference was closing’, is an aerial photo of a military seaplane in flight above the British fleet in Gibraltar.

‘On the wings of the air’ The modernist faith in the constructive, unifying possibilities of technology found its transcendent symbolism in the imagery of flight: the abstracted landscapes of aerial photography, images of aeroplanes, and dashing, death-defying aviators.29 At the time of VU’s launch, and well into the 1930s, the cult of aviation united artists and socialites, rich and poor, communists and capitalists, in a universal dream of liberation. The aeroplane, more than any other twentieth-century invention, symbolised the triumph of technological man over the earth-bound constraints of the physical body: a perfect, pan-dimensional freedom in space and time. The figure of the aviator was both Promethean hero, usurping the godlike power of flight, and quintessential celebrity: rich, young, glamorous, and genuinely (as opposed to cinematically) courageous. For utopian modernists, flight both symbolised dynamic futurity and presented the practical possibility of boundless, rapid communications between cities, and even within conurbations: the quixotic Vladimir Tatlin devoted countless hours, in the years 1929–31, to designing an elegant – and aeronautically illiterate – human-powered aircraft, the ‘Letatlin’.30 In 1930s Italy, tame futurists, now resembling a ‘sports team’ with ‘brightly coloured ties, futurist hats and various badges’, devoted their time to aeropittura and related ‘aero’ arts, including aero-dance, aero-architecture, and even aero-ceramics – activities described by Walter Adamson as the ‘pop culture of a would-be consumer society – a futurist culture industry’.31

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In early-1930s VU, aviation was nothing less than an editorial obsession. In addition to agency pictures of aeronautical moments – the arrivals and departures of film stars and aristocrats, experimental flying machines, crashes – VU ran numerous photographic features capturing the spectacle and exhilaration of flight, and the new perspectives of aerial photography.32 These articles – with titles such as ‘Le confort et beauté de l’avion’ (The comfort and beauty of the aeroplane) and ‘Comme une fleur’ (Like a flower) – convey a flamboyant aesthetic idealism, expressed in heroic images of aviators, and in the fetishised machine geometry of flying machines.33 Characteristically, VU’s aviation pictures exploit the symmetries and serial forms of machinery, and the display geometries of air force culture, to produce spectacular photographic patterns. In a striking full-page image from VU 244 (16 November 1932), for example, the gleaming, duplicate forms of an aircraft’s engines are reflected across the ascending diagonal axis of the photograph, with a pair of blades in the lower engine and one of the wing struts aligned with this diagonal (Figure 80). These parallels produce a simple stripe pattern, whilst the perpendicular blades of the lower engine suggest an alternative, hatching motif, with the blade defining

Figure 80 ‘Un paquebot de l’air’ (A ship of the air), VU, November 16, 1932, p. 1813.

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the corner of the photograph; the diminutive figure of the aircraft mechanic is beautifully configured within the composition, his outstretched arm paralleling the line of the lower engine’s ascending blades. The assertion of pattern theory is that all the fragmentary pattern forms, or proto-patterns, described above are immediately legible, and that all are contained within the viewer’s subjective reading of the picture. The image here exemplifies the expansive nature of modernism’s patterning culture, embracing both the discovery of groupings and regularities in the visual world, and their photographic construction. The multiple, interconnected groupings in the photograph – the figure links to the propeller blade, the machine components link to each other, the sky translates by rotational symmetry to the wedge form beneath the aircraft’s wing, and so forth – produce a measured aesthetic and symbolic unity: a negotiation, in the broadest terms, between subjectivity and machine-age regularity. This composite effect also appears at the level of page layouts, with visual repetitions and regularities connecting motifs across neighbouring images. In ‘Sur les ailes du vent’ (On the wings of the air), for example, also from VU 244, the perfect triangle (Gestalt completion) of an aeroplane formation is subtly mirrored in the photograph beneath it by the angles of the parachute’s lines, and, on the facing page, by the crazy launch angle of a stunt plane and the flattened, triangular perspective of a second formation flying upside down (Figure 81). In pattern theory terms, the page spread is a proto-pattern composition on a theme of geometric forms: triangles, rectangles, and a circle. Utopian optimism reached its apex in VU in the summer and autumn of 1930, in issues celebrating contemporary and historical achievements of the French people. Two events provided a particular focus for VU’s patriotic fervour: the 150th anniversary of the Tricolour, and the first eastward crossing of the Atlantic, by two French aviators, Dieudonne Costes and Maurice Bellonte. The first of these events (VU 121, 9 July 1930) prompted a bout of triumphalist flag-waving, with declarations of French supremacy in technology and science, fashion and cuisine, and in the beauty of its women: ‘Les femmes les plus séduisantes sont les femmes françaises’ (The most seductive women are French women).34 The beauty of women is paralleled, in VU 121, with the aesthetic perfection of bridges, ships, and the ‘world’s biggest’ lighthouse and aircraft hangars. In each case, the discovery of ideal form – in the curve of a hull or the latticed steelwork of a gantry – prompts a gesture of repetition, a visual echo in images on the same page. In VU’s utopian design language, the elements of pattern-making are

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Figure 81  ‘Sur les ailes du vent’ (On the wings of the air), page spread, VU, November 16, 1932, p. 1814.

assembled, like a gracious invitation, whether the patterning game is played or merely implied. In VU’s multiple perspectives on the Costes et Bellonte transatlantic flight (VU 129–37, 3 September to 29 October 1930), machine-age pattern forms are combined with the heroic imagery of the age of glamour. The saga’s narrative, conveyed in a sequence of visual tropes, enacts the fictive process described by Susan Sontag, in which photography turns people ‘into objects that can be symbolically possessed’.35 The mythic quest begins on the cover of VU 129 (3 September 1930), where the exile of the heroes from the kingdom is expressed in their solidarity, and indifference to a crowd of onlookers, and in the anxious figure of a woman (princess) gazing after her departing lover (knight errant); the departure narrative is completed on the inside pages, with pictures of the two aviators climbing into the cockpit – ‘Costes, calme et souriant, prend place sur son siège’ (Costes, calm and smiling, climbs into his seat) – and a final, archetypal image of the tiny aircraft climbing into the grey morning sky from the runway of Le Bourget airport. The achievement of the Atlantic crossing was celebrated in a special issue, VU 130 (‘“VU” Avec Costes et Bellonte à New-York’, 10 September 1930). The photography constructs a skilful narrative sequence building to the climactic

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moment of arrival, as experienced in New York and Paris, with diverse photographic and design techniques serving to establish the key points in the story, and their associated mood. The photomontage cover of VU 130, juxtaposing a close-up of the two aviators in flight over an aerial view of New York, employs a simple dramatic realism to evoke the journey’s final moments from the position of the pilots; on the inside leading page, the scene a few minutes later is breathlessly captured by the scratchy, wire photograph of the arrival, sent from Curtiss Field aerodrome to newspaper offices in London.36 The action then cuts, cinematically, to images of the waiting crowds in Paris, and on to scenes of jubilation when news of the landing comes through. This movement is expressed through a subtle compositional shift, from naturalism (the naturally configured, expectant crowd) to a geometric stylisation of the euphoric moment, emphasised in a photographic cut-out. The sequence culminates in a dazzling set piece, ‘NEW-YORK REÇOIT COSTES ET BELLONTE’ (New York welcomes Costes and Bellonte), showing the ticker-tape parade for the aviators down Broadway (Figure 82). The VU photo-page is a sublime expression of modernist photographic patterning: the vanishing point in the top-right corner of the

Figure 82 ‘New-York reçoit Costes et Bellonte’ (New York welcomes Costes and Bellonte), VU, September 10, 1930, p. 889.

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picture has been burnt out and replaced by a semicircular inset close-up of the two men waving, which creates a ‘sun’ motif; the ‘rays’ of the sun are constructed from the diagonal vectors of buildings, the crowds lining the route, the cortège, and even the white streaks of streamers – some of which appear, miraculously, to have aligned themselves with the patterning scheme. The perfect regularity of the composition describes a symbolic unity: humanity, metropolis, and machines are unified, and dynamically configured, in the light of heroic modernity; through the transcendent technology of flight, utopian modernism achieves its moment of synthesis. If aviation embodied the utopian ideal, it also expressed its fragility. VU’s idealised images of flight were balanced by weekly visions of technological disaster: derailed trains, mangled cars, and crashed aeroplanes. On one level, such photographic juxtapositions express a convulsive, Dionysian potential, the erotic death-drive impelling Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto’, to which the cult of speed inevitably tended.37 Some of VU’s montages project just such an erotic fascination, as for example in VU 256 (7 February 1933), where a photograph of a speedboat breaking the world 12-mile record is juxtaposed with an Irish train derailment (two dead) and an image of a sinking cargo ship (four sailors carried away by a wave).38 Particularly in VU’s earlier, optimistic period, such disaster images appear as incidental, even picturesque, oppositions within the magazine’s master narrative, in which the affirmation of technological modernity was paramount.39 VU’s reportage was, however, never confined to the single, captioned image; the values of humanist photojournalism presented a continual and often unsettling challenge to the magazine’s utopian myth-making. This potentiality is exemplified in VU 134 (8 October 1930), in a story sandwiched between the Costes et Bellonte special issue and the coverage of their triumphant return to France.40 Entitled simply ‘La Catastrophe’, the single-page photo-story recounts the explosion of a British airship, in which the commander died and the crew were severely burnt (Figure 83). The story contains main pictures of the smouldering wreckage, and of the body of the commander (an undertaker’s coffin lies beside the limed cadaver); forming a column down the right-hand side of the page are three circular inset pictures: the crew members in their hospital beds, their heads and arms swathed in bandages. The images are genuinely disturbing: the hooded eyes of one patient confront the camera, the others appear too far gone to care. Photography confronts, in this story, its dual nature, as witness to experience and idealist projection – a tension which would become increasingly acute in VU in the years after 1930, as images of a world in crisis proliferated.

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Figure 83  ‘La catastrophe’, page layout, VU, October 8, 1930, p. 1033.

