Rethinking Postwar Europe: Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the Late 1940s and 1950s 3412514004, 9783412514006

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Rethinking Postwar Europe

Rethinking Postwar Europe Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt, Agata Pietrasik (eds.)

Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s

Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt, Agata Pietrasik (eds.)

The book “Rethinking Postwar Europe” offers an in-depth insight into the largely unexplored topic of artistic practices in the 1940s and 1950s in Europe which until recently had been obscured by ideologies of the Cold War. Thanks to the authors’ diverse methodological backgrounds, the volume presents—for the first time—a comprehensive multilayered narrative, focusing on the complexities and entanglements in the artistic field. Instead of assessing the postwar period in the traditional way as divided by the Iron Curtain, the contributions investigate processes of contact, interaction, dissemination, overlapping, and networking. Consequently, the analysis of a diversified European modernism in both its aesthetic and its socio-political dimension resonates with all the different case studies. In particular, the volume looks at how artists developed, designed and (re)negotiated identities and discourses, and sheds new light on the power of art—and creative powers in general—in a postwar setting of mutilations, losses, and devastations.

lange r.indd 3

24.10.19 13:52

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

Barbara Lange/Dirk Hildebrandt/Agata Pietrasik (eds.)

Rethinking Postwar Europe Artistic Production and Discourses on Art in the late 1940s and 1950s

Böhlau Verlag Wien Köln Weimar © 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

Published with kind support from German Research Foundation, Bonn

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data available online: https://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie., Lindenstraße 14, D-50674 Köln  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Cover image: Anni Albers, Maker: Gloria S. Finn Dale, Rug, 1959 (Gift of Laurel Vlock, Class of 1948, and Jim Vlock, Class of 1947, MBA 1948; Photography courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; mit freundlicher Genehmigung der VG Bild-Kunst) Proofreading by Dore Wilken, Freiburg Typesetting by SchwabScantechnik, Göttingen Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-51401-3

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

Still from Filip Markiewicz, Voyage au bout d’une identité, 2015. Full HD film synchronized on 3 projectors, 2.23:1/ 35 min, variable dimensions; produced by Mudam Luxembourg, Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg for the Luxembourg Pavilion at 56th Venice Biennale 2015: Still 23.55.32. © Markiewicz

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

Table of Contents

Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

Europe, a Challenge  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

9

An Introduction

Narratives Éva Forgács

Shaping the Narrative of a New Europe in Art  . . . . . . . . . . . 

31

Willem Sandberg and the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam’s Retrieval of Malevich Simon Vagts

Bodies, Factories, and Islands  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

51

Roberto Rossellini Mapping Catastrophe

Practices Barbara Lange

Community and Communism  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Asger Jorn’s Concept of Ceramics Dirk Hildebrandt

The Politics of Asger Jorn’s Modification  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Writing a Network of European Postwar Art Agata Pietrasik

Imagining the Future of Postwar Europe  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 An International Artist Settlement in Mauthausen

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Table of Contents

Identities Hildegard Frübis

Europe as Transit  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Jewish Displaced-Persons Camps and the Photographs of Roman Vishniac Regina Wenninger

Overcoming Ideological Barriers?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 How West German Art Critics Appropriated Polish Abstract Art Tanja Zimmermann

Primitivism and Naïveté as Categories of Political Aesthetics  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Early Approaches against Eurocentrism in Art Criticism after the Second World War

Particularities Pedro Lapa

Joaquim Rodrigo’s Painting  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 A Particularity in the Portuguese Case Elisabeth Ansel

‘Emancipated from Provincial Myth’  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 The Irish Artist Louis le Brocquy in the Context of National Debates and European Modernism Regine Heß

Display, Discuss, and Build  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 German Architectural Congresses and Exhibitions between Continuity and Cold War

Contributors  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Index  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

Europe, a Challenge

An Introduction To Filip Markiewicz Europe is the most thrilling subject. In his cinematic installation Voyage au bout d’une identité (2015) a man proclaims abstracts from the Manifesto for a Technology of De-Politization of the Body. The text, written in an avantgarde manner, calls for a Europe where people no longer belong to any particular nation, where countries have become geographical territories with individual historical cultures, and where artistic creations give impulses to improve standards of living.1 In order to provide the viewers of the film with orientation of how to manage this challenge, the artwork shows pictures of a couple traveling across Europe, assembling impressions of the continent’s cultural diversity regardless former or current actual political systems. (Figs. 1–3) We see, for example, pictures from Warsaw with its neoclassical and Stalinist buildings, and from Paris with the quartiers mentioned in Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967). The film shows rural parts of the continent, where the protagonists pass through. We get insights into different modes of interior design, clothing and speech habits. We listen to a variety of music, which comes from the film’s soundtrack. In short, Markiewicz offers us a diverse image of Europe that has left a lot of certainties and stereotypes behind. An uncertain ground and a curious approach without neglecting the challenge and burden of history is also the starting point of our book. 1 Filip Markiewicz, Voyage au bout d’une identité (2015, full HD film synchronised on three projectors, 35  min) was part of the artist’s contribution Paradiso Lussemburgo to 56th Venice Biennial in 2015, on display in Ca’ d’Oro, the pavilion of Luxembourg. We want to thank Filip Markiewicz for supporting our book with his illustrations.

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Europe, a Challenge

Figs. 1–3  Stills from Filip Markiewicz, Voyage au bout d’une identité, 2015. Full HD film synchronised on 3 projectors, 2.23:1/35 min, variable dimensions; produced by Mudam Luxembourg, Ministry of Culture of Luxembourg for the Luxembourg Pavilion at 56th Venice Biennale 2015: Stills 23.52.25; 00.00.59; 00.01.03. © Markiewicz

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

Why Europe? The idea for our publication started already some years ago: in a discussion about colonial cultures and postcolonial approaches in art history, a colleague burst out ‘Why are we always reproducing the old scheme of Europe and the rest? When will we finally start to see Europe as only one of many regions, as one of several provinces of the world?’2 At that time, the challenges of overcoming the established narratives had been focused on what was called ‘the rest’ that this interruption caused only some arguments when the meeting was over. With a raise of eyebrows and a whisper about ‘Eurocentrism’ a certain uneasiness spread: What do we really know about Europe? Moreover, what do we have in mind when we talk about Europe? A continent? An uncertain territory, uncertain because it is a part of a much bigger landmass? Or an assembly of nation states, which change their borders and names from time to time? Obviously, it is much more than just the European Union. A quick search in history and geography manuals made the issue by no means easier. One had to realise that not only none of these sources provided the required fixed definition, but one could also learn that in geography, as well as in history, the image of continents, their borders and cultures are even more discussed than in art history.3 It seems that ‘Europe’ is, what Henri Lefebvre has termed, a social space.4 What applies to all continents is also true to Europe: a continent is bound to a physical space, a territory, which can be experienced only diffusely. The realization of its existence is based on ideology, representation, and practices. Con-

2

This objection referred to the title of the book by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differences, Princeton, NJ, revised edition, 2007.

3

One of the books which inspired a lot of these most fruitful discourses not only in geography labeled as spatial turn became Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertation of Space in Critical Social Theory, London and New York, NY, 1989. See Nigel Thrift and Sarah Whatmore, ‘Introduction’ , in Cultural Geography: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, eds. Nigel Thrift and Sarah Whatmore, London, 2004, 1–17; Benno Werlen, ‘Geographie/Sozialgeographie’ , in Raumwissenschaften, ed. Stephan Günzel, Frankfurt/Main, 2009, 142–158; Jörg Döring, ‘Spatial Turn’ , in Raum. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel in collaboration with Franziska Kümmerling, Stuttgart and Weimar, 2010, 90–99. See also Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History?, Princeton, NJ, 2016.

4

See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, 1991, 411. Lefebvre’s book was first published in French (La production de l’espace) in 1974. Although Lefebvre’s theory does not provide instruments to analyse the becoming of largescale entities like ‘Europe’ , it helps to understand the concept of a social space as a never-ending process of making.

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sequently, Europe is both: an ever-changing product of social practices as well as their instrument, medium, and milieu in the physical world. Most often, art history still uses the opposition of Europe on the one side and all the rest on the other.5 While we are aware that we need to widen our geographical scope, we still redistribute designs of a Europe, which had been created at the dawn of modernity by modernist concepts of the humanities. These images follow the old imperial logic of the 19th century, including nation states, Christianity on top of all religions, and the hierarchy of learned and so-called unlearned socie­ ties, where electricity and water closets waited long to get installed.6 Taking the expanding field of art history into account, we need to take stock that these old paradigms are very resistant. Their stability leads us to the very core of a structural problem: the unveiling of this order of things as a structure of power and marginalization will only get into a new and sustainable balance when we manage to integrate the inner-European processes of exclusions and hierarchization into the new global art history. Consequently, to gain a new concept of European art history means to move one step back in order to realise – like in Voyage au bout d’une identité – the many differences. That is not an easy project, especially when we turn to the 20th century. European art overwhelms us with a most vivid, complex and heterogeneous structure, which has a specific character. One may see certain familiarities between inner-European structures and those of colonialism. But in the 20thcentury negotiations, concerning the social space changed fundamentally, and Europe did no longer follow the road of master and subaltern. Since the 1920s, full citizenship with the implementation of equal rights was provided to nearly all Europeans; those European countries which still excluded women from certain fields followed within the next decades, and still existing, or former colonial dependencies became tested. Of course, these legal states do not picture real life. However, after World War I the master narrative of a European identity, stabilised through institutions and practices, needed to include, somehow, the granted diversity of different cultures. The historians Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow list this as a speci-

5

See Monica Juneja, ‘Alternative, Peripheral or Cosmopolitan? Modernism as a Global Process’ , in Global Art History. Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Wissenschaft, eds. Julia Allerstorfer and Monika Leisch-Kiesl, Bielefeld, 2017, 79–107.

6

See Steyn Bergs et al., ‘Situating Art’s Histories: The Politics and Paradoxes of Globalizing’ , Kunst­licht, 39:1, 2018, 4–8.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

ficity of modern Europe.7 Moreover, with the newly founded Soviet Union and its specific interpretation of a socialist society, the bourgeois project of modernity got a powerful opponent and the diversity of European societies a new dynamic. Art was deeply involved in all these processes, not only as a medium of ­ideologies, but also as an agency of its own. From an art historian point of view, Jarausch’s and Sabrow’s list necessarily needs a further important addition: in modern Europe questions of origin, culture and identity are also negotiated by, through and with the arts. From the 1920s onward more than ever. Numerous studies about the interwar period have demonstrated how this situation caused disruptions in European societies, how art and political practices sometimes competed. After the end of World War  II, this complex disposition became even more disturbed by the gravity field of politics. Between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the ideology of the Cold War became the pattern to categorise, understand, and interpret art. The ‘Shadow of Yalta’ – as the late Piotr Piotrowski has called it concerning the famous conference in Crimea in February 19458 – somehow kidnapped the view on the postwar European art world and made it hostage to Cold War ideologies. Thus, art specific processes became covered under a layer of icing, which only benefited the power interests of the two main poles of global politics, USSR and USA. Bitter to say, but until now it still dominates our perspectives. Not that no efforts were made to overcome this structure. Piotrowski himself was one of the protagonists who did not get tired of pleading for new perspectives. With a focus on the art scenes in European socialist countries, he pointed out, that they had been much more diverse than their popular image. While the Cold War image of the Eastern Bloc cracks with every new research project, also the former image of the West began to tremble. As important as those efforts are still a second challenge is calling. The need to bring art and politics into a balance without the dominance of the geopolitical order of the Cold War remains under work. The task is: how are we able to design an art historical perspective on Europe, which does not forget political responsibilities in history and, at the same time, enables us to talk about all the fruitful and exciting impacts of European art and culture? This book is meant to be a contribution to it. 7

See Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, ‘“Meistererzählungen” – Zur Karriere eines Begriffs’ , in Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, Göttingen, 2002, 9–32, 21.

8

See Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski, London, 2009.

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Europe, a Challenge

Whereas most art historical studies about the decades of the Cold War concentrate on the time of the 1960s onwards, we take the previous years into account. Concerned with Cold War ideologies, one quickly realises that further researches on those formative years right after the war are urgently and necessarily needed to understand the morphology of the European art world. The genocide and the war, which destroyed the territory so immensely and left the survivors in a state of trauma, were seen as a failure of politics. Most protagonists of the art world – artists as well as art critics, art historians, curators and part of the audiences – recalled the creative power of art and its responsibilities to humankind. They were convinced to be leading figures in rebuilding a new peaceful Europe. But resuming the progressive legacy of the continent remained marked by the mass murder of the European Jews during the World War II. To name this, the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ in the immediate aftermath of the war. Later, the notion became incorporated into the international legal system and until today it serves as a ‘“gold standard” of humanitarian emergencies’9. As demonstrated by Michael Rothberg this had also tremendous cultural consequences, as Europe’s way of coming to terms with the Holocaust was deeply entwined with the global processes of decolonisation.10 Thus, no matter how the political system was structured, after Auschwitz became a central idea and a challenge.11 As Eckhart Gillen and Peter Weibel point out, ‘Adorno saw the task of art only in the refusal of reconciliation, in uncompromising negation of the conditions that had made Auschwitz possible.’12 What Adorno attributes to the role of art in postwar Europe implies a contradiction in terms: if art actively participates in the rebuilding of Europe, it can only do so against the background of the   9 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’ , in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, eds. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, Oxford, 2010, 19–41, 41. 10 See Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA, 2009. 11 The list of theories conceptualising the condition after Auschwitz is long. We only refer to Theodor  W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main, 1955; Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death. The Place of Negativity, Minneapolis, MN, 1991; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA, 1998; Giorgio Agam­ben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. Da­ niel Heller-Roazen, New York, NY, 1998; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Das jüdische Volk träumt nicht’ , Fragmente, 29/30, 1989, 99–128; Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis, MN, 1997. 12 Eckhart Gillen and Peter Weibel, ‘Europe after the Rain. The Dialectic of Trauma and Revival in European Art from 1945 to 1968’ , in Exh. Cat. Karlsruhe et al., ZKM. Center for Art and Media 2016: ‘Facing the Future. Art in Europe – 1945–1968’ , Tielt, 2016, 12–15, 13.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

conviction that it is impossible to continue to relate to the grown structures of tradition and history that had designed Europe before the War. In this sense, the future of Europe is less dependant on reconstruction than essentially associated with the task of reinvention.

Fig. 4  Page with Notzimmer-Mobiliar Aermo. From: Max Bill, Wiederaufbau, Zurich, 1945, 166–167.

Time could not be turned back, and the concepts of starting anew differed a lot. There were those practical contributions, like Max Bill’s plea to provide people in the destroyed territories with houses, furniture, and housewares.13 (Fig. 4) Although the booklet which he published with the aid of the Swiss Department of Foreign Trade is structured by countries, referring to their particular destruction and the postwar situation, Bill’s arguments are not based on national states or political

13 See Max Bill, Wiederaufbau. Dokumente über Zerstörungen, Planungen, Konstruktionen, Zurich, 1945, 166–167.

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Europe, a Challenge

systems but on the European wide conditions of material supply, building technologies, transport systems and experiences in urbanism. What came as a very useful support for the victims of the war, turns out – as a glance into the introduction exposes – to be also an idea for a growing economy in which the Swiss architects wanted to participate too.14 In contrast, Ottomar Domnick’s activities were far from economic interests.15 Open-minded, well-educated and without financial problems the psychiatrist, talented cello player and engaged collector of artworks from Stuttgart in the German South West represented a certain bourgeois milieu, which in the years before the war had got cornered by populist propaganda against intellectual elites. He himself an emigrant from the Pomeranian region, which after the war became part of Poland, was not limited to argue in national terms. Inspired by discourses on abstraction – not least with his professional view on the human brain in mind – he started to build his private collection of non-figurative artworks. Becoming a role model for other art lovers, the interior decoration of his and his wife Greta’s home was soon subject of an article in the popular German art magazine Die Kunst und das schöne Heim (Art and the Beautiful Home) in 1949, illustrated with a view into the living room with its presentation of artworks, wooden masks and tabular steel furniture from the Bauhaus. (Fig. 5) Domnick spent a lot of his time and money to make people in the occupied zones of Western Germany familiar with non-figurative painting.16 Although in most newspapers his activities were broadly claimed as a contribution to international understanding, mainly between Germany and France, they were not welcomed by all politicians, curators, and artists. His concept of free spirit and his opinion of freedom was by no means shared by everybody in the West.

14 See Bill 1945, 7–8. 15 For further references see Werner Esser, ‘“Stuttgarter Aufbruch” oder “Die Zukunft hatte schon begonnen”. Ottomar Domnick, Franz Marc und das erste Sammlermuseum des Landes’ , in Neuordnungen. Südwestdeutsche Museen in der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Landesstelle für Museums­ betreuung Baden-Württemberg, Tübingen, 2002, 117–135. 16 See Martin Schieder, Im Blick des Anderen. Die deutsch-französischen Kunstbeziehungen 1945–1959, Berlin, 2005, 91–117.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

Fig. 5  Haus Dr. D. In Die Kunst und das schöne Heim, 1, 1949, 28. From: Werner Esser, ‘“Stuttgarter Aufbruch” oder “Die Zukunft hatte schon begonnen”. Ottomar Domnick, Franz Marc, die Staatsgalerie und das erste Sammlermuseum des Landes’ , in Neuordnungen. Südwestdeutsche Museen in der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Landesstelle für Museumsbetreuung Baden-Württemberg, Tübingen, 2002, 121. Photograph by Madeline Winkler-Betzendahl.

In this book, we take a broad variety of these different activities into view in order to find a balance between art and politics. Together, the contributions not only describe – to quote one of postwar protagonists, Lawrence Alloway – an ‘aesthetics of plenty’17, which is genuine for European culture of that time, but also their different methodological viewpoints give insights into nowadays widespread research interests, as well as into quite a variety of possibilities, to analyse the most complex and heterogeneous art world after World War II. As a survey would run the risk to neglect too many particularities, this specific collection of case studies with its staking of a broad horizon hopefully will become a useful contribution to discussions on Europe’s place in art history. 17 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty’ , in Exh. Cat. London, ICA 1990: ‘The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty’ , ed. David Robbins, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990, 49–53. Alloway invented the term in his essay The Front of Culture (1959), in Imagining the Present. Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic: Essays by Lawrence Alloway, ed. Richard Kalina, New York, NY, 2006, 61–64, 61.

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Europe, a Challenge

The Power of Art in Postwar Europe The contributions of this book are structured by four fundamental but open categories. Narratives is the first section, which starts with a discussion of two differently composed frames to conventionalise and articulate reality of the postwar period in Europe: one of rupture and renewal and the second one of continuity and trauma. The essays in the section Practices focus on expressions of ideas which became materialised by doing, writing or designing. They demonstrate a central subject of the postwar decades: the negotiation of European identities, their routes, and challenges. In the section Identities, the case studies take an even closer look at different approaches to the discursive forms, which allowed individuals to represent themselves, respectively, to design (new) reflections. Their diversity contradicts an exclusive image of a singular European identity. In Particularities the focus on very different, somehow un-comparable dispositions in postwar art history, allows bringing to the fore the importance of art for postwar European cultures. As a matter of fact, what unites this multitude of distinct artistic projects and approaches is a belief, shared across different states and political systems of Europe, that art can transform and renew societies.

Narratives As pointed out above, Europe is a narrative. Or rather, it is the interaction and counter-play of manifold and different narratives. From a certain point of view, one could even say that Europe is nothing but a stratification, nothing but layers and layers of narratives. But as much as it is a centuries-old concept, it is also the specific historical constellation, which provides context for this publication. That being said, it must appear as an impossible undertaking to define Europe in the sum of its parts. Still, it is impossible to understand the aftermath of the postwar situation without acknowledging the dominance and political force of particular narratives that have shaped our ideas and thinking about Europe in many ways. One of the most important achievements of art history in recent years is the considerable progress in realising and working against the implied dichotomization of Europe’s own, Western self and the other – a conflict, which is directly linked to art’s restoration in postwar times. As early as 1989, Walter Grasskamp’s survey of the first documenta (1955) records the double failure of the curators, trying to redeem the Entartung of art in Nazi Germany and to acknowledge the other in

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

terms of a ‘continuity of the archaic’18 at the same time. Taking on the impulse of what Grasskamp referred to as unbewältigte Moderne (unresolved modernism), Susanne Leeb has offered a deconstruction of European art history’s longstanding narratives. She unveils its (un-)conscious reliance on the figure of the other to confront the dichotomy with the concept of an anthropological configuration.19 In this sense, modern art history becomes more and more engaged with entangled histories, for example, the simultaneity of colonial modernisms. Hopefully, recounting the specificity of these histories will further ‘new methodologies that can account for both similarity and difference’20, as Atreyee Gupta writes. This is an important reminder of the fact that even in the so-called West itself, the ideology of modernism has only allegedly been a complete triumph of modernity over tradition. In the context of new global art histories, Gupta’s plea for ‘similarity and difference’ is also the necessary condition for the reassessment of inner-European processes of exclusions and hierarchization. Éva Forgács and Simon Vagts are contributing to the visualization of art’s narrative potential in different ways. As much as Forgács’ argument is related to the historical archive, it offers an inquiry into notorious narratives of modernism. Her case study is Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and  the longstanding process of preparing an exhibition on Kazimir Malevich, finally realised in 1957. In a sense, Vagts’ investigation in Roberto Rossellini’s filmmaking presents the counterpart to this institutionalised setting. His close reading of three of Rossellini’s films, released between 1948 and 1952, offers an unexpected cartography of postwar Europe. Unfolding the meaning of particular motives and designating the films as the axes in a system of coordinates, Vagts comes to unfold art’s potential with regard to the political situation of Europe. In both cases, considering Europe from the vantage point of artistic production 18 Walter Grasskamp, Die unbewältigte Moderne. Kunst und Öffentlichkeit, Munich, 1989, 76– 89, 87: ‘Der nationalsozialistischen Suggestion einer Kontinuität des Klassizismus wird mit der Behauptung einer Kontinuität des Archaischen begegnet.’ [emphasis in quotation] 19 See Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen. ‘Weltkunst’ und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne, Berlin, 2015, 9–33. 20 Atreyee Gupta, ‘In a Postcolonial Distinction: Postwar Abstraction and the Aesthetics of Modernization’ , Art Journal, 72:3, 2013, 30–46, 46. It seems that Andreas Huyssen’s statement on the ‘antagonistic ethos of European modernism’ reverberates in Gupta’s argument. Huyssen writes ‘The crises of subjectivity and of representation at the core of European modernism played out very differently in colonial and postcolonial modernity. Such alternative geographies of modernism have emerged on our horizon since the rise of postcolonial studies and a new attentiveness to the genealogy of cultural globalization.’ Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’ , New German Critique, 100, 2007, 189–207, 190.

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entails a rethinking of established narratives. Furthermore, art gives us a sense of ‘similarity and difference’ , not as exclusory alternatives, but understood as the two mutual faces of the same coin.

Practices Art’s narrative threads resist tropes such as Anselm Haverkamp’s influential description of the 1950s as a period of latency ‘in whose emptiness something must have happened, even if it is not visible.’21 In their essays on Asger Jorn, Barbara Lange and Dirk Hildebrandt fill the alleged ‘emptiness’ by showing how the idea of a ‘transnational network’ was already in use among artists in early postwar Europe. Barbara Lange demonstrates how the artist’s use of ceramics as a medium becomes a way to assemble a tangible community. In her account, the small village of Albisola in Northern Italy appears as the bottleneck of a transnational network avant la lettre, a social space created by artistic means. Coming from the same impulse, Dirk Hildebrandt’s contribution is likewise involved with the politics of Jorn’s art. His starting point is the artist’s famous series of painterly Modifications. Hildebrandt takes this series as a point of departure to discover a concept of writerly modification, moored in the artist’s writing. Hinting at the potentiality of art as a methodological tool that even shapes communal projects, both authors imply art’s capacity as a practice. Jacques Rancière comes to define ‘artistic practices’ as ‘“ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility.’22 To account for this understanding of art as a way of doing and making, Rancière refers to traditional concepts of art’s autonomy and visibility.23 According to this argument, art needs to be situated within the aesthetic realm to intervene into what lies beneath it. This remains true to artists like Asger Jorn. Still, taking his ambitions into closer consideration reveals that the artist neither believed in a notion of art being located on the walls of a museum, nor did he follow the idea of artistic production necessarily leading

21 Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Latenzzeit. Die Leere der 1950er Jahre. Interview with Susanne Leeb and Juliane Rebentisch’ , Texte zur Kunst, 50:12, June 2003, 45–52, 45: ‘Latenzzeit ist ein Verlegenheitsterminus, ein Vorschlag, wie man mit der Periode der fünfziger Jahre umgehen kann, in deren Leere etwas passiert sein muss, selbst wenn es nicht sichtbar ist.’ 22 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, York and New York, NY, 2011, 12. 23 See Rancière 2011, 22.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

to classical works of art. Moreover, art was to him a way of re-designing relationships and connections. Through artistic practice, Jorn enabled people to imagine and establish different relationships to themselves, as well as to objects. In other words, he refused to see the critical potential of modern art as being detached from political and economic spheres. Outlining the ethical dimensions of artistic practice, Agata Pietrasik’s essay on the Polish artist Marian Bogusz adds yet another layer to this connection. In the concentration camp in Mauthausen, the artist together with fellow prisoner Emmanuel Muños developed the concept for an International Artistic Settlement, which – in their utopian thoughts – was to be built at the very site. On the one hand, Bogusz’s idea to replace the concentration camp was based on the utopian potential of modernism, implying a concept of universalism, granting freedom and equality for everybody. On the other hand, his project addresses the discourses of modern architecture by confronting it with traditional and vernacular forms. As much as Bogusz’s project is situated in the context of memorial culture, it aims at ‘remembrance without commemoration’ , as Pietrasik puts it – a cultural practice of life, based in history and directed towards the future. During imprisonment, art as a practice of a free mind had been a survival strategy. After the war, to Bogusz, this experience became a motor for socially engaged art in opposition to officially promoted doctrines in socialist Poland.

Identities The question of identity is at the heart of the re-construction of postwar Europe. As much as identity is associated with categories like home, origin, and belonging, it is linked to the relationship between individual and community, society and state. From this perspective, the question of identity is at least threefold: Who are we, where do we belong, and what do we share with each other? Jean-Luc Nancy has famously defined the relationship between individual and community as a process of being singular plural: ‘Being singular plural means the essence of being is only as co-essence […] or being-with (being-with-many) […].’ He proceeds to explain the implied politics ‘[P]ower is neither exterior to the members of the collective nor interior to each one of them, but rather exists in the collectivity as such.’24 Of course, Nancy’s assumptions about the inextricability of individual and commu-

24 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Stanford, CA, 2000, 30.

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nity cannot be taken for granted, especially not in the turbulent times after World War II. They nonetheless offer a reformulation of the problem of a European identity, departing from the identification of individuals and/or peoples with Europe in postwar times: How do individual actors cope with the situation, and how do they address their communities in terms of a process to endow identity? In times of global processes of migration, it is the figure of a refugee who calls into question the very site in which these questions are negotiated. Giorgio Agamben has identified the refugee as a ‘limit concept’ that not only ‘calls into question the fundamental question of the nation-state’ but clears the way ‘for a long overdue renewal of categories in the service of a politics, in which bare life is no longer separated or excepted, either in the state order or in the figure of human rights.’25 As contemporary as Agamben’s words may seem, they are, of course, written in the context of his argument on the biopolitics in concentration camps. While Agamben describes the politics of the camp in terms of a ‘pure space of exception’ for entering it presupposed denationalising and stripping the inmates off their citizenship,26 the liminal situation of a refugee, in a sense, becomes the general rule in postwar times. In her essay, Hildegard Frübis addresses the displacement of Jewish survivors as a standby condition, which becomes visible in the photographs of Jewish photographer Roman Vishniac. Frübis takes Vishniac’s pictures of Jewish concentration-camp survivors, accommodated in displaced-persons camps, as visual documents of this situation. Among snapshots of a new beginning of Jewish life in Germany, she also traces its different departures like the actualization of the Zionist movement, paving its way to Palestine. In this sense, Vishniac’s photographs are not to be considered mere symbols of a new Jewish identity but careful observations of postwar Europe resuming momentum after a standstill of history. While Vishniac’s photographic perception of this liminal situation departs from a particularly political space, Regina Wenninger’s contribution deals with the cultural politics of postwar Europe. More specifically, she focuses on the discourse on abstract art as staged between the German art magazines Das Kunstwerk and tendenzen, offering a comparative perspective. Tendenzen polemicised against abstract art as a token of a bourgeois culture, supposedly affirmed in Das Kunstwerk. Around 1960, Polish abstract art of all things became the exemplary object to stage the well-known conflict between East and West on the pages of two magazines. Polish abstraction was a phenomenon hard to categorise within

25 Agamben 1998a, 78. 26 Agamben 1998a, 78.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

the logic of the Cold War. The art escaped a framework of socially engaged figuration and given the fact that it was eagerly displayed on many official exhibitions abroad, it was hard to categorise it as a dissident art either. Analysing the reception of Polish abstraction in Western Germany, Wenninger presents us one of the firmest binary oppositions of the Cold War. By literally reading oppositional agendas from two magazines, Wenninger hints at the problematic affirmation of heroic narratives of the Cold War and proposes a more detailed picture of the self-fashioning of one of the German identities and its cultural dimensions in the wake of postwar Europe. Tanja Zimmermann introduces a third perspective to the question of a European identity by reversing the direction of Regina Wenninger’s argument. Tracing concepts like primitivism and naïveté, Zimmermann shifts to the margins of the Cold War discourse to offer a different view of the building processes in postwar Europe. She contextualises the naïve as a possibility to circumvent and redefine the usual gap between social realism and abstract art, separating Eastern from Western ideologies. Against this backdrop, Zimmermann presents us with Oto Bihalji-­ Merin, a Serbian art critic and writer to whom naïve art offered the possibility to accompany the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement. In this sense, the naïve appears as a trans-cultural notion traversing artistic and geopolitical discourses to relocate European identity.

Particularities The aforementioned master narrative of postwar Europe created an image of a singular continent, a homogenous space with shared values and conditions. This image has been used as a tool in the process of colonization, and it was presented as an example to be emulated by the peoples subjected to colonial rule. The particularities of Europe were further erased during the Cold War when cultural and political diversities were broken down to construct an opposition of West and East. The period of the Cold War provided a very powerful, all-encompassing narrative of rivalry between communism and capitalism and was also transposed to aesthetic categories such as abstraction and socialist realism. For a long time, the image of Europe has been structured by those binaries. Not only did they cover up the different shades of relationship to these major postwar powers but also hid particular histories of the European multitude. We take into view Ireland and Portugal as Particularities, which by no means fit into the master narrative of a great divide between socialism and capitalism.

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The two countries allow us to revisit generalised views and easily made assumptions about the so-called West. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Eastern Europe was put under a greater scrutiny and eventually emerged as a conflicted yet somehow separate part of the continent, bound together by a specific, historical experience of communism. At the same time, the coherence of the Western part of Europe remained more solid, even if its canon expanded in order to include novel practices and other previously unacknowledged practices, such as performance art from former Yugoslavia by Marina Abramović.27 This part of the book opens questions about what we consider a legitimate part of the West. Do countries such as Portugal, marked by a tragic legacy of dictatorship and a long history of colonialism, belong to the narrative of a democratic West? Where is the place of the other within this construct? In his contribution, Pedro Lapa presents us with the Portuguese painter Joaquim Rodrigo, who in the 1950s, worked in isolation imposed by the political conditions. This isolation led him to develop a unique and complex language of pictorial abstraction. Rodrigo was influenced by Angolan painting made available to him through a popular publication. In this sense, his artworks not only indicate painting’s aesthetic values but also reflect on its political conditions, combining a critique of colonialism with abstraction. Through this unorthodox practice, the artist moved beyond the realm of his local particularities towards universalism and emancipation embodied by abstraction. Yet, even though the forms of his painting were engaged in a global debate, they remain influenced and shaped by the very conditions of their production. Elisabeth Ansel brings to the fore the tension between an artist and his or her particular, national identity by analysing the work of the Irish painter, Louis le Brocquy. The reception of his œuvre during the 1940s and 1950s is deeply intertwined in debates about distinctive qualities of a national Irish culture, both in Ireland and Great Britain. Unable to avoid being typecast as Irish, le Brocquy was indeed perceived as a modern painter, exploring the qualities of a medium and important questions of his time (this position was reserved for artists such as Francis Bacon). But his paintings were equally understood as processing national traditions of Ireland.

27 For an exceptional attempt to rethink West not only post 1989 but also in response to the emergence of the global South and North see Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds. Former West and the Contemporary after 1989, Cambridge, MA, 2017.

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Barbara Lange, Dirk Hildebrandt and Agata Pietrasik

The above-mentioned case studies raise important questions about who could be considered a modern artist, independent from a given heritage of an assumed national origin, especially when the artists migrated. How could the artists avoid being defined by their nationality? Those questions of local versus global modernisms can also be related to architectural debates of postwar Germany, which are the subject of the essay by Regine Heß. German architects of the 1950s were troubled by the Nazi past and at the same time were trying to rebuild a completely ruined country. Modernism was then a way of connecting to the pre-war traditions of the Bauhaus and looking into the future, without engaging in the legacy of the war. Embracing universalism of modernity enabled oblivion of a painful, national past.

The Book Our book is a collaborative project. ‘Rethinking Postwar Europe’ started with a conference in Tübingen in the Southwest of Germany in February 2018, organised by Arnold Bartetzky, Marina Dmitrieva (both Leipzig, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe – GWZO), Tanja Zimmermann (University of Leipzig, Institute of Art History) and Barbara Lange (University of Tübingen, Institute of Art History), funded by German Research Foundation (DFG). Although all participants were familiar with the subject and specialists in their field, the gathering led to an unexpected result. Apart from the fact that the presented case studies provided an astonishing and most vivid complexity of European art and culture in the decade immediately after World War II, we became, somehow, speechless. Fully aware that the old pattern of the Cold War is outdated, the different methodological approaches together with old and new narratives drew a most ambivalent image of postwar Europe. We had to realise how deeply our thoughts are rooted in ideologies of the Cold War. Instead of being disappointed, we took it as an opportunity to publish an edited book, not as conference proceedings but as a statement of its own in order to put our fingers on certain weak spots. Fortunately, in addition to most of the contributions which had been already subject on the conference, we could also include essays on narratives in the mass media film as well as on debates on architecture in postwar Germany. The editors would like to thank the colleagues who helped us with this publication by joining us as contributors. A very helpful supporter of our project was Christian Fuhrmeister who took part in the early stage of conception. We would

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also like to acknowledge the technical assistance of Paul Ambros and Elisabeth Weiß who brought the manuscript into a smooth form. In particular, we want to thank Erika Daniela Ortiz Martinez for her assistance in proofreading and Marco Barbero for his support of the final manuscript preparation. The German Research Foundation generously funds the book as part of the research project ‘Europe after the War: The Power of Art in the late 1940s and in the 1950s’ (University of Tübingen, Barbara Lange). The cover of our book shows a detail of a wall-hanging, designed by Anni Albers.28 Intertwined is probably the best word to describe the pattern of the motive, which can illustrate Europe’s plurality and connectedness at the same time. However, the artwork stands for more than a visual description of Europe’s cultures. It also signifies the multiple layers of entanglement within a global context. Albers studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau before she herself taught weaving at that famous art school. 1933, she was one of the many Germans who was forced into exile. Luckily, she could accompany her much more famous husband Josef Albers, who had taught the Vorkurs (primary course) at the Bauhaus to the United States of America as the designated director of the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina. For many years, Anni Albers was also one of its inspiring teachers, pursuing the idea of an art, which was able to cross social and regional boundaries. Like its role model, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College became a place where creativity was encouraged while cultures from different contexts were brought together. An idea once started in Europe, took new forms. Anni Albers, for example, was able to broaden her weaving skills, not least inspired by her travels to Central and South America. But she could also fulfill what she had learned in Europe and what had been fostered at the Bauhaus: a cultural curiosity and an eagerness for experiments. This brought her together with Gloria Finn Dale, a textile artist from England who worked in Washington D.  C. during the 1950s and who executed the rug in intensive colors – an artwork which Le Corbusier classified as most adequate for postwar societies: To him, textile art as an old technique, familiar to people worldwide, was able to form a culture without hierarchies, based on tradition while also most practical for the needs of contemporary societies with their migration practices.29 In the discourses on art, archi28 Anni Albers and Gloria Finn Dale Untitled, 1959. 48 × 65 in. (122 × 165 cm). Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University (accession number 92.029). Concerning Anni Albers see Exh. Cat. London, Tate Modern and Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 2018/19: ‘Anni Albers’ , eds. Ann Coxon et al., London, 2018. 29 See Le Corbusier, ‘Tapisseries Muralnomad’ , Zodiac, 7, 1960, 56–65.

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tecture and design culture in Europe in the immediate postwar decades, this shift is an important consideration. Untitled is a starting point for rethinking postwar Europe as part of world’s cultures.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/Main, 1955. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, The Place of Negativity, Minneapolis, MN, 1991. Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA, 1998. (Agamben 1998a) Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen, New York, NY, 1998. (Agamben 1998b) Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty’ , in Exh. Cat. London, ICA 1990: ‘The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty’ , ed. David Robbins, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990, 49–53. Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Front of Culture’ (1959), in Imagining the Present. Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic: Essays by Lawrence Alloway, ed. Richard Kalina, New York, NY, 2006, 61–64. Steyn Bergs et al., ‘Situating Art’s Histories: The Politics and Paradoxes of Globalizing’ , Kunstlicht, 39:1, 2018, 4–8. Max Bill, Wiederaufbau. Dokumente über Zerstörungen, Planungen, Konstruktionen, Zurich, 1945. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Differences, Princeton, NJ, revised edition, 2007. Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History?, Princeton, NJ, 2016. Le Corbusier, ‘Tapisseries Muralnomad’ , Zodiac, 7, 1960, 56–65. Jörg Döring, ‘Spatial Turn’ in Raum. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Stephan Günzel in collaboration with Franziska Kümmerling, Stuttgart and Weimar, 2010, 90–99. Werner Esser, ‘“Stuttgarter Aufbruch” oder “Die Zukunft hatte schon begonnen”. Ottomar Domnick, Franz Marc und das erste Sammlermuseum des Landes’ , in Neuordnungen. Südwestdeutsche Museen in der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Landesstelle für Museumsbetreuung Baden-Württemberg, Tübingen, 2002, 117–135. Exh. Cat. London, Tate Modern and Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 2018/19: ‘Anni Albers’ , eds. Ann Coxon et al., London, 2018. Eckhart Gillen and Peter Weibel, ‘Europe after the Rain. The Dialectic of Trauma and Revival in European Art from 1945 to 1968’ , in Exh. Cat. Karlsruhe et al., ZKM. Center for Art and Media 2016: ‘Facing the Future. Art in Europe – 1945–1968’ , Tielt, 2016, 12–15. Walter Grasskamp, Die unbewältigte Moderne. Kunst und Öffentlichkeit, Munich, 1989. Atreyee Gupta, ‘In a Postcolonial Distinction: Postwar Abstraction and the Aesthetics of Modernization’ , Art Journal, 72:3, 2013, 30–46. Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Latenzzeit. Die Leere der 1950er Jahre. Interview with Susanne Leeb and Juliane Rebentisch’ , Texte zur Kunst, 50:12, June 2003, 45–52. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, eds. Former West and the Contemporary after 1989, Cambridge, MA, 2017. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’ , New German Critique, 100, 2007, 189–207.

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Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow‚ ‘“Meistererzählungen” – Zur Karriere eines Begriffs’ , in Die historische Meistererzählung: Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, Göttingen, 2002, 9–32. Monica Juneja, ‘Alternative, Peripheral or Cosmopolitan? Modernism as a Global Process’ , in Global Art History. Transkulturelle Verortungen von Kunst und Wissenschaft, eds. Julia Allerstorfer and Monika Leisch-Kiesl, Bielefeld, 2017, 79–107. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Das jüdische Volk träumt nicht’ , Frag-mente, 29/30, 1989, 99–128. Susanne Leeb, Die Kunst der Anderen. ‘Weltkunst’ und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne, Berlin, 2015. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford, 1991. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’ , in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, Oxford, 2010, 19–41. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett, Minneapolis, MN, 1997. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, Stanford, CA, 2000. Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski, London, 2009. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, York and New York, NY, 2011. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA, 2009. Martin Schieder, Im Blick des Anderen. Die deutsch-französischen Kunstbeziehungen 1945–1959, Berlin, 2005. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, London and New York, NY, 1989. Nigel Thrift and Sarah Whatmore, ‘Introduction’ , in Cultural Geography: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, eds. Nigel Thrift and Sarah Whatmore, London, 2004, 1–17. Benno Werlen, ‘Geographie/Sozialgeographie’ , in Raumwissenschaften, ed. Stephan Günzel, Frankfurt/Main, 2009, 142–158.

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Narratives

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Éva Forgács

Shaping the Narrative of a New Europe in Art

Willem Sandberg and the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam’s Retrieval of Malevich The framework of my inquiry into post-World War II art and the art discourse is the recent sea change in the art history of the period, a new objectivism that emerged in the last 20–25 years. We are seeing a more intense and detailed inquiry into the nuts and bolts of dictatorial cultural politics and the political use of art in dictatorship than before. While, as Michel Foucault noted, by the 1970s the term fascism was ‘used as a floating signifier, whose function is essentially that of denunciation’1, it has become, since about the 1990s, a more technical term, signifying a subject exposed to rigorous analytical examination in history as well as art history. This is a conspicuous shift in the narrative of the post-World War II history writing and, more recently, art history that indicates that the arts and cultural politics of dictatorships can be studied in more of a historical perspective now, or that a new sensitivity and a new interest have emerged to inquire into them.

1

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al., New York, NY, 1980, 139.

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Retrieving Modernism Postwar art, museum practice, and art history writing was about restoring prewar modernism. Re-establishing the continuity of interwar modernist tradition that had been lost to Italian Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the War itself was what curators and art historians saw as the moral and professional task cut out for them. To restore the modernist narrative in the wake of the war was part of the effort to reinstate the thoroughly scathed – indeed, traumatised – European culture. Those who declared themselves postwar modernists had no choice but to focus on modernism. They ignored more or less the much larger and longer lasting trend of the ideology-driven, figurative – albeit stylised – new classicism of the interwar period. The monumental neo-classicist statues of heroes of original and invented national myths as well as the religious imagery of the 1930s and early 1940s that constituted the body of the official art of many post-World War I European countries, fell outside the interest of most postwar art historians and curators. In his 1981 essay ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’2 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh pioneered to turn attention to this darker side of the moon: he alerted to the ‘compulsively mimetic modes’3 of representation and the ‘collapse of modernist idiom’4 as early as in the wake of World War I – a process, parallel to the avant-gardes of the era, but eclipsed in post-World War II art history. He also noted that there was, also at the time of writing his essay, an audience ‘craving for the restoration of the visual codes of “recognisability”’5, a feature that he saw as regressive in comparison to the formal languages of the avant-gardes. The postwar years – indeed, decades – belonged to efforts to save and retrieve the modernist tradition that had been suppressed and seemed to have been lost. There was a lot to bring back to public attention: artists of the Russian avantgarde like Malevich were virtually unknown, as was the modernist art of Western and Eastern Europe; Dada, constructivism, De Stijl, expressionism and surrealism, along with other trends, and a number of individual artists virtually disappeared from the public eye. Although a Bauhaus-Debatte was taking place in the Federal 2

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’ , in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis, New York, NY, and Boston, MA, 1984, 107–136 (originally published in October, 16, Spring 1981, 39–68).

3

Buchloh 1984, 107.

4

Buchloh 1984, 108.

5

Buchloh 1984, 107.

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Éva Forgács

Republic of Germany, and the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm was opened as a successor institution to the Bauhaus in the same year 1953, against the philosophy of which Asger Jorn bitterly debated, and organised his ‘Imaginist Bauhaus’ movement, actual Bauhaus works had not been exhibited until the late 1960s.6 It was an urgent task to sort out the aesthetic and conceptual heritage of early twentieth century art isms. Postwar art history writing and curatorial philosophy was emphatically anti-fascist. In the process of rediscovering the Russian avantgarde it was also anti-Stalinist: the outlook of the international art world of the so-called West was clearly anti-authoritarian, committed to the great achievements of modernism, the postwar continuations of which progressive art historians and institution leaders fostered and supported. The urgency of anti-fascism having faded, scholarship of the last two or three decades has become more descriptive and objective, turning from politically judgmental to more matter-of-fact, committed to exploring the total picture of the interwar period. Religious neo-classicism and the iconography and ideology of national monuments have become topics of essays, conferences, and dissertations; with this certain no-goes of the immediate postwar decades vanished, and for example photos of Leni Riefenstahl made in Africa were published in albums and were exhibited in Los Angeles art galleries, among other places, for their artistic and documentary value, without a hint at her political role during the Third Reich. Aesthetics tended to be detached from politics. The narrative of Italian futurism was given the broad time frame 1909–1944 in a 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York;7 and research in the conceptual roots of early fascism in France and Italy that included modernist as well as monumental formal elements, abound.8 As Jeffrey Schnapp, author of the 1996 book Staging Fascism, put it in an interview, the new goal was ‘to inaugurate a 6 In spite of the 1953 Bauhaus Debatte in the German Federal Republic, in which even Adorno and Ernst Bloch spoke up against ‘box houses’ (Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘The Disappearing Bauhaus’ , in Bauhaus Construct, eds. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, London and New York, NY, 2009, 66.). The first international Bauhaus exhibition was organised by the Württembergische Kunstverein in Stuttgart, only in 1968. It travelled to Paris, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, in 1969, and five different cities until 1971. Walter Scheidig’s illustrated book Bauhaus Weimar was published in Leipzig, 1966, but was limited to objects of the Weimar Bauhaus (1919–1924) only, and was not translated to other languages. 7 Exh. Cat. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 2014: ‘Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe’ , eds. Vivien Greene and Walter L. Adamson, New York, NY, 2014. 8

See for example Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire: les origines françaises du fascisme, 1885–1914, Paris, 1978; Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909–1939, Durham and London, 2007, 11; Eric Michaud, The Cult of

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serious, critically aware exploration of the Fascist decades without ideological blinders of the sort that had long marred both left- and right-wing historiography.’9 Similar developments can be observed in re-positioning Soviet socialist realism as a ‘logical continuation’ of the Russian avant-garde not emphasising its anti-avant-garde features as much as its utopian faith in a collective society and social equality.10 Examining the immediate postwar moment in the light of these new, objective trends in art history and cultural history, it is clear that both the art and the art institutions of the era served an effort to re-imagine Europe and progressive European culture. Wherever we look, it was the war’s victors who mastered the art discourse. In the wake of the war nowhere – West of the Soviet Union – do we see the celebration of interwar neo-classicism, religiousness and nationalist art. The vision of a new Europe enthralled the postwar imagination, and in mainstream art as well as the institutions of art major efforts were made to bring the unfulfilled project of interwar modernism and the avant-gardes to fruition, eagerly seeking out their new, postwar chapters in the making.

Europe 1945: Ground Zero Peter Weibel points out: ‘In 1945, after World War II ended, not only the cities of Europe were in ruins, but after 60 million dead, seven years of war, the Holocaust, the Gulag, and nuclear annihilation, also the belief in humanity, humanism, and culture was destroyed. Europe was at ground zero of meaning and existence.’11 He cites many intellectual and artistic works that reflect this in their titles even years later, like Roberto Rossellini’s film trilogy the last piece of which is titled

Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford, CA, 2004 (first French edition Paris, 1996); Emily Braun et al., Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, New York, NY, 2011.   9 Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Humanities Now. What Matters and the Speed we are Moving at. An Interview with Jeffrey T. Schnapp’ , Italian Studies, 64:1, Spring 2009, 144–162, 150, http:// jeffreyschnapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Interview-with-Pierpaolo-Antonello1.pdf [25 January 2019]. 10 See works of Boris Groys, in particular: ‘The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde’ , in The Culture of the Stalin Period, ed. Hans Günther, London, 1990, 122–148. 11 Peter Weibel in Booklet to the Exhibition Karlsruhe, ZKM 2017, Art in Europe 1945–1968. The Continent that the EU Does not Know, ed. Peter Weibel, 2017, 7.

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Germany, Year Zero, in 1948,12 Samuel Beckett’s 1956 Endgame, Roland Barthes’ 1953 Writing Degree Zero as emblematic works marking the end of the war as end of an era and the beginning of a new. It is safe to say that this was the general sense all over Europe. Processing the implications of this historical moment, even the 1957-founded German artist group Zero had as its program to start a new concept of art from scratch. In Otto Piene’s words, Zero was ‘a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning’ , because, as the group announced, ‘we had simply no models anymore!’13 In the first issue of their journal Zero in 1958 they explicitly claimed to have achieved ‘a “new idealism” with their art, a second, actual Zero Hour.’14 A similar state of mind is registered in postwar Dutch literature. The CoBrA group’s young poet Lucebert gave a talk at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1949 in which he talked about ‘literary nudity’ , and cited an earlier poem of Paul van Ostainen: ‘I want to be bare and begin.’ This new generation of poets and painters, to whom the director of the museum Willem Sandberg gave a forum, was, as Diane Butterman put it, ‘Numbed by the Second World War, […] and desperately wanted to reconnect with the worlds of their imaginations: they wanted to pursue, for instance, Dadaism and the paths mapped out by the French surrealists of the past.’15 Guardians of modernist artworks in the museums did not so much work on announcing a new beginning, as, much rather, re-establishing continuity. The years 1945–1948 were particularly important as a period of hopes for a united, new Europe that will merge the traditions of East and West, North and South, and inaugurate a great new cultural era. Bringing back to public knowledge the progressive, future-bound avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s was tantamount to setting things back on track, undoing the destruction, and keeping the right direction: forward, to continuation.

12 See Simon Vagts’ contribution to this book. 13 Tim Ackermann, ‘Interview with Heinz Mack “We had simply no models any more.”’ , Zeit Online, 31 March 2015, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/kunst/2015–03/zero-kunst-avantgardeheinz-mack [16 November 2018]. 14 ‘mit ihrer Kunst eines “neuen Idealismus” eine zweite, eigentliche Stunde Null gesetzt zu haben.’ Eckhart Gillen, Feindliche Brüder? Der Kalte Krieg und die deutsche Kunst, Berlin, 2009, 200. 15 Diane Butterman, ‘Introduction’ , in Lucebert. The Collected Poems, Vol. II., ed. Lucebert, trans. Diane Butterman, Copenhagen and Los Angeles, CA, 2017, 19. ‘Lucebert’ was penname of Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, a poet of the CoBrA group.

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The Yalta Conference held in February 1945 issued the Declaration of Liberated Europe promising the European nations ‘to create democratic institutions of their own choice.’16 In the circuits of art and culture it was not widely known that Stalin, implementing the peace treaty, was going to increase Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and an iron curtain would descend, cutting this area off the Western half of the continent and putting it under Soviet rule. Nevertheless, many Western European artists and curators, just like Eastern Europeans, pursued the idea of a new, united Europe. The CoBrA group, for example, itself international  – the name acronym of Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam – was one of the first to reach out to East Europeans, namely the Czech Ra group, hoping to develop further contacts with Eastern Europe. Prague-based artist Joseph Istler was invited to participate at CoBrA’s 1949 exhibition in Amsterdam. There was more on the CoBrA artists’ mind than bringing back pre-war modernity: they imagined a new, international, pan-European art and culture, which they wanted to help liberate from the last vestiges of capitalism. In 1948 CoBrA member Constant (Anton Nieuwenhuys) wrote, still hopefully, about a new beginning: In the unprecedented cultural emptiness that has followed the war […] in which the reigning class increasingly pushes art into a position of dependence […]. We find established a culture of individualism, which is condemned by the very culture that has produced it. […] A new freedom is about to be born, one, which will allow people to satisfy their creative desires. As a result of this process, the profession of artist will cease to be a privilege; which is why some contemporary artists are resistant to it. In the period of transition, artistic creation finds itself at war with the existing culture, while simultaneously announcing a future culture. With this dual aspect, art has a revolutionary role in society.17

16 ‘Yalta Conference Agreement, Declaration of a Liberated Europe’ , 11 February 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, National Archives, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/116176.pdf [3 January 2019]. 17 Constant, ‘Declaration of Freedom’ , Reflex, 1:2, 1948, quoted by Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture. Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, Sterling, 1991, 9.

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The Stalinization of Czechoslovakia and the rest of Eastern Europe, however, put an end to these connections. At about the same time, and in contrast to the above, the equally progressive Czech art critic Jindřich Chalupecký wrote in 1949: It appeared self-evident to us [Czechs, E. F.] that Communism would take on a different form in our country [than in the USSR, E. F.]. […] Before we realised what was happening, the world around us changed. Almost overnight, it was possible to utter the most outrageous nonsense and spread lies […]. The deadly, stupid and interminable propaganda eventually renders people indifferent toward any action or initiative proposed by the Communist Party. […] even Marx and Engels believed that it would be possible to transform bourgeois pseudo-democracy into a genuine democracy, where all matters concerning human well-being would be truly decided by the people themselves. […] But [the present practice, E. F.] resembles instead of a distorted vision of Plato’s Republic [where, E. F.] “caretakers will have to use much deception and many lies for the benefit of their wards […] in order to assure everybody’s well-being.” Lies, deception, and ruthlessness are thus presumed to lead to truth, honesty, fraternity, and peace.18 As Chalupecký’s dramatic response to the unfolding Stalinization of Eastern Europe demonstrates, left-wing Eastern Europeans were dramatically disappointed, near to disbelief, at seeing their respective communist parties’ ruthless actions against culture and modernism in particular, followed by actions against people in the show trials.

Willem Sandberg, graphic designer and museum director Many progressive Westerners were not immediately aware of this reality, or they thought it temporary, and worked incessantly on retrieving the modern tradition as a united Europe’s true cultural face. One of them was graphic designer, curator and eventually director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Willem Sandberg.

18 Jindřich Chalupecký, ‘The Intellectual under Socialism’ (1949), in Primary Documents. A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, eds. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl, New York, NY, 2002, 30.

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Fig. 1  Willem Sandberg regarding a mobile by Alex­ander Calder, Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam July 1947. Photograph by © Ben van Meerendonk/AHF, Collectie IISG, Amsterdam

(Fig. 1) Reflecting on the reality of split postwar Europe, one of his friends, Karl Gunnar Vougt Pontus Hultén, former director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm from 1960 to 1973, and first director of the Centre Georges Pompidou (1974–1981) wrote about Sandberg in retrospect: In those years after 1945 when the chances of constructing better cities, a better Europe, seemed to grow smaller every day, to see something new that had power was a great joy and inspiration. […] In the Stedelijk Museum Sandberg […] constructed a new social situation for the museum. […] He told the public that […] the modern artist [works] not so much in the present as in the future […] creating the basis of a future world. […] It is possible that most of the best elements of the modern museum world were first introduced in the Stedelijk.19

19 Pontus Hultén, ‘In the Stedelijk’ , in Sandberg: a Documentary, eds. Ad Petersen and Pieter Brattinga, Amsterdam, 1975, 5.

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Born in an old Dutch family in 1897, Sandberg got acquainted with modern art during his travels across Europe in the 1920s. He met expressionist painter, Mazdaznan priest, and later Bauhaus master Johannes Itten in Switzerland, saw new, kinetic art experiments in Vienna, and visited the Bauhaus.20 He studied graphic design in Amsterdam and got in contact with the Stedelijk Museum in 1928 first in this capacity, then as curator of modern art there starting in 1937. During World War II he was an activist of the Dutch Resistance movement, forging documents for Jews and other persecuted people. He was a participant of setting the Amsterdam Registry Office on fire so the holders of the forged documents could not be identified. Narrowly escaping the fate of the group’s other members who were executed by a firing squad, Sandberg was guarding the bunker he had started to build for rescuing the art works of the Stedelijk and, eventually, other Dutch Museums. After the war he became director of the museum in 1945, and remained in that office until he retired in 1962. During his tenure as curator he organised exhibitions of modern art, for which he designed the accompanying posters and other printed matter himself. As early as 1946 he opened an exhibition of Piet Mondrian in celebration of modern art over Nazism. Sandberg not only showed Mondrian’s unfinished 1944 Victory Boogie Woogie, painted in New York, anticipating the victorious end of the war, but had a copy made of it and hanged it in his office as a symbol of freedom and victory – also the victory of modern art. This reflected his fundamental attitude to re-­establish the modernist narrative in the wake of World War II. A landmark event was the Stedelijk’s 1951 De Stijl exhibition, a proud presentation of the Dutch chapter of European modernism. Seeking the original international context of the Dutch movement brought Sandberg and his chief curator Hans L. C. Jaffe to recover Kazimir Malevich’s works, thus powerfully launching the international rediscovery of the Russian avant-garde, then forgotten and by and large invisible in Europe. The intense connection between the Russians and the Dutch during the interwar period was a matter that had yet to be brought to public attention. The case of Malevich was exceptional because the location of a body of his works that he had left in Germany after his 1927 solo exhibition in Berlin was known, so the works were within reach. In 1951 Sandberg and Jaffe made a visit to architect Hugo Häring, keeper of the Malevich works. One of Sandberg’s main achievements was to organise the exhibition of Malevich’s works and then purchase them from Häring – an operation that took several years and strong commitment.