‘The triumph of woman’ The mortal risks of pioneering aviation, poignantly evoked by the ‘Catastrophe’ story, represented the price paid by the modernist hero for a utopian reconfiguration of the human body, its capacities and identities.41 Key to the construction of this ‘man of the future’ was the cult of the machine,42 serving as a metaphorical ideal of the disciplined, machine-like modern body, and promising the expansion of human capacities through forms of prosthetic enhancement.43 In this context, the image of the aviator, endowed with the miraculous power of flight, symbolised both the technological future and the associated transformation of humanity: the photographic embodiment of Dziga Vertov’s ‘perfect electric man. A new man freed from weight and clumsiness, with the exact and light movements of a machine.’44 Such transformations were not, moreover, limited to the physical realm: freedom from the earth, and from the social environment, permitted an equally radical symbolic liberation, from the constraints of traditional gender identities and roles. In the pages of VU, the combined, centaur-like figure of the aviator-aircraft presented an ideal of the

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leisured, mechanised modern man, but equally of his spectacular counterpart, the emancipated, mythic figure of the new woman.45 Two front cover images from VU describe contrasting ideals of the new woman that were current in the early 1930s. On the cover of VU 219 (25 May 1932) the waving figure of Amelia Earhart, the ‘girl-Lindbergh’, smiles down from the bolted steps of an aeroplane fuselage (Figure 84). She is dressed in aviator’s leather flying suit and boots, and her hair is cropped mannishly short and tousled. The caption describes her exploit: a solo crossing of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland, then on to London after changing planes. Earhart, in her insouciant gesture and proprietorial intimacy with the aircraft, presents as a female equivalent of Costes and Bellonte (or Charles Lindbergh, as her sobriquet declares her), and hence the embodiment of an ultra-modern revolution in gender identity, going well beyond the stylish emancipation of the 1920s femme moderne.46 This iconic front cover was then quoted, five months later, for the cover of VU 244 (16 November 1932), which invoked the Earhart image to assert a very different ideal of modern femininity. The aviator Madeleine Charnaux, ‘une de nos plus charmantes pilotes’ (one of our most charming pilots), perches

Figure 84  ‘La girl-Lindbergh a traversé l’Atlantique’ (The Lindbergh girl has crossed the Atlantic), cover, VU, May 25, 1932.

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decorously above the cockpit of her plane, adjusting her hair with the aid of a compact mirror. Her aviator clothes are ‘feminised’ by the addition of a scarf and fur-lined gloves, the aeroplane recast as a dressing table. The effect is of an ironic reduction, from flight as symbol of pioneering feminism to aviation as consumerist fantasy; as noted in Le Figaro in 1925, the aeroplane was the new must-have accessory for the aspiring modern woman: ‘Nothing stops her, nothing fills her with fear. … Intrepid, she drives her own car while waiting to pilot her aeroplane.’47 VU’s images of Earhart and Charnaux represent less oppositional accounts of the new woman than varieties of this spectacular ideal. Other fashionable types were also on display in its pages: woman as athlete (both ‘masculinised’ in depictions of muscular exertion and ‘feminised’ as a sculptural ideal); as sexually liberated ‘girl about town’; as the mass-produced mannequin of window displays and Broadway musicals. The magazine’s depictions of women were complex and contradictory, and motivated by more than mere sexism or patrician idealism; the unifying theme, however, was the projection of an idealised, youthful femininity, serving as the visual embodiment of modernism’s erotic utopia.48 As Rita Felski notes, the multiplication of stereotypes was intrinsic to the new woman’s symbolic identity: ‘[T]hrough its very artificiality, femininity was to become the privileged marker of the instability and mobility of modern gender identity.’49 As a dynamic, protean figure, appearing in multiple guises, VU’s new woman distilled the boundless potential of the imagined future. The symbolic possession of the female erotic object was expressed through highly formalised photographic patterning. VU’s idealised configurations of beautiful young women were a visual signature of the magazine throughout the 1930–3 period, providing an optimistic counterpoint to the bleak actualities that increasingly dominated its news pages. The compositions, achieved through posed photography, photomontage, and other design techniques, were characterised by spectacular, geometric regularity. The page layout for ‘Des Reines en maillots de bain’ (Queens in bathing costumes) from VU 125 (6 August 1930), depicting European beauty queens at a contest in Deauville, is typical for stories of this kind. Around a central catwalk image of Miss France, the bathingcostumed forms of other contestants appear in cut-out, forming a symmetrical, geometric constellation. Pattern, as the symbol of erotic utopia, here invokes fantasies either of identification or of control. Since the pattern is regular, it is repeatable, creating imaginative space in which the viewer’s subjective self may be substituted for the erotic object, to become the fantasised object of desire.

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Alternatively, if the motif (rather than its configuration) is repeated, this creates a fantasy of appropriation/control, as the serial object is both abundant, and powerfully configured in the geometric order. VU’s patterned, serial representations of women drew on a defining symbol of the new, consumer society: the department store mannequin. The ‘realistic’ shop dummies that graced window displays from the 1920s onwards, modelling ideals of physical beauty as well as fashions in clothing and jewellery, embodied the modernist myth of perfectibility. Whilst mannequins had been part of display culture in the prewar decades, their new, lifelike perfection described a fundamental inversion: rather than substituting the real woman consumer, the dummy was now itself the symbolic role model, inviting women to participate in the spectacular culture of modernity, and representing its ideal of femininity. In Liz Conor’s account: The Mannequin negotiated the apparent diversity of consumer behaviors by providing a simplified, but changeable, visual icon for their identification and cultural reflexivity. While able to specify types, she also represented a normative version of the consuming woman as beautiful, white, young, and slender. … [The woman consumer] could be included in this category of visually idealized women by using the products and merchandise the mannequin displayed to fashion an improved self.50

Whilst mannequins became the figure of the idealised, machine-age woman, women, in their turn, were transformed into mannequins: the term mannequin vivant was used to describe haute couture models in this period.51 In the pages of VU, this idea of femininity as constructed and reproducible impelled sexist articles such as ‘Vénus malléable’ from VU’s 1933 ‘Femmes’ special issue, featuring the image of ‘Vénus standard, type 1933’.52 The idea’s logical extension lay in photographic fantasies of a patterned world: posed or photographically constructed images of infinitely similar, and endlessly attractive, young women. In the fiction serial ‘College Girls’, which ran for twenty issues between July and December 1931, the amorous adventures of residents at an American ladies’ college were accompanied by agency photographs of idealised student life.53 The images project a vision of fantastical uniformity: cheerful, standardised young women geometrically arrayed as hockey players, rowers, dancers, gymnasts, or gown-wearing graduates. The images are dynamic and expansive, as if captured spontaneously in a make-believe world composed entirely of geometric social arrangements: a page spread in VU 177 (5 August 1931), for example, combines

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a chorus line and a rowing eight, with the receding forms of identical boats and crews stretching away into the distance. The amorous potential of this superabundant world is beautifully captured in VU 181 (3 September 1931), in a ‘fish-eye’ composition of reclining dancers in a California revue (Figure 85). VU’s photographic fascination with female beauty extended well beyond the seductions of the serial image. Fashion and glamour articles, photo-spreads on women athletes and on metropolitan life, project alternative visions of the modern woman, and employ contrasting styles of photography and page design. In fashion spreads, which were a stock element of the magazine’s repertoire, demure models appear in minimal settings, the pages composed in the rectilinear, asymmetrical style approved by Jan Tschichold.54 Perpendicular layouts, composed of overlapping and inset images, express the cool sophistication of the leisured, metropolitan woman able to afford the space for measured selfappraisal – these are, characteristically, the least cluttered of VU’s page designs, and absent of the dynamic diagonals and curves that appear in other stories. In the photo-story ‘Cils’ (Eyelashes) in VU 204 (10 February 1932), for example,

Figure 85  Illustration from ‘College Girls’, VU, September 3, 1931, p. 2143.

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the scientific construction of modern beauty finds a visual analogue in the rationalised forms of the asymmetric grid, with the woman’s eyes presented in commodified close-up and offered for aesthetic appraisal: ‘Avant et après l’opération: Que préférez-vous?’ (Before and after the operation: Which do you prefer?)55

The social utopia In addition to her machine-made perfection and her power of flight, the new woman was also the confident negotiator of the social and sexual spaces of consumer modernity. In VU’s idealist photography, the fluid potential of this modernity, for a new informality in social relations, and for the reconfiguration of gender roles and sexual identities, was conveyed in projections of modern leisure, centring on the spectacular arenas of the beach and of metropolitan street life. In the lifestyle piece ‘Les Ouvrières de Paris: Dimanches et Fêtes’ (The female workers of Paris: Sundays and holidays) (VU 252, 11 January 1933), for example, images of young women and men at leisure in the parks and bistros of Paris employ the jaunty camera angles of a spontaneous, fast-moving modernity.56 Within the page layout, the free-form, oppositional vectors captured in these photographs create a kind of euphoric instability, through the constant shifting of the image horizon. Rather than stability (the composed, rectilinear form), VU’s ‘girl about town’ craves excitement: the deferred, dynamic equilibrium of urban life, and the freedom and spontaneity of motorised leisure.57 The definitive setting for VU’s social utopia was the beach, on which the inclusive values of an ideal, bountiful modernity were visually reified. In its photographic features on modern tourism, the beaches of Biarritz and Deauville were cast as the future society in microcosm: the setting for fashion shoots and social comedies, for the perfect, sunlit bodies of the utopian future and the clothed, traditional bodies of the prewar past. The liberated, spectacular figure of the new woman is joined, in VU’s beach images, by the figure of utopian man: spectacularised, socially configured, and – in some iterations, at least – androgynous.58 The essential character of VU’s social utopia was peaceful coexistence – between nations, but also generations, classes, and sexes – for which the spectacular, ‘feminised’ man served as symbolic guarantor. The four-page photo-story ‘La Faune des Plages’ (The fauna of the beaches) (VU 178, 12 August 1931), depicting the beach life of elite French resorts, offers

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generalised perspectives of this sunlit paradise. The thirteen images, credited to seven photographers and a picture agency, are, presumably, photographs from different locations; visually, and metaphorically, they represent a unity – a fiction which text and captions effortlessly sustain. On the opening page spread, the androgynous figure of a sleeping youth (a cropped close-up portrait, à la Helmar Lerski) shares the left-hand page with a portly gentleman diver and a sunhatted infant playing in the waves (Figure 86). The diagonals of the youth’s hat and shoulder parallel the line of the breaking wave; these vectors are carried across to the facing page in the cascading pictures and in the tilted image of a lady in a deckchair. The photographic proto-pattern, the sign of utopian unity, unifies the discrete figures without suppressing their truculent individuality – the caption for the older woman reminds the reader: ‘Celleslà ne se baignent jamais’ (Those [ladies] never go bathing). On the following page spread, different structures achieve the same unifying result: each picture (excepting the small circular image) is reflected, through diagonal symmetry, with its opposite on the facing page, creating a matrix of visual and thematic connections (Figure 87). The fishermen launching a boat in the bottom left corner are visually echoed by the crowd of bathers in the upper right; the

Figure 86  ‘La faune des plages’ (The fauna of the beaches), page layout, VU, August 12, 1931, pp. 2042–3.

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Figure 87  ‘La faune des plages’ (The fauna of the beaches), page layout, VU, August 12, 1931, pp. 2044–5.

water-skier and the photographer are metonymically connected through the mutual embrace of technology; the two children are photographed from the same high angle. Utopian patterning, reduced to the subtlest web of visual and narrative suggestions, is, nonetheless, as intrinsic to this story as it is to the fantasy world of ‘College Girls’. The utopian patterning of ‘La Faune des Plages’ describes a fanciful regularity in the spatial relationships of the tourist beach, re-imagined as an ideal society in miniature. An aerial photograph by Martin Munkacsi, in VU 181 (3 September 1931), presents an alternative symbolic structure, in which figures appear not as the elements in a geometric array, but as textural forms in non-linear configurations (Figure 88). In the context of VU’s idealist imagery, this natural distributive array can be read as oppositional to the hegemonic modernism of grids and vector patterns – a momentary appeal for organisism in a world (and a magazine) obsessed with abstract geometry. In the recto photograph, the tiny figures of Parisian children, ‘for whom the sea is only a little scrap of blue on the map’, are spread out across the lawn of a city park. The disposition of these urban sunbathers is not random – there are no clumps or empty patches in the whole expanse – but neither is it geometric; rather, by negotiating a share of space on the precious turf, these ‘motifs’ have determined their own ideal,

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Figure 88  ‘Le dos à la mer et la face au soleil’ (Backs to the sea and fronts in sunshine), page layout, VU, September 2, 1931, pp. 2140–1.

organic configuration.59 In the page spread, this natural pattern is opposed to the inflexible geometry of seated figures on a promenade, whose configuration, the caption suggests, is symbolic of their bourgeois conventionality: Whilst the ‘great ones’ of this world, on their elegant beach, turn their backs to the sea, which they regard with no more curiosity than they regard the Parisian sky between the roof tops, the little ones … spread out on a lawn at the edge of the city, offer to the rays of sunlight that deign to reach them, their dazzled faces.60

In the upper half of the picture, a magnificent wave crashes onto the shoreline, flecked with the scintillating forms of natural patterning; its thunderous advance appears ready to engulf the privileged world and its geometric order (with the poor of Paris riding on its crest!). Munkacsi’s creation was quoted in VU in a composite photographic spread of the following year (VU 232, 24 August 1932) (Figure 89). As in the earlier spread, an aerial photo of naturally configured sunbathers appears as a full-page recto image; on the verso page, there is again the image of a rolling wave – this time of a river with leaping salmon. A third photograph, however, composing the top half of the verso page, creates a bizarre, and horrifying, opposition to

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Figure 89  Untitled page layout, VU, August 24, 1932, pp. 1356–7.

these optimistic images. Above a calmly descriptive caption – ‘New gas masks were worn by tank crews during their recent manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain’ – is the cropped photograph of a battle tank;61 emerging from the turret and forward hatch are the heads of two crewmen in gas masks. The force of this iconography in the France of 1932 – a mere sixteen years after the armistice – is hard to overstate, and is redoubled here through the shocking juxtaposition. For the readers of VU, it was one of a growing torrent of such despairing images.

Notes 1 Picture captions from Le Corbusier, “Architecture d'époque machiniste,” Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique 23 (1926), reproduced in Nina Rosenblatt, “Empathy and Anaesthesia: On the Origins of a French Machine Aesthetic,” Grey Room, no. 2 (2001): 80. 2 Raizman, History of Modern Design, 166. 3 See above, p. 56. 4 Raizman, History of Modern Design, 166. 5 See above, p. 208–10. 6 See note 17, p. 68.

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7 Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France, 93; Weber, The Hollow Years, 29–30. 8 Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic, 1914-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 173–5. 9 Quoted in Weber, The Hollow Years, 29. 10 H. H. Tiltman, Slump! A Study of Stricken Europe Today (1932), quoted in Kemp, The French Economy, 1913–39, 99. 11 See above, pp. 203–5. The evidence on VU’s circulation figures is fragmentary at best. Bellanger notes a distribution of half a million copies for VU’s notorious “Au Pays des Soviets” special issue of November 1931: Bellanger, Histoire Générale de la Presse Française (Vol III), 598. Caroline Brothers cites a perhaps more dubious claim of the same figure, from the 1936 Annuaire de la Presse, which would suggest that this exceptional circulation had been sustained throughout the Depression years: Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London: Routledge, 1997), 4–5. 12 “Dictateurs modernes,” composite news page, VU, A3, No. 113, May 14, 1930, p. 461. 13 See above, pp. 216–18. 14 VU, A3, No. 115, May 28, 1930, pp. 498–501. VU’s 1931 special issues on the Soviet Union and the United States are discussed in Chapter 11, below, pp. 260–7. 15 Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 308. 16 See above, p. 203. 17 See above, pp. 211–12. 18 For the idealist applications of photomontage in commercial advertising, see Lavin, “Photomontage, Mass Culture, and Modernity,” 53. 19 Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten (The white-collar workers) (1929), quoted in Hubertus von Amelxunen, “De la construction de L’espace historique dans le photomontage et dans le photoreportage,” in Face à l’Histoire (1933-1996). L’artiste moderne face à l’évènement historique, ed. Jean-Paul Ameline (Paris: Flammarion: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1996), 94. 20 The visual correspondence of mass religious events to images of secular crowds and the serial patterns of modern manufacture is characteristic of VU’s visual culture, in which religious traditions and practices were incorporated as a picturesque element within secular modernity. This inclusivity contrasts with the striking antimodernism of the 1933 articles on religious miracles and occult prophecies – notably, the three-part series “Le Grand Châtiment: La fin du monde est-elle proche?” (The great tribulation: Is the end of the world nigh?), VU, A6, Nos. 283–5, August 16–30, 1933. See below, p. 282–3. 21 See, for example, the photo-story “Transport Aérien par Fusées” (Air travel by rocket), in VU 111, p. 394. VU’s fascination with flight is discussed later in this chapter.

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22 VU, A3, No. 111, April 30, 1930, pp. 403–6. For a discussion of the new anthropometric and psychometric sciences of the interwar decades, see Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty, 130–47. 23 Stella Croissant, “Dans Vienne Nouvelle” (In new Vienna), VU, A3, No. 142, December 3, 1930, pp. 1287–8. 24 Modernist architecture and planning was the subject of numerous articles in French and German magazines around this date (above, pp. 131–8); see, for example, Adolf Behne, “Die Städtbauer auf neuen Wegen” (City planners on new paths), Berliner Illustrirter Zeitung, J39, N24, June 1930. 25 “1er Mai: Mobilisation [–] à la Maison de Santé du Gardien de la Paix” (1st of May: Mobilisation [–] At the Police Hospital), VU, A3, No. 112, May 7, 1930, p. 411. 26 The Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts in 1927, after their widely disputed conviction for murder and armed robbery. The execution sparked international protests, including riots in Paris, London, and other cities across the world. 27 “Quand la nature se trompe” (When nature makes a mistake), VU, A3, No. 113, May 14, 1930, p. 462; “Champs de fleurs et sourires d’enfants” (Fields of flowers and smiling children), VU, A3, No. 112, May 7, 1932, pp. 418–9. 28 VU, A3, No. 111, April 30, 1930, p. 407. 29 See also the discussion in Part two, above, pp. 102–5; 131. The contrasting modernist ideals of UHU and VU are well exemplified in their treatment of the aviation theme. 30 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 2000), 123–4; Lodder, Russian Constructivism, 143. 31 Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, 246–7. 32 For examples of the spectacular magazine photography of flight at this period, see Lebeck and Dewitz, Kiosk, 154–5. 33 “Le Confort et Beauté de l’Avion” (The comfort and beauty of the aeroplane), VU, A3, No. 145, December 24, 1930, p. 1423; “Comme une fleur” (Like a flower), VU, A6, No. 295 bis, special issue: “Aviation: Nous et les autres” (Aviation: Us and the rest), November 11, 1933, pp. 36–7. The page caption of the earlier story asks the reader: “This propeller, does it not make one think of the leaf of a chestnut tree? Who can doubt that the beauty of the machine approaches that of nature?” Le Corbusier defines modernism’s cult of aviation in similarly aestheticised terms, in the opening chapter of L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (1925). The machine, he writes, “awakens us to the intense joy of geometry” and beckons us into the “Salon de l’Aeronautique as opposed to the Salon de l’Automne.” Quoted in Adamson, Embattled Avant-Gardes, 220–1. 34 “Les femmes les plus séduisantes sont les femmes françaises” (The most seductive women are French women), VU, A3, No. 121, July 9, 1930, p. 699.

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35 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 14. 36 The extended caption provides a dramatic account of the photograph’s onward journey: “The negative, developed at 20.15, American time, was transmitted by radio to London at 1.50. Received in London at 3.00, the plane took it from Croydon at 8.00, it arrived in Paris at 10.00, to be published in the newspapers at 13.00.” Photo caption, VU, A3, No. 130, September 10, 1930, p. 878. 37 See above, pp. 57–8. 38 VU, A6, No. 256, February 7, 1933, p. 176. 39 Car crashes provide material for a striking photomontage page in Match L’Intran, no. 24, April 19, 1927, p. 15. 40 The return of Costes and Bellonte to France provides the cover and lead story in VU, A3, No. 137, October 29, 1930. 41 “Le triomphe de la femme” was the title of a themed issue on the charms and accomplishments of the modern woman, VU, A3, No. 104, March 12, 1930. 42 McNamara, “Between Flux and Certitude,” 63. 43 Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 2–5. 44 Quoted in Margarita Tupitsyn, “From the Politics of Montage to the Montage of Politics: Soviet Practice 1919 through 1937,” in Montage and Modern Life, ed. Teitelbaum, 87. 45 For the fluid cultural dynamics of gender and sexuality in interwar France, see Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, “Becoming Modern: Gender and Sexual Identity after World War I,” in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 3–19. 46 For the social and cultural implications of 1920s hairstyles and fashions, see Mary Louise Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France,” in The Modern Woman Revisited, ed. Chadwick and Latimer, 65–94. 47 Quoted in Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 78. The Figaro ideal is exemplified in “L’Ecole des Femmes: Aviatrices” (School for women: Aviatrixes), VU, A3, No. 101, February 19, 1930, pp. 148–9. 48 For a detailed account of the 1920s new woman as spectacularised commodity and as consumer, see Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 49 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), 95. 50 Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 108. 51 See, for example, Pierre Frondaie’s article “La femme et son maître” (The woman and her master), VU, A3, No. 121, July 9, 1930, pp. 700–701. 52 “Vénus malléable,” VU, A6 (No. 299a), special issue, “Femmes,” December 9, 1933, pp. 46–7.

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53 College Girls was the French title of the novel Unforbidden Fruit (1928) by the American author Warner Fabian (Samuel Hopkins Adams). The book’s popular success lay in its risqué depictions of the sexual exploits of 1920s female students. In Lynn Peril’s account: “Fabian offered a less innocent voyeurism to adult readers seeking a titillating look at the collegiate flapper and her bold new sexuality.” Lynn Peril, College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Then and Now (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 101. 54 See above, pp. 63–4. 55 “Cils” (Eyelashes), VU, A5, No. 204, February 10, 1932, p. 181. An earlier clinical “dissection” of feminine beauty was staged in “Le triomphe de la femme” (The triumph of woman), VU, A3, No. 104, March 12, 1930, p. 203. UHU magazine went a stage further, presenting a set of portraits cut into horizontal strips, allowing the reader to “design” their own ideal woman: “500 Frauen nach Ihrer Wahl” (500 women at your choice), UHU, J5, H8, May 1929, pp. 76–83. The game was repeated, using male portraits, in the August issue (J5, H11, August 1929). See also, “Konversationlexikon der Schönheit” (A conversational lexicon of beauty), Das Magazin, J7, H75, November 1930, pp. 5344–6. 56 For a discussion of the camera technologies used by VU’s photographers, see Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 12. 57 The new woman as motorist appears recurrently in VU’s lifestyle features. Contrasting “male” and “female” viewpoints are presented in a series of articles in VU, A5, No. 238, October 5, 1932, pp. 1596–601. 58 See, for example, “A Biarritz sur la plage” (On the beach in Biarritz), VU, A5, No. 236, September 21, 1932, p. 1534. 59 Note also the treatment of the sunbathing theme in UHU (above, pp. 170–2), in which children, similarly, become the symbolic representatives of an alternative, organic modernism. 60 “Le dos à la mer et la face au soleil” (Backs to the sea and facing into sunshine), VU, A4, No. 181, September 2, 1931, pp. 2140–1. 61 Photo caption, VU, A5, No. 232, August 24, 1932, p. 1356.