20 See Ad Petersen, Sandberg: graphiste et directeur de Stedelijk Museum, trans. Daniel Cunin, Paris, 2007, 87.

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Case in Point: the Stedelijk Museum’s Malevich Exhibition This event was a tour de force of Sandberg and an emblematic event of rethinking Europe by bringing back a hardly known, as good as lost artist and put his work centre stage. It was a six-year long effort expanded to many countries, institutions, and individuals. In September 1952 Jaffe wrote a letter to Häring reminding him of the visit that he and Sandberg had paid to him the previous year to take a look at the Malevich paintings, gouaches, and instruction boards. Jaffe also reminded Häring that the reason why he and Sandberg had been interested in the works was to explore the ‘Russian abstracts’21 as the wider context of the De Stijl in the wake of the successful exhibition of their works that travelled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1952.22 Jaffe, who was working on his De Stijl monograph and may have been interested in De Stijl’s Russian counterparts and connections also on that account, made it clear that the Stedelijk intended to organise a Malevich exhibition in this framework.23 Having collaborated with Alfred H. Barr Junior and MoMA that had works not only by Malevich but several other Russian avant-garde artists, promised to increase international awareness of the importance of the Russians, and Malevich in particular, and thus to greatly contribute to the reconstruction of the pre-World War II progressive movements. Jaffe and Sandberg considered the Malevich works of very high quality. While Barr was cut off from further Russian acquisitions during the Cold War years, the leaders of the Stedelijk found a unique treasure trove in Häring’s house and were intent to tap it. Not having a response to his letter in which he had explicitly and somewhat urgently asked Häring if he was willing to lend the works for the purposes of an exhibition at the Stedelijk, Jaffe wrote again, assuring him that all transportation costs would be taken care of by the museum, which would also guarantee the safe return of all pieces.24 Not giving up on the Malevich exhibition after several years without progress, Sandberg started correspondence in 1955 with Naum Gabo whom he had known since

21 Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Hugo Häring, 1 September 1952, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. All translations of the documents are the author’s. 22 De Stijl Exhibition New York, MoMA 16 December 1952–15 February 1953. 23 See Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl. The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, Cambridge, MA, 1956. 24 See Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Hugo Häring, folder 5830, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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the 1920s.25 A retrospective of Gabo at the Stedelijk was also considered and discussed. The Russian born artist, now living in Connecticut, knew some of Häring’s old friends who, both himself and Sandberg thought, could weigh in to persuade Häring to go along with the Malevich exhibition. On 3 April 1955 Gabo informed Sandberg that he had got in touch with Häring’s friend and colleague Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and MoMA curator James Sweeney to talk to them about our project re. the Malevich exhibition. […] I definitely got the promise from Mies van der Rohe to write to Häring in his own name and in the names of Sweeney, Herbert Read, yourself and myself about the proposition to lend the Malevich works for a traveling exhibition.26 An undated carbon copy indicates that the announcement Sandberg refers to in his 7 November 1955 letter had been addressed and sent to Häring, apparently drafted by Sandberg who signed it at the bottom. It persuaded and assured the recipient that Mies van der Rohe, as well as former Bauhaus professor of urban design Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Gabo fully agreed with the Stedelijk’s planned arrangements for the Malevich exhibition and its future travels to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. The draft includes the first arguments of the nascent narrative of the Malevich revival: Many of our mutual friends and I have suffered for many years to see that Malevich’s work is entirely and fully unknown here in spite of the great interest that the youth and many leading personalities in our field take in it. Now I am writing you not only in my own name but also in the name of all the undersigned to make it clear to you how very desirable it would be to organise a Malevich exhibition here as well as elsewhere. We are all profoundly convinced of your uniquely great service in preserving this collection for posterity and it is very far from us to decrease or diminish your authority concerning the collection.27

25 See Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, CT, and London, 2000, 355. 26 Letter, Naum Gabo to Willem Sandberg, 3 April 1953, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 27 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Hugo Häring, 7 November 1955, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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In a letter written to Gabo Sandberg gives an account of his and his staff’s28 recent visit to Häring whom they found in very weak health, indeed, near to death as Häring himself had expressed it to his visitors, so that Sandberg felt it urgent to come to an agreement with him regarding the Malevich exhibition before it would be too late. ‘[Häring, E. F.] immediately mentioned our letter and confided that he has already responded to Hilberseimer’29, Sandberg informed Gabo. With one painting being on loan to a friend that will be, after an exhibition, returned directly to Häring, Sandberg said that altogether ‘there are 66 items including the theoretical charts etc. The whole could be put into one or two crates because the paintings are not framed.’30 Häring had also informed Sandberg that he had been in correspondence with persons in the US and England who were interested in the Malevich works but no closer information was available about this because of Häring’s physical weakness. Sandberg was curious to know, so he asked Gabo to find out ‘if Häring had contacted MoMA? I would be very glad if you could get information – maybe Hilberseimer knows something about it?’31 Sandberg was clearly competing with Barr for having the first postwar Malevich exhibition in the West. ‘It was two years ago that I talked to Barr about this Malevich collection – he very much wanted to exhibit it in his museum. [But] Häring told me that it was impossible for him to travel as we had suggested to him.’32 Furthermore Sandberg suggested at this point that three or four museums could cooperate on this project, and put on show the exhibition alternately before other museums, and then, after these initial shows, allow it to travel. This plan was not realised. A few months later Sandberg was fortunate to find Häring in good enough condition for an exchange and received a lot of information from him. He visited him in hospital in the company of Margot Aschenbrenner, Häring’s secretary since 1934, and gave this account to Gabo in a letter dated 7 March 1956: […] he was extremely vivacious and remembered a lot of the details of the Malevich pictures’ Odyssey: [after the closing of the 1927 Berlin exhibition, E.  F.] Malevich had a big crate sent to Häring that included the paintings, gouaches, drawings, theoretical charts on color etc. Häring did not open the 28 He uses plural we (nous) but does not name who else was included. 29 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 November 1955, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 30 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 November 1955. 31 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 November 1955. 32 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 November 1955.

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crate but deposited it with the transporter Knaur. After a few years when the storage fees became too heavy, he had the crate transferred to [director of the Kestner-Gesellschaft, E. F.] Alexander Dorner in Hannover. Dorner had kept them for several years then, he thought it was dangerous (Entartete Kunst); he sent the crate back to Häring who kept it in his home in Berlin. When the Reimann school [where Häring was teacher, E.  F.] was bombed in 1943 he moved back to Biberach and took the crate there. After the war Häring opened the crate and compared the contents with the catalog of the 1927 Malevich exhibition finding that 12 pieces were missing […]. Häring explained to me that as he had not been the owner of the works he was not able to sell anything. […] He also mentioned Max Bill who had made propositions to him but with whom he has had a fallout since. An art dealer offered 120,000 DM for the whole material but he did not want to sell, particularly not to an American […] he wanted to keep the works together and have them stay in Europe, preferably Amsterdam.33 Häring’s indecision and his severe illness kept things in suspense. What he told Sandberg about the increasing interest in Malevich’s works was only the beginning. Later in March 1956 Gabo reported to Sandberg that: I have been told from many sources that a whole pack of wolves of art dealers and speculators are attempting to get this collection out of Häring’s hands and by any means to get possession of Malevich’s work. […] We need to make clear that this collection is unsalable and that we are prepared to put up a fight against them in case they should take advantage of a weak man and come into possession of a property which does not belong either to Häring or to anybody else but the lawful heirs of Malevich.34 In the end of the same month Häring wrote to his friend Hilberseimer, now in Chicago, explaining to him that Sandberg wanted the Malevich paintings, but because of previous difficult ownership issues (‘schwierige eigentumsfrage’ sic!) that he had already declared in his letter to Sandberg to have cleared up, he considered

33 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 March 1956, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 34 Letter, Naum Gabo to Willem Sandberg, 24 March 1956, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. I corrected some of the names’ spelling.

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to offer the paintings as a loan to the Stedelijk.35 Häring disclosed that he had accepted Sandberg’s offer and agreed that the Malevich exhibition could travel to the USA for exhibition, too. However, he requested a declaration from those who had been mentioned in Hilberseimer’s last letter to him, including Gabo and, most likely, Sweeny, Read, and Mies van der Rohe that they were in agreement with this arrangement. Häring estimated that the loan will cost the Stedelijk Museum only a small fragment of the probable income the exhibition was expected to generate and went into discussing estimates of the total possible income, as if he had owned it to Hilberseimer to come clean with the numbers. Matters took up speed after June 1956 when Häring finally notified director Sandberg that according to German law he had, as of 1955, got legal ownership of Malevich’s works and he was now entitled to lend or even sell them.36 Awareness of his imminent passing is expressed in most of his letters until his death on 17 May 1958. During the run-up to the exhibition the Stedelijk opened intense correspondence with other museums that were eager to take over the exhibition, and with individuals  – first of all Russian artists dispersed in different countries  – who were thought to have known Malevich personally and provide information on the artworks’ first appearances and reception. Sandberg was also seeking early 20th century Russian catalogues that could provide information on the art works included in the Häring material, and was interested in further works that could be added to the list.

Including Malevich in a new Narrative of Modernism In February 1957 Director Dr. Peter Lufft of the Kunstverein Braunschweig wrote a letter to Sandberg regarding the news of the Malevich material. He learned from Braunschweig lawyer Ernst Böhme about the legal process of the Malevich estate having been closed, and expressed that he too was interested in taking over the exhibition in cooperation with the Museums of Bremen and Cologne that were also keen to show it. Contributing to the nascent narrative Dr. Lufft wrote that: ‘[t]o Malevich, I think, the injustice that had been done by forgetting, has to be 35 See Letter, Hugo Häring to Prof. L. Hilberseimer (sic!), 29 March 1956, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 36 See Letter, Hugo Häring to Willem Sandberg, 29 March 1956, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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made good by broadening awareness of his significance (that can happen only through an exhibition).’37 The museum and gallery directors who were eager to house the Malevich exhibition were, indeed, pioneers, as Malevich’s reputation was still very low at the time. Indicative of this is the letter of Gary Schmidt, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel sent in May 1957 in answer to a question of Sandberg concerning adequate documentation of the Malevich works. Schmidt wrote that he did not know any literature on Malevich other than scarce mentions in a few publications to date, of which he gave precise reference.38 In July 1957, half a year before the opening of the Malevich exhibition in the Stedelijk, Jaffe asked Barr if he could provide any data of the Malevich works to be shown ‘with a view to the possibilities of taking over […] the exhibition to America,’39 but no cooperation of Barr is documented. On 4 November 1957 Sandberg addressed the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, asking for information in dating and identifying some artworks by Malevich by photocopies of old exhibition catalogues, especially Malevich’s early works, first of all pre-1911 and post-1915. In an undated letter, lacking polite addressing  – putting in ‘Dear Colleague’ only –, received on 3 January 1958, P(avel) Lebedev, director of the Tretyakov Gallery answered that he and his staff were, regrettably, too busy to meet this request, ‘as the Malevich works are stored in the cellars of the Tretyakov’ ,40 that is, they are inaccessible or hard to access. The Malevich exhibition opened at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam on 20 December 1957. The press release gave a detailed biography and career history of Malevich, clearly presenting him as an unknown master, but calling attention to similarities between him and Mondrian who was a point of reference for the Dutch as well as international audiences.41 Throughout fall 1957 and winter 1958 the leaders of the Stedelijk set out to gather more information on Malevich for the catalogue that was still in the making. They engaged in correspondence with Xenia Pougny, widow of the painter Ivan (Jean) Puni; Rob Lipchitz, brother of sculptor Jacques Lipchitz; Polish painter 37 Letter, Peter Lufft to Willem Sandberg, February 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 38 He mentioned Michel Seuphor, L’Art Abstrait, Paris, 1949, 179, 220–225, 303. 39 Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Alfred Barr, 15 July 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 40 Letter, Pavel Lebedev to the Director of the Stedelijk, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 41 See Casimir Malevitch (sic!), document, folder 3738, Archive of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

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Henryk Stażewski, and English ballet dancer and author of the first comprehensive Western book on the Russian avant-garde, Camilla Gray. Each provided bits of information that Sandberg acknowledged. However, in December 1957 he was still in need of more clarification and data, so he wrote to Barr who had, ‘through our mutual friend Gabo’42 heard about the need for more information concerning the items of the Malevich exhibition. Sandberg explained in this letter that although he thought ‘it will be good just to show the collection as it is now in our Museum from December 20th–February 2nd’ and publish a ‘first catalogue’ , he planned to improve both efforts and hoped to get Barr’s ‘critique and advice’ so that ‘a revised and corrected edition can be printed later on’ along with a ‘more complete show in Amsterdam’43 for which he would be happy to collaborate with Barr and include the Malevich works from the MoMA, too, also hinting at the possibility of traveling the entire exhibition to New York as well. That is, having secured the Stedelijk’s priority in exhibiting Malevich, he offered a later cooperation to MoMA in return for the much-needed help with correctly identifying the Malevich works and the acquisitioning of additional ones. Further celebratory responses arrived from Dr. Lufft, Braunschweig, who had read the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s account of the Malevich exhibition in Amsterdam, and reproachfully reminded Sandberg that he had been among the first to want to take it over. In January 1958 a letter arrived from the State Russian Museum, Leningrad, signed by a secretary, providing photos and the list of 18 Malevich paintings in the collection of the State Russian Museum – an important reference for Sandberg regarding Malevich’s œuvre.44 In point of fact, the exhibition travelled to the Bozar in Brussels, shown there in May and June 1958 and then to the Kunsthalle Bern in February and March 1959. On 27 January 1958 Düsseldorf art dealer Alex Vömel wrote to Sandberg that the Malevich exhibition had greatly impressed him and he wondered if some of the paintings were for sale and if so, for what price.45 On 28 February 1959, Franz Meyer, director of the Kunsthalle Bern, wrote to Sandberg that: ‘[t]he Malewitsch [sic!] exhibition has been so extraordinary that I cannot but thank you once again

42 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Alfred Barr, 10 December 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 43 All quotations in Letter, Willem Sandberg to Alfred Barr, 10 December 1957. 44 See letter and list, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, to Willem Sandberg, 30 January 1958, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 45 See Letter, Alex Vömel to Willem Sandberg, 27 January 1958, folder 3738, Archives of the Ste­ delijk Museum Amsterdam.

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Éva Forgács

for having the possibility to put the pictures on show. This is an artistic force and uniqueness that I have rarely seen in these rooms.’46 He also informed Sandberg that the artworks were going to be on their way to Rome to safely arrive there by April. The exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna was open until July 1959. Director Palma Bucarelli wrote the catalogue essay herself putting Malevich in the context of the Russian avant-garde.47 Sandberg also worked actively on developing international awareness of Malevich. Prior to the opening of the Malevich exhibition he wrote a letter to the General Secretary of the Venice Biennale informing him about the upcoming ‘important exhibition of the founder of the suprematist movement in Russia: the painter Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935),’ pointing out, once again, that ‘[Malevich, E. F.] had a significance that was analogous to that of […] Mondrian.’48 The following station was the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in fall 1959, and then the Louisiana Foundation in Humlebæk, Denmark, in spring 1960. Exhibiting Malevich’s works was a major international operation to revive interwar modernism. Eventually a catalogue raisonné of the 1927 Malevich exhibition was also published.49 Consistently with reconstructing the interwar modernist narrative Sandberg supported and collected contemporary progressive art, first of all the CoBrA group,50 that he thought exemplary for its internationalism and exhibited as early as 1949 in seven large rooms of the Stedelijk under the title ‘International Experimental Art’. Moreover, Sandberg gave the artists an advance to create some larger works in the weeks before the exhibition. Constant, Corneille, Karel Appel and Eugène Brands created several large pieces of art that have become iconic for the movement. The architect Aldo van Eyck was commissioned to shape the exhibition, which was unconventional to say the least. The public as well as the critics

46 Letter, Franz Meyer to Willem Sandberg, folder 3824, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 47 See Exh. Cat. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea 1959: ‘Casimir Malevic’ , eds. Giovanni Carandente and Palma Bucarelli, Rome, 1959. 48 Letter, Willem Sandberg to Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua, 22 November 1957, folder 3823, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 49 See Troels Andersen, Malevich. Catalogue Raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition 1927, including the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1970. 50 The 1948-founded Reflex group became CoBrA in 1949. Holland’s liberation on 5 May 1945, was said to bring forth an eruption of colors and shapes, adequate to it. CoBrA was seen to have provoked ‘postwar tedium, and parochial small-mindedness.’ See Ank Leeuw-Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portrait of an Artist, Amsterdam, 2013, 189–191.

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despised the show; the CoBrA artists were considered scribblers and fake artists. One critic wrote: ‘Smirch, twaddle and mess in the City Museum of Amsterdam.’51 This hostility was very similar to the reception of the De Stijl group in the 1920s. Sandberg courageously continued the interwar avant-garde’s struggle against intellectual laziness turning the Stedelijk into the bastion of modern art. His vision was typical for the post-World War II sense of a new, optimistic beginning of a new era. Against the background of the interwar and postwar Dutch avant-garde art Sandberg and Jaffe embarked on a farsighted project aimed at restoring and re-introducing to the public the entire international avant-garde movement, both the material art works and the spirit of the utopian 1920s. Resuscitating the De Stijl aesthetics and spirit, a genuine homespun, Dutch avant-garde tradition, and presenting the CoBrA group as their descendants spoke volumes. The Malevich exhibition, part of the same effort, was also an epochal event that led to a new art discourse about interwar modernism, including the avant-gardes in Russia and Eastern Europe as well, as a recommendation for this art to be continued. Sandberg’s concept and vision greatly contributed to the nascent, morally committed postwar narrative of progressive art and to the rethinking of European art after 1945 and throughout the 1950s.

Bibliography Unpublished Texts Casimir Malevitch (sic!), document, folder 3738, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Naum Gabo to Willem Sandberg, 3 April 1953, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Naum Gabo to Willem Sandberg, 24 March 1956, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Hugo Häring to Prof. L. Hilberseimer (sic!), 29 March 1956, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Hugo Häring to Willem Sandberg, 29 March 1956, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Hugo Häring, folder 5830, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Hugo Häring, 1 September 1952, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

51 Fondation Constant  – Stichting Constant, ‘Cobra 1948–1951’ , http://stichtingconstant.nl/­ cobra-­1948–1951 [12 January 2019].

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Letter, Hans L. C. Jaffe to Alfred Barr, 15 July 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Pavel Lebedev to the Director of the Stedelijk, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Peter Lufft to Willem Sandberg, February 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Franz Meyer to Willem Sandberg, folder 3824, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 November 1955, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Willem Sandberg to Hugo Häring, 7 November 1955, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Willem Sandberg to Naum Gabo, 7 March 1956, folder 5828, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Willem Sandberg to Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua, 22 November 1957, folder 3823, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Willem Sandberg to Alfred Barr, 10 December 1957, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter and list, State Russian Museum, Leningrad, to Willem Sandberg, 30 January 1958, folder 5829, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Letter, Alex Vömel to Willem Sandberg, 27 January 1958, folder 3738, Archives of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

Published Texts Tim Ackermann, ‘Interview with Heinz Mack “Wir hatten einfach keine Vorbilder mehr” (We had simply no Models any more).”’ , Zeit Online, 31 March 2015, https://www.zeit.de/kultur/ kunst/2015–03/zero-kunst-avantgarde-heinz-mack [16 November 2018]. Troels Andersen, Malevich. Catalogue Raisonné of the Berlin Exhibition 1927, including the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 1970. Mark Antliff, Avant-Garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France, 1909– 1939, Durham and London, 2007. Pierpaolo Antonello, ‘Humanities Now. What Matters and the Speed we are Moving at. An Interview with Jeffrey T. Schnapp’ , Italian Studies, 64:1, Spring 2009, 144–162, 150, http://jeffreyschnapp. com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Interview-with-Pierpaolo-Antonello1.pdf [25 January 2019]. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression’ , in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis, New York, NY, and Boston, MA, 1984, 107–136 (originally published in October, 16, Spring 1981, 39–68). Emily Braun et al., Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, New York, NY, 2011. Diane Butterman, ‘Introduction’ , in Lucebert. The Collected Poems, Vol. II., ed. Lucebert, trans. Diane Butterman, Copenhagen and Los Angeles, CA, 2017. Jindřich Chalupecký, ‘The Intellectual under Socialism’ (1949), in Primary Documents. A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, eds. Laura Hoptman and Tomas Pospiszyl, New York, NY, 2002. Constant (Anton Nieuwenhuys), ‘Declaration of Freedom’ , Reflex, 1:2, 1948. Exh. Cat. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 2014: ‘Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe’ , eds. Vivien Greene and Walter L. Adamson, New York, NY, 2014.

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Exh. Cat. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea 1959: ‘Casimir Malevic’ , eds. Giovanni Carandente and Palma Bucarelli, Rome, 1959. Fondation Constant – Stichting Constant, ‘Cobra 1948–1951’ , http://stichtingconstant.nl/cobra1948–1951 [12 January 2019]. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al., New York, NY, 1980. Eckhart Gillen, Feindliche Brüder? Der Kalte Krieg und die deutsche Kunst, Berlin, 2009. Boris Groys, ‘The Birth of Socialist Realism from the Spirit of the Russian Avant-Garde’ , in The Culture of the Stalin Period, ed. Hans Günther, London, 1990, 122–148. Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture. Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, Sterling, 1991. Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder, Constructing Modernity. The Art & Career of Naum Gabo, New Haven, CT, and London, 2000. Pontus Hultén, ‘In the Stedelijk’ , in Sandberg: a Documentary, eds. Ad Petersen and Pieter Brattinga, Amsterdam, 1975. Hans L. C. Jaffe, De Stijl. The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, Cambridge, MA, 1956. Ank Leeuw-Marcar, Willem Sandberg: Portrait of an Artist, Amsterdam, 2013. Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford, CA, 2004. Ad Petersen, Sandberg: graphiste et directeur de Stedelijk Museum, trans. Daniel Cunin, Paris, 2007. Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘The Disappearing Bauhaus’ , in Bauhaus Construct, eds. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, London and New York, NY, 2009. Michel Seuphor, L’Art Abstrait, Paris, 1949. Zeev Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire: les origines françaises du fascisme, 1885–1914, Paris, 1978. Peter Weibel, Booklet to the Exhibition Karlsruhe, ZKM 2017, ‘Art in Europe 1945–1968. The Continent that the EU Does Not Know’ , ed. Peter Weibel, 2017. ‘Yalta Conference Agreement, Declaration of a Liberated Europe’ , 11 February 1945, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, National Archives, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter. org/document/116176.pdf [3 January 2019].

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Simon Vagts

Bodies, Factories, and Islands

Roberto Rossellini Mapping Catastrophe Transitory stages have always played a decisive role for Roberto Rossellini. For both, his films and himself as an artist, the in-between is an important category. Starting his career in 1941, Rossellini made what we now call The Fascist Trilogy. His friendship with Vittorio Mussolini earned him the financial support of the Centro Cinema­ tografico del Ministero della Marina and the Air Force. Only five years after L’uomo dalla croce (1943) premiered ‘one month before the Allied troops invaded Sicily’1, he made Deutschland im Jahre Null, one of the first films shot in postwar Germany. His films of the forties and early fifties are obsessed with beginnings, endings and what lies in-between. Thinking about Rossellini implies thinking about reorganization. The reorganization of artistic approaches, political intentions, the historical meaning of cinema and, after all, Europe.2 In this essay, I am focussing on three films. Each of them describes a different moment in European postwar history. Deutschland im Jahre Null (1948) examines the restoration and rebuilding of Berlin, Stromboli, terra di Dio (1949) shows the return of the fugitives and their exhausting struggle to find a home, and Europa ’51 (1952)

1

http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/italians/resources/Amiciprize/1996/fascistfilms.html [30  October 2018].

2

See for further reading Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations. Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema, Minneapolis, MN, 2008, and Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision. The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Minneapolis, MN, 2012.

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follows the downfall of a woman to address the roots of a class conflict and questions a social system in ways that are still relevant nowadays. The three films, or rather their relationship can be considered to embody the situation of postwar Europe from a decidedly aesthetic perspective. They belong to the most insightful filmic documents of their time. Even beside their historical relevance, they incorporate a new aesthetic of the cinematic image that gains its formal and visual strength through the newly constructed relation between narration and documentation, authorship, and anonymity, artistic work and objective eye. As I shall show, elaborating on this new aesthetic requires a depiction of historical reception, a reading of contemporary theoretical texts, and an in-depth view of Rossellini’s stylistic characteristics. The historical reception will be delineated by references to André Bazin, certainly the most influential critic writing about Rossellini in the forties and fifties. In addition to that I decided to refer to two works that belong to the most significant texts of political thinking of this period: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer (1942), respectively Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950). The investigation of Rossellini’s style will centre around the movement of bodies. They are drawn, shoved, and beaten, they travel on the sea and get imprisoned. They crawl on volcanic rocks, stumble through ruins and, most importantly, they are falling. I am going to argue, that the way Rossellini stages movement – of bodies and the camera – is predestined to make his artistic and political statement visible. The films stand out as representations of a specific historical moment and constitute a new language of film. Rethinking Europe through an investigation on Rossellini’s aesthetics entails furthermore a rereading and a reevaluation of established interpretations. In the case of Rossellini, this means to bring his status as an epitome of the auteur into question. This has to be done without denying his importance to the history of film. Nevertheless, we have to face not only the political circumstances of his work but also his very own political decisions.

Deutschland im Jahre Null (1948) Edmund Köhler is a twelve-year-old boy. His family sent him to get something to eat. He tries to sell a scale at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. A man is interested and asks Edmund for a deal. But instead of the 300 Mark Edmund wants to receive, the man offers him two pieces of canned meat. Disappointed by this unfair exchange,

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Simon Vagts

Edmund walks over to the Neptunbrunnen, where he meets his former teacher Mr. Henning. (Fig. 1 and 2) They talk about their current situation. Edmund does not go to school because of his liabilities for the family, his sick grandfather, and his deserted brother. Mr. Henning does not teach anymore because his idea of child education and the idea of the new school are not compatible. He wants to accompany Edmund and convinces him to attend him on his way home. He constantly keeps stroking his face and his back. Edmund agrees, and they head to the tramway stop where Mr. Henning has a short conversation with a construction worker, who entitles himself as a slave. ‘What are we now? In the past we have been men, National Socialists, now we are only Nazis.’3 (Fig. 3) After the train ride, Mr. Henning keeps pressuring Edmund by reminding him of a crime Edmund’s father committed in the past. He forged a sick certificate to keep Edmund from joining the Hitler Youth. ‘What are they teaching in school? Democracy?’ , Mr. Henning asks ironically while he is leading Edmund to his home, a manorial villa.4 They enter through a large door into the arrival hall where a man and a woman are sitting on a beach chair and a chaise longue, reading books. A girl is performing an arch of hysteria, also known as arc de cercle or arc-en-ciel.5 (Fig. 4 and 5) She lifts herself up and leaves the scene immediately.

3 4

Deutschland im Jahre Null, I/F/D, 1948, 0’’20’.

Deutschland im Jahre Null, 0’’24’. 5 The term arc de cercle was first used by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in the end of the nineteenth century in his studies on hysteria and describes a phase of a hysterical attack in which the patient is only lying on her feet and shoulders. See Christine Künzel, Vergewaltigungslektüren. Zur Codierung sexueller Gewalt in Literatur und Recht, Frankfurt/ Main, 2003, 101. We will later get to understand how important the lesser known designation arc-en-ciel is for Deutschland im Jahre Null.

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Fig. 1  Roberto Rossellini (Director), Deutschland im Jahre Null, Italy/France/Germany 1948, BW, 35 mm, 78 min., min. 19″20′.

Fig. 2  Deutschland im Jahre Null, min. 19″55′.

Fig. 3  Deutschland im Jahre Null, min. 21″35′.

Fig. 4  Deutschland im Jahre Null, min. 23″28′.

Fig. 5  Deutschland im Jahre Null, min. 22″43′.