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The crisis, spreading its ravages around the world, provokes misery, riots, strikes on all sides. There comes a moment when a man, or a party, profits from the despair and the disorder to establish their domination and to promise … something else. The crisis bears fruits. … Hitler gathers them. ‘The crisis bears fruits’, VU, 8 November 1933 The evolution of VU magazine over the years 1930–3 was complex and incremental. At an immediate level, there were many continuities: VU of 1933 presented the same eclectic mix of news pages, culture, science, travel, and lifestyle features; its page layouts retained the stylistic elements developed in its founding years. Yet the idealism that underpinned the magazine’s progressive vision had evaporated, in the face of the deepening, multiple crises in French economic and political life, and in European and world affairs. As the modernist faith in technological society imploded, the magazine which traded in its symbols underwent its own crisis of values, expressed in its editorial content, and, more obliquely, in its photography and graphic design. This chapter explores how this conflict found expression in VU’s spectacular use of structural patterning. In its ‘Grande Enquête’ (Great enquiry) series of special issues on the global economic crisis, and particularly in the many individual articles concerned with the rise of Hitler, VU’s accentuated vector forms captured the remorseless advance of totalitarianism, and the breakdown of established social order. Intriguingly, these destabilised and oppositional patterns also appear, sporadically, in general-interest articles – on, for example, education and sports – as if even these benign topics were infected by VU’s existential anxieties about the survival of French society.

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Patterns of discontent VU’s photographic projections of the 1930s global crisis centred on images of the urban crowd. In the years up to 1933, VU published multiple photographs of mass gatherings, capturing the tumultuous moods of a world on the brink of collapse: from the manic gaiety of street parties to the rage and panic of riots and demonstrations, the solemnity of memorials to the mass fervour of totalitarian display. In VU’s feature stories and composite news pages, the narratives and symbolic meanings of these crowds, as expressions of social order and disorder, of collective protest and organised repression, were expressed primarily through the photographs, which were often accompanied by only the briefest of captions.1 In the symbolic shapes of crowd configurations, readers were invited to ‘read’, photographically, the signs and portents of a fragmenting actuality.2 In line with this principle of legibility, VU’s crowd images are highly consistent at the level of basic form: the typical view is panoramic, from an elevated angle, with the crowd captured as a totality and its component figures reduced to de-individualised atoms within the whole. The compositional form, in short, is that of the mass pattern, with symbolic meaning expressed through the configuration of its human elements, rather than through their individuated intentions. So consistent, in fact, is this formal convention that VU’s crowd images present as a natural category: this is just how crowds are. In this context, a contrasting, and markedly atypical photograph, from March 1933, points up the potential that existed for a radically different imagery of mass gatherings; its use on this occasion suggests, perhaps, VU’s reflexive endorsement of the fragile symbolism of social reconciliation. The double-page, close-up image shows a cheerful, individuated crowd of respectable middle-aged Parisians singing lustily from song sheets (Figure 90). The extended caption introduces the heroic individuals from the May 1930 feature, ‘1er Mai: Mobilisation’,3 and redoubles on the earlier story’s affirmative intent: THE POLICE ARE JOLLY GOOD FELLOWS M. and Mme Chiappe, the benefactors of the police service, did not hesitate to blend their voices with those of artists who had come to the courtyard of the Prefecture to give a concert for the chief of police to thank him for having allowed them to sing in the streets on behalf of their unemployed comrades.4

VU’s more typical, generalised use of crowd imagery, to symbolise the contrasting dispositions of the contemporary social body, is exemplified in

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Figure 90 ‘Les agents sont de brav’gens’ (The police are jolly good fellows), page spread, VU, March 8, 1933, pp. 360–1.

the ‘Enquête’ special issue ‘Au Pays des Soviets’ (In the land of the Soviets), VU 192, 18 November 1931.5 The symbolic sequence begins with an iconic image, reproduced in the article ‘Genèse du Soviétisme’ (Genesis of Sovietism), showing the suppression of the Petrograd rising of July 1917 (Figure 91). In the photograph, captured from above street level, tiny figures are shown fleeing in all directions from a confused scene unfolding on the square behind them; some are caught in the moment of falling, whilst other dark shapes appear to be the prostrate forms of the dead or wounded. The visual narrative, of the crowd’s violent dispersal, accords precisely with the brief description of the event in the accompanying article – ‘It was the spark which lit the revolt’ – suggesting an explosive outward movement, as the crowd fragments into fleeing individuals.6 The unified trajectory of the figures creates a clear temporal regression, the crowd which has ceased to be, and whose spectral presence lends the image a symbolic potency.7 For the readers of VU, in 1931, this universalised crowd was now violently disintegrating once again. The Petrograd image recalls a news photograph which had appeared in the magazine four issues previously, of a riot in London: the banner image of ‘L’Angleterre sous l’orage’ (England in the storm) shows men running past the camera, and in all directions, as mounted police move in to break up a demonstration.8

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Figure 91  ‘Les journées sanglantes à Petrograd’ (The bloody days in Petrograd), VU, November 18, 1931, pp. 2532–3.

The perennial discontent of the Depression years, as presented in VU’s imagery of protest and disorder, plays out Elias Canetti’s theory of the emboldened, persecuted crowd: ‘As long as it feels that it is growing … it can be dispersed and scattered by police, but this has only a temporary effect, like a hand moving through a swarm of mosquitoes.’9 Photographs of the disintegrating crowd, captured simultaneously in dispersed localities across the world, spoke to a narrative of mounting, seemingly unstoppable social breakdown, threatening nothing less than the collapse of modern civilisation. The stock components of this visual narrative, rehearsed in many VU photographs of the early 1930s, are immediately legible: people running from some point of origin, but in all directions; individuals separated or in small clumps, and with random spaces between these groupings; the act, or implication, of violence: pursuers, weapons, prostrate figures. The ritual enactments of the drama – whether played out in the streets of Bombay, Berlin or Aberdeen (Figure 92) – are expressed as variations on a common visual structure: in compositional terms, the crisis of the social order is symbolised by the collapse of the photographic pattern. The fragmentation of 1917 Petrograd is contrasted, in ‘Au Pays des Soviets’, with the social harmony that unfolds for the French photographers.10 In this sympathetic account of the planned economy, the natural configurations of ‘ordinary life’ are visually contained and configured by the benign forces of geometric patterning.11 The smiling faces of workers at a rubber factory are framed within a conventional modernist grid; a page spread on Soviet clothing

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Figure 92  ‘Une bataille entre étudiants anglais’ (A battle between English students), VU, November 19, 1930, p. 1210.

combines orthogonal images within a balanced oppositional vector pattern: the assertion of utopian order configures the human traffic to travel in opposite directions on opposite pavements (Figure 93). ‘Au Pays des Soviets’, and the later VU special issues on Germany, the United States, and France, were presented as pragmatic enquiries into the global crisis of modernity, in search of possible solutions. At the visual level, they represent attempts to align the symbolic forms of utopian modernism with real-world socio-economic structures – the mechanisms that might still, conceivably, promote the realisation of the technological ideal. The image of a well-ordered communitarian society, presented by the Soviet Enquête, equates to the triumph of this geometric vision – an equation visually embodied, in the article ‘Soviétisme et Démocratie’, in one of the intricate (and occasionally baffling) diagrams that were a signature of VU in this period: the centralised structure of Soviet government is expressed as a radiating sequence of rings, each representing a collective organisation within the geometric totality.12 Two other crowd images from ‘Au Pays des Soviets’ suggest, however, the implicit tensions in this equation. In the first, a ring of tiny figures are seen

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Figure 93  ‘Vêtements’ (Clothing), page spread, VU, November 18, 1931, pp. 2544–5.

performing ‘collective dances’ in a Moscow park – a prototype of the mass geometric displays that appeared across the industrialised world at this period. The second, montage image, composing a page layout at the back of the issue, shows the geometrically perfect ranks of the Red Army infantry, cavalry, air force and ‘battalion of skiers’, configured in a rigid vector pattern composition (Figure 94). The road from the disorder of Petrograd 1917 to the optimistic order of ‘collective dances’ is, inescapably, also the road toward militarism. The utopian geometry of ‘College Girls’ rehearses the symbolic forms of global conflagration. The idea that France’s own domestic crises might somehow be solved by communism – or any other political or economic system – was, by this date, a forlorn hope at best. The French economy, which had gone into recession later than its competitors, faced the prospect of impending collapse: shares in 1932 had fallen to half their 1928 value, while French national revenue per person declined at 10 per cent per annum.13 While unemployment and industrial unrest continued to rise, French political life had descended into chaos, with a succession of weak, unstable governments hamstrung by politicking and rocked by financial scandal. In the pages of VU, images of the emerging, demonic order of Nazi Germany provided a bleak counterpoint to news photographs

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Figure 94  ‘L’Armée Rouge’ (The Red Army), page layout, VU, November 18, 1931, p. 2625.

of domestic and global unrest, evidence of democracy’s failure to deliver an alternative stability. VU’s utopian modernism, built on the dream of mass production, was a promise of American plenty. In VU’s idealist photography, this promise was definitively expressed in the imagery of the expansive grid: the replicating forms of cars, consumer products, houses, attractive young women. The symbolic potency of these images depended, critically, on deferral: just as the political dream of VU’s social utopia described the accommodation of opposing ideologies within a nebulous future society, the grid as cornucopia depended on the deferred promise of supply. In VU’s special issue ‘L’Amérique Lutte’ (America struggles) (VU 196, 16 December 1931), published four weeks after ‘Au Pays des Soviets’, the promise is contained in the familiar imagery of abundance: sides of beef in a Chicago abattoir stretching away to the vanishing point; the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies; the ‘8500 employees of the National Cash Register in front of their factory buildings’.14 The caption of a full-page photograph of a skyscraper redoubles on this abundance, even while lamenting the bewildering

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monotony: ‘Windows, windows, and more windows, uniform, symmetrical, like so many eyes opened on the activity outside.’15 The expansiveness that this presents is, however, an empty promise. On the photomontage cover of ‘L’Amérique Lutte’ the blank façades of these same skyscrapers give way to the pre-industrial figure of a farmer driving a pair of yoked oxen across a bare hilltop. The leading editorial page shows the view from a skyscraper and a hand holding a plant pot, in which appears the ghostly shadow of a dead plant; the page title below reads: ‘Nature … morte!’16 A small inset image at the bottom of the page shows a typical street scene from the prewar era, accompanied by a nostalgic caption: ‘But back then, the New York skyscrapers had only 25 storeys … Few cars, but there were carriages. … That was America’s romantic epoch … 1900.’17 The fecund ‘second nature’ confidently prophesied by Jan Tschichold appears, in this hyperbolic vision, to have withered at the roots.18 Completing the rhetorical cycle, the centre spread then presents a dynamic montage of skyscraper images (Figure 95): a composition which, in the symbolically charged context of ‘L’Amérique Lutte’, can be read either as a euphoric hymn to the American century, or as a fable of over-production and societal instability.