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Simon Vagts

This scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Deutschland im Jahre Null is both, exemplary and outstanding for Rossellini and European cinema after World War II. Within five minutes, the film refers to a lot of different political and historical aspects: inflation, black-marketing, exploitation of young children in any possible way, the breakdown of the educational system, the Nazi regime, and of course, Berlin. The capital is presented as a rotting ruin, consisting of bombed houses and debris lying on the street. Deutschland im Jahre Null is a document of Germany just after the war, giving the impression of people’s environments. But beneath this documental approach of the film, that would soon go down in film history as a main work of Italian neorealism, one finds another layer of meaning, indicated in the curious movement of the little girl. To understand how her performing an arch of hysteria, which is taking place in the background of a shot and being partly concealed by Mr. Henning’s appearance, gains unexpected expressiveness, requires at least a short introduction to the historical relevance of Deutschland im Jahre Null and the debates that were surrounding it upon release. Deutschland im Jahre Null premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland on 10 July 1948. It won the Golden Leopard and the Best Director-Award. Despite this success, the film received mixed reviews, mostly based on Rossellini’s new approach to his films. In comparison to his earlier films, especially Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1948), Deutschland im Jahre Null avoids a realistic mise-en-scène in the eyes of the critics. This ascertainment is not completely wrong. Rossellini ignored some of the aspects neorealism had introduced to cinema. Some parts of the film were actually shot in Italy while the ruins of Berlin were projected in the back of the studio and all indoor shots were taken in Italy. Furthermore, the critics mention the strong dramatization. As far as I can see, there is really no reason why Deutschland im Jahre Null should be seen as more dramatic than Roma città aperta. Both arguments, the composite setting, the mixture of the original setting, the studio scenes, and the alleged dramatization are to be considered as a replacement of the documentary that came to determine Rossellini’s work and neorealism itself by narrative cinema. Shortly after the film was released in France in 1949, André Bazin wrote an article in the communist journal Esprit. Here, he tries to single out the contours of Rossellini’s specific use of realism. To him, the film focuses on its main character Edmund and his struggle to find food and help his family to get along in postwar Germany. Bazin states, that ‘the audience quickly becomes enraptured and teary when children show feelings that are usually associated with grown-ups’6 while ‘Roberto Rossellini’s

6 André Bazin, ‘Germany, Year Zero’ , in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011, 57–60, 57.

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profound originality in Germany, Year Zero (1947) [sic!] lies in his deliberate refusal to resort to any such sentimental sympathy, to make any concession to anthropomorphism.’7 Bazin describes this method as psychological objectivity that, according to him, is deeply connected to realism.8 Rossellini’s “realism” has nothing in common with all that the cinema has given to us up to now in the name of realism […]. His realism lies not in the subject matter but in the style. Rossellini is perhaps the only filmmaker in the world who knows how to get us interested in an action while leaving it in its objective context. Our emotion is thus released of all sentimentality, for it has been filtered by force through our intelligence. We are moved not by the actor or the event, but by the meaning we are forced to extract from the action.9 As far as Bazin is concerned, realism and objectivity of Deutschland im Jahre Null draw two obvious conclusions: First, emotional participation becomes totally obsolete. Even the fear and grief of a child cannot take over the audience. Second, ‘the moral or dramatic significance is never visible on the surface of reality; yet we cannot fail to sense what that significance is if we pay attention.’10 Following Bazin, Rossellini transforms the empathy for the characters into a pedagogical lesson. The identification with actors on the screen seems no longer possible. More precisely, it is the impossibility to emphasise with the actors, which broadens our understanding of historical reality. Although never mentioned in the text, Bazin refers to the distinction between narrative and documentary film. According to him, neorealism cannot be reduced to obvious aspects like original settings, amateur actors, and the putative avoidance of dramatic structures. They make the neorealist approach evident but do not alone guarantee the neorealist essence of the film. Moreover, Bazin insists on its ability ‘to force the mind to draw its own conclusions about people and event, instead of manipulating it into accepting someone else’s interpretation […].’11 Taking the project of neorealism serious, for Rossellini means to avoid and extinguish individual subjects and the tragedies of singular figures, and taking the film as an initial point of reflection. That would make the project of neorealism a quite notable and moral undertaking. Bazin’s analysis of Deutschland im Jahre Null seems appro  7 Bazin 2011a, 58.   8 Bazin 2011a, 60.   9 Bazin 2011a, 60. 10 Bazin 2011a, 60. 11 Bazin 2011a, 60.

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priate but needs to be contextualised. His positive reading can be explained by the already mentioned bad reviews: He is trying to counterbalance them. His essay In Defense of Rossellini from 1955 helps to confirm this assumption. Bazin acts as Rossellini’s advocate. Looking into this text one realises that the definition of neorealism is, even seven years after Deutschland im Jahre Null that allegedly ended Rossellini’s neorealist phase, a work in progress. Here, Bazin is not wondering if Deutschland im Jahre Null can be called neorealist, but if ‘Rossellini [has] ever really been a neorealist […].’12 Of course, the question is affirmed, but it shows that neorealism, its nature, means, and style are discussed. For once, Bazin tries to define the meaning of neorealism: To put it another way, by definition neorealism rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of characters and their actions. It looks on reality as a whole, not incomprehensible, certainly, but inseparably one.13 Referring to Rossellini, Bazin makes an assumption that will be important with regard to my argument: ‘The world of Rossellini is a world of pure acts, unimportant in themselves but preparing the way (as if unbeknownst to God himself) for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning.’14 This short introduction to Bazin’s analysis of neorealism reveals the constituent function Rossellini’s films take over. They bring up seminal questions that artists had to face in postwar Europe. They had to find a new style, to overthink their concepts of reality, of objectivity, and individuality, and they had to legitimate their work. But most importantly they had to adopt a political stance. This is exactly what Bazin leaves unmentioned. This may have to do with Rossellini’s past because his political standing and his aesthetics cannot be separated from each other. From today’s point of view, we obviously have to take this into account, because a rethinking of Europe requires a re-reading of our artists’ works and their involvement in history. This is, in short, what I want to add to Bazin’s interpretation of Rossellini’s neorealism. To Bazin, Rossellini’s psychological objectivity and the missing empathy with the characters in his films – not only in Deutschland im Jahre Null – makes room for pedagogical intentions and the intellectual participation of the audience. However, there is also another side to this artistic strategy that has to do with Rossellini and his political stance. Rossellini never stopped filming. From the end of the 12 André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Rossellini’ , in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011, 163–171, 166. 13 Bazin 2011b, 167. 14 Bazin 2011b, 170.

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thirties – starting as an assistant-director – until the mid-fifties, there is hardly a year he did not release a film. He made about forty films in forty years.15 This working posture is stunning, but it involves sacrifice. As I have already mentioned, L’uomo dalla croce was first shown in Italian theatres on 3 February 1943, only five months before 25 Luglio (25 July), the end of the fascist regime in Italy. One and a half years later Rossellini, close friend of Vittorio Mussolini, son of the Duce del Fascismo, who also maintained friendships with Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti, finished his next film: Roma città aperta. Within 18 months Rossellini changed from the fascist regime’s favorite film director to cinema’s teacher of humanism. He did not celebrate heroic military actions of compatriots anymore but the enlightened self-reflexion of his audience. I do not want to question Rossellini’s change of mind or his repentance. I do not think that an investigation in Rossellini’s political history reveals his true political state of mind. At least that is not what I am interested in. Moreover, I want to emphasise the historical depth that lies beneath the critical discourse on neorealism. The relevance of stylistic idioms and certain rules like original settings and amateur actors goes far beyond aesthetics. They were interpreted as moral and political decisions. Breaking the rules of neorealism meant a betrayal of what Bazin called ‘a whole range of moral categories […].’16 It is indispensable to notice Rossellini’s involvement in world history. He produced propaganda films for the fascist regime and became one of the leading figures in film history.17 In this sense, film history and world history had become inseparable, the often proclaimed innocence of cinema had been lost.18 The overlapping of world and film history lies at the bottom of Bazin’s project. His attempt to differentiate between narrative cinema with dramatic plots and the neutral reproduction of what he refers to as realism seems naive because cinema, at least Rossellini’s cinema, did not free Italy from its rulers at all. On the contrary: it supported them. But there is more to Bazin’s

15 He did forty-nine cine films (contributions to compilation films and short films among them) and twelve films for television. 16 Bazin 2011b, 167. 17 It seems almost impertinent when Bazin writes about Rossellini’s work and the ‘integrity of style and moral unity only too rare in cinema, which compel us to esteem it even before we admire it.’ Bazin 2011b, 166. As if he had never heard of his Fascist-Trilogy. 18 Daniel Morgan elaborates on this topic in his seminal book on Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Murnau and Freund were neither Nazis nor Nazi sympathisers, but Godard suggests that this does not make them innocent of crimes: filmmakers bear responsibility for the political use of their craft by others. And if their hands are dirty, his own may be as well.’ Daniel Morgan, Late Godard. And the Possibilities of Cinema, Berkeley, CA, 2012, 90.

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theory of neorealism’s naivety. The underlying impetus of Deutschland im Jahre Null and Rossellini’s other postwar films cannot be understood without concerning their different contexts. This is Bazin’s great dilemma. On the one hand, he proclaims that ‘neorealism by definition rejects analysis, whether political, moral, psychological, logical, or social, of characters and their actions’19 and on the other hand ‘neorealism is a way of seeing or presenting people and events with a maximum of presence or faithfulness of life. It is filmmaking in the present tense of the indicative mood, but it does not exclude the historical present.’20 Neorealism shows a maximum of presence, but leaves the analysis to the audience and in the case of this text, to the author. In other words: Deutschland im Jahre Null offers itself as a product to be analysed by its viewers. Focusing on one of the pure, unimportant acts that prepare ‘the way […] for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning’21 will add insight into the overall conception of Rossellini’s aesthetic. Apparently, the scene described at the beginning of my essay gives a perfect example for the approach to Rossellini’s neorealism offered by Bazin. It shows different localities of Berlin in a prosaic manner. Almost no close-ups are used, the montage is stable, the camera movements are very reduced, almost every shot is taken from one point of view. The presence of history is undeniable. The audience is confronted with many topics that were formative for people living in Berlin at the time the film was shot. Following Bazin, the political environment and the resulting social problems are shown but not analysed. They are dealt with en passant. There is no argument or debate, the topics are laid bare but not discussed. But what about the ‘dazzling revelation’22 of the pure, unimportant act of the girl performing an arc-en-ciel at the end of the scene? I argue that there are two levels of meaning to the obscure and dubious movement of the girl that lifts herself up in a gymnastic way. One refers to the nature of the act itself – this could be called the conceptual dimension – the other, to its outreaching meaning – the emblematic dimension. First, I want to discuss this ‘unique pure act’ how Bazin would call it, in consideration of the outlined debate on neorealism. As already mentioned the act takes place in the background and could easily go unnoticed. Not only because of its unimportance and insignificance but because of its limited visibility. The accom19 Bazin 2011b, 167. 20 André Bazin, ‘Is the Italian Cinema Going to Disown Itself?’ in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011, 142–147, 146. 21 Bazin 2011b, 170. 22 Bazin 2011b, 170.

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plished feat is not referred to by the other characters in the room at all. No one talks about the absurdity or realises it. The performance of the girl takes place but not for the other characters. She is apparently acting for the audience; she does not give any narrative hint, she has no character, she is pure body, pure performance. One could maintain that this is defining for the neorealistic style and the unpredictability of amateur actors or original settings, where Rossellini was not able to control the exact kind of lighting. However, this pure, unimportant act has nothing to do with wrong lighting or a naturally spoken dialect that gives a feel of authenticity. The uplifting of the girl is carefully staged. Edmund and Mr. ­Henning enter the villa, the camera pans to the right, and we see the little group in front of a large window. On their way to them, Edmund and Mr.  Henning hesitate. Mr. ­Henning looks in the girl’s direction where the girl is walking on all fours on her back and slows down. It seems as if he is waiting for the right moment to enter the room so that the girl is in the correct position: he tries to be right on time. But the assumed bad timing does not only indicate unprofessional behaviour of the actors but Rossellini’s intentions. Rossellini’s mise-en-scène is on point. The scene exhibits the director’s will to stage a scene. The natural movement of actors and camera movement are sacrificed on behalf of the image composition. In the case, they would have moved too fast the girl would have been completely covered by Mr.  Henning’s body. Rossellini definitely told them to avoid this and instructed them to stop. Therefore, treating Rossellini as some kind of neutral observer who just records acts and fragmented information is invalid. He arranges his shots carefully. The feel of an incoherent narrative, loosely connected scenes and authenticity is highly constructed. The film does not demonstrate the wide range of social problems of Berlin by accident and the girl does not enter the scene unexpectedly. A second level of meaning refers to the cultural background of the film, the social life and the role of the body during the Nazi regime. If her presence is planned in every detail, what does it stand for? First of all, she sets the atmosphere in the villa. The suspected paedophilia of Mr. Henning, who keeps touching Edmund constantly, becomes evident. By performing her stunt, the girl fulfills an entertaining function for the residents. At the same time, it appears as a sinister act. It reminds us of documented dislocations or other symptoms of hysteria.23 But the full body control also hints at the highly supported physical exer-

23 And further of The Exorcist (1973) by William Friedkin. Here the haunted girl walks down the stairs in exactly the same way as in Deutschland im Jahre Null. But that is of course an ahistorical reading.

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cises in the Third Reich in groups like the Hitler Youth or the German Girls’ Organization (Bund Deutscher Mädel) and their iconic staging in films of Leni Riefenstahl, most famously in Triumph des Willens (1934) and Olympia – Fest der Völker (1938). It becomes obvious, then, that the pure, unimportant act has a lot of connotations in spite of its alleged meaninglessness. There are many reasons why the presence of the girl’s body is intriguing. Historical, atmospheric, and narrative layers are all inscribed in her body that also contains one of the most significant stylistic elements of Deutschland im Jahre Null and makes it legible: Verticality. Verticality sets the scene for the whole film. Most prominent are the ruins of Berlin. They materialise the destruction and the bombings, the downfall of the Nazi Regime in a metaphorical way. Noa Steimatsky elaborates on this in her seminal study on Italian neorealism: Rossellini’s ruins offer material evidence, proclaim the imperative of shelter, of housing; they constitute as well a symbolic commemoration. Yet they resist a solid, definitive articulation: they emerge as an arena wherein a monumental thrust is traversed by a force of contingency. The ruin is internalised, inscribed in the film’s body that itself emerges as a ruinous edifice, redefining Rossellini’s realism, and his modernism, in an exemplary intersection.24 Moreover, Steimatsky comes to neorealism defining itself as ‘participating in a continued rebuilding of reality […].’25 As one of the very few researchers, she mentions Rossellini’s work for Mussolini and wonders about his intentions: If cinema, a tool of ordinary Fascist propaganda even in Roberto Rossellini’s hands just a few years earlier, was complicit in Fascist monumentality […] then how will it now approach the postwar memorializing and reconstructive pro­ ject? How to rebuild out of these ruins?26

24 Steimatsky 2008, 43. 25 Steimatsky 2008, 69. 26 Steimatsky 2008, 71.

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Regarding Steimatsky’s question, the uplifting of the girl out of the arc-en-ciel seems emblematic. In any case, her argument fits perfectly: ‘It [the landscape of ruins, S. V.] reflects in turn an image of the body itself […] as ruin.’27 This equation of body and architecture even gives the pure, unimportant act an optimistic flair. But there is another vertical movement in Deutschland im Jahre Null that contrasts the hopeful and uplifting gymnastic interlude. Namely, Edmund’s death. At the end of Deutschland im Jahre Null, Edmund is driven by the sheer desperate situation of himself and his family. Unable to get anything to eat, molested by ‘his pederast schoolmaster’28 and worried about the state of health of his family Edmund climbs up a ruin and jumps off. His suicide represents the strongest vertical movement in a film that is full of verticality. The fathoming of a vertical axis does not appear for the last time in Rossellini’s work. As we shall see, death by verticality returns in Europa ’51. In fact, it is among the most frequent imagery Rossellini uses. The vertical structures of bodies themselves – as in the arc-en-ciel –, bodies and their environments – as in Edmund’s suicide – and the environments – as in the ruins of Berlin – hint at the unstable condition of Germany and Europe and the liminal situation. They articulate the space between the end of the war and the rebuilding of state and continent. The emphasis on vertical movements, like Edmund’s downfall or the arc-en-ciel, implies Europe’s uncertainty. As a compositional device, it illustrates the historical state of mind.

Europa ’51 (1952) The three films constitute a special body of work that I would like to refer to as Rossellini’s geodetic survey. He takes measure of Europe, its borders, social problems, and political directions. Rossellini’s inventory project already speaks through the titles of the films, which contain more or less detailed geographical indications: Deutschland im Jahre Null, Europa ’51, and Stromboli, terra di Dio.29 Country, continent, and island refer to entities of different sizes where specific problems can be dis-

27 Steimatsky 2008, 71. 28 Steimatsky 2008, 52. On a side note, Steimatsky belongs to the very few authors who call Mr. Henning what he is. The sexual harassment of Edmund passes unnoticed most of the time. 29 Rossellini sticks to this all over his career. Viaggio in Italia (1954), India: Matri Bhumi (1959), and of course the already mentioned Roma città aperta. Even his last film from 1977 includes a concrete location information: Beaubourg, centre d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou.

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cussed. Rossellini’s measurement of Europe has to start with Germany, because it marks the Nullpunkt as Hannah Arendt calls it in The Origins of Totalitarianism from 1951, the same year Europa ’51 was produced. She writes of ‘the German defeat, which left behind a country in ruins and a nation that felt it had arrived at “point zero” of its history.’30 It is this Nullpunkt of history where Rossellini starts his map grid, Deutschland im Jahre Null becoming the y-axis. The film has no temporal expansion; there are no proceedings. It only moves in depth and describes the fall and uplifting of bodies and political systems, their verticality. In Europa ’51 time is not out of joint anymore. The catastrophe has passed and enables Rossellini to add a date to the geographical location, abbreviated to ’51. Time has gone by since the catastrophe, and so the film focuses on completely different aspects of European nation-building and rebuilding. The film is set in postwar Rome where a wealthy, English couple raises a boy whose melancholic and depressed behaviour attracts attention. He feels out of place and as a result of his mental state he commits suicide by throwing himself down the staircase. Of course, this makes a strong parallel to the final scene of Deutschland im Jahre Null. The analogy cannot be denied. But Europa ’51 does not only repeat the suicide. It perpetuates it. Deutschland im Jahre Null ends with Edmund’s death while the death of Michele constitutes the starting situation for the story of Irene Girard (played by Ingrid Bergman). (Fig. 6) Horrified by her son’s early decease, she is in search of a new purpose in life. She discovers social commitment as a means to cope with her grief. Her journey through social classes has a bitter end when she takes the shift of her ill friend who works in a factory. Gilles Deleuze describes the scene as ‘visual and sound abstract’31 by analysing it as follows: Europe ’51 shows a bourgeoise woman who, following the death of her child, crosses various spaces and experiences the tenement, the slum and the factory […] Her glances relinquish the practical function of a mistress of a house who arranges things and beings, and pass through every state of an internal vision, affliction, compassion, love, happiness, acceptance, extending to the psychiatric hospital where she is locked up at the end of a new trial of Joan of Arc: she sees, she has learnt to see.32

30 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, NY, et al., 1994, 46. 31 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis, MN, 1989, 45. 32 Deleuze 1989, 2.

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Fig. 6  Roberto Rossellini (Director), Europa ‘51, Italy 1952, BW, 35 mm, 118 min., min. 80″05′.

Her compassion for the poor people of the Roman outskirts has to end at the exact moment Irene is leaving the upper class. As long as she remains embedded in her own social origin, her interactions with the lower class are tolerated, but she is not allowed to change places with her friend. The visit of the factory where she tries to play the role of a factory worker to help a poor woman can be described as abstract because Irene’s social origin makes it impossible for her to accept the factory as a part of her own reality. Irene becomes aware of the working environment of the lower class and ‘sees’ , in Deleuze’s sense, that the social life she admired so much was nothing more than a mirage, the result of a mere act of romanticising. In this sense, Europa ’51 outlines the beginning of the European class society. The Nullpunkt has been left behind. The glimpse at the film’s titles already indicated this point. Of course, Europa ’51 makes use of a completely different film language than Deutschland im Jahre Null. In a precise sense, the language itself can be taken as a symptom of a new style and approach. What was criticised four years earlier

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has become essential to Rossellini: he abandons neorealism’s typical blending of authenticity and realism. Talking English in an Italian film seems legit as long as the characters speak in their mother tongue, but when Irene uses it to communicate with children clothed in rags in the slums of Rome, the viewer could be surprised. I do not want to imply how neorealist Rossellini really is. I want to point out that Europa ’51 illustrates the nation-building as a large-scale project that goes far beyond the borders of individual languages. Unlike Deutschland im Jahre Null, Europa ’51 focuses completely on one character’s individual perspective but – and here both films do the same – the individual fate discloses the hardened system of the rebuilt Europe even at this early stage in 1951.

Stromboli, terra di Dio (1950) At first glance, it may seem strange to arrange the films in a non-chronological order, but there are good reasons for it. First of all, it undermines the usual narrative of auteur cinéma which implies an ongoing artistic development. Of course, thinking about Rossellini’s evolution as an artist and the logic of his œuvre is essential, but that is exactly what I am trying to avoid. This kind of teleological reading of Rossellini’s work disregards the political and historical circumstances of the three films. The chosen arrangement hints at the ubiquitous isolation of the figures that belong to specific surroundings. It begins in the city of Berlin, proceeds to the outskirts of Rome and ends on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. This movement of decentering underpins my argument and makes my usage of mapping more understandable. After identifying Germany, the country at the Nullpunkt with the y-axis and Europa ’51 as the grid of Rossellini’s map, we will see how an island, Stromboli, terra di Dio forms the x-axis of a geographical extension. Stromboli, an island north of Sicily, occurs as a safe haven at first glance. Karin (played by Ingrid Bergman)33, an imprisoned woman in an internment camp from Lithuania is to be released. She marries an Italian, whom she had not known for long. After receiving the permission to leave, the newlywed couple travels to Stromboli, home of Mario Vitale, her new husband. Karin learns to accommodate herself with the regional cus33 Bergman is acting for the first time in a film by Rossellini, her later husband. Deleuze interprets Bergman’s moving to Italy and her divorce as a desertion to the enemy. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, transl. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN, 1986, 242.

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toms quickly. Despite the immense poverty, the distrust and envy of the people make her feel unwell. In the end, the island turns out to be another prison Karin has to escape from. In a way, Stromboli, terra di Dio anticipates some of the motifs Rossellini makes use of two years later in Europa ’51. A woman has to orient herself in a new environment, which leads to mental illness and despair. In both films, a woman is confronted with an unfamiliar social class, and both films end with the mental breakdown of the main character. In Europa ’51 she gets locked up in the psychiatry, in Stromboli, terra di Dio she is left in the hands of nature, climbing up a volcano, uncertain if she is going to die or not. Although the films have a lot in common, there is one decisive difference: the setting. It is not the urban space of Rome or Berlin but a sparsely populated island. Rossellini chose it for a good reason. Mainly, because he can focus on an element that has aesthetic qualities and defines some of the fundamental characteristics of Europe: the sea. He is interested in the sea as the natural border that is independent of the political situation and the demarcations that change during wartime; sea as a territory itself that allows people to work travel and live. In other words: The sea limits and enables living environments at the same time. Stromboli, terra di Dio ‘is a film about the repeal of boundaries’ and ‘the sea becomes barbwire’ as Frank Fehrenbach writes in an essay on the meaning of the sea in neorealism.34 Unlike Deutschland im Jahre Null and Europa ’51, Stromboli, terra di Dio does not bear a year in its title. Although the internment camp lends historical context at the very beginning of the film, Stromboli appears as a place out of time, lacking a historical index. The way the inhabitants live, furnish their houses, and stick to their religion is untouched by the outside world. Furthermore, any kind of industrial and economic progress is avoided by the nature of the island itself. The frequent volcanic eruptions and the tough weather conditions make it very difficult to improve the quality of living. The most impressive scene of Stromboli, terra di Dio presents the inhabitants’ traditional way of fishing. (Fig. 7) The whole process is shown to Karin and the audience. The sailing of the fishing boats, the search for an appropriate spot, the men casting their nets, the wriggling fishes getting caught in them, and at last, the transport out of the water onto carriages. The 34 ‘Stromboli ist ein Film über die Aufhebung der Grenzen’ , ‘Das Meer wird zum Stacheldraht’. Frank Fehrenbach, ‘Mare Nero. Meeresbilder bei Visconti, Rossellini, Antonioni und Fellini’ , in Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, eds. Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf, Zurich, 2010, 163–190, 174. Fehrenbach emphasises the general filiation between the cinema and the sea by referring to Bazin and Deleuze.

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brutality of the scene affects Karin as much as it affects the audience. Survival on the island depends on how well people arrange with the natural conditions, which they have learned to master.

Fig. 7  Roberto Rossellini (Director), Stromboli, terra di Dio, Italy/USA 1950, BW, 35 mm, 107 min., min. 58″13′.

When the film was produced, the relation between territory and inhabitants was subject to several discourses. At the time, Carl Schmitt thinks about the meaning of solid ground and floating water for human beings in his Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (1942) and later in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950) that specifies some of the ideas he had formulated earlier. Like Rossellini, Schmitt is not standing outside of history but participating in it. He was a member of the NSDAP until the end of the Nazi regime and legitimated the reign of National Socialism as a lawyer. Jacques Derrida, who investigates Schmitt’s writing in his Politics of Friendship, notices the

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connection between Schmitt’s thoughts and his political commitments ‘which led to his arrest and conviction after the war. [And] often appear more serious and more repugnant than those of Heidegger […].’35 But he also praises the originality of Schmitt’s thoughts who ‘no doubt remained anti-Semitic for the rest of his life and the forms of his anti-Semitism were extremely virulent […].’36 Working on Schmitt is always a difficult task, because of this conflict.37 In Land und Meer he defines territory as the fundamental aspect of people’s life: ‘All basic orders are spatial structures. One calls constitution of a country or a part of the earth his basic order, his Nomos.’38 This Nomos strongly influences behaviour and world view: The human has a certain awareness of his “space” , that is subjected to historical changes. The manifold ways of life correspond to different spaces. Even within the same time, the circumstances for the practice of daily life of every single human is determined by the diverse bearings on life.39 However, the meaning of the Nomos is not limited to individuals. Geographical knowledge, earned through seafarings over human history, functions as a condition for nation building: ‘When Cesar […] conquered Gaul and England from Europe, the view on the northwest opened up and the Atlantic Ocean was achieved. That

35 Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, London and New York, NY, 2005, 107. 36 Derrida 2005, 107. 37 See the classic in Schmitt-studies Friedrich Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende. Die Versuchung Carl Schmitts, Munich, 1996. In this groundbreaking study Balke examines Land und Meer and The Nomos of the Earth, and every other main text of Schmitt. The understanding of Schmitt’s theory has also influenced Fred Moten. In his in-depth reading of Emmanuel Lévinas’ racism and the European project as a project of universalisation, he refers to Schmitt and his ‘distinction between friend and enemy […] where [a] possibility, that constant interplay of danger and preservation, lives.’ Fred Moten, The Universal Machine, Durham and London, 2018, 40. Moten offers more than an update of Derrida’s reading. He contextualises Schmitt within a postcolonial discourse 38 Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, Stuttgart, 2018, 71. ‘Jede Grundordnung ist eine Raumordnung. Man spricht von der Verfassung eines Landes oder eines Erdteils als von seiner Grundordnung, seinem Nomos.’ 39 Schmitt 2018, 55. ‘Der Mensch hat von seinem “Raum” ein bestimmtes Bewußtsein, das großen geschichtlichen Wandlungen unterworfen ist. Den mannigfachen Lebensformen entsprechen ebenso verschiedenartige Räume. Selbst innerhalb der gleichen Zeit ist für die Praxis des täg­ lichen Lebens die Umwelt der einzelnen Menschen schon durch ihren verschiedenen Lebens­ bezug verschieden bestimmt.’

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was the first step towards today’s spatial visualization of “Europe”.’40 Discovering the natural borders of the mainland and other continents, especially America, and the new concept of space (Raumvorstellung) lead to a moment of identification. The juxtaposition of land and sea, constitutional for Schmitt, gets blurred with regard to the island. Friedrich Balke notices that: One can estimate the whole venture of the island to connect to the power of the sea and invent a maritime existence: a force that is not grounded and originates from an element that has “no character,” and following this, is anarchical in the most radical sense, because on the wave everything is wave. The sea is also for Schmitt the paradigm of an absolute field of immanence, that detracts from every pretension because it is not of use as writing surface.41 Stromboli, terra di Dio unfolds this maritime existence. The proximity to the sea makes it impossible for people to establish an enduring and stable society. Karin’s main problem on the island is that she is not able to adjust her environment and her concept of space. After she renovated her home, the volcanic eruption destroys her house. Stromboli incorporates a specific, political status: the status of a refugee. Karin, who married a stranger to escape from prison, fled to a place that rejects humans and humanity. As the title of the film suggests, the fate of the inhabitants of Stromboli lies in the hands of God. Karin’s crying for help and asking for God at the end of Stromboli, terra di Dio is emblematic for Rossellini’s picture of postwar European society.

40 Schmitt 2018, 59. ‘Als Cäsar […] von Rom aus Gallien und England eroberte, öffnete sich der Blick nach Nordwesten und war der Atlantische Ozean erreicht. Das war der erste Schritt zu der heutigen Raumvorstellung “Europa”.’ 41 Balke 1996, 341. ‘[Man kann] das ganze Wagnis der Insel ermessen, sich mit den Kräften des Meeres zu verbinden und eine maritime Existenz zu erfinden: eine Macht, die statt festgegründet zu sein, einem Element entspringt, das “keinen Charakter” hat, also in einem radikalen Sinne anarchisch ist, weil auf den Wellen alles Welle ist. Das Meer ist auch für Schmitt das Paradigma eines absoluten Immanenzfeldes, das sich jedem Anspruch, jeder Prätention schon dadurch entzieht, daß es, jedenfalls zunächst, nicht als Einschreibungsfläche taugt.’

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The Extrapolation of Rossellini’s Cinema As the focus on the three films has shown, Rossellini discovers postwar Europe and the new circumstances for its inhabitants. The films refer to three over-all challenges Europe had to deal with: the reconstruction of bodies and buildings, the renewing of a classism, and the resettling of refugees. In this sense, Rossellini’s cartography does not provide orientation with regard to geographical developments of Europe – Bazin is totally wrong here. Moreover, Rossellini’s survey offers a map of Europe that functions on a psychological and ethical level. Rossellini is not at all educating his viewers on how to organise states, nations, or societies. Facing his political past, this would have been presumptuous at least. It is intriguing that the Frenchman Bazin did not realise this. By observing and orchestrating the abyss of individuals and nations, Rossellini relates them. Deleuze states that ‘it is not the cinema that turns away from politics, it becomes completely political [.]’42 Rossellini’s films incorporate this assumption by focusing on individual fates that point beyond narration. Their politics lie in their historical presence, caught in the apparatus of cinema, its recording, and projection technique. They do not have an allegorical meaning. It is the fact that they were filmed, which gains political importance. Being there is described as an act of existence in the face of catastrophe. Deleuze’s observation lives on in the cinema movements of the sixties, like the Nouvelle Vague, Cinema Nuovo, and Free Cinema, as it does in avant-garde streams like the L. A. Rebellion at the end of the seventies, just to name a few examples. Rossellini’s project implies that the act of documenting gains political meaning. Showing the suicide of a young boy, the grief and mental illness of a woman and the desperate search for a home are to be taken as effects and symptoms of the catastrophe of World War II. Rossellini as a figure of history, one that served the Italian Fascist Regime, is definitely ambivalent and the almost unconditional defence of one of the most clairvoyant film critics who obscures his legacy seems to make it impossible to define Rossellini as moral, aesthetic, or artistic authority. Through his films, Rossellini incorporates the political and historical complexity of Europe. Thinking about Europe and cinema means thinking about Rossellini. Hannah Arendt wrote that ‘[no] matter how much we may be capable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future.’43 And perhaps she is right. Maybe learning from

42 Deleuze 1989, 19. 43 Arendt 1994, 37.

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Simon Vagts

Rossellini’s films does not teach us anything about the future. But it certainly helps us to understand our present.

Bibliography Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Edition with added Prefaces, New York, NY, et al., 1994. Friedrich Balke, Der Staat nach seinem Ende. Die Versuchung Carl Schmitts, Munich, 1996. André Bazin, ‘Germany, Year Zero’ , in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011. (Bazin 2011a) André Bazin, ‘In Defense of Rossellini’ , in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011. (Bazin 2011b) André Bazin, ‘Is the Italian Cinema Going to Disown Itself?’ , in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, ed. Bert Cardullo, New York, NY, 2011. (Bazin 2011c) Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1. The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN, 1986. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis, MN, 1989. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins, London and New York, NY, 2005. Frank Fehrenbach, ‘Mare Nero. Meeresbilder bei Visconti, Rossellini, Antonioni und Fellini’ , in Das Meer, der Tausch und die Grenzen der Repräsentation, eds. Hannah Baader and Gerhard Wolf, Zurich, 2010. Christine Künzel, Vergewaltigungslektüren. Zur Codierung sexueller Gewalt in Literatur und Recht, Frankfurt/Main, 2003. Daniel Morgan, Late Godard. And the Possibilities of Cinema, Berkeley, CA, 2012. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine, Durham and London, 2018. Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, Stuttgart, 2018. Karl Schoonover, Brutal Vision. The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema, Minneapolis, MN, 2012. Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations. Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema, Minneapolis, MN, 2008.

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Practices

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Barbara Lange

Community and Communism

Asger Jorn’s Concept of Ceramics Clay-Stories ‘Ceramics is the new video?’1 This question, put forth in a review of an exhibition in 2011, indicates that although ceramics are omnipresent in the contemporary world of fine arts, a concept of how to integrate them into art history is still absent. As in the early days of video art, it is not only the obvious diversity of ceramic objects but also the distinctive features that set them apart from other art forms, that make said integration difficult and have limited the field to only a small number of specialists. Much more important seems to be the fact that our impression of ceramics often oscillate between everyday life on the one hand, and the artificiality of a work of art on the other. As with video art, which always carries its kinship with commercials, TV, and net culture in its backpack, ceramics, in turn, remind us of set tables, vases on window shelves or bathroom items. (Fig. 1) That is not all: the links to popular culture include unique, hand-made objects as well

1



I would like to thank Lucas Haberkorn, head of Jorn Archives at Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark, for his support of my research on Asger Jorn and for our lively exchange about the artist’s ideas and his political motivations. Through the colleagues in Silkeborg I learnt a lot about Danish community and got a first-hand experience of its helpfulness and hospitality. My thanks go also to Dominik van Os for his critical remarks and his support to bring my thoughts into a written text and to Christian Fuhrmeister. See Roberta Smith, ‘Paul Clay’, New York Times, 30 June 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/­ 2011/07/01/arts/design/paul-clay.html?_r=0 [9 September 2018].

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as all the uncounted industrially produced goods, which characterise our modern industry-based mass culture. Being such hybrids, artworks made of fired clay are like a thorn in our flesh constantly recalling the fact that we need to rethink our practices of inclusions and exclusions, both in art as well as in society as a whole.

Fig. 1  Asger Jorn, Animal Al­bisola, 1954–55. Glazed ceramic, 22 x 24 x 18 cm. Silkeborg, Jens Olesen Collection. Photograph by © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

However, while discerning these similarities between ceramics and video, one realises that something is wrong with the equation: Video is, what art historians of the late 20th century used to call, one of the new media based on the use of modern technologies. Compared to artworks made of clay its pedigree is very short, starting only in the context of post-World War II culture in the context of discourses on science, linguistics, mass media, and politics.2 In contrast, ceramics somehow

2

See Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, ‘Introduction: Complexities of an Art Form’ , in Illuminating Video. An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, New York, NY, 1990, 13–27, 14–15.

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Barbara Lange

helps to trace the history of humankind to early forms of societies. No wonder that one of art’s founding myths, told in different cultures around the world, is the story of a potter’s daughter who invented art by forming the face of her lover in clay.3 At the dawn of modernism, this was used to stigmatise clay and pottery with their prominence in material culture as feminised, practically not real art.4 Despite the Arts and Crafts Movement or Bauhaus and its follow-up institutions like the Black Mountain College, a hierarchy which separated arts and crafts was still in use in the middle of 20th century when World War II ended. However, when Asger Jorn started to promote his earthenware in the 1950s, he was by no means a pioneer. There had already been prominent examples from the times of the avant-garde, all driven by the aim to overcome the separation of cultures. One can delineate a genealogy starting with small sculptures by Paul Gauguin and the artists of the Blauer Reiter, continuing with bigger pieces by Aristide Maillol and his experiments with clay, touching on Marc Chagall and ending with vessels by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso from the late 1940s, when also CoBrA artists like Karel Appel entered the stage.5 Most of these avant-garde artists focused on the material as such to signal a certain connectedness with so-called folk or primitive art. Beyond that, Picasso and Jorn himself got deeply involved in the social structures of ceramic production, where the collaboration of people with different kinds of knowledge is needed: One who creates the form either on the potter’s wheel or in freestyle, one who is familiar with all the oxides and colours of the glazes, and finally one who perfectly knows how to handle all the unpredictable elements in the firing process.6 With the help of Picasso who decorated numerous plates and vessels in Vallauris, the small village in the South of France could consolidate its economy during the first hard years after World War II.7 In Albisola, Northern Italy, it was Asger Jorn who in the 1950s framed the collabora-

3

See Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler. Ein geschichtlicher Versuch, Frankfurt/Main, 1995, 103.

4

See Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Dibutadis. Die weibliche Kindheit der Zeichenkunst’ , Kritische Berichte, 24:4, 1996, 7–20, 8.

5

See for example Janet Koplos et al., eds. The Unexpected. Artists’ Ceramics of the 20th Century, New York, NY, 1998.

6

This is even true when artists who are amateurs produce ceramics. At least the firing is mostly done by professionally trained craftsmen.

7

In 1946, Picasso started his collaboration with the ceramic workshop Madoura in Vallauris. See Exh. Cat. Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 2018: ‘Picasso keramik’ , eds. Michael Juul Holm et al., Humlebæk 2018; Exh. Cat. ’s-Hertogenbosch, Stedelijk Museum Het Kruithuis 2006/07: ‘Avec Plaisir. Keramiek van Pablo Picasso’ , ed. Titus M. Eliëns, Zwolle,

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tive working process of producing ceramics in the terms of his political theory to rebuild a peaceful Europe. Like video art, his notion of ceramics is also concerned with mass media, politics, and sciences. And even with linguistics, as the processes and results forced new forms of naming. Not limited to workshop practices but extended to corporate culture, Jorn’s concept of ceramics offered a social role model in order to form a stable community based on the creativity of art and the long-lasting tradition of craft in the postwar decade. Therefore, he took up certain ideas of the interwar time, virulent during the Weimar Bauhaus, and tried to avoid that creativity would simply merge into the economy.8 On the following pages I will discuss this disposition. In the context of rethinking the structures of art history of postwar times, Jorn serves as an example of an artist who was deeply affected by the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In his political thinking he favoured communism. At the same time, Jorn was also convinced of uncontrolled creativity. To him, art was a power in its own right – an idea which he felt confirmed by reading Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Thus, a form of communism as promoted by socialist and communist parties or practiced in socialist states meant a dead-end in his eyes as it simply neglected the magic of art.9 Engaging with Jorn’s practices and theories offers the opportunity to consider a structure of art history, which is bound to political thoughts but without being locked up in the narratives of a political order of nation-states, governmental interests, or other non-art categories. Following Jorn’s traces introduces us to a mobile artistic network of the 1950s which lived an anti-capitalistic attitude on the one hand and which exhaustingly used – and was able to use – the bourgeois concept of free speech and liberal thoughts on the other. The pattern of socialist 2006. Although these catalogues take the economic consequences of Picasso’s activities in Vallauris into account, further researches on the political significance of this practice are still needed. 8

For the tradition of how to merge crafts and art to which Asger Jorn refers, see Regina Bitt­ ner and Renée Padt, eds. Handwerk wird modern. Vom Herstellen am Bauhaus, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2017. See also below footnote 29.

9

For Asger Jorn’s theoretical background see Graham Birtwistle, Living Art – Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra (1946–1949), Utrecht, 1986. Although the title of this study suggests a rather limited view on Jorn’s theory, the period under review covers not exclusively the artist’s formative years. In addition, a lot of important texts like ‘Magi og Skønne Kunster’ (1971; manuscript 1948) which Birtwistle discusses at length had already been written at that time and was only published later. As Birtwistle also considers the dependencies between the texts of the 1940s and later ones he gives a close insight into Jorn’s process of reading and writing.

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Barbara Lange

vs. capitalist culture cannot cover this structure and its dynamics at all. Furthermore, this polarization is not able to consider what has become one of the most prominent, but controversially disputed categories in modern culture at all: folk art,10 or, in Jorn’s terms, folk’s art. With Jorn as my subject, I hope to widen our art historical views and conceptions to new approaches to that neuralgic term. Hopefully, it will also help to undermine the walls which were built between arts and crafts. Walls, by the way, which already begin to shake a lot during the 1950s.

Fig. 2  Asger Jorn, Untitled, 1954. Glazed ceramic, dimensions and whereabouts unknown. From: Ursula Lehmann-­ Brockhaus, Asger Jorn in Italien, Werke in Keramik, Bronze und Marmor 1954–1972, Silkeborg, 2007, 56, Fig. 41. Photograph by © Fondazione Giuseppe Mazzotti 1903, Albisola.

Jorn’s ceramics are also a good example when it comes to consider the drawn lines between Europe and other parts of the world. From a formalist point of view the rough materiality of his works from the 1950s (Fig. 2) fits perfectly into the image of a worldwide postwar style: Whether one looks at developments in Europe, Japan, 10 See the Tanja Zimmermann’s contribution to this book.

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North America, or Western Africa, it seems that everywhere potters and sculptors took clay as a challenge to oppose form and surface to each other, and thereby challenge well-established ways of reception.11 However we were to neglect a lot of ceramics’ specific particularities if we classify by visual appearance only, and we run the risk of overlooking all the differences – be it in the use of clay, glazes or the firing processes. When, for example, Peter Voulkos invented his crude forms during the 1950s while working in California,12 his background differed a lot from Jorn’s. To be sure, both artists had survived the war, Voulkos as a soldier of the US army, Jorn engaged in the Danish resistance movement. While the latter had suffered from terrible starvation and the fear of getting arrested by the Nazis,13 Voulkos had faced the experiences of fierce battle-fights. In contrast to Jorn, however, he knew all the time of the possibility of returning to a safe home across the sea. Voulkos became one of the most prominent US-artists who worked with clay in a country where this tradition was linked to the culture of Native Americans. Although Voulkos did not play this card, it gives his work a meaning entirely different from Jorn’s plans to publish a book on ancient Danish art.14 Furthermore, Voulkos’ use of certain techniques from traditional pottery in Japan opens different discourses. Jorn, instead, completely ignored Japanese ceramics, which was labelled as simple beauty and was well appreciated in Europe during the 1950s.15 11 See Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Oxford and New York, NY, 2007, 44. 12 On Peter Voulkos’ impulses for working with clay see Exh. Cat. New York, Museum of Arts and Design 2016/17: ‘Voulkos: the Breakthrough Years’ , eds. Glenn Adamson et al., London, 2016. An early reaction to his ceramics was Rose Slivka, ‘The New Ceramic Presence’ , in Craft Horizons, 21:4, July/August 1961, 31–32, 36. 13 Troels Andersen refers to an unpublished letter which Jorn had planned to send to Denmarks prime minister Hans Hedtoft to describe some of the experiences of those who had been in the resistance during the time of occupation. See Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn 1914–1973. Eine Biographie, trans. Irmelin Mai Hoffer and Reinald Nohal, Cologne, 2001, 124. See also Enrico Baj, ‘Préface’ , in Baj/Jorn. Lettres 1953–1961, ed. Musée d’art moderne Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, 1989, 12–19, 14. By contrast, Helle Brøns and Dorthe Aagesen assess that the time of war which Jorn spent under occupation in Denmark gave him the opportunity of rest and consolidation. See Helle Brøns and Dorthe Aagesen, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 12–47, 20–21. 14 The book remained an unfinished project. See the different versions of Olddansk Kunst (1948– 49), including drawings and photographs of archeological earthenware in Jorn Archives Silkeborg, Manuscripter. 15 Japanese ceramics were very much promoted by Bernard Leach who played an extremely powerful role during the 1940s and 1950s in the field of pottery. See Jeffrey Jones, Studio Pottery in Britain 1900–2005, London, 2007, Section 3: Bernard Leach and the Leach Pottery. In ceramic workshops of that time Leach’s handbook A Potter’s Book (1940, republished

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In his concept of folk art mingei pottery had to remain a white spot16 because his idea of form and image resisted conventional beauty. Jorn strictly refused to be classified as a European artist,17 but it makes much sense to analyse his œuvre in the context of postwar Europe with its own diversity of cultures and political structure. Due to the continent’s history, the scope of its art world differs from other parts of the world. Europe with its small galleries and its museums; its social diversity of collectors; the numerous art journals in different languages and a long-lasting tradition of publishing on art well collected in libraries, its artists’ groups, and diverse institutions of teaching art, this Europe was Jorn’s context.

Explorations in the World of Ceramics In the early 1930s, Asger Jorn started his artistic career in Denmark as a potter, only to head for Paris to become a painter.18 Visiting an exhibition of vessels decorated by Picasso in 1947 stoked his attraction to ceramics again.19 But even though some of his CoBrA-comrades worked with clay, it was only in 1953 that

1952) became, as it was called, ‘the bible’. See Garth Clark, ‘Pen and Kiln. A Brief Overview of Modern Ceramics and Critical Writing’ , in The Ceramics Reader, eds. Andrew Livingstone and Kevin Petrie, London, 2017, 3–9, 5. 16 For the renaissance of folk art in pottery (mingei) in Japan after World War II see Gisela Jahn, Japanische Keramik – Aufbruch im 20. Jahrhundert: die Bildung von Tradition, Moderne und Individualität 1900–1945, Weimar, 2014, 127–161. 17 In 1965 Lawrence Alloway organised the show ‘European Drawings’ in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and arranged that Asger Jorn was awarded with the Guggenheim Prize. Jorn withdrew and explained his withdrawal in several ways, for example in a letter to Alloway: ‘Dear Alloway. As I am no “european” artist, and as I do not accept the existens of any “european” art I do not want to expose as an “european” artist […]’ [emphasis in Jorn’s text; Jorn’s spelling], Letter, Asger Jorn to Lawrence Alloway, 29 October 1965, Breve til Alloway, Jorn Archives Silkeborg. See also Dirk Hildebrandt’s contribution in this book. 18 On Jorn’s career see the comprehensive biography of three volumes: Guy Atkins, 1) Jorn in Scandinavia 1930–1953, London, 1968; 2) (with the help of Troels Andersen) Asger Jorn, the Crucial Years 1954–1964, London, 1977; 3) Asger Jorn, the Final Years 1965–1973, London, 1980 and Andersen 2001. A deeper insight into his place in art history is provided in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014. 19 See Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn. The Avant-Garde Won’t Give up, Farnham, 2014, 115.

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Jorn began to practice this art form again.20 At the end of his stay in the sanatorium of Silkeborg, where his tuberculosis was cured, he started to paint vessels turned by a local potter. A contract with Silkeborg’s art museum, which was the basis for this collaboration, was probably an attempt of his hometown to support the artist and his family financially. Karen Kurczynski has convincingly argued that Jorn interpreted this job most fruitfully:21 He combined traditional forms with unusual decorations, constantly moving away from dishes for the daily use to reliefs or small sculptures that function like a picture puzzle. (Fig. 3) One still recognises where the shape of the object comes from, but at the same time, one is caught by the artwork, like with this untitled piece which reminds us of a decorated plate. Only the full plastic form, which can be seen as a limb disturbs this impression.

Fig. 3  Asger Jorn, Untitled, 1954. Glazed ceramic, 33 x 26,3 x 4,6 cm. Silkeborg, Museum Jorn. Photograph by © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

20 For an overview on Jorn’s ceramics see Exh. Cat. Silkeborg, Museum of Art and Karlsruhe, Badisches Landesmuseum 1991: ‘Asger Jorn. Keramik’ , eds. Troels Andersen et al., Silkeborg, 1991. 21 See Karen Kurczynski, ‘Asger Jorn, Popular Art, and the Kitsch Avant-Garde’ , in Kitsch. History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica Kjellmann-Chapin, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013, 64–102.

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The explicit intention to leave things to chance plays a prominent role in Jorn’s writings of those years.22 While spending his time with the potters near Silkeborg, he realised that he could combine art making and life with pottery. In an article published in the journal Dansk Kunsthaandværk spread throughout Scandinavia he argued that promoting ceramic workshops in the Midjutland-region of Silkeborg would help to regain an economic consolidation.23 Similar to his earlier writings that had also been published in journals on design and architecture, Jorn is again much more concerned with social life than with the aesthetic of forms. The purpose of his arguments is to demonstrate how society could become a kind of team. His role model for ‘new possibilities (nye muligheder)’24 is Vallauris which he describes as a peaceful and wealthy community. Although he mentions Picasso explicitly, Jorn’s focus is neither fixed on the artist in particular nor on his artwork. More importantly, his text presents the figure of the artist as one specialist among the other members of the community. His role – and to Jorn being an artist is indeed a gendered issue – is to suggest and communicate the best possibilities to unite people and the surrounding environment into an ecologically well-functioning ensemble by creating an optimum of form and function, a real living form.25 To Jorn, the specific structure by which people come together is a collaborative working process. This position goes back to Jorn reading Karl Marx and Marx’s idea of living labour as a concrete activity of a two folded nature, producing so-called use labour and an exchange value. As Marx himself explained in his Afterword to the Second German Edition of Capital (1873), this kind of materialism gives commodities a completely different status than in idealistic philosophy, which was so important for concepts of aesthetics 22 See Birtwistle 1986. 23 See Asger Jorn, ‘Indtryk af Silkeborgegnens pottemageri’ , in Dansk Kunsthandværk, 27:1, January 1954, 11–15. 24 Jorn 1954, 14. 25 This is one of the fundamental arguments in Jorn’s writings and one of its problems as well, because he is not able to solve the contradiction between the process-related living and the contoured and defined form. The phrase ‘levend (living)’ appears in different variants such as ‘levende kultur’ , ‘levende kunst’ , ‘levende form’ , ‘levend ornament’ and is always linked to social life. This figure of argumentation was already phrased in the unpublished typoscript ‘Levende kultur. Et studie i kulturens relativitet’ which Jorn later dated to 1945, see Asger Jorn, ‘Levende kultur. Et studie i kulturens relativitet’ , 1945, Manuskripter, Jorn Archives Silkeborg. Birtwistle 1986, passim pointed out that several parts were only added later. At the latest with ‘Magi og Skønne Kunster’ which Jorn had finished in 1948 and only published in 1971, the idea is fully formed. See also the book section ‘Hvad er social kunst’ in Asger Jorn, Magi og Skønne Kunster, Copenhagen, 1971, 108–109.

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and art in early modernism: ‘With me [Marx, B. L.], on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world, reflected by human mind, and translated into forms of thought.’26 Jorn picked up this concept, but made a very important change: Whereas Marx pleaded for a system of control to give living labour the right direction, Asger Jorn believed in self-managed experiments of all collaborators in a working process, allowing spontaneous ideas and giving way to uncontrollable creativity. It is materialised in the living form of ceramics as an unpredictable product, which by its material and craftsmanship is bound to the history of humankind, as well as to negotiations during collaboration. The use value and the exchange value of a living form thus lie in the capacity to make a self-defined and self-managed community become visible and explorable. In this concept, form is not a vessel, but more a strategy which became materialised.27 In the following years, the artist was given the chance to prove this theory in real life. When Jorn wrote the article on pottery in Dansk Kunsthaandværk, he had already left Denmark for Switzerland to complete his health-cure.28 During his sojourn in the Alps, he heard about the activities to revive the Bauhaus in Ulm and soon realised that the planned curriculum differed a lot from his ideas. He started to exchange letters with Max Bill, the appointed director of the new institution,29 as well as with Enrico Baj, the initiator of Movimento nucleare in Milan with whom he had come into contact in 1953. To Baj, he proposed the 26 Karl Marx, ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition’ (1873), http://mofopo.com/reading/Marx_Capital.pdf, 7 [3 February 2019]. 27 See also Nicola Pezolet, ‘Jorn, Max Bill, and Reconstruction Culture’ , in October, 141, Summer 2012, 86–110. He describes Jorn’s attitude as follows: ‘[…] not merely formal; it is what creates an aesthetic response that is subjective but also socially effective.’ Pezolet 2012, 106. 28 Jorn 1954 is signed with ‘Chésiêres november 1953’. 29 For the correspondence between Asger Jorn and Max Bill see Jorn Archives Silkeborg, ‘Breve fra Jorn til Bill’ and ‘Breve fra Bill til Jorn’. In his letter from 16 January 1954 Jorn stated for example: ‘[…] You are not allowed to use the name “Bauhaus” for your school, if you won’t allow the visual arts to have a right of its own and if you are not going to install a workshop for experiments in Ulm. For those you need to engage professors who are personalities and who are widely respected – least with artists of all kind of modern art. (Sie haben kein recht, den berühmten namen “Bauhaus” für ihre hochschule zu gebrauchen, wenn sie nicht in Ulm der bildkunst einen selbstständigen platz geben, und eine abteilung von freien bildnerischen experimenten aufrichten. Dafür müssen sie professoren einstellen, die selbstständige persönlichkeiten sind, und die für ihr künstlerisches schaffen (jedenfall zwischen modernen künstlern von allen tendenzen) anerkannt und respektiert sind […]’ [Jorn’s spelling and phrases.], Letter, Asger Jorn to Max Bill, 16 January 1954, Breve fra Jorn til Bill, Jorn Archives Silkeborg.

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founding of an alternative to the planned new Bauhaus, one which should have what Jorn called the magic of art. In his letters, he wrote about his plans of renting a house in Vallauris and his negotiations with real estate agents. Once he faced the costs, such a move would entail, however, his interests turned to Baj’s continued proposal to move to Northern Italy.30 In 1954, Jorn and his family finally arrived in Albisola, a small coastal town of the Mediterranean in Liguria. Its long tradition of pottery had already made it the home of some Futurists of the so-called second generation, when during the 1930s and 1940s the local Fabbrica Mazzotti had started to fire most of their sculptures made of clay and the tiles for their murals.31 With Jorn relaunching this practice, Albisola became not only a centre of avantgarde, but also a hot spot for a counter-culture in opposition to an art world, which tried to keep its distance from the field of politics. Some of his new contacts like Enrico Baj or Lucio Fontana looked back onto a career under fascism. This was the same with sculptor and poet Tullio Mazzotti, better known by his nom de plume Tullio di Albisola, who after the war was now running the ancient family ceramic workshop and became one of Jorn’s most important companions in developing a community based on the collaborative practice of ceramics. In Italy of those days, they had already tried to give the well-promoted folk culture a contemporary touch by making reference to kitsch and the real everyday life.32 How their views fitted with those of Jorn’s former CoBrA-comrades like Karel Appel, Constant and Christian Dotremont or their supporter Willem Sandberg, all of whom Jorn invited to Albisola, or to a refugee from Nazi occupation in France like Roberto Matta, also a frequent visitor to the small Ligurian town, or to Lawrence Alloway, promotor of popular art, is still left to further researches. However, Albisola became a laboratory where collaborations and the develop-

30 See the correspondence between Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj from 1954, published in Baj/Jorn. Lettres 1953–1961, ed. Musée d’art modern Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne 1989. 31 See Exh. Cat. Gallarate, Galleria d’Arte Moderna and Savona, Complesso Monumentale del Priamàr 2003: ‘Albisola futurista: la grande stagione degli anni Venti e Trenta’ , ed. Fabrizia Buzio Negri, Gallarate, 2003 and Exh. Cat. Genova, Wolfsoniana 2009/10: ‘Pubblicità e propaganda: ceramica e grafica futuriste’ , ed. Silvia Barisione, Milan, 2009. See also Monica Cioli, Il fascismo e la ‘sua’ arte: dottrina e istituzioni tra Futurismo e Novecento, Florence, 2011, 183–208. Gabriele Huber stresses the different situations for artists under fascism in Italy and in Germany. See Gabriele Huber, Enrico Baj und die künstlerischen Avantgarden 1945–1964, Berlin, 2003, 44. 32 See Huber 2003 and Anthony White, Lucio Fontana. Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2011.

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Fig. 4  Sitting together in Bar Testa in Albisola 1957: (clockwise) Asger Jorn, Lawrence Alloway, unknown person, Aligi Sassu, Lucio Fontana, Emilio Scanavino. From: Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn 1914–1973. Eine Biographie, trans. Irmelin Mai Hoffer and Reinald Nohal, Cologne, 2001, 334. Photograph by © Gunni Busck.

ment of a community that radically differed from the established art world with its venues like art galleries, museums, and exhibition halls could be improved.33 (Fig. 4) Jorn advanced to what he had dreamt of before: he became a communicator and an interpreter, also in a very literal sense. Due to his (and his wife Matie’s) language skills, he acted as a hub for ideas and activities for all the different people at Albisola (with their individual skills and opinions). By moving there with his wife and the children, living and working in the local environment, the idea of living form became indeed his form of life in everyday reality. We find his change of attitude documented in a text: the introduction to the catalogue of his show of ceramics in Copenhagen in 1955. Although he uses similar arguments as in the mentioned article on pottery in Silkeborg, written only a few 33 See Kurczynski 2014, 105–145.

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Fig. 5  In the Workshop Giuseppe Mazzotti, Albisola, August 1954: (from left to right) Corneille, potter Pippo Pescio, Roberto Matta, Asger Jorn, Aligi Sassu, Tullio d’Albisola, Emilio Scanavino. From: Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus, Asger Jorn in Italien, Werke in Keramik, Bronze und Marmor 1954–1972, Silkeborg, 2007, 24, Fig. 10. Photograph by © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg.

months before his arrival in Albisola, he has gained a certain sovereignty in the meantime. Living and working amidst a village with a running ceramic industry together with friends and colleagues who have joined him, (Fig. 5) he now writes in more general terms. He describes ceramics as a productive medium, excellent capable of interconnecting people as well as integrating heterogeneous cultures, and finding forms which demonstrate these social processes by the possibility of showing these experimental structures.34 Thus, ceramic does not only signify the object; the artifact is also a bearer of the social process which produced its form, its living form.