Figure 95 ‘Gratte-Ciel’ (Skyscrapers), page spread, VU, December 16, 1931, pp. 2792–3.

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A composite news page from VU 216 (4 May 1932), published four months after the US special issue, might stand as an epitaph of the grid as the resonant symbol of machine-age cornucopia. Above an image of a Fascist parade in Rome – in which an infant ‘Fascist of tomorrow already performs the required salute’ – is an agency news photograph from New York. Beneath tower blocks, on the bare expanse of a city square (‘at the crossing of Chrystie and Jossythe Street’), are the collapsed forms of unemployed men, sleeping in daylight with their jackets pulled over their heads.19 In the America of 1932, the disordered crowd that ran from the square in Petrograd has reached the end of the road.

The demonic grid The defining expressions of the grid in VU’s photography of 1931–3 are composed of human groupings: increasingly, over this period, images of military and political parades. Before turning to these, however, the phenomenon of mass display is worth considering briefly in more general terms, for its peculiar symbiotic relationship with photography, and with photographic patterning in particular. As this book has argued, the diverse styles of modernist photography can be unified at a formal and symbolic level, as the expressions of a patterning aesthetic; its common procedure involved the flattening of space to promote visual groupings and regularities. In general terms, the more regular the photographic pattern, the more its forms also resembled those of mass manufacture: the flat, repeating designs of decorative and applied patterns; the serial forms of consumer commodities. In mass display, photography discovered an undreamed-of regularity in human relations, a fascination which was, surely, mutual: the spectacle of mass display was fundamental, its ambition and scale proportionate to the mass viewing audience made possible by photographic reproduction. The awesome regularity of Nuremberg rallies, or mass gymnastics, demanding the camera’s external, panoramic gaze, expresses a movement in two directions: of expansion, through the commodity’s potential for infinite self-replication; of division, as each fragment of the pattern contains the whole form. The human grid is thus a potent double symbol: of life and death, both the duplication of the perfect body and its machine-age disposability (Figure 96).20 In the photographic language of VU, 1932–3, the grid was the symbol of demonic supply. In addition to the many images of military parades, there were pictures of vast geometric arrays of military aircraft and of munitions; VU’s

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Figure 96 ‘Sokol’, VU, July 20, 1932, p. 1191.

pacifist response included numerous articles on international disarmament, with images and graphics visualising the human and material cost of war.21 A poignant photo-story in VU 243 (9 November 1932), ‘Front 1932’, on the fragile return of rural life to areas of the war-torn western front, describes the replacement of the ‘terrible monotony’ of the trenches by ‘Grands cimetières si bien rangés, où dorment les morts de la guerre’ (Large, perfectly ordered cemeteries, where the war’s dead sleep); the accompanying picture is of the war cemetery at Romagne, in which the serial forms of white crosses form an endless, geometrically perfect grid broken by saplings and the tiny, dark figures of mourners.22 The cemetery grid, as the inverse shadow of the dark grid of military display, represents its final ‘resting place’, its completion as the symbolic figure of machine-age mortality. The demonic grid, as VU’s cover art persistently warned, was on the move. Alexander Liberman’s photomontages, which began to appear on VU covers in autumn 1932, took the rise of Hitler, and the re-militarisation of Germany, as their recurrent theme.23 The compositions represent a return to the propagandist roots of the medium – a re-politicisation later recalled by Hannah Höch as representing a cultural shift: ‘After 1933, photomontage was no longer used only in illustrated reportage, but also in the service of political propaganda, and this

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without any scruple. Free photomontage, on the other hand, including caricature or even satire, was eradicated.’24 A typical Liberman design forms the cover of VU 319 (25 April 1934) (Figure 97), illustrating the banner headline ‘En Allemagne: Vers Une Armée de Masse’ (In Germany: towards a mass army). The familiar, serial forms of massed infantry march in columns up the left of the page, disappearing into the distance behind the VU logo; the vector forming this perspectival illusion is shared by the barrel of the artillery gun, whose diverging parallels create a contrary perspective: the symbolic void of the barrel’s mouth is thrust forward out of the page. Liberman’s optical trick makes its point: the German war machine is in motion, and its real intentions are on the reader of VU magazine. In the visual symbolism of Hitler’s rise to power, the crisis of the grid, producing militarism, met the crisis of the vector, which was the road to war. The collapse of modernism’s utopian myth, in the tumult of 1932–3, reflected not only the failure of its promised machine-age prosperity, but also its complicity in the new, demonic order – a complicity which was as various, and contradictory, as modernism itself. VU magazine, which had warned passionately of the danger

Figure 97  Front cover, VU, April 25, 1934.

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of Hitlerism since 1930, was nonetheless implicated in the Nazi catastrophe – at least at the symbolic level of its visual language.25 The geometry of Nuremberg owed an evident debt to the geometry of VU’s technological utopia.26 Two news images, dating from 1931 and 1932, reflect the transformed symbolism of geometric crowd patterns at this period. A news story in VU 195 (9 December 1931) describes the chilling inevitability of Hitler’s rise to power: Will Adolph Hitler soon take power? The results of the latest elections seem to prove that public opinion is more and more favourable to the National Socialist party. And the declarations made by its leader to the journalists … in Berlin, seemed already to emanate from a head of state.27

Paradoxically, the supporting photograph describes an ‘enormous anti-Hitlerian demonstration’ at the Sportspalast in Berlin, though it perfectly resembles the many images of Nazi gatherings that appeared in VU’s news pages at this period.28 The seated crowd forms a regular expansive-concentrative grid, symmetrically lit by the rays of overhead lighting, with the speaker, in military uniform, standing centre stage in front of them. The geometric human pattern, symbolic of rationalist modernity, by 1932 expressed an inexorable demonic unity: the crowd of a rival Berlin demonstration, eight months after the Sportspalast image, raise an endless sea of aligned arms in the mass parallel vector pattern of the Nazi salute.29 The demonic potential of VU’s militarised crowds was conveyed in patterned figurations expressing movement and conflict. A photographic spread in the Germany special issue, VU 213 (13 April 1932), for example, displays the spectacular formations of the Stahlhelm (‘Casques d’Acier’, Steel Helmets), again at the Sportspalast.30 On the left-hand page, the white-vested youth of the Front d’Acier form a diamond-shaped grid, surrounded by rising tiers of dark-clothed figures. On the facing page, the stiff-legged march of paramilitaries, and the rising vectors of their flags, form complex interlocking serial forms; the geometries of other images create further clashing and complementary proto-patterns. The conflicted patterning reaches its fullest intensity, in the same issue, in the depiction of German physical culture – images that underline Germany’s significant place in the global body culture of the period. In ‘Sport et Nudisme’ (Figure 98), the javelins of two female gymnasts, ‘Walkyries modernes’, produce energetic parallel vectors, their impetus greatly intensified by the grimacing, warlike intent of the two women. The composition, rather than reinforcing this dynamic, constructs a forceful opposition, in the slanting lines of a ‘women

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Figure 98  ‘Sport et Nudisme’, page spread, VU, April 13, 1932, pp. 520–1.

workers’ sports festival’ in the image. In place of the balanced or complementary vectors of VU’s photographic utopias, the patterning is spasmodic and unresolved; the opposing page rejects the compositional balances and symmetries that appear, characteristically, in VU’s sports stories: ‘Sport et Nudisme’ recalls, in particular, a photo-story of eight months earlier, ‘Grimaces d’athlètes’ (VU 181, 3 September 1931), in which the intense expressions of female athletes are presented in frames that form a perfect symmetry across the page fold, with the contents of each image mirrored by its corresponding partner.31 It is, paradoxically, in stories that are not directly concerned with the rise of Nazism, that the destabilisation of VU’s photographic world is most striking. Tilted horizons and slanting image frames appear frequently in page layouts of 1930–1, as part of the repertoire of photographic patterning. Toward 1933, these angles become increasingly acute, creating, for some stories, vertiginous page layouts: a February 1933 feature on the Musée Grévin waxworks, for example, combines sharply contrasting viewpoints to create a hallucinatory, disembodied world.32 In the photographic feature ‘Jeunes Filles en Uniforme’ (Girls in uniform) (VU 223, 22 June 1932), describing life in a girls’ boarding school outside of Paris, images of placid, well-behaved pupils are tipped dramatically

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Figure 99  Page spread from ‘Jeunes Filles en Uniforme’ (Girls in uniform), VU, June 22, 1932, pp. 1026–7.

off the horizontal (Figure 99). An exercise class on the roof of a building appears on the point of tipping into the abyss, a sliding motion echoed in the slanting children and the serial shapes of clothes on coat hooks on the facing page. The composed world of children’s education, which appeared in ‘L’École Populaire Moderne’ (VU 111, 30 April 1930) as a promise of utopian order,33 in the VU of 1932 projects only imbalance and insecurity. The curious tension between narrative theme and photographic image that appears in ‘Jeunes Filles en Uniforme’ is particularly marked in two stories from the second half of 1932; both, notably, on the theme of war memorial.34 ‘La Fête des Croix de Bois’ (The festival of wooden crosses) (VU 230, 10 August 1932) describes the sombre ceremonials for the opening of the ossuary at Douaumont. In the page spread, the vectors formed by flags and marching soldiers are opposed to the slanting parallels of crosses, creating visual conflicts which are strongly reminiscent of the ‘Casques d’Acier’ page spread in VU 213.35 In ‘Front 1932’ (VU 243, 9 November 1932), a return to the battlefields of the western front published in the week of Armistice Day, the memorial cross in the leading-page photograph lists to the right, as if its foundations were sagging. The symbolism appears almost too obvious – tilted horizons were, after all, a stock photographic device at this period – except that, in the photographs on the following pages,

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Figure 100  Page spread from ‘Front 1932’, VU, November 9, 1932, pp. 1782–3.

it is dramatically redoubled (Figure 100): the reconstructed churches lean at crazy angles, like they have collapsed inwards; the sign of a reopened cafe slants drunkenly, as if imagining its own dilapidation. The world built on the ruins of war appears, in these stories, acutely uncertain of its viability. The mood of crisis evoked in VU’s conflicted visual patterning was made explicit in an extraordinary special issue, ‘Fin d’une Civilisation’ (End of a civilisation) (VU 259, 1 March 1933), published a month after Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor.36 The photomontage cover by Marcel Ichac, showing a bare-chested worker crushed between giant cogwheels, sets the tone for an impassioned enquiry into the self-destructive nature of technological modernity – an enquiry with self-evident implications for the magazine’s own identity and values. Under the banner heading ‘DANS LES TEMPS APOCALYPTIQUES’ (In apocalyptic times), Lucien Vogel asks: Has civilisation reached its limit of evolution in the industrial era, and will it simply destroy itself by continuing, without needing the insanity of war? Is it not racing towards its own ruin, and is each effort at correction not hastening its course toward the impasse where it will break its head open?37

The rhetoric recalls, inescapably, the existential despair of the final years of the First World War, forcefully articulated by writers such as Paul Valéry and

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Romain Rolland.38 In Valéry’s essay ‘La crise de l’esprit’ (The crisis of the spirit) of 1919, the war is understood not as an aberration from the progressive march of civilisation, but as its potential end point; a product of the same logical, alienating processes that had produced industrial modernity: We later civilisations ... we too know that we are mortal. We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries. … And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilisation has the same fragility as a life. … I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labour, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.39

In Vogel’s bleak editorial for VU 259, and across the discursive articles that make up the issue, the social and economic crises of the Depression emerge as the product of this same ‘disciplined’ and ‘conscientious’ modernity, now locked in pursuit of rationalisation and technological progress. A photomontage diagram in the article ‘machines à penser’ (thinking machines) graphically presents its human consequence: the outer rim of a circle shows a customer at a bank counter, and the phalanx of clerks involved in processing the transaction; in the centre of the circle this same task is performed by a single female operator beside a mechanised telling machine: ‘The whole operation, from the cash desk to the inspection, concentrated in one machine which records, classifies, calculates, posts, and prints out the accounts. Two female operators can accomplish the work of twenty-five clerks.’40 The technological future, in the pessimistic previsions of VU 259, founders on its central contradiction: the rationalised society creates material abundance at the cost of unemployment and social breakdown. VU’s lament for the technological utopia, the collective dream of modernism in the post-1918 era, is visually expressed, as ever, in the language of photographic patterning. A line of dancing girls – ‘standardised dancers: same gesture, same smile, same figure’ – mirrors the perspectives of ‘standardised nature’ in geometric rows of tulips.41 The ‘Apotheosis of Mechanical Civilisation’, forming the centre spread, is symbolised by an aerial photograph of a New York cityscape, with the endless, intricate geometries of skyscrapers picked out in pinsharp detail; the picture caption is a quotation from ‘The Fall of Babylon’ in the

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Figure 101 Photomontage illustration from ‘La Fin des Robots’ (The end of the robots), VU, March 1, 1933, p. 308.

Book of Revelation: ‘Which city was like the great city? The great city where all those who had ships on the sea became rich by her wealth.’42 In a sublime finale, a despairing robot stands on a heap of metal spirals, playing King Lear in the photographic rain (Figure 101). * * * A photo-page from VU 295, 8 November 1933, suggests the final collapse of the magazine’s optimistic idealism in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. ‘La Crise Porte Ses Fruits’ (The crisis bears fruits), published in the week of the Nazis’ landslide victory in one-party elections, describes the establishment of a new certainty (Figure 102).43 A photo of a vulture in the top corner is paired, diagonally, with a photo of Hitler at the bottom of the page. A cascade of images tumbles down between these metaphorical twins: the familiar, disordered crowds of VU’s composite news pages. The Fuhrer, at the solid bottom of the page, stands on a podium in driving rain, the embodied permanence of the new, demonic order.

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Figure 102 ‘La Crise Porte Ses Fruits’ (The crisis bears fruits), page layout, VU, November 8, 1933, p. 1686.

Notes 1 See above, pp. 49–50. 2 The power of photography to paint a true picture of the global crisis was an article of faith for VU’s editors. See, for example, the foreword by editors Carlo Rim and Maximilien Vox to the ill-fated “Tout est foutu” special supplement of 1932 (note 36, below). 3 See above, p. 237. 4 “Les agents sont de brav’gens” (Free translation: The police are jolly good fellows), photographic spread, VU, A6, No. 260, March 8, 1933, pp. 360–1. 5 The Enquêtes were conceived as a series of three special issues, exploring the socioeconomic structures and living conditions of the Soviet Union (VU, A4, No. 192, November 18, 1931), the United States (VU, A4, No. 196, December 16, 1931) and France (VU, A5, No. 220, June 1, 1932); a fourth special issue, on Germany, “L’Énigme Allemande” (The German enigma) VU, A5, No. 213, April 13, 1932, follows a similar template, and was published before the France issue. The explicit aim, outlined in Lucien Vogel’s introduction to VU 192 (p. 2527), was to find systemic answers to the “problems posed to the world” by the Depression.

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6 “Genèse du Soviétisme” (Genesis of Sovietism), VU, A4, No. 192, November 18, 1931, p. 2532. 7 The fragmented radial configuration in this image resembles a Glass pattern, named after the mathematical biologist Leon Glass. Glass patterns are produced by overlaying two random dot patterns, in which the second is a linear or non-linear transformation of the original. The visual system is able to map these correlations, thereby perceiving the underlying global transformation. See Blake and Sekuler, Perception, 185. In the Petrograd image, the impression of an outward movement through time is accentuated by the perceptual grouping (Gestalt continuation) of figures sharing the same linear vector. 8 “L’Angleterre sous l’orage” (England in the storm), VU, A4, No. 188, October 21, 1931, p. 2385. 9 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1962), 23. 10 VU’s chief editor, Lucien Vogel, was lead photographer on this assignment, as he was for later special issues, on Germany (VU 213, April 13, 1932), and Italy (VU 282, August 9, 1933). See Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 317. 11 The journal of VU’s editor-in-chief, Carlo Rim, provides an intriguing glimpse into how the Soviet special issue was received: “What a chorus of belligerence on the part of our right-thinking colleagues! Never were so many gross imputations, so much nonsense about the photographs. To think that a population of 160 million people had constructed the USSR for the sole intention of presenting it, like a gigantic cardboard set, to the Leicas of our photographers.” C. Rim, Le Grenier D'arlequin: Journal 1916-1940 (Paris: Denoël, 1981), 154–5. A version of this complaint also appears in Rim’s article “Défense et Illustration de la Photographie,” VU, A5, No. 214, April 20, 1932, p. 587. Such controversy may well have been beneficial: the brief entry on VU in the Histoire Générale de la Presse focuses on the Soviet issue, noting that it greatly enhanced VU’s prestige: Bellanger, Histoire Générale de la Presse Française (Vol III), 598. For further detail on the “Au Pays des Soviets” controversy, see Kurkdjan, Lucien Vogel et Michel de Brunhoff, 403. 12 “Schéma montrant l’organisation fédérale et administrative de l’U.R.S.S.” (Diagram showing the federal and administrative organisation of the USSR), VU, A4, No. 192, November 18, 1931, p. 2529. 13 Weber, The Hollow Years, 43; Kemp, The French Economy, 1913–39, 104–10; McMillan, Dreyfus to De Gaulle, 99–102. 14 “L’Age Américain: Quantité et Qualité” (The American age: Quantity and quality), VU, A4, No. 196, December 16, 1931, p. 2775. 15 “L’Age Américain,” p. 2774. 16 “Nature … Morte,” photo-page, VU, A4, No. 196, December 16, 1931, p. 2758. The title puns on the phrase’s double meaning: “still life” or “dead life.”

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17 Ellipses are in the original text. 18 See above, p. 64. 19 “Les chômeurs américains” (The American unemployed), VU, A5, No. 216, May 4, 1932, p. 672. 20 The photograph shows one of the extraordinary mass gatherings of Czechoslovakia’s Sokol gymnastics movement, which forcefully promoted the ideals of Czech nationalism at this period. 21 See, for example, “S’il n’y avait pas eu la Guerre” (If there had been no war), VU, A3, No. 139, November 12, 1930, pp. 1186–7; “La Guerre de Demain” (The war of tomorrow), VU, A4, No. 194, December 2, 1931, pp. 2695–6; “Les Chiffres qui Parlent” (The telling numbers), VU, A5, No. 243, November 9, 1932, pp. 1792–3. For a discussion of VU’s defining pacifist issue, “La Prochaine Guerre” (The next war), VU, A3, No. 152, 11 February 1931, see Panchasi, Future Tense, 79–100. 22 “Front 1932 … De Quelques Haut-Lieux Oubliés” (Front of 1932 … in some forgotten hotspots), VU, A5, No. 243, November 9, 1932, pp. 1780–1. 23 The first of Liberman’s anti-Nazi photomontages, “Le Dictateur Enchainé” (The chained dictator), appeared on the cover of VU, A6, No. 256, February 5, 1933. Michel Frizot, “Photo/Graphics in French Magazines: The Possibilities of Rotogravure, 1926-1935,” in Photo/Graphisme (Jeu de Paume, Paris: Jeu de Paume, 2008), 10. 24 Quoted in von Amelxunen, “De la construction de L’espace historique,” 96. My re-translation from the French. 25 Hitler was introduced to VU’s readers in a short biographical article in September 1930: “Hitler: Le Nationaliste sans Patrie” (Hitler: The nationalist with no homeland), VU, A3, No. 132, September 24, 1930, p. 934. The magazine followed Hitler’s subsequent rise to power, with increasing urgency, throughout the 1930–3 period and beyond. 26 Modernism’s profound implication in the visual culture of Nazism is reflected in an article from 1934: “Un Exemple à Retenir: L’Organisation du Congrès de Nuremberg” (An example to hold onto: The organisation of the Nuremberg Congress), VU, A7, No. 340, September 19, 1934, p. 1189. Photographs of immaculate rows of tents, banners, and troop patterns are accompanied by a rueful editorial: “These new images could begin to effect a raising of the spirit, firstly by offering to one’s eyes a satisfying distinction between picturesqueness – which must continue to reign – and vulgarity.” 27 “Adolph Hitler,” VU, A4, No. 195, December 9, 1931, p. 2708. 28 For example, an almost identical image, showing a National Socialist gathering at the Sportspalast, appears in VU, A5, No. 205, February 17, 1932, p. 210.