34 See Asger Jorn, ‘Oplysninger’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Kunstindustrimuseet 1955: ‘Asger Jorn keramik’ , Copenhagen, 1955, 2–4. As frequently with Jorn’s texts, this one was also reprinted. See Kunst, 3:4, December 1955, 124.

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Studying the objects from the 1955 exhibition in the Museum for Applied Arts – kunstindustri as it is termed in Denmark – it is obvious what made Jorn so enthusiastic: in the context of the ceramic industry of Albisola, he had discovered industrially produced pigments for the glazes. They give the pieces a much brighter, somehow tacky colour, very untypical to what was estimated in the art world up to this point, where references to so-called East Asian beauty were welcomed. Instead, the colourful and ‘unskilled’ glazes move Jorn’s ceramics closer to mass culture, distributed in trash-stores for tourists or in cheap department stores where people with low income buy their supplies. Lucio Fontana had already used this form of cultural cross-over in his clay sculptures by the end of the 1930s.35 Jorn, who met Fontana in Albisola, picked up that linkage. Much more than the elder artist he stressed its experimental character. The materialist outcome of the open processes in which he put his objects becomes apparent in forms only settled during the firing process and especially in unpredictable reactions of the unusual handling of the glazes. From Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, a studied chemist, Jorn learned how to combine the well-known with the unforeseeable. With ­Tullio Mazzotti he conducted experiments with industrial forms.36 The most prominent ceramic of that time, which shows all of these aspects at once, is the huge Aarhus mural, a monumental wall made of tiles for a high school in Aarhus, Denmark, which was planned and realised together with the workers of the Eliseo Salino’s workshop Ceramiche San Giorgio in Albisola. The collaborative artwork was installed in 1959, when Jorn’s interests had already found a new context in the Situationist International.37 Whereas some of his fellow artists from Albisola – like Gallizio and Constant or his brother Jørgen Nash – followed this shift from material to performing and to a more ‘immaterial’ culture, the craftsmen of Albisola remained in their workshops and continued their practices just like before. Their conditions of life and the scope of their actions differed a lot from those of the artists, however difficult and challenging their respective situations might have been.38 Still, this was not the end of Jorn’s career as a potter. 35 See Huber 2003, 93–95 and White 2011, 52–65. 36 See Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus, Asger Jorn in Italien, Werke in Keramik, Bronze und Marmor 1954–1972, Silkeborg, 2007, 43–45. 37 See Frances Stracey, Constructed Situations: A New History of Situationist International, London, 2004. 38 Although Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio joined Asger Jorn with Situationist International, he wrote a long and reproachful letter to his friend in which he expressed his lack of understanding of Jorn’s giving up the community of arts and crafts in Albisola. In his response Jorn bitterly criticised Gallizio for this intervention. See Jorn Archives Silkeborg, ‘Breve fra G. Pinot Gallizio

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Giving up ceramics for about ten years, he returned to Albisola in the late 1960s to produce freestyle pieces.39 Later, his interests lay more in the object than the setting of its production. Although in his books from the 1960s and the early 1970s he continued to promote his idea of communism made by art,40 Jorn had realised the utopian character of this concept. Whereas such projections were increasingly limited to his writings only, the Albisola project had been an attempt to make it a living reality.

A Question of Moral or Why Folk Art Matters Given the multitude of his œuvre, the sometimes controversial statements in his writings, and the zig-zags in the course of his life, Jorn is not an easy topic to follow. At the same time, it is precisely this complexity which provides us with the most fertile insights into several major discourses of postwar Europe. A sensitive protagonist like Jorn who as a jack-of-all-trades was active in many fields and constellations not only combines different subjects. He also exposes why and how certain issues are interconnected in the first place. In this context, Peter Shield gave a classification of Jorn’s writings, which is also helpful to navigate through his œuvre, writings, and activities: He compares them to the musical form of a rondo: ‘[…] you discover the structure by passing through the ever repeated and ever varied returns of the subject […].’41 The main motive in Jorn’s ‘rondo’ is the need to overcome the structures of capitalist society. Instead of favouring the interests of the market, all people should have a distinct voice. As all individuals are deeply locked into consumers’ culture, making them slaves to commercial interests only, Jorn calls for a breakthrough of this pattern. He was convinced that this could be obtained with the help of art.

til Jorn’. Leaving Albisola was part of a deeper change in Jorn’s life concerning his relationship to his wife and the children from his two marriages. It also documents that Jorn became bored with living in the touristic scenery while his international career picked up speed. Despite the friction Jorn kept supporting Gallizio’s art by buying his works and giving them to Silkeborg Museum of Art. See Lehmann-Brockhaus 2007. 39 See Lehmann-Brockhaus 2007, 104–135. 40 In particular: Naturens Orden (1962); Værdi og økonomi (1962); Ting og Polis (1964); Magi og Skønne Kunster (1971). See for a chronological survey of all his published books Bibliografi over Asger Jorns skrifter/A Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, ed. Per Hofman Hansen, Silkeborg, 1988, 44. 41 Peter Shield, ‘On Reading Jorn’ , in Hofman Hansen 1988, 35–38, 36.

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In his view, its special bond with nature should make art a tool to rediscover the true rhythms of life. Graham Birtwistle has demonstrated that the artist’s thoughts are deeply involved in traditions specific to Scandinavian culture as ongoing references to August Strindberg, Carl Jonas Love Almquist, and Emanuel Swedenborg suggest. They were all looking for ways to understand mystic not in the ways of metaphysics.42 In particular, Jorn is interested in their interpretation of a free spirit that ties the conditions of life to nature and sees art as a power to develop new directions of living. This formed the starting point for Jorn’s own artistic concept, which mainly took shape in the aftermath of World War II. To him, art – like nature – is a game played with colours, sounds, clay or words.43 These elements are tools to connect people and make them aware of their subjectivity. Therefore, it is the responsibility of art to nourish this disposition and not to slide off either into pure formalism nor the trap of success in the market. Thus, if art keeps a tension between attraction, value and a certain poetical mystery, it can determine the morals of society. As Jorn wrote: ‘[…] the poetical is not only the taste but the power, because it brings the beholder into the game. Therefore, the moral significance of art is much more important than the aesthetic one.’44 In his arguments, Jorn replaces the system of fine art with its genius-artist and a beautiful, overwhelming work of art with a concept in which all beholders are intuitively able to be touched by perfect forms, which are connected to lived realities.45 This is founded in material culture and the working process by and in which – following Jorn – art gains its ‘moral significance’.46 The daily need and use of objects and buildings give them the optimum design; thus form and image are influenced by tradition. Like the figure of the beholder, Jorn defines artworks by social aspects. Needless to say, that under these conditions his attitude differs from that of a postwar modernism, which classifies art according to visual appearance.47 To him, phenomena of the popular, which were labelled kitsch in the art world formed no

42 See Birtwistle 1986, 96. 43 See Jorn 1971, 29. 44 ‘[…] det poetiske i brødet ikke blot er smagen, men den kraft, som dette indgiver den modtagende person, at kunstens moralske betydning er større end dens æstetiske betydning.’ Jorn 1971, 18 [emphasis in original]. 45 See also Asger Jorn, ‘Sozialistische Heringe, realistische Ölfarbe und Volkskunst’ , in Cobra, 5, 1950 (German Edition), 4. 46 Jorn 1971, 17. 47 See also Brøns and Aagesen 2014, 30, especially footnote 31.

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taboos.48 In Asger Jorn’s mother tongue, the expression for popular art, folkelig kunst, carries the connection between people and art already in itself. The shaping of this connection is what lies in the focus of Jorn’s interest, not questions of style concerning folk art. With the Marxist category of labour, this concept integrates the life of ordinary people and their living conditions. It turns art into an issue of morality, the connectedness to popular art to one of politics, not of life-style. We recognise this kind of argumentation as an anti-capitalist critique, already well established during the early days of industrialised modernity. Indeed, Jorn read John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851) and was familiar with their interpretation by Henry van de Velde.49 He also worked through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels whom he criticised for their blindness, having only the history of Latinised traditions of culture and ideas in mind while neglecting most of the other facets of history and knowledge.50 In the 1980s, Graham Birtwistle could argue that Jorn did not study his sources of inspiration to the letter but worked in an eclectic manner.51 This takes us into a direction of the well stereotyped Jorn-image of the somehow confuse, but genius artist, reading some Marxist theory interpreted from a syndicalist point of view, a lot of literature from the Arts and Crafts Movement and its later offspring as well as references to Klee and Kandinsky, some Wilhelm Worringer here, some Herbert Read there. Today with the Jorn Archives in the back and contemporary participative movements in mind, we are able to classify anew. Sure, Jorn absorbed what was en vogue in his politically engaged art world circles during the 1940s and selected it for his theory of a peaceful communism based on collaborative and creative working processes. But, well read as he was, he selected his sources carefully, named his references, and worked at a most interesting, concise network, including tradition of material culture, political and economic theories, social utopias, and technology.52 From an artist’s point of view, with the tools of an artist he proposed forms of life that were meant to resist those infrastructures which run the risk to lose humanity out of sight. 48 See Kurczynski 2013. 49 See Asger Jorn, Pour la forme, Paris, 1958, especially Section 2 which is a translation of ‘Forma e struttura’ , first published in Eristica, 2, July 1956, a journal published by Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio as an activity of Movement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (M. I. B. I.). 50 In particular Jorn was inspired by Friedrich Engels, Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft (1882), and Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates (1884). See Jorn 1971 and for an analysis of the passages in question Birtwistle 1986, 222–229. 51 See Birtwistle 1986, 179, includig footnote 3. 52 See Dirk Hildebrandt’s contribution to this book.

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How well this fitted into a certain scene of artists who were engaged in reforming the postwar societies in Europe is highlighted by the first international meeting for ceramics in Albisola in the summer of 1954, the Incontro internazionale della ceramica. Like the mid-1950s journals Eristica, published by Giuseppe Pinot Gallizio, and Il Gesto, published by Enrico Baj, it was labeled as an activity of Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (M. I .B. I.), which was established in the ceramic-town and would later become part of the Situationist International. For a period of time, artists, craftsmen, gallerists, and art critics came together and exchanged their respective interests and knowledge, each of them being their own well-accepted agency. (Fig. 5) In his political theory of populism, Ernesto Laclau has argued that the popular is an empty sign and the people only an idea.53 Thus, the unstable fundaments of identity always need to be filled, and classifications are always to be negotiated. This happens, as Laclau explains, either on a rhetoric level or by specific activities. In collaborative working processes as M. I. B. I. in Albisola, the participants could actively experience how a community was shaped, and thus truly popular artworks were produced. The participants’ position was not passive, but instead highly engaged in the process of creation. With M. I. B. I. the empty sign became a densely filled, a lived reality. However constructive and relaxed the collaboration may have been, the photographs of this event also indicate a problem: the Albisola-project was a men’s world.54 While this particularity went well with the art scene of those days, the mixture of art and craft was still gendered and in particular ceramics – as all media of mass culture – were feminised. It needed more impulses than Jorn’s update of early anti-capitalist theories to resolve certain well-established structures of modernism. Still, it was also the time when in certain places in Europe there was the opportunity to improve these theories. What do we gain by looking at Asger Jorn’s ceramics and by analysing his concept of popular art in terms of rethinking postwar Europe by means of art history? At first sight, not a lot: We already know that we should not concentrate on metropolitan cities like Paris, Milan or Warsaw when reconstructing the history of postwar Europe, but that we need to look also at smaller places like Silkeborg or Albisola. We are also already aware of the importance of artists’ groups and their networking practices. We know that the art scene in Europe is diverse

53 See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York, NY, 2005. 54 Indeed, the problematic position of women was a legacy M. I. B. I. passed on to Situationist International. See Stracey 2011, 20.

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and that we need to outline this diversity. Digging deeper, we need to state critically that we still tend to isolate these observations from the social structure in postwar Europe, which at that time underwent fundamental reconstructions. Far too often we still assume an essential difference between art and politics. Asger Jorn, especially with his ceramics, is an instructive example to demonstrate the undividable entanglement between both fields and the importance of local formations within them instead. His activities allow us to take notice of a certain flexibility among elite cultures which also touches on the relationship between art and craft. Following World War II, this was by no means an outdated issue, but instead a very acute topic, not least because fascist ideologies had co-opted concepts of folk art for their own means. During the 1950s, artists tried to establish new approaches, free from fascist connotations on the one hand and open to integrate the conditions of industrialised production on the other. Bearing lively experiences of the war in mind, an artist like Jorn claimed political responsibility. Rethinking postwar Europe urges the art historian to look at social conditions while analysing forms. Yet, discussing Asger Jorn’s ceramics does not only provide new views on the immediate postwar decade. It also takes phenomena of participatory art, de-skilling or so-called trash art of later decades into a different perspective. For example, the activities of an artist like Joseph Beuys could be seen in this new light. This also and especially holds true to a project like FLUXUS and several of Beuys’ Aktionen of the late 1960s, performed with Henning Christiansen who was closely connected to the art and music scene in Denmark. And indeed, having Jorn’s ideas of folkelig kunst in mind, we arrive at a much more complex understanding of video art and its place in art history.

Bibliography Unpublished Texts Letter, Breve til Alloway, Asger Jorn to Lawrence Alloway, 29 October 1965, Jorn Archives, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Letter, Breve fra Jorn til Bill/Breve fra Bill til Jorn (Breve), Asger Jorn to Max Bill, 16 January 1954, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Letter, Breve fra G. Pinot Gallizio til Jorn, Jorn Archives, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Asger Jorn, ‘Levende kultur. Et studie i kulturens relativitet’ , 1945, Manuskripter, Jorn Archives, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Asger Jorn, Olddansk kunst (several versions), Manuskripter, Jorn Archives, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

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Published Texts Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft, Oxford and New York, NY, 2007. Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn 1914–1973. Eine Biographie, trans. Irmelin Mai Hoffer and Reinald Nohal, Cologne, 2001. Guy Atkins, Jorn in Scandinavia 1930–1953, London, 1968. Guy Atkins, with the help of Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn, the Crucial Years 1954–1964, London, 1977. Guy Atkins, Asger Jorn, the Final Years 1965–1973, London, 1980. Enrico Baj, ‘Préface’ , in Baj/Jorn, Lettres 1953–1961, ed. Musée d’art moderne Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne, 1989. Graham Birtwistle, Living Art – Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra (1946–1949), Utrecht, 1986. Regina Bittner and Renée Padt, eds. Handwerk wird modern. Vom Herstellen am Bauhaus, Bielefeld and Berlin, 2017. Helle Brøns and Dorthe Aagesen, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 12–47. Monica Cioli, Il fascismo e la ‘sua’ arte: dottrina e istituzioni tra Futurismo e Novecento, Flo­ rence, 2011. Garth Clark, ‘Pen and Kiln. A Brief Overview of Modern Ceramics and Critical Writing’ , in The Ceramics Reader, eds. Andrew Livingstone and Kevin Petrie, London, 2017, 3–9. Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014. Exh. Cat. Gallarate, Galleria d’Arte Moderna and Savona, Complesso Monumentale del Priamàr 2003: ‘Albisola futurista: la grande stagione degli anni Venti e Trenta’ , ed. Fabrizia Buzio Negri, Gallarate, 2003. Exh. Cat. Genova, Wolfsoniana 2009/10: ‘Pubblicità e propaganda: ceramica e grafica futuriste’ , ed. Silvia Barisione, Milan, 2009. Exh. Cat. ’s-Hertogenbosch, Stedelijk Museum Het Kruithuis 2006/07: ‘Avec Plaisir. Keramiek van Pablo Picasso’ , ed. Titus M. Eliëns, Zwolle, 2006. Exh. Cat. Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art 2018: ‘Picasso keramik’ , eds. Michael Juul Holm et al., Humlebæk, 2018. Exh. Cat. New York, Museum of Arts and Design 2016/17: ‘Voulkos: the Breakthrough Years’ , eds. Glenn Adamson et al., London, 2016. Exh. Cat. Silkeborg, Museum of Art and Karlsruhe, Badisches Landesmuseum 1991: ‘Asger Jorn. Keramik’ , eds. Troels Andersen et al., Silkeborg, 1991. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, ‘Introduction: Complexities of an Art Form’ , in Illuminating Video. An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, New York, NY, 1990. Per Hofman Hansen, ed. Bibliografi over Asger Jorns skrifter/A Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, Silkeborg, 1988. Gabriele Huber, Enrico Baj und die künstlerischen Avantgarden 1945–1964, Berlin, 2003. Gisela Jahn, Japanische Keramik – Aufbruch im 20. Jahrhundert: die Bildung von Tradition, Moderne und Individualität 1900–1945, Weimar, 2014. Jeffrey Jones, Studio Pottery in Britain 1900–2005, London, 2007. Asger Jorn, ‘Sozialistische Heringe, realistische Ölfarbe und Volkskunst’ , Cobra, 5, 1950 (German Edition), 4. Asger Jorn, ‘Indryk af Silkeborgegnens pottemageri’ , Dansk Kunsthandværk, 27:1, January 1954, 11–15.

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Asger Jorn, ‘Oplysninger’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Kunstindustrimuseet 1955: ‘Asger Jorn keramik’ , Copenhagen, 1955, 2–4. Asger Jorn, Pour la forme, Paris, 1958. Asger Jorn, Magi og Skønne Kunster, Copenhagen, 1971. Janet Koplos et al., eds. The Unexpected. Artists’ Ceramics of the 20 th Century, New York, NY, 1998. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Die Legende vom Künstler. Ein geschichtlicher Versuch, Frankfurt/ Main, 1995. Karen Kurczynski, ‘Asger Jorn, Popular Art, and the Kitsch Avant-Garde’ , in Kitsch. History, Theory, Practice, ed. Monica Kjellmann-Chapin, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013, 64–102. Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn. The Avant-Garde Won’t Give up, Farnham, 2014. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London and New York, NY, 2005. Ursula Lehmann-Brockhaus, Asger Jorn in Italien, Werke in Keramik, Bronze und Marmor 1954– 1972, Silkeborg, 2007. Karl Marx, ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition’ (1873), http://mofopo.com/reading/Marx_ Capital.pdf [3 February 2019]. Musée d’art modern Saint-Etienne, ed. Baj/Jorn, Lettres 1953–1961, Saint-Etienne, 1989. Nicola Pezolet, ‘Jorn, Max Bill, and Reconstruction Culture’ , October, 141, Summer 2012, 86–110. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, ‘Dibutadis. Die weibliche Kindheit der Zeichenkunst’ , Kritische Berichte, 24:4, 1996, 7–20. Peter Shield, ‘On Reading Jorn’ , in Bibliografi over Asger Jorns skrifter/A Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, ed. Per Hofman Hansen, Silkeborg, 1988, 35–38. Rose Slivka, ‘The New Ceramic Presence’ , Craft Horizons, 21:4, July/August 1961, 31–32, 36. Roberta Smith, ‘Paul Clay’ , New York Times, 30 June 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/ arts/design/paul-clay.html?_r=0 [9 September 2018]. Frances Stracey, Constructed Situations: A New History of Situationist International, London, 2004. Anthony White, Lucio Fontana. Between Utopia and Kitsch, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2011.

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Dirk Hildebrandt

The Politics of Asger Jorn’s Modification

Writing a Network of European Postwar Art Il [Asger Jorn, D. H.] parvint ainsi a formuler … la question fondamentale d’une nouvelle avant-garde: Ou et comment trouver un place pour l’artiste à ce stade de développement du monde?1

This essay proposes an investigation of Asger Jorn’s œuvre by way of reading it. Yet, an isolated discussion of the artist’s writings is not subject of my argument. In fact, discerning the role Jorn reserved for writing holds more than an analysis of merely one of the many fields, in which the artist felt at ease. To Jorn, writing was a decidedly artistic way to relate to and appropriate different forms of knowledge according to his interest. The practice of writing conveys a conception of art that stands apart from the traditional laws and categories of aesthetics, instead embracing life in its ethical dimensions.2 Yet, it would be misleading to suggest that Jorn followed an ‘eclectic’ manner of writing, as Graham Birtwistle has implied decades ago.3 On the contrary: While Jorn questioned the traditional separation of the arts from early on, his writing remained conceptually coher1 Guy Debord, ‘Dix Années d’Art Experimental. Jorn et son Rôle dans l’Invention théorique’ , in Asger Jorn, Pour la Forme. Ébauche d’une Méthodologie des Arts, Paris, 2001, 7. 2 See Asger Jorn, ‘Intime Banalitäten’ (1941), in Asger Jorn, Heringe in Acryl. Heftige Gedanken zu Kunst und Gesellschaft, ed. Roberto Ohrt, Hamburg, 1993, 13–20, 18. 3

Graham Birtwistle, Living Art – Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra (1946–1949), Utrecht, 1986, 179.

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ent in relation to his artistic practice as a whole.4 He was very careful in selecting his sources, and it took him a long time to conceptualise and actually build his texts. Even when already published, Jorn never considered his writerly work to be finished. In fact, his bibliography reveals how he continued to modify his texts, constantly adapting them to new and different contexts.5 Writing, as I will show, is Jorn’s principle to organise the ‘narrative’ of his art: in this sense, it is a form ‘at work.’6 To understand the complex structure of this type of writing, I am going to closely analyse Jorn’s strategies of developing a decidedly aesthetic methodology. The artist considered this method to be synonymous with an ‘anti-methodological methodology’7. Jorn thus trifles with scientific categories, with logical induction, and consistency, and may appear to deliberately escape analysis. Still, I assume that it is this contradictory pattern itself which becomes as much discernible in specific media as it allows to establish relations between them. Hence I propose to identify the common denominator of the artist’s work by way of his theoretical approach: Jorn’s writing, I attempt to show, produces a network. The concept’s longstanding tradition within arts and aesthetics is well established:8 the network has served to account for a whole ‘logic of connection’ in

4 As I will point out below, Jorn’s counteroffer to eclecticism is a ‘synthetical method of research’ , [‘eine Methode der synthetischen Forschungsweise’] applicable to ‘all cultural activities’ , see Asger Jorn, Plädoyer für die Form. Entwurf einer Methodologie der Kunst (1958), trans. Inge Leipold, Munich, 1990, 22. 5 This kind of an always unfinished Nachträglichkeit of Jorn’s texts presents the art historian with a strong ambivalence. While I will especially point to modification as Jorn’s artistic tool, I am leaving out the story of a corrupt authorship, initiated by institutions. This is implicit in Per Hofman Hansen’s bibliography of Asger Jorn’s writings. For example, Hofman calls attention to Jorn’s Gedanken eines Künstlers (1953) which is a book compiled of Jorn’s earlier texts like, among others, Held og hasard (1952) or Naturens orden (1962). Hofman describes it as ‘an impressive work for which Galerie van de Loo in Munich was responsible and of which extracts have often been reprinted’ , in A Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, ed. Per Hofman Hansen, Silkeborg, 1988, 132. 6

I am drawing on Caroline Levine’s understanding of narrative as ‘particularly helpful […] for the analysis of forms at work. What narrative form affords is a careful attention to the ways in which forms come together, and to what happens when and after they meet’ , Caroline Levine, Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton, NJ, 2015, 19.

7

Jorn 1990, 181.

8

On different histories of networks at the crossroads of art, art history and science, see Julia Gelshorn and Tristan Weddingen, ‘Das Netzwerk. Zu einem Denkbild in Kunst und Wissenschaft’ , in Grammatik der Kunstgeschichte. Sprachprobleme und Regelwerk im ‘Bild-Diskurs’ , eds. Hubert Locher and Peter J. Schneemann, Zurich, 2008, 54–77.

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the second half of the 20th century.9 Considering Jorn’s writing from this vantage point, I will retrace its practice in a double sense – as an underlying condition to his art, and as a praxis which relates to and affects the artistic, cultural, and political situation after the War. In short, my goal is to introduce writing as the tool of a ‘non-totalizing’ activity which produces the network of Jorn’s art and defines its politics.10 Visualising this network’s form through the artist writing, I am not only looking for inner coherence in a fraying œuvre. It is my intent to apply its narrative form to offer a new perspective on postwar Europe in the context of the challenges in the aftermath of World War II. Rethinking Europe through Jorn’s ingression into the aesthetic-political field equals entering the swaying ground of a pervasive modification.

The Artist as Modifier Lawrence Alloway’s work can serve as an insightful point of comparison to approach and define the different aspects of Jorn’s politics of modification. Attracting attention as a writing artist of the British Independent Group, the London-born Alloway became even more successful as a critic and curator when moving to New York in the 1960s. Since the 1950s, he had followed mass-cultural tendencies in the American art scene, while mainstream criticism still centred on the old heroic figures of the New York School. Furthermore, refusing to limit his thinking to the sphere of art, Alloway was committed to an ‘anthropological criticism’ , advocating women rights and standing up for a higher share of Black- and Latin American art in museums.11 However, as a curator of the Guggenheim Museum, he emphatically continued to represent an institution which was indebted to a canonical notion of Western high culture.12

  9 Noticing that it was ‘no longer just the form of networks but the connections between them,’ Mark Wigley describes a notion of network specific to the second half of the 20th century, Mark Wigley, ‘Network Fever’ , Grey Room, 4, 2001, 82–122, 94. 10 See ‘Gespräch zwischen Michel Foucault und Gilles Deleuze. Die Intellektuellen und die Macht’ , in Michel Foucault, Von der Subversion des Wissens, trans. and ed. Walter Seitter, Munich, 1974, 128–140, 131. 11 See Lawrence Alloway, ‘Anthropology and Art Criticism’ , Arts Magazine, 45:4, 1971, 22–23. 12 ‘[D]eeply opposed to any exclusionary ethos’ , Alloway has been called ‘a pluralist, and an old-fashioned political liberal as well’ , Richard Kalina, ‘Imagining the Present. Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic’ , in Lawrence Alloway. Imagining the Present. Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, ed. Richard Kalina, London and New York, NY, 2006, 1–30, 3.

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Alloway’s various activities and positions escaped clear-cut categories and made him acknowledge, then, the complexity of a present which cannot be explained according to a biased logic.13 Reacting to this complexity, Alloway introduced the concept of a network, which takes the art world as a starting point to relate art to political, social and economic spheres.14 His writing produces an immaterial form of knowledge, which connects different kinds of networks. Interestingly, Alloway directly associated these networked structures to the creative role of artists. Reflecting on the conditions of European postwar art, he attributed particular responsibility to the artistic profession: he saw the artists’ historical consciousness as a base for renewing a culture which found itself in a state of increasing fragmentation.15 To meet the respective profile, Alloway required the artist to act as a ‘modifier’.16 Against this backdrop, modifying implies the capacity of an artistic rethinking, evolving at the interface of theory and praxis. The idea of an artist as modifier resounds in Asger Jorn’s work in several ways. (Fig. 1) The title of his well-known series Modifications is a telling factor in itself. Their starting material is cheap paintings bought on local flea markets. Jorn defamiliarises their pictorial logic by adding colour patterns to their surfaces. In one case, he makes an additional reference to The Ugly Duckling, a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, whose protagonist does not fit given aesthetic and societal norms.17 In accord with the painterly technique, the allusion to a literary source lends new context to the image. For one thing, Modifications questions painting’s properties by overwriting the conditions of its traditional imagery. But to do so, Jorn does not merely draw on painting’s own means. Referencing Andersen’s fairy tale indicates an exemplary interest in painting as a narrative form. Arthistorians usually interpret the Modifications as the artist’s very own, painterly version of a détournement, hence applying the key concept of the Situationist International to Jorn’s work. The French term implies the misuse or distortion of

13 See Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘The Present Complex. Lawrence Alloway and the Currency of Museums’ , in Lucy Bradnock et al., eds. Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator, Los Angeles, CA, 2015, 166–187. 14 See his collected writings on the topic in Lawrence Alloway, Network: Art and the Complex Present, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984. 15 See Lawrence Alloway, ‘Art in Western Europe: The Postwar Years, 1945–1955’ (1978), in Alloway 1984, 51. 16 ‘Every artist is a modifier of artists of the preceding generation, whether motivated by a desire to cherish or destroy,’ in Alloway 1984, 43. 17 See Jorn 1993, 15.

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Fig. 1  Asger Jorn, The Disquieting Duck (Le canard inquietante), 1959. Oil on canvas, 53 x 64,5 cm. Silkeborg, Museum Jorn. From: Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn. Eine Biographie, trans. Irmelin Mai Hoffer and Reinald Nohal, Cologne, 2001, 339.

‘any elements, no matter where they are taken from’18 aside from its normal course or purpose. While Guy Debord described détournement as a means to divert and finally destroy all traditional forms of culture, Jorn’s Modifications operate within its discursive and material conditions. Karen Kurczynski has pointed out that Jorn’s series is ‘derived from all manner of European painting genres’19, and Hal Foster has presented his ‘calculated deskilling’ of artistic tradition to prepare the ground 18 Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (1956), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb, Berkeley, CA, 2006, 14–21, 15. 19 See Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avantgarde Won’t Give up, Farnham, 2014, 176.