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29 “L’Allemagne a élu son nouveau Reichstag” (Germany has elected its new Reichstag), VU, A5, No. 229, August 3, 1932, p. 1242. 30 “Les Associations en Uniforme” (Organisations in uniform), VU, A5, No. 213, April 13, 1932, pp. 504–5. 31 “Grimaces d’athlètes” (Athletes’ grimaces), VU, A4, No. 181, September 2, 1931, pp. 2138–9. 32 “Têtes de Rechange” (Exchangeable heads), VU, A6, No. 255, February 1, 1933, pp. 148–9. Further examples of destabilised layouts include “Le Club Cent-Kilos” (The one-hundred kilo club), VU, A5, No. 239, October 12, 1932, pp. 1652–3; “Manoeuvres de L’Armée Rouge” (Red Army manoeuvres), VU, A6, No. 258, February 22, 1932, pp. 252–3. 33 See above, p. 236. 34 VU’s pacifism appears closely aligned to the visceral anti-war sentiments of French war veterans; consistent with this, VU’s photography and articles presented France’s active servicemen and its First World War heroes in a humane and sympathetic light. For a discussion of French pacifism in the reconstruction era, and its remarkable resilience in the face of German rearmament in the 1930s, see Weber, The Hollow Years, 19–25; Daniel J. Sherman, “Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 443–66; Mona Siegel, “‘History Is the Opposite of Forgetting’: The Limits of Memory and the Lessons of History in Interwar France,” The Journal of Modern History 74, no. 4 (2002): 770–800. 35 “La Fête des Croix de Bois” (The festival of wooden crosses), VU, A5, No. 230, August 10, 1932, pp. 1274–5. 36 An earlier, profoundly pessimistic VU supplement, titled “Tout est Foutu” – which roughly translates as “We’re screwed” – was prepared for publication in April 1932. According to Frizot and de Veigy, the supplement was pulped before its release, possibly due to its unfortunate timing in the wake of the assassination of the French president, Paul Doumer. For discussion of “Tout est Foutu” and facsimiles of the unpublished page layouts, see Frizot and de Veigy, Vu, 282–7. 37 “Dans les Temps Apocalyptiques” (In apocalyptic times), VU, A6, No. 259, March 1, 1933, p. 277. 38 Roberts, Civilization without Sexes, 2–5. 39 Paul Valéry, “La crise de l’esprit” (The crisis of the spirit), first published in La Nouvelle Revue Française, August 1, 1919. Translation from: historyguide​.org​/ Europe​/va​lery. 40 “machines à penser” (thinking machines), VU, A6, No. 259, March 1, 1933, pp. 286–7. 41 “Normalisation” (Standardisation), VU 259, p. 295.

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42 “Quelle ville était semblable à la grande ville? La grande ville où se sont enrichis par son opulence tous ceux qui ont des navires sur la mer.” The Book of Revelation or Apocalypse of John, Ch. 18, v. 18–19; the text is from the 1910 French translation of the Geneva Bible. “Apothéose de la Civilisation Mécanique” (Apotheosis of mechanical civilisation), VU 259, p. 305. 43 “La crise porte ses fruits” (The crisis bears fruits), VU, A6, No. 295, November 8, 1933, p. 1686. See epigraph to this chapter. Ellipses are in the original text.

Epilogue Modern Pages

The modernist magazines of the 1920s were built on the promise of prosperity. The secular vision shared by UHU, VU, and many other popular titles on European news stands, was of an expansive future, in which peace and technological progress would deliver an ordered, plentiful consumer society. The collapse of consumer capitalism in the Depression era, and the crisis of liberal democracy that followed in its wake, were also fatal to modernism’s utopian ideals, whose cultural force depended on a capacity for continuous deferral. The magazines which survived the turmoil of the early 1930s could no longer invoke the progressive future as a promissory note, and had either to engage with pessimistic reality, and hope to take their readers with them, or present varieties of distraction and visual fantasy. Two new French news weeklies of the 1930s, Voilà and Regards – both of which took VU as a template, offered contrasting responses to this editorial dilemma. The magazines, in each case, built on the patterning language of titles such as Volk und Zeit, Match l’Intran and VU, to present dynamic and visually striking page layouts.1 For the communist weekly Regards, launched in 1932, asymmetric grids and vector patterns were part of a propagandist toolkit, expressing both the iniquities of capitalism and the implacable march of the proletariat. ‘Borinage’, from June 1934, for example, employs a cramped grid layout with dimly lit, overlapping photographs, to depict the dirt and squalor of Belgian mining villages;2 ‘Une Usine Qui en Nourrit Trente’ (One factory which feeds thirty others), from the following month, embeds the serial forms of tables and cooking vats within a dramatic diagonal layout, symbolising, for the magazine’s socialist readers, the productivity of Soviet collective labour.3 Like VU’s utopian patterns, the strength of Regards’s set-piece page designs reflects the unity of its editorial ideals. In marked contrast to Regards, the patterned layouts of Voilà magazine, launched in 1931, simply offered a way of introducing lightness and visual variety into its weekly issues: the magazine exemplifies the full assimilation

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of geometric modernism into 1930s visual culture, as the hegemonic visual language of modernity. The magazine, which styled itself ‘L’hébdomadaire du reportage’ (The reportage weekly), in reality avoided reporting on political events and the unsettling actualities of the Depression years – Hitler’s seizure of power was all but unmarked in Voilà, except for an editorial of 18 March 1933, advising readers: ‘Let us be calm, and not work ourselves up. Fear has never stopped anything. … Besides, it is presently unjustified.’4 The 18 March issue, following the breezy commercial formula it had established over its first two years, presented a picture story on the pastimes of English youth, a report on Belgian life by Georges Simenon, and a double-page spread on the ‘Underside of Paris – mysteries of a great restaurant’, formed of tilted star-shaped and circular frames, and filmic photo sequences: the patterning language of geometric modernism shorn of its idealism, and of its claims on the tenuous future.

‘The next war’ The evolution of VU magazine in the 1930s describes a narrative arc of crisis and resolution.5 Initially, as explored in Chapter 11, the shift was toward intensification: of its editorial rhetoric on the Depression crisis, and of its visual language in general. The shift towards angularity and oppositional form in photography and page layouts reached a peak around 1933 – a development related, in Chapter 11, to the collapse of VU’s modernist ideals and the rise of Nazism. As if to underline VU’s existential crisis in this period, the magazine published, in August and September of that year, an extraordinary series of articles on religious visions and faith healing – stories that contrast markedly with the measured, secularised framing of religious rituals in VU’s early years. The front cover of VU 283 (16 August 1933), ‘Visions Diaboliques ou Divines’ (Diabolical or divine visions), shows two women in an ecstatic trance, clutching a crucifix: the inside article, titled ‘Le Grand Châtiment: La fin du monde estelle proche?’ (The Great Tribulation: Is the end of the world nigh?), recounts the ‘strange events’ in the Basque country ‘that have begun to multiply in the past two years’.6 The story, running to sixteen photo-illustrated pages over three subsequent issues, captures a new variation on VU’s crowd imagery: prostrate and euphoric villagers, gazing to the heavens, or with eyes rolled up sightlessly into their sockets. VU 287, published two weeks later, explored the miraculous powers of a faith healer in central France, with the testimonials of her patients as

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photo captions: ‘“So it’s true, I can get well.” And the old woman leaves. She has faith, she will get well.’7 The VU of 1934 described a world in which the fervent dreams of modernist visionaries had turned to dust. As Moholy-Nagy wrote: ‘The situation of the arts around us is devastating and sterile. One vegetates in total isolation, persuaded by newspaper propaganda that there is no longer any place for any other form of expression than the emptiest phraseology.’8 It is tempting to read the evolution in VU’s design language at this period in these psychological terms. Whatever the case, the consolidation of the Nazi regime was paralleled by a subtle shift in the magazine, towards regularisation: page layouts from 1934 avoid the jagged oppositional patterning of previous years, employing a more measured machinemodernist regularity based on the asymmetric grid. Michel Frizot describes the change as a ‘settling down’ after the ‘agitation’ of the 1933 issues, ascribing the change, somewhat prosaically, to lack of time, and possibly ‘lack of desire and ideas as well’.9 Given the richness and variety of VU’s 1934 themes, and the quality of its page layouts, the latter charge, at least, seems misplaced. This was the year of VU’s sustained campaign against German rearmament, propagandised in Alexander Liberman’s photomontage covers; VU’s response to the Stavisky scandal, in the January and February issues, appears, moreover, no less striking in its visual and journalistic rhetoric than earlier stories on the rise of Nazism;10 1934 was also the year of beautifully crafted special issues on China, modern medicine, motoring, and cinema, marking the emergence in VU of a fully realised modernist design style. There is nonetheless an implicit sense of retrenchment in the editorial character of VU 1934. What Frizot calls VU’s ‘lack of desire’ equates to the loss – as in UHU magazine’s final years – of its unifying, optimistic idealism. The critical shift, which would play out two years later in the magazine’s support for the Spanish Republican cause, was VU’s increasingly overt politicisation, culminating in support for Léon Blum’s Popular Front, and a reappraisal of its long-standing commitment to pacifism.11 Faced with the devastating reality of a militarised, totalitarian Europe led by Hitler’s Germany, the magazine’s idealism had given way to a despairing acceptance of the need for democratic resistance: VU’s humanism over-ruled, in the final count, its principled commitment to international disarmament. An article by Paul Allard, from VU 435, encapsulates the bleak, impassioned realism of VU’s 1936 issues: Twenty years have passed. Epithets which might evoke, for the new generations devoted to the next sacrifice, what Verdun was – it is in vain that the men who

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by some miracle escaped mobilise themselves once again today. ‘Titanic’ Hell, ‘Dante-esque’, butchery, heroic carnage, bloody holocaust. What’s the use? Since one knows that it will all begin again, that, like twenty years ago, a blind ‘fatality’ drives people against one another, that the politics of force triumphs, that the word disarmament makes the realists shrug their shoulders, and that the Ossuary of Douaumont of 193 … – instead of 500,000 skeletons – will hold millions and millions.12

VU’s final issue, dated 5 June 1940, a week before the German occupation of Paris, shows the ruins of bombed buildings silhouetted against a blood-red sky.13

Notes 1 Match l’Intran itself had largely abandoned its utopian design language by 1933, evolving into a more conventional weekly sports supplement. For facsimiles of key pages from Volk und Zeit, the weekly supplement of the German social democratic newspaper Vorwärts, see Lebeck and Dewitz, Kiosk, 137–9. 2 “Borinage,” Regards, A3, No. 21 (53), June 8, 1934, p. 11. 3 Regards, A3, No. 25 (57), July 6, 1934, pp. 6–7. 4 “ni haine … Ni CRAINTE” (neither hatred … Nor Fear), Voilà, A3, No. 104, March 18, 1933, p. 4. A semi-complete run of Voilà is available online at www​.m​​useen​​iepce​​.com/​​index​​.php?​​/coll​​ectio​​ns. 5 For the VU special issue “La Prochaine Guerre” (The next war), see Chapter 3, note 21, p. 278. 6 “Le Grand Châtiment: La fin du monde est-elle proche?” (The Great Tribulation: Is the end of the world nigh?), VU, A6, No. 283, August 16, 1933, p. 1289. 7 “Lève toi, prends ton lit et va dans ta maison” (Rise, take up your bed and go home), VU, A6, No. 287, September 13, 1933, p. 1432. 8 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, letter to Herbert Read, 1934, quoted in Jobling and Crowley, Graphic Design, 152. 9 Frizot, “Photo/Graphics in French Magazines,” 9. 10 For an account of the Stavisky scandal and the destabilising effects of the February 1934 riots on French political life, see McMillan, Dreyfus to De Gaulle, 102–4. 11 Sophie Kurkdjan, “Représenter et penser l’affrontement: Le magazine Vu face à la guerre d’Espagne et à la menace d’une deuxième guerre mondiale,” Amnis, no. 10 (2011): 11–13. 12 Paul Allard, “Le Serment de la Paix” (Sermon of peace), VU, A9, No. 435, July 15, 1936, p. 844. 13 Front cover, VU, A13, No. 638, June 5, 1940.