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for reclaiming painting’s autonomy after its abuse by the National Socialists.20 Even though both scholars are talking about different phases in Jorn’s career, they implicitly hint at modification as a concept, designated to reorient the structure of artistic, historical and political discourse. To take modification into account as a narrative form, I am relying on Lawrence Alloway’s presentation of Jorn as an artist whose aesthetic strategies kept up with the challenges of the historical situation in particular ways.21 Jorn’s programmatic networking qualities meet Alloway’s interest in the problems of postwar Europe. In fact, Jorn indicates a categorical resistance to histories of art which rely on the concept of the Nation State. As a founding member of several artistic groups throughout Europe, he influences and inspires several others in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany, invents collaborative techniques, literally breeding mashes between people, art and craft, political thinking, and artistic production.22 Network structures, as immaterial entities, hence shape Jorn’s artistic trajectory. Yet, they also appear in a very material sense in his artworks. Rather than aiming at a belle peinture, as Alloway has observed, his pictures expose a ‘mutual interest in process’ while indicating a ‘pungent sense of cyclic life’.23 The different ways in which this liveliness moves across Jorn’s paintings give us an idea of how picture and context, material and immaterial structures, art and politics pervade one another. In this sense, it is writing which puts the narrative of a network into operation which transfers modernism’s teleological movement to a colourful zigzag. Writing – understood as a method and an epistemological model – exemplifies the power of art to establish a narrative form. It runs across painted surfaces, transcends medial and cultural boundaries, always emerging at the junction of artistic, historical, institutional, and political hubs. Rethinking Europe through Asger Jorn’s work, as will become clear, implies reading its status quo by means of modification.

20 See Hal Foster, ‘Creaturely Cobra’ , October, 141, Summer 2012, 4–21, 9. 21 Among Wols, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, Alloway held Jorn to be one of the very few artists to be well aware of the challenges brought about by the postwar period: ‘Most artists continued their personal project detached from or helpless before the issues of war, with only a few exceptions’ , see Alloway 1978, 37. 22 See Barbara Lange’s contribution in this volume. 23 Alloway 1978, 45 and 48.

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At documenta 2 Following the trajectory of Jorn’s narrative implies addressing European modernism right on. Even though its otherness distances us from notorious centres like Paris and takes us to places like Silkeborg or Albisola, the artist’s work has to be comprehended as the result of a thorough reflection on European modernism. During his educational years, Jorn encountered modernism’s leading protagonists first hand. He headed to Paris for an apprenticeship with Wassily Kandinsky, worked in the studios of Fernand Léger and Le Corbusier. A look at the proceedings of documenta 2 helps to locate the relationship Jorn’s work holds to this well-known story in a more precise manner. While his paintings were actually exhibited alongside the pre-war vanguard art of, among many others, Kandinsky, Léger, Picasso, and Henri Matisse, the Museum Fridericianum offered a stage for a very contemporary event. In 1959, it exhibited one of the first direct encounters between European and American postwar vanguard art. A container from overseas had arrived only shortly before the opening; packed and shipped to the documenta by Porter McCray, curator of the Museum of Modern Art. It comprised a selection of artworks by the famous New York School. The container’s content made Haftmann and Bode change their original plan to exhibiting most of the European artists on the top floor of the Fridericianum. One could (and did) interpret this process as a symbol for a new cultural hegemony of American art over the well-established European discourse surrounding the Ecole de Paris. Yet the curators counteracted this reading of documenta’s exhibition strategies by introducing a discourse which allowed them to re-establish a somewhat different perspective and balance. On a conceptual level, they drew from the idea of Abstraktion als Weltsprache (abstraction as world language)24 to reject the notion of national or transcontinental territories of art as being in perpetual conflict with each other. Taking a closer look at Fridericianum’s main hall, it is fairly obvious to which extent Haftmann and Bode complemented this concept of a universal equilibrium. (Fig. 2) Consciously evading Cold War opposition lines, they let works by the American Jackson Pollock and the German Wilhelm Nay face each other on the front walls, while making the pictures of the Englishman Ben Nicholson and the naturalised Frenchman Hans Hartung gaze at each other on its sides. These

24 See Werner Haftmann, ‘Einführung’ , in Exh. Cat. Kassel, Museum Fridericianum 1959: ‘II. documenta ’59. Kunst nach 1945. Internationale Ausstellung. Malerei’ , ed. Eduard Trier, Vol. 1, Cologne, 1959, 12–19, 13–14.

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Fig. 2  Display of Number 32 by Jackson Pollock at the documenta 2, Kassel 1959. From: Das Kunstwerk, 13:2–3, 1959–1960, n. p.

crossing visual axes prompted a balance, not only in terms of art, but emblematically also among Germany and its former occupation forces. Asger Jorn was featured with three paintings in Kassel.25 One of them, A Soul for Sale, came into view just above a staircase which lead to the first floor. (Fig. 3) The positioning at this spatial threshold, subconsciously underlined the art-work’s intent as a challenge to the formalist universalism of a world language. The hope invested in abstraction’s Esperanto is confused by the depiction of a grimly looking and smoking creature, eluting from the contingency of scriptural hatchings and gestural colour gradients. Already at the level of representation, the painting

25 The German titles are: Ausverkauf einer Seele, Winterkraut, Im Niemandsland, all 1958, see Trier 1959, 210.

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Fig. 3  Asger Jorn, A Soul for Sale (Ausverkauf einer Seele), 1958. Oil with sand on canvas, 200 x 250 cm. New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. From: Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 217.

complicates the stable frontiers of abstraction and figuration whose confrontation dominated the early discourses of postwar art. In the context of documenta’s display, Jorn’s painting marks the threshold between European Informel and American abstract expressionism – a discursive field usually organised along opposing categories, like spontaneity versus composition.26 To discern the specificity of Jorn’s work, I argue, it is as much necessary to escape simple polarization as avoiding the egalitarian leveling proposed by Bode and Haftmann.

26 Inspite of his lifelong refusal to travel and exhibit in the United States, as well as his famous dismissal of the Guggenheim Award which should be awarded to him in 1964, his account for anti-American gestures, his knowledge, and appreciation of the achievements of the American modernists is undeniable.

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The resistance of A Soul for Sale against being subsumed to the established categories of historical discourse challenges common tropes of art history. It already does so on the level of representation. The picture’s surface offers itself as an archive, presenting the means, tokens, and techniques of different types of abstraction. Tache, grid, gesture, colour stains, hastily drawn lines, hatchings, and scratchings are juxtaposed as discrete elements  – side by side, carefully selected and cautiously applied to appear as autonomous entities. Jorn employs the emblematic vocabulary of different abstractions to present his picture as a networked form. What Alloway calls a ‘mutual interest in process’ , complies with the ongoing process of an invisible line running across the picture’s surface. As much as it relates its disparate elements, it sets in motion a game of symbolic representations, which prevents the attribution of a style specific to the picture. Following the line’s multidirectional course, one can grasp Jorn’s picture as being designed according to the method of modification. To further elaborate on the specificity of this method, I am going to trace it to the structural level of writing. Reading Jorn’s art in and through his theoretical reflections guides the way to connect the elements and nodes of Jorn’s network to its own contemporary moment in more specific ways. As I shall show, modification does not create clear-cut statements but allows to scrutinize, to challenge and possibly to invert the present moment. Accordingly, Jorn does not insist on Europe as a self-evident entity functioning according to the logic of already known operations. Europe is not merely a cultural-historical concept, but rather question that continuously remains to be asked: ‘Is Europe, once more, capable of reorienting itself to reach another level?’27

Detourned Painting To locate the genesis of the different ways in which modification is at work in Jorn’s writing, Guy Debord offers himself as a comparative figure. Debord, Jorn’s friend and co-founder of the infamous Situationist International, diagnosed our societies as being reduced to a spectacle. He famously introduces the notion of spectacle in terms of a ‘societal relationship between people that is mediated by images’28. To inverse this imagistic form, which replaces real with mediated relationships,

27 Jorn 1990, 210. 28 Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York, NY, 1995, 12.

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Debord sets up a whole economy based on the situationist guiding principle I have already introduced as détournement: therefore, inversing the course of the Society of Spectacle means to re-write it in the first place.29 In S. I.’s early days, Debord and Jorn found common ground in discussing the value of art for such ends. Yet, the history of the group is characterised by a continuous loss of belief in the project of an ‘aesthetic revolution’ of society.30 The political activists around Debord purported that art merely offered a ‘framework’ whose performative destruction was intended to provide the energy for the ultimate ‘situation’ , by which they quite simply meant revolution.31 Within a couple of years, the situationist belief in art as a ‘new cultural theater of operations’32 had become a counterrevolutionary obstacle on the way to a truly real experience of everyday life. On the contrary, Jorn held a strong belief in the power of art. Even though he never stopped sharing political ideas with Debord, it was this belief which made him leave the S.I. in 1961.33 In any case, it is the aesthetic outcome of the situationist project which left its traces in the discourses of art history. The main part of the first retrospective exhibition on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou in 1989 was indeed devoted to the group’s artistic heritage.34 Including artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Jamie Reed, it even suggested that the international discourse on institutional critique could be traced to situationist roots. S.I.’s ongoing conflict about the role of art is documented by a booklet which accompanied the exhibition. (Fig. 4) It contains not only the founding manifesto of the S.I., written by Guy Debord, but also a short text preceding it. The author of this second text, Detourned Painting, is indeed Asger Jorn. The text, in fact, was originally conceived on the occasion of the very first exhibition of his Modifications at the Rive Gauche Gallery in Paris in 1959. 29 See Jörn Etzold, Die melancholische Revolution des Guy-Ernest Debord. Allegorien des Spektakels, Zurich, 2009, 195–207. 30 See Raymond Spiteri, ‘From Unitary Urbanism to the Society of Spectacle. The Situationist Aesthetic Revolution’ , in Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, ed. Aleš Erjavec, Durham, 2015, 178–214. 31 See Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art’ (1963), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 160–166, 164. 32 Guy Debord, ‘One more Try if you Want to be Situationists’ (1957), in McDonough 2002, 51– 59, 51. 33 On the historical circumstances, see ‘The Fourth SI Conference in London (Excerpts)’ , in Knabb 2006, 171–174. 34 See Elisabeth Sussmann, ed. On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time. The Situationist International – 1957–1972, Boston, MA, 1991.

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Fig. 4  Cover of the booklet accompanying the exhibition Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unite de temps, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989.

In Jorn the curators had chosen a suitable representative for the Situationist’s artistic side. Then again, the artist had been writing extensively on the relationship of art and politics since the very beginning of his career. Already in the 1930s, Jorn was impressed and strongly influenced by the Danish syndicalist Christian Christensen who introduced him both to the Danish Communist Party and Marxist theory. Still, as I will discuss below, Jorn was increasingly critical of Marxist’s denial of art and culture. Indeed, he was convinced that blending political and artistic action had to be avoided. His idea to develop a decidedly artistic value to approach politics resonates with the argument presented in his text to be published in the exhibition booklet in 1989: ‘Detournement is a game born out of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorise is able to create new values.’35 Art’s worth is resistant to a commodification which operates according

35 See accompanying booklet to the first exhibition of the Situationist International in Paris: Exh. Cat. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou 1989: ‘Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unite de temps. À propos de l’Internationale Situationniste 1957–1972’ , ed.

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to the logics of input and outcome. Devalorization equals the capacity to unfold a whole economy built on the belief in art’s relative independence with regard to market’s laws of efficiency. Jorn’s approach is indicative of a vanguard strategy but it also holds a strong belief in the long-established concept of artistic autonomy: for Jorn, being a painter and aiming at the dissolution of art’s boundaries go hand in hand. Usually, the Modifications are taken to offer a material translation to this simultaneity. Presenting them as ‘monuments to […] bad painting’ ,36 the artist intended to connect long-established dichotomies of high and low, avant-gardism and history. Re-using mass-produced paintings in a decidedly highbrow connection – which may eventually lead to being exhibited at documenta – may appear as a curious attempt to evacuate their original context, if only to reintroduce them to this very same context again. What appears to be a zero-sum game, then, is directed towards making art’s classical autonomy appear porous, if only to reinvent it once more: if art is a tool to redefine itself, it may as well make itself work in the social sphere.37 A passage from Detourned Painting helps to determine this dizzying movement in a more precise way. Reflecting on the Modifications, Jorn writes: The object, reality, or presence takes on value only as an agent of becoming. But it is impossible to establish a future without a past. The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past. He who possesses the past of a phenomenon also possesses the sources of its becoming. Europe will continue to be the source of modern development. Here, the only problem is to know who should have the right to the sacrifices and to the relinquishments of this past, that is, who will inherit the futurist power.38 The argument itself is performed as a movement whose threads point into opposing directions. They do so in a way which equals the rapid change between timely registers: the continuity of ‘becoming’ is instantly countered by a ‘past’ , without which

Martine Reyss, Paris, 1989, n. p. I am quoting from the English translation of Asger Jorn’s ‘Detourned Painting’ (1959) by Thomas Y. Levin, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/painting.html [29 November2018]. 36 Exh. Cat. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou 1989, n. p. 37 Assuming that their support material was ‘likely a work made in an assembly-line-process’ , Karen Kurczynski helps shifting the emphasis to a social share of Jorn’s production, see Kurczynski 2014, 175. 38 Jorn 1959.

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its forward movement seems unthinkable. This recollection is in turn countered by an avant-gardist classic: the impossibility of a ‘future’ without ‘sacrificing the past’. The fourth and final change of direction takes the movement back to the beginning, if only to, once again, ask for the ‘agent’ to complete it for the sake of ‘Europe’. As the argument accelerates, it shifts through different registers. Starting with a general remark on the different forms and degrees in which art is equipped with the power to enact change, we are coming to understand Jorn’s social agenda. It is disclosed in the very performance of reading. In the end, the reader is forced to connect these remarks to the historical situation of Europe. But this connection is not based in the principle of causality. Instead, it emerges from the multi-directionality of the argument itself: By performing its different threads, Jorn refrains from explaining a singular point of view but gives shape to a complex of interrelated problems. While his writing visualises this complexity, it still propells the claim that art is the tool to support a society’s future. On the one hand, the form of Jorn’s writing addresses a structural level, in which the idea of a political value of art is inscribed in different ways. On the other hand, my close reading reveals the connection between a trans-historical belief in art’s vanguard potential and the specific historical conditions under which this potential is actualised. If Jorn gives a diagnosis about the situation of a continent whose postwar constitution remains a task to be realised, his writing describes this task from a decidedly artistic perspective: the reinvention of Europe is an ongoing cultural process of negotiation.

Writing Modification. Concerning Form This perspective on Europe allows for a deeper understanding of Jorn’s conception of art as a tool to negotiate politics. As we have already seen with regard to the Modifications, the basis for his artistic politics is located in art’s own traditions. In this respect, scholars have convincingly postulated a close relationship of archival function and artistic strategy within Jorn’s paintings.39 Yet, as I shall show, the work of the modifying artist is not limited to the perpetuation of its own histo39 Claire Gilman underlines that the Modifications evacuate meaning but still offer ‘a kind of archive of the avant-garde’ which is inserted into their very surfaces, see Claire Gilman, ‘Bad Painting? Asger Jorn’s Modifications’ , in Exh. Cat. Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig 2008: ‘Bad Painting – Good Art’ , eds. Eva Badura-Triska et al., Cologne, 2008, 152– 163, 156.

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ries: the politics of modification also depend on the dissolution of historical specificity: Jorn aims at the creation of a narrative, which transcends art in favour of the timeless realm of form. To establish a basis for my thesis, I am relying on Steven Harris who suggests an analogy between painting’s relation to history and the artist’s way of writing, characterising it as an active dispute with, not against, other discourses and practices: ‘it is difficult […] to conceive of Jorn’s writings or his artistic practice apart from its active engagement with the work and thought of others, as a model for the kind of active readers, viewers and citizens that he wished to see.’40 To offer a writerly model to the emancipation of ‘readers, viewers and citizens’ presupposes an author who invests in strong political claims. Never did a direct link between Jorn’s interest in art and politics become more explicit than in his Value and Economy (1961) – an essay of book-length that opens with an analysis and critique of Marxism.41 Jorn’s critique evolves around the assumption that its social theory is built upon a ‘denial of art and culture’.42 His disputes of actual politics and economy lead him to reinsert art as a social praxis into the discourse of Marxist theory, and transgress its traditional field to enter the realm of a revolutionary work based in culture: ‘The goal is this: That as wide circles as possible enter actively into cultural work – each person in his own field – so that this is not talk of cultural work for the people but by the people.’43 On a methodological level, Jorn’s essay accounts for the emancipatory qualities of art, assigning it a ‘counter-­value.’44 But how exactly do these politics function as a praxis of art? To follow the counter-value in Jorn’s theory is to trace it to his argument’s orientation – an orientation already indicated in the preliminary remarks of Value and Economy: ‘The Marxism which is criticised here is what made Marx maintain that he was not a Marxist […]. This has meant that the communist movement is dissolving. I go in for progress, but in order to progress one must be able to

40 Steven Harris, ‘Asger Jorn In, On and About Surrealism’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 50–71, 50. 41 Actually, Jorn presents his rereading of Marxism in the context of many different publications. For example, it interpenetrates Pour la Forme as a whole, see Jorn 1990, esp. 109–116. 42 See Asger Jorn, ‘Value and Economy. Critique of Political Economy and the Exploitation of the Unique’ (1961), in Natural Order and Other Texts. Reconstructing Philosophy from the Artist’s Viewpoint, ed. Peter Shield, Burlington, VT, 2002, 119–217, 127. 43 Jorn 1961, 211 [emphasis in quotation]. 44 Jorn 1961, 184.

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regress.’45 To get a closer look at Jorn’s ambitions to turn Marxism inside out demands for an analysis of the ways in which he actually redirects its arguments. In this regard, his account for a ‘new and precise concept of value’ points to a decisive direction within his own project: grounding art in discourse, Jorn aims at the introduction of art as a theoretical model to assign it the status of a ‘science.’46 I have already proposed a formalist reading of the ways in which the act of modification sets this re-orientation in motion in Jorn’s Detourned Painting. Still, this formalism detracts from the political implications, the ‘counter-value’ of the method. Considering the political perspective on Jorn’s writing requires a contextualization with regard to its sources: The politics of modification are closely related to the politics of discourse. Jorn’s strategies are based in academic discourse, but without ever making use of its proper methods and rules. His whole argument in books like Concerning Form, first published in French in 1958, unfolds along the lines of discursive currents from the fields of philosophy, art history, and other humanities as well as from the natural sciences.47 Concerning Form offers a good example of how Jorn’s approach to the arguments of other authors can best be understood as a kind of détournement, a modified form in itself.48 By way of re-writing them, they become part of his own artistic processes. Modification, then, does not seek to destroy knowledge in its given forms. On the contrary, it aims at re-assembling it: modification creates new form. But what kind of form is implied here, and how does it emerge from Jorn’s writing? The artist’s goal is to redefine form, and to describe modification not as a merely formalist entity, as detached from the social and political spheres of life. Introducing form as a networked, living, and social entity, Jorn aims at supplying

45 Jorn 1961, 121. 46 Jorn considered his theoretical work to ‘lay down the foundations of modern art science’ , see Helle Brøns and Dorthe Aagesen, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014, 12–47, 40. 47 It is represented by thinkers like Henry van de Velde, John Ruskin, John Dewey, Max Stirner, William Godwin, Hebert Read, Henri Focillon and Niels Bohr, to name at least a few authors, Jorn discusses at length in Jorn 1990. 48 In his Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, Per Hofman Hansen shows how Pour la Forme as ‘one of his main works’ not only aggregates papers and essays written in former years but guarantees its contents ‘liveliness by distributing it to many different texts and books’ , Hofman Hansen 1988, 32.

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it with critical force.49 To do so in a convincing way, he turns to the context of academic and, more precisely, scientific knowledge. Several sources in Concerning Form even indicate that his whole project operates in full recognition of a paradigm shift in the understanding of form that emerged in the sciences around 1900. Since then, as Eva Geulen has shown, form is no longer understood as ‘fixed or fixated gestalt’ , but begins to refer to processes – form-processes as such.50 Against this backdrop, Jorn’s idea of art’s ‘dynamic and vital forms’51 more specifically relates to Henri Focillon’s introduction of artistic forms as ‘mobile entities’ that contain the ‘ability to engender so great a diversity of shapes.’52 Reading Focillon, Jorn must have felt a relationship with the Frenchman which is directly linked to the question of Europe. Together with Paul Valéry Focillon led the so-called Permanent Committee on Arts and Letters throughout the 1930s. Initiating conversations and open letters on themes like The Future of Culture or The Future of the European Spirit, the aim of this group of intellectuals was to politicise cultural profession to critically monitor current events. In the same manner, the arrival of World War II led Focillon to ‘an art history of the world in real time’ , as Molly Nesbit has coined: Focusing on ‘the churches of Spain, especially those close to the raging battles of the Spanish Civil War’53, the art historian became increasingly concerned with political topicalities. But how were these political implications envisioned to operate in terms of form? As much as doing art history ‘in real time’ to Focillon became a way to politicise his academic profession, form appears as his tool to analyse and present art’s own moveable politics in this context. According to the art historian’s theory of living forms, which he mainly developed in his Vie des formes (1934), artistic forms travel through history as living entities that keep manifesting themselves in different shapes:54 every single work of art appears as a historical point in a supra-­

49 I am reading Jorn’s approach through recent scholarly treatments of form that intend to use its patterns as methodological tools ‘to rethink the historical workings of political power and the relations between politics and aesthetics’ , Levine 2015, xiii. 50 ‘fixierte oder fixierende Gestalt’ , Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager, Cologne, 2016, 12. 51 Jorn 1990, 136. Jorn points out that ‘every form created by man, is in a state of perpetual change’ , Jorn 1990, 27. 52 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan, New York, NY, 1992, 6. 53 Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History of Art, New York, NY, 2013, 59. 54 ‘[T]he life of forms’ , as Cornelia Zumbusch puts it, ‘resides in its potential productivity and capacity to give birth to new types of images’ , Cornelia Zumbusch, The Life of Forms. Art and Nature in Walter Benjamin and Henri Focillon, Aisthesis, 8:2, 2015, 117–132, 120.

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historical chain of images.55 Form, then, is not a fixed gestalt but a continuous process of relating historical contexts and discourses to produce a connective tissue, a timeless and immutable network. In 1941, Focillon himself notes: ‘We are looking to unlock the network, to animate it, to make forces play in it which – if opposed in principle – will find not their pacification but a sovereign state, there in the drama of the work of art.’56 Obviously, there is more to the relationship of network and the work of art than the analogy of formlessness versus form. Calling the artwork a ‘sovereign state’ , Focillon defines the politics of the artwork’s form: while in the open and animated structure of ‘the network’ opposing forces constantly keep playing against each other, the work of art functions as the entity in which this activity and energy manifest themselves. Focillon’s elaborations on the conditions of the life of a form help to further qualify the aesthetic structures of the implied politics. These are ultimately grounded in the self-sufficiency of artistic forms as opposed to organic forms,57 and their capacity to reproduce themselves: ‘Forms obey their own rules – rules that are inherent in the forms themselves or better, in the regions of the mind where they are located and centered.’58 Asger Jorn, by citing from Focillon’s book, underlines the idea of self-referentiality in his own concept of form: ‘Le signe signifie, alors que la forme se signifie.’ [The sign signifies, while form signifies itself, D. H.]59 Against this backdrop, Jorn’s active engagement with Focillon’s work – to take up Harris’ wording again – becomes a fundament for the understanding of his own conception of forms as living entities, mediating political and social values of art: ‘The transformation of objects into subjects, that is the artistic activity.’60 This thought parallels the idea of modification, of turning Marxist politics inside out, as developed in Jorn’s Value and Economy. Calling into being objects as actors supplied with subjective force, necessitates a modification, a redefinition of art.

55 See Focillon 1992, 6. 56 Henri Focillon, ‘L’histoire de l’art et la vie de l’esprit’ (1941), in Relire Focillon. Principes et théories d’histoire de l’art, ed. Matthias Waschek, Paris, 1998, 171–183, 183: ‘Nous cherchons à desserrer le réseau, à l’animer, à y faire jouer des forces qui, opposées en principe, trouvent, non leur apaisement, mais leur état souverain, dans le drame de l’œuvre d’art.’ 57 ‘Organic life designs spirals, orbs, meanders and stars […]. [T]he instant these shapes invade the space and the materials specific to art, they acquire an entirely new value and give rise to entirely new systems’ , Focillon 1992, 3. 58 Focillon 1992, 10. 59 Jorn 2001, 131; ‘Das Zeichen bedeutet etwas, während die Form sich selbst bedeutet,’ Jorn 1990, 183. 60 Jorn 1990, 189.

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The freedom of artistic forms, their freedom to act according to their own rules, is grounded in a classical concept of autonomy which presents itself as the very basis of art’s involvement in political issues. Art’s autonomy allows it to establish a ‘philosophy of freedom’61, as Focillon explains. This philosophy, as we have learned, relies on the ability of artistic forms to animate networks – networks operating by their own timeless rules, yet being determined by the opposing forces of historical and social realities. I do not mean to extract a social theory from Concerning Form that could ultimately serve as a model to design human societies according to some kind of modified version of Marxism. In fact, Focillon’s example shows how Jorn’s political ambitions remain emphatically related to the sphere of aesthetics and questions of methodology. Analysing Jorn’s use of scientific sources in Concerning Form makes it fairly clear: modification is the methodological tool of an artist writing to claim art’s status as a science – a political science grounded in history but armed with the timeless force to produce and connect networks. I would like to conclude my reading by getting back to the structural analogy of writing and painting to see Jorn’s artistic science addressing decidedly political ends. In this respect, it is insightful to take a closer look at his Verlust der Mitte, another painting Jorn finished in 1958. (Fig. 5) Its figural imagery as well as its title draws attention to specific reference and discursive politics the artist was deeply involved with. I am referring to Hans Sedlmayr’s book of the same name, Verlust der Mitte (Art in Crisis: The Lost Center) that the art historian had already published in 1948, and which was widely read and discussed controversially throughout the 1950s. Not least at the Darmstädter Gespräche in 1952, where the former NSDAP-member Sedlmayr – 1952 was not 1968 – reminded interlocutors and audience of his book’s method: the so-termed ‘critical forms.’62 To Sedlmayr, ‘cricital forms’ signify a newness that barely allows for an alignment with past ideas and concepts. This radicality the author pairs with rarity: ‘Among the forms under which an epoch finds actual expression, it is exceedingly rare to find any that are really radically new. By far the majority of the forms which any

61 That is Focillon’s conclusion to his very last cycle of conferences – a conference never held due to health issues. In the preparatory notes he records: ‘Une philosophie de la liberté’ and, evoking a networked structure, he adds ‘plus la mêlée est complexe, plus nous sommes libres’,  Focillon 1998 (1941), 183. 62 See the discussions collected in Hans Gerhard Evers, ed. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit. Darmstädter Gespräche, Darmstadt, 1950. See also Regine Heß’ contribution to this book.

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Fig. 5  Asger Jorn, Loss of Center (Verlust der Mitte), 1958. Oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm. Ghent, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. From: Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 218.

age develops are merely readaptions of old ones […].’63 His prominent example is Etienne Louis Boullée’s plan for a cenotaph to Newton whose spherical form Sedlmayr dismisses and appreciates at the same time: ‘A nonsenical idea’ , he insinuates, ‘needs by no means be wholly without significance.’64 It has a diagnostic value. The sphere, Sedlmayr elaborates, finds itself in a state of ‘groundlessness’ , reflecting the

63 Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis. The Lost Center, Chicago, IL, 1958, 3; ‘Unter den Formen, in denen eine Epoche sich im Felde der Kunst verkörpert, sind radikal neue immer sehr selten; weitaus die meisten Formen einer Zeit werden durch Umformungen älterer erzeugt’ , in Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, Frankfurt/Main, 1955, 9 [emphasis in text]. 64 Sedlmayr 1958, 4; ‘Aber eine unsinnige Idee muß nicht notwendig auch sinnlos sein.’ Sedlmayr 1955, 9 [emphasis in text].

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situation of man since the French Revolution.65 As much as Boullée’s sphere has lost touch with the ground, man’s steadiness has been lost. Therefore, man no longer constitutes the benchmark for art and science.66 Sedlmayr describes the famous notion of an epoch determined by a loss of centre, a loss that, from the author’s perspective, heavily reverberates in 20th century abstract art.67 Jorn’s Verlust der Mitte holds more than an iconographical or formalist connection to Sedlmayr’s book. The latter’s ideas are crucial for an understanding of Jorn’s painting as a networked form. In fact, the painting was created in Munich, where Sedlmayr was still holding his professorship at the time.68 In addition, the ideas and presence of the arthistorian plays a role in Jorn’s book Concerning Form – certainly, the book’s endeavour cannot be grasped without the provocation that the title readily displays. To be pour la forme, to advocate form in the 1950s, is to address a frowned-upon terminology. Even if neither Sedlmayr’s name nor his theory is mentioned a single time in Concerning Form, its content can be read as a modification of the art historian’s arguments. Jorn counters Sedlmayr’s Verfallsgeschichte in many ways. For example, the artist inverses Sedlmayr’s fundamental assumption that the history of art and art itself is centred around man as an anthropological invariability, defining it as a human science. To Jorn, as we have already learned, man is but one subject next to objects whose agency sets the ‘dynamism of form’ in motion. Jorn’s plea for the value of abstract art’s autonomy counters Sedlmayr’s idea to discredit this autonomy as the ‘descent of art into irrationality, its decay into construction, photography and dream.’69 And if Jorn comes to the conclusion that ‘a singular form has to develop to a typical phenomenon’ to gain ‘collective meaning’ ,70 we may 65 Sedlmayr 1955, 9. 66 In this sense, Thomas Zaunschirm has argued pointedly, Sedlmayr uses the anorganic form of the sphere as a tool to give an in-depth analysis of his epoch, see Thomas Zaunschirm, ‘Methoden der Kunstgeschichte. Zu drei Vorträgen von Hans Sedlmayr’ , Salzburger Museumsblätter, 36:2, 1975, 15. 67 Nevertheless, Sedlmayr assigns abstract art a diagnostic value, reflecting the disturbed relationship of man and himself, nature, time and religion, see Sedlmayr 1955, 132. 68 See Birgit Jooss, ‘Das Ringen um die Moderne in München’ , in Aufbrüche. Galerie van de Loo: Die ersten Jahre – 1957–1966, eds. Marie-José van de Loo and Selima Niggl, Munich, 2007, 8–31. Even after teaching in Munich until 1964, Sedlmayr kept working as a professor of art history at the University Salzburg until 1969. I am grateful to Christian Fuhrmeister for his remarks on Sedlmayr. 69 Sedlmayr 1955, 134. 70 ‘Damit eine Form kollektive Bedeutung erlangt, muß sie sich von einem einmaligen zu einem typischen Phänomen entwickeln’ , Jorn 1990, 28.

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finally understand his interest in Focillon’s life of mobile forms as a way to react to and directly oppose to the strongly individualising cases of Sedlmayr’s ‘critical forms’. His is a political act performed by means of an artistic methodology that is decidedly invested into the necessity of changing directions in postwar Europe.

Conclusion My attempt was to show that it is impossible to only look at Asger Jorn’s art. It has to be read according to its different directionalities. The method of writing networks not only attests to a discursive structure in his artistic production but also introduces a certain artistry into discourse. In this sense, paintings like A Soul for Sale or Verlust der Mitte are documents written through historical and academic discourses. They are junctions of different contexts both on an ‘invisible’ and visible level, indicated in the seismographic colour-lines on their very surfaces. The blobs, the explicit and latent figurations, the impasto of Jorn’s inking, the hatched lines – all these features constitute the vocabulary of an artistic science processed in his art’s network, its art historical, geographical, activist, and political dimensions. The network is the result of a writerly practice – of writing modification. We learn from Jorn that there is no such thing as art’s politics in an ontological sense. In terms of art, politics are only conceivable as form, for example as a network that constantly challenges its sources.71 Art, as Lawrence Alloway taught us, is a starting point to alter the mechanisms of economic and social spheres. Modification spreads to all areas of Jorn’s activities, unfolding its formative potential in different ways. Foremost, it comes into play as a decidedly artistic method: ‘The method of art is rationalised incoherence, an ostensive order.’72 As it multiplies its ‘non-totalizing’ networks, modification keeps mocking, scrutinising, and analysing the structures of power. It acts according to the force of theory, a theoretical praxis.73

71 This echoes the qualities that Bruno Latour’s attributes to networks. They allow to refuse metaphysical assumptions about causality, and instead trace the points of contact between different agents, see Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-­Network Theory, Oxford, 2005, 8. 72 Jorn 1990, 185. 73 ‘Praxis manages to lead from one theoretical point to another; and theory relays one praxis to another. A theory cannot be developed without encountering a wall, and a praxis is needed to break through.’ (‘Diese Überleitung von einem theoretischen Punkt zum anderen wird von

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Jorn’s artistic methodology allows for a decidedly less categorical perspective on postwar Europe. ‘Europe will continue to be the source of modern development […]. I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art.’74 Looking back to the convergence of art and politics in postwar Europe through Jorn’s network does not offer a European recovery program at all. The confusing sense of direction that the politics of modification put into play does not provide us with belated solutions to historical problems. Moreover, looking forward from an art historical perspective, we come to understand that Jorn’s view on Europe departs from analysing the problem of art’s detachment from politics. Aiming at the modification of longstanding norms and categories, such as the common understandings of painting, art’s social role, the concept of autonomy, and the idea of national styles, implies a rethinking of naturalised borders, rules, and habits. In this sense, the open form of his network, Jorn’s Europe avant la lettre, keeps haunting us until today. It remains a question to be asked: ‘Is Europe, once more, capable of reorienting itself to reach another level?’75

Bibliography Lawrence Alloway, ‘Anthropology and Art Criticism’ , Arts Magazine, 45:4, 1971, 22–23. Lawrence Alloway, Network: Art and the Complex Present, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984. Lawrence Alloway, ‘Art in Western Europe: The Postwar Years, 1945–1955’ , in Lawrence Alloway, Network. Art and the Complex Present, Ann Arbor, MI, 1984, 37–52. Graham Birtwistle, Living Art – Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra (1946–1949), Utrecht, 1986. Helle Brøns and Dorthe Aagesen, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 12–47. Julia Bryan-Wilson, ‘The Present Complex. Lawrence Alloway and the Currency of Museums’ , in Lawrence Alloway: Critic and Curator, eds. Lucy Bradnocket et al., Los Angeles, CA, 2015, 166–187. Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle (1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York, NY, 1995. Guy Debord, ‘Dix années d’art expérimental. Jorn et son rôle dans l’invention théorique’ , in Asger Jorn, Pour la Forme. Ébauche d’une méthodologie des arts, Paris, 2001, 7. Guy Debord, ‘One more Try if you Want to be Situationists’ (1957), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 51–59.

der Praxis bewerkstelligt; die Theorie hinwiederum (sic!) verbindet eine Praxis mit einer anderen. Keine Theorie kann sich entwickeln, ohne auf eine Mauer zu stoßen, welche nur von der Praxis durchstoßen werden kann.’), Foucault 1974, 128. 74 Jorn 1959. 75 Jorn 1990, 210.

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Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art’ (1963), in Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 160–166. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, ‘A User’s Guide to Détournement’ (1956), in Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA, 2006, 14–21. Jörn Etzold, Die melancholische Revolution des Guy-Ernest Debord. Allegorien des Spektakels, Zurich, 2009. Exh. Cat. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou 1989: ‘Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps. À propos de l’Internationale Situationniste 1957–1972’ , ed. Martine Reyss, Paris, 1989. Hans Gerhard Evers, ed. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit. Darmstädter Gespräche, Darmstadt, 1950. Exh. Cat. Kassel, Museum Fridericianum 1959: ‘II. documenta ’59. Kunst nach 1945. Internationale Ausstellung. Malerei’ , ed. Eduard Trier, Cologne, 1959. Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014. Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan, New York, NY, 1992. Henri Focillon, ‘L’histoire de l’art et la vie de l’esprit’ (1941), in Relire Focillon. Principes et théories d’histoire de l’art, ed. Matthias Waschek, Paris, 1998, 171–183. Hal Foster, ‘Creaturely Cobra’ , October, 141, Summer 2012, 4–21. Michel Foucault, Von der Subversion des Wissens, trans. and ed. Walter Seitter, Munich, 1974. Julia Gelshorn and Tristan Weddingen, ‘Das Netzwerk. Zu einem Denkbild in Kunst und Wissenschaft’ , in Grammatik der Kunstgeschichte. Sprachprobleme und Regelwerk im ‘Bild-Diskurs’ , eds. Hubert Locher and Peter J. Schneemann, Zurich, 2008, 54–77. Eva Geulen, Aus dem Leben der Form. Goethes Morphologie und die Nager, Cologne, 2016. Claire Gilman, ‘Bad Painting? Asger Jorn’s Modifications’ , in Exh. Cat. Vienna, Museum Mo­derne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig 2008: ‘Bad Painting – Good Art’ , eds. Eva Badura-Triska et al., Cologne, 2008, 152–163. Werner Haftmann, ‘Einführung’ , in Exh. Cat. Kassel, Museum Fridericianum 1959: ‘II. documenta ’59. Kunst nach 1945. Internationale Ausstellung. Malerei’ , ed. Eduard Trier, Cologne, 1959, 12–19. Per Hofman Hansen, ed. A Bibliography of Asger Jorn’s Writings, Silkeborg, 1988. Steven Harris, ‘Asger Jorn in, on and about Surrealism’ , in Exh. Cat. Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst 2014: ‘Asger Jorn. The Restless Rebel’ , ed. Sven Bjerkhof, Munich et al., 2014, 50–71. Birgit Jooss, ‘Das Ringen um die Moderne in München’ , in Aufbrüche. Galerie van de Loo: Die ersten Jahre – 1957–1966, eds. Marie-José van de Loo and Selima Niggl, Munich, 2007. Asger Jorn, Plädoyer für die Form. Entwurf einer Methodologie der Kunst (1958), trans. Inge Leipold, Munich, 1990. Asger Jorn, ‘Intime Banalitäten’ , in Heringe in Acryl. Heftige Gedanken zu Kunst und Gesellschaft, ed. Roberto Ohrt, Hamburg, 1993, 13–20. Asger Jorn, ‘Detourned Painting’ (1959), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/­sionline/ si/painting.html [29 November 2018]. Asger Jorn, Value and Economy. Critique of Political Economy and the Exploitation of the Unique, in Natural Order and other Texts. Reconstructing Philosophy from the Artist’s Viewpoint, ed. Peter Shield, Burlington, VT, 2002, 119–217. Richard Kalina, ed. Lawrence Alloway. Imagining the Present. Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, London and New York, NY, 2006. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA, 2006. Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give up, Farnham, 2014.

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Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford, 2005. Caroline Levine, Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton, NJ, 2015. Tom McDonough, ed. Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents, Cambridge, MA, 2002. Molly Nesbit, The Pragmatism in the History of Art, New York, NY, 2013. Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, Frankfurt/Main, 1955. Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis. The Lost Center, Chicago, IL, 1958. Raymond Spiteri, ‘From Unitary Urbanism to the Society of Spectacle. The Situationist Aesthetic Revolution’ , in Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Movements, ed. Aleš Erjavec, Durham, 2015, 178–214. Elisabeth Sussman, ed. On the Passage of a few People through a rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, Boston, MA, 1991. Mark Wigley, ‘Network Fever’ , Grey Room, 4, 2001, 82–122. Thomas Zaunschirm, ‘Methoden der Kunstgeschichte. Zu drei Vorträgen von Hans Sedlmayr’ , Salz­ burger Museumsblätter, 36:2, 1975. Cornelia Zumbusch, The Life of Forms. Art and Nature in Walter Benjamin and Henri Focillon, Aisthesis, 8:2, 2015, 117–132.

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Agata Pietrasik

Imagining the Future of Postwar Europe

An International Artist Settlement in Mauthausen Marian Bogusz was a Polish painter and sculptor, an organiser of numerous artistic events and founder of many galleries and groups. His multi-layered practice is strongly marked by his remarkable resilience, and a belief in, and faithfulness to, the artistic utopia of modernism. Bogusz was a survivor of the concentration camp in Mauthausen and became one of the most active members of the Polish postwar art scene, committed to vigorously propagating modern art beyond the closed circles of gallery goers. The following essay discusses one of the artist’s least known projects, namely the design of an International Artist Settlement which he undertook while still in Mauthausen ca. 1944, and places it in the context of succeeding postwar European modernism, as well as continuing broader questions regarding the European remembrance of the Second World War.

Modernist Houses as Sites of Dwelling Throughout his practice, Marian Bogusz created a rich body of work, very diverse in its character, ranging from painting to public sculpture. A list of his undertakings, given their unstable historical and political context, is truly impressive: already in 1947 Bogusz was a founding member of the Club of Young Artists and Scientists in Warsaw, which inaugurated its program with the first exhibition of modern art in postwar Poland; in 1955 he started Grupa55, uniting artists opposing the officially

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promoted doctrine of the socialist realism; later he co-founded Galeria Krzywe Koło (Crooked Wheel Gallery) in 1956, in Warsaw. Furthermore Bogusz initiated many innovative and alternative artistic gatherings such as a Pleinair in Osieki (1963) and the Lublin Plastic Art Meetings (1976–78), both of which are considered crucial in having advanced the development of modern art under communism in Poland.1 As suggested by even this brief overview, Bogusz’s œuvre is multifaceted, it consists of significant material artefacts but equally importantly much of his work is intangible, leaving few traces other than forged connections and opportunities created (for himself and others). Between these polar aspects of the artist’s œuvre are his many unrealised projects, which he put forward during symposiums or proposed for particular institutions, and which exist today only as descriptions and drawings. Nevertheless, despite the evident formal variety of expression, it is possible to name the fundamental concerns binding Bogusz’s diverse enterprises. One such key issue is the propagation of modern art – making it available and comprehensible for all people regardless of their social position. A second issue is indirectly connected to the first and can be broadly described as a concern for housing, or dwelling, but understood under specific conditions. As will become evident in the following analysis of Bogusz’s project, the artist understood home not only as a concrete, material form, but also as an ephemeral, conceptual space, which gathers people and objects, provides shelter (whether as a material structure or a symbolic framework). A home in Bogusz’s conception functions then not as an enclosure but as an opening, it creates a premise for further dissemination of given ideas. Such a broad understanding of the notion of home allows us to bring together not only his numerous unrealised designs for homes, but also artistic initiatives ranging from establishing gallery spaces to making symposiums, both of which can be understood as a sort of ‘temporary housing’ for given artistic conceptions, facilitating their dissemination. In the context of the war and early postwar the notions of house and home are particularly charged, since they play an instrumental role in both political and artistic discourses. During the war homes are evoked as symbols of nation and selfhood, keepers of individual, and collective identities. Thus their mass destruction was later named as domicide.2 The figure of home also plays a key role in 1

For an overview of the practice of Marian Bogusz see Exh. Cat. Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu 1982: ‘Marian Bogusz 1920–1980 – wystawa monograficzna’ , eds. Maria Dąbrowska and Irena Moderska, Poznan, 1982; Bożena Kowalska, Bogusz, artysta, animator, Pleszew, 2007.

2

See Madeline G. Levine, ‘Home Loss in Wartime Literature. A Typology of Images’ , in Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. Bożena Shallcross, Athens, OH, 2002, 97–116.

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many testimonies from the wartime, it serves as a vehicle for memory, allows for the recalling of a past before the war and consequently the possibility to retain a sense of a selfhood and belonging, in spite of the most depriving circumstances.3 Subsequently, in the postwar period the issue of housing and home design became a major topic for numerous architectural debates.4 Homes were to be redesigned in the aftermath of their destruction in order to build solid foundations for a better life in future. For this reason the process of rebuilding was discussed not only as a pressing, practical necessity but also as a vital ideological project and one of the most important battlefields of the Cold War.5

The International Artist Settlement in Mauthausen These issues, located at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, are strongly manifested in the project for an International Artist Settlement (Międzynarodowe Osiedle Twórcow) devised in Mauthausen by Bogusz in collaboration with fellow prisoner and artist Emmanuel Muñoz, circa 1944. The two artists developed this idea when imagining a potential future for the site after the war, according to their plans the settlement was to be built on the actual site of Mauthausen. The concept of the design is hence rooted in wartime experience, and yet it is simultaneously oriented towards the future. Documentation of the original project is ephemeral, as the idea is only represented in some 15 drawings made by Bogusz shortly after the liberation of the camp, and these are known today only from their photographic reproductions.6 (Figs. 1–3) The most comprehensive presentation of the project to date was published decades after the war in 1979, on the occasion of artist’s exhibition in Rawa,

3

See Jacek Leociak and Marta Janczewska, ‘Dom’ , in Literatura Polska Wobec Zagłady (1939– 1968), ed. Sławomir Buryła, Warsaw, 2012, 84–123.

4

See John Pendlebury et al., eds. Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction: Creating the Modern Townscape, London, 2014.

5

See Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, London, 2002, 25–151; Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Minneapolis, MN, 2013; Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe, London, 2013; Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, Minneapolis, MN, and London 2010.

6

The drawings are deposed in the Archive of the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Institut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Warszawie).

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Fig. 1  Marian Bogusz, Concert Hall, Project for the International Artists Settlement in Maut­ hausen 1943–1945, ca. 1944. Photograph, 6 x 9 cm. Collection of the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Photograph by W. Wolny.

a small town in central Poland.7 Bogusz attempted to realise there an analogical undertaking and to build an art colony destined for young artists. Due to a failure in negotiations with local authorities, these plans also remained unrealised, but while presenting the project for Rawa, Bogusz harked back to the genealogy of the idea, namely the conception of an artist settlement from Mauthausen. The catalogue of the Rawa exhibition featured a few reproductions of the plans for selected buildings in the International Artists Settlement, as well as an extensive description of the project in the form of a letter to Emmanuel Muñoz, which also confirms that the idea presented in the drawings was strongly rooted in conversations between the two artists. Regrettably, the biography of Muños, who most

7

See Exh. Cat. Rawa, Galeria Autorska ‘Za’ 1979: ‘Marian Bogusz: wizje architektoniczne 1944– 1945, projekt osiedla artystów. W miesiącu pamięci narodowej’ , Rawa, 1979.

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Agata Pietrasik

Fig. 2  Marian Bogusz, House for Writers and Critics, Project for the International Artists Settle­ ment in Mauthausen 1943–1945, ca. 1944. Photograph, 6 x 9 cm. Collection of the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Photograph by W. Wolny.

likely did not survive the camp, remains unknown. Mauthausen was a place for the imprisonment of many Spanish Republicans, mainly from Catalonia, and it is then highly probable that Muñoz was one of them.8 The question of whether he was trained as an artist, an architect, or was simply an amateur of the arts, is unresolved. The two of them were likely however to have shared political views,

8

See David Wingeate Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube, London, 2000.

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Fig. 3  Marian Bogusz, House for Musicians, Project for the International Artists Settlement in Mauthausen 1943–1945, ca. 1944. From: Exh. Cat. Rawa, Galeria Autorska ‘Za’ 1979: ‘Marian Bogusz: Wizje architektoniczne 1944–1945, projekt osiedla artystów. W miesiącu pamięci narodowej’ , Rawa, 1979, 12.

since Bogusz himself was a left-wing artist, who together with other like-minded prisoners even formed an underground resistance unit in the camp.9 More is known about Marian Bogusz’s imprisonment in Mauthausen. The artist was transferred there in February 1941, having previously been a prisoner in the Fort VII prison in Poznan. He was 21 years old and had already studied art in the State School of Arts and Crafts in Poznan. During his first year in Mauthausen Bogusz worked in the stone quarry, but from 1942 onward he was assigned to a much less precarious job in the camp administration’s Building Office (Baubüro). Here, among other tasks, he was to work on technical drawings of the camp’s

9

See Janina Jaworska, ‘Nie Wszystek Umrę …’: Twórczość plastyczna Polaków w hitlerowskich więzieniach i obozach koncentracyjnych 1939–1945, Warsaw, 1975, 65.

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planned extensions. In 1943 the Nazis organised an arts and crafts workshop in the camp, where they placed several artists, including Bogusz.10 During official working hours the artists were manufacturing objects ordered by the camp’s staff but, having access to materials, they were also able to carry out their own work illegally, and make artwork for themselves. Bogusz undertook many such activities and connected with other artists in the camp, such as the Pole Zbigniew Dłubak and the Czech Zbynek Sekal, with whom he even organised clandestine exhibitions of drawings.11 Bogusz’s letter to Muñoz is the only extensive description of the envisaged settlement. At the same time it also provides testimony as to how crucial art was to the survival of these prisoners in Mauthausen. Discussions about art provided a rupture in the cruel monotony of the camp, where time was punctured only by exhausting roll calls and repetitive acts of violence. Perhaps this is why Bogusz in the letter compares their secret artistic practice to a protective layer, ‘armour’ which defended the artists from falling into a state of hopelessness, defined by Bogusz as a ‘submissive numbness’ , an inhuman condition, whose only horizon was death.12 To have an inner life meant to retain humanity. Thus the idea of creating the settlement encapsulated deep beliefs in the meaning of art, to which we can see Bogusz remained faithful to after the end of the war. It was furthermore deeply rooted in a universalism and humanism which the artist explained in the Rawa catalogue in the following manner: ‘[…] in our idea of the international artist settlement, therein was human, humanity – a thought about everybody.’13 At the core of the project of the settlement then lay the conviction of the absolute necessity of art and creativity in human life as a way of preserving humanity in mankind, and this belief was substantiated by the artists’ experience in Mauthausen. The utopian project dreamt of by Bogusz and Muñoz also had very concrete underpinnings. Bogusz specified the location of the settlement in the above mentioned letter and envisaged the imagined architecture in detail, depicting it in plans 10 Bogusz gave his account about the time in Mauthausen to the Polish art historian Janina Jaworska, who published one of the first books dealing with practices of Polish artists in concentration camps; see Jaworska 1975, 65–67. 11 For a more detailed account of their practice see Agata Pietrasik, ‘Radość nowych konstrukcji w czasach bezdomności. Twórczość Mariana Bogusza w latach czterdziestych’ , Miejsce: Studia nad sztuką i architekturą polską XX i XXI wieku, 1, 2015, 24–43. 12 See Bogusz 1979, 6–7. 13 ‘[…] bo w naszej ideii międzynarodowego osiedla twórców był człowiek, ludzkość – myśl o wszystkich.’ Bogusz 1979, 6.

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and drawings, a few of which were also published in the catalogue. The colony was to be built in the so-called ‘Russenlager’ , a part of the camp built between 1941 and 1942, where Soviet prisoners of war were initially interned, hence its name. Later these buildings were transformed into an infirmary, a place where the most vulnerable, weak prisoners were kept and where ‘selections’ for the gas chamber took place frequently.14 The barracks of the ‘Russenlager’ were located south from the buildings of the main camp, in the proximity of granite quarries. The quarries had played a crucial role in the choice of a location for the camp. Stone extracted through the forced labour of the camp’s prisoners was supplied to the company Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (German Soil and Stone Work).15 The architectural demands of the Nazi regime, including plans to rebuild the biggest German cities and to create large scale, monumental buildings, were among the main factors for a huge demand for granite during the wartime. This was the main reason why the camp in Mauthausen was established so early on, already in 1938, immediately after the Anschluss. Prisoners who were forced to work in the quarries were subjected to exhausting work for eleven hours a day and had to extract the blocks of granite and carry them on their backs. They were regularly beaten under the slightest pretext. The survival of Jewish prisoners was especially precarious, they received the most brutal punishments, including being pushed by the SS or Kapos over the edge of the quarry. The proximity of the planned artist’s settlement to this particular place, the site of the camp’s most extreme exploitation, is therefore one of the most striking features of the project, also because it stands in a stark contrast to the contemporary paradigm of preservation of the sites of former concentration camps. However when the project is considered in its contemporaneous context, the ideas envisaged by Bogusz appear less surprising than when seen from a present-day perspective. A similar project, imagining the postwar future of a concentration camp, was undertaken in Auschwitz-Birkenau, also circa 1944, when the underground Polish resistance movement commissioned the artist Jerzy Brand-

14 See Michel Fabréguet, ‘Entwicklung und Veränderung der Funktionen des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen 1938–1945’ , in Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur, eds. Ulrich Herbert et al., Frankfurt/Main, 2002, 193–215. 15 See Hans Marsalek, Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, Vienna, 1974, 2–3; Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: the SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, London, 2002, 21–22.

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huber with the task to create a future monument of Auschwitz.16 Brandhuber was an active artist before the war and a graduate of the Art Academy in Krakow. The artist envisaged a massive chimney (around 60–70 meters tall) as the memorial for Auschwitz. It would be built on the grounds of Birkenau, the part of the camp where the gas chambers and crematoria were located. An eternal flame was to burn on the top of the chimney, in the memory of all the people murdered in the camp. Brandhuber envisaged that the whole structure would be surrounded by millions of stone blocks, each symbolising a dead inmate. Furthermore, the artist postulated that the monument should be maintained by former SS members. In other words, he imagined a future for the camp in which former Nazis would be obliged to work at the site on a daily basis, and hence those who had been perpetrators would be forced to convey the memory of their victims. Such an idea extends the notion of a monument beyond representation of the dead, making it a platform for the enacting of justice. This performative aspect of the project enables the site to resist any potential future petrification, and this line of thinking is not far removed from that articulated by Bogusz, in wanting to facilitate ongoing creative production in Mauthausen. What differs in the project conceived by Bogusz and Muñoz from the analogous designs created behind the barbed wire of other concentration camps, lies thus not in the fact that the artists dared to imagine a utopian future for a dystopian place, but rather that the character of that utopia was particular, namely modernist. The architectural drawings made by Bogusz circa 1944 present clearly that the modernist style of the imagined architecture was a vital part of the project’s conceptual framework. Modernism was here proposed as way of reorganising space and relationships between people, objects and nature, advocating emancipation and freedom. These modernist qualities of the architecture are visible in all the drawings reproduced in the catalogue of the above mentioned 1979 exhibition which present propositions for the houses of musicians and writers. (Fig. 2 and 3) The buildings have characteristic, oblong shapes, rounded edges and tall windows opening onto the surrounding natural environment. Their design is dynamic, and renders their form similar to a river gently meandering through a forest. Apart from the three drawings published in this catalogue there exist also a further dozen photographs of the original 1944 sketches depicting the International Artist Settlement, currently 16 Jadwiga Rawecka and Marek Rawecki, ‘Antynomie pamięci’ , in Biuletyn Informacyjny Państwowego Muzeum Oświęcim-Brzezinka i Fundacji Pamięci Ofiar Obozu Zagłady Auschwitz-­ Birkenau PRO MEMORIA, 7, 1997, 13–14; Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, Athens, OH, 2003, 150–152.

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preserved in the archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. One of these drawings presents a vision for an art gallery and exhibition rooms, it depicts a tall building with roof terraces and spacious interiors. Interestingly, the model artworks depicted inside the exhibition room are mainly large scale, abstract paintings, which can be interpreted as testament to the fact that a particular type of artistic practice was on the artist’s mind while working on the project. The sketches also reveal another crucial aspect of the overall design, namely its emphasis on a connection to the surroundings. For example, the house designed for musical performances has a large terrace roof which is pierced with three holes that have trees growing up through them. The design for a house for writers and critics, likewise, incorporates plants as a part of its rooftop garden, it also employs natural materials, such as wooden logs, which serve as columns. The project as envisaged by Bogusz is not only a modernist utopia, but also an ecological one. In the 1979 catalogue letter to Muñoz the artist stated that the settlement should be a car free zone and that human movement between the different levels of the establishment should be facilitated through the use of specially designed conveyor belts.17 The architecture proposed by Bogusz is thus punctured with different interventions: large bay windows, glass roofs, openings and gaps, so that the outside of a building can penetrate the inside, creating a porous space. The openness of the architecture towards the neighbouring flora is pushed to the extent of incorporating it into the actual structure of the buildings. This can be also interpreted as an alertness and responsiveness to the location, which is the concentration camp. Looking at the project from this angle, the surrounding nature can be considered as a part of a landscape that has emerged after genocide and its lush revival would always be in relation to the history of the site, just as the creative process of the artists who would inhabit the planned settlement, would always connected to the site and the activity that took place there.

Humanistic Form over Functionalism The architecture designed by Bogusz employs the formal language of pre-war functionalism, while altering it at the same time. It therefore anticipates some postwar critiques of modernism. The project of the International Artist Settlement displays surprising stylistic and intellectual affinities with the work of an unconventional 17 Bogusz 1979, 7.

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practitioner of architecture, Bernard Rudofsky. Rudofsky was a Viennese émigré who fled Europe just before the outbreak of the Second World War. He put the architecture of modern houses and dwellings at the core of his praxis. Home was seen by the architect as a place to create a particular human habitus. Rudofsky also recognised the significance of the wartime destruction of houses of which he wrote in 1947: ‘the ark, shelter, not industry, [was] the main target in modern war.’18 Rudofsky strived to create a new form of housing inspired by ancient and vernacular architecture, and the question of home’s relationship to nature and to its milieu was of particular importance in developing his project. One of the features commonly repeated in many of Rudofsky’s designs is an enclosed garden, or solarium