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Index Americanism  76–7, 80, 86–7, 98–9, 125, 128–9, 153, 162, 175, 177–8, 218–20, 247, 257, 265–6 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ)  206 Arnheim, Rudolf  5, 38 Atget, Eugène  168, 169 Balla, Giacomo  57 Baudelaire, Charles  48 Bauhaus  13, 27, 63, 85, 109, 133, 137, 140, 147 Behne, Adolf  134–7 Bellonte, Maurice. See Costes and Bellonte, transatlantic flight Benjamin, Walter  4, 88–90, 110, 142, 196 Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung  66, 75, 80, 206 Bidou, Henri  213, 216 Blossfeldt, Karl  140, 141, 142, 172, 195 Blut und Boden (Blood and soil)  95, 117 Boccioni, Umberto  53, 57 Le Bon, Gustave (The Crowd)  49 Born, Wolfgang  21 Brecht, Bertolt  131 Breuer, Robert  124, 140–3

Earhart, Amelia  245–6 Eisenstein, Sergei Battleship Potemkin  58, 59 Endell, August (Die Schönheit der grossen Stadt)  53 Film und Foto exhibition  89, 112, 195 Ford, Henry  129 Fotografie der Gegenwart (Photography of the Present Day)  89 Frankfurt School  17 Freikörperkultur. See nudism Fridland, Simon  31 Friedrich, Ernst (Krieg dem Kriege)  14, 79, 94, 96 futurism  57–8, 231, 238, 243

Cendrars, Blaise  177 Charnaux, Madeleine  245–6 Chilehaus  131, 132, 146 Le Corbusier  56, 61, 64–5, 136, 138, 231 grids (the ‘regulating line’)  64 Costes and Bellonte, transatlantic flight  240–1, 242, 245 Cunningham, Imogen  17

Die Gartenlaube  76 Gestalt (Goethean theory)  19 Gestalt principles  35–7, 56 Girod, Charles  189, 191–2 Gleichschaltung (forced alignment)  189 Godal, Erich  191–2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  115, 127, 141 theory of organic form (Gestalt)  18–19, 91, 107 Gombrich, Ernst  5, 42 Graeser, Wolfgang (Körpersinn)  155–6, 168 Gropius, Walter  4, 70, 133–4

Die Dame  1, 10, 66, 85–6, 124 Das deutsche Lichtbild (photographic album)  122, 123, 125, 126 distributive patterns. See pattern theory Dix, Otto  130, 176

Hartlaub, Gustav Friedrich  218 Hauptmann, Gerhart  125–6 Hausmann, Raoul  176 Herf, Jeffrey (Reactionary Modernism)  6, 7, 14

300 Hesse, Herman  141 ‘Die Sehnsucht unser Zeit nach einer Weltanschauung’ (The longing of our time for a world view)  15–16 Höch, Hannah  5, 66, 67, 91, 268 Hoerle, Heinrich (Monument to the Unknown Prostheses)  176 Hoppé, Emil  113, 126–7 Jackson Girls. See synchronised dance J’ai vu  205, 207 Kanizsa, Gaetano  52 Kepes, Gyorgy  5, 37 Kertesz, André  92, 113, 115 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig  53 Klages, Ludwig (graphology)  20 Köppen, Edlef  76, 78, 151 Die Koralle  12, 124–7 Korff, Kurt  210 Kracauer, Siegfried  5, 162–3, 233 Krauss, Rosalind (‘Grids’)  61 Kroner, Friedrich  79, 189 Krull, Germaine  37, 38, 39, 41, 59 Kultur (Germanic culture)  7, 14, 16, 18, 126, 129, 165 Kulturpessimismus (cultural pessimism)  19, 76, 129 Laban, Rudolf von  169 Lang, Fritz (Metropolis)  7, 176 Lania, Leo  76 Das Leben  86, 152 Lebensreformbewegung (life reform movement)  18, 170 Liberman, Alexander  268–9, 283 Das Lichtbild (exhibition)  11, 20, 21 life reform movement. See Lebensreformbewegung Lindbergh, transatlantic flight  131, 245 Lorant, Stefan  105–6 Das Magazin  23, 75, 86, 122–3, 152–5, 257 Malevich, Kasimir  97 Black Square  60

Index Mallet-Stevens, Robert (Villa Noailles)  137 mannequins  246–7 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  57, 65, 243 Match l’Intran  56, 208, 209, 210, 232, 281 May, Ernst  136 Meidner, Ludwig  48, 54 ‘An Introduction to Painting Big Cities’  47, 53 Meyer, Hannes  125–6 Miketta, Hubert  75 Le Miroir  205, 207 modernism machine/nature dialectic  12, 23 modernist photography  93, 105–15 organic modernism  91–3 patterning aesthetic  103–4 Reactionary Modernism (Herf)  14–15 urban crowds  48–53 vectors  57 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo  4, 29, 56, 109–12, 114, 115, 136, 283 Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film)  27, 28, 29, 85 Molzahn, Johannes  21 Mondrian, Piet  61–2, 63, 65, 136 Münchner Illustrierte Presse  56, 105 Munkacsi, Martin  92, 114, 115–16, 251–2 Nacktkultur. See nudism Nackttanz (nude dance)  167 Nadar, Félix  97 Naturzwecke (natural purpose) (Kant)  18, 138 Neue Sachlichkeit (exhibition)  129–31 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)  86, 92, 112–13, 130, 142 New Photography  27, 43, 110, 113, 120, 123, 125, 130, 219 The New Typography. See Tschichold, Jan New Vision (modernist photography)  43, 92, 93, 113, 120 new woman  114, 128, 152–3, 155, 167, 179, 197, 220, 232, 245–6 nudism  13, 155, 158, 159, 166–72, 173, 175

Index Outerbridge, Paul  86 Panofsky, Erwin  5, 48 pattern theory antecedents  5 constructivist model of vision  33 definition of pattern  32 dialogic model  32–4 distributive patterns  42–3, 52, 66 grids  60, 267 concentrative and expansive modes  61 long diagonal  220 modernism  3 modernist patterning aesthetic  27–30, 240, 267 morphology  42–3 oppositional vectors  59 perceptual dynamics  52, 240 perceptual organisation  30–3, 212 structural patterns  28, 66–7 symbolic potentiation of pattern  224 total arrays  91 Paul, Bruno, ‘Der-Die-Das’ (cartoon)  50–2 picture agencies  77, 225 Ploch, Artur  79–80 Der Querschnitt  86, 146, 158 Radiant City. See Le Corbusier radio  14, 130–1, 219, 223, 256 Reactionary Modernism (Herf)  6, 7, 14 Regards  281 Reiser, Hans  19, 20, 76 Renger-Patzsch, Albert  23, 88, 93, 106–9, 195 Renner, Paul (‘Das Lichtbild’)  11, 20, 21 Revue des Monats  13, 54, 75, 85–6, 105, 151–3, 154, 155, 189 revue magazines  4, 75–6, 78–80 Rex, Hemann (Der Weltkrieg in seiner rauhen Wirklichkeit)  96 Riezler, Walter  23, 102 Roh, Franz  90 Ross, Colin  129 Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag)  79 Ruttmann, Walter (Symphonie einer Großstadt)  54–5, 59

301

Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de  94, 99 Sander, August  195–6 Sant’Elia, Antonio  58 Schauwecker, Franz (So war der Krieg)  94, 95, 96, 97, 117 Scherl’s Magazin  22, 23, 31, 39, 40, 54, 55, 75, 77, 79, 85–6, 122, 189 Schilling, Erich (‘Suum cuique’ cartoon)  51 Schröder House (Gerrit Rietveld)  61 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul  133, 184 Seidenstücker, Friedrich  197 Simplicissimus  50, 51 Spengler, Oswald  19, 76, 190 Stenbock, Nils  191, 192 De Stijl  61–2 Stone, Sasha  4, 85, 113, 115, 139, 161 structural patterns. See pattern theory Suren, Hans, Der Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sunlight)  173–4 synchronised dance  160–3, 177–8 Tatlin, Vladimir  238 Monument to the Third International  58 Taut, Bruno  27 Tiller Girls. See synchronised dance Tönnies, Ferdinand (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft)  18 total array. See pattern theory Tschichold, Jan (The New Typography)  56, 63, 64, 138, 218, 231, 248, 266 UHU advertising  78–9 aerial photography  93–105 anti-feminism (1930s)  197–8 anti-Nazism  189–91 aviation  102, 131 cartoons  67, 148, 191–4 contributors  4, 198 distribution, cover price  78, 80, 196 editorial principles  79–80 launch campaign  80–1 legacy of First World War  99–101, 117 modernist architecture  131–8 modernist photography  105–15

302 New Photography  106, 130 nudism  158, 159, 166–72, 173, 175 organic architecture  140–3 organicism  138–43 photographic ‘objectivity’  109–14 photomicrography  90–3 photo-stories  196–7 rationalisation  194–5 revue magazines  4, 75–6, 78–80 rival magazines  77 Schönheit (cult of aesthetic beauty)  16, 126–7, 137, 138–40 visual content  87–9 weekend leisure  163–6 Umbo (Otto Umbehr)  88, 112 Valéry, Paul (‘La crise de l’esprit’)  273–4 van Doesburg, Theo  21 La Vie au grand air  207–8 La Ville Contemporaine. See Le Corbusier Vogel, Lucien  206, 214, 217–18, 232–3, 273–4 Voilà  6, 206, 281, 284 Volk und Zeit  281 VU advertising  218–24 ‘L’Amérique Lutte’ (America struggles) special issue  265–7 antecedents  4, 206–8, 210 anti-Nazism  18, 50, 198, 204–5, 213, 216, 259, 268–70, 273, 275, 283 ‘Au Pays des Soviets’ (In the land of the Soviets) special issue  254, 261–4 automobiles  219, 235 aviation  238–46 cinema as model  210–12 circulation  254 colonialism  215, 216 composite news pages  49, 212, 213, 233, 234

Index consumerism  219–20, 222 crowds  260–4 Depression crisis  222, 232, 260–2, 264 education  236, 271–2 ‘L’Énigme Allemande’ (The German Enigma) special issue  270–1 ‘Fin d’une Civilisation’ (End of a civilisation) special issue  273–5 First World War  268, 272 leisure  249–52 Mussolini  211, 212, 216–18, 233 new woman  244–9 objectivity, as editorial principle  213–14 pacifism  238, 267–70, 272–3 photojournalism  243 politics  213–18 rationalisation  237, 265–6, 274 religion  282–3 ‘Remarques sur un nouveau journal illustré’ (manifesto)  203–5, 210, 213, 218, 232 Spanish Civil War  218, 233, 283 Weber, Max  17 Weimar era dialectical modernism  13–15 expansion in magazine market  75 picture agencies  77 revue magazines  78–80 weekend leisure  163–6 Wertheimer, Max  23–4, 35, 106 Woolworth, Frank  98, 128, 144 Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon)  196, 198 Zielesch, Fritz  102–4 Zweig, Stefan  7, 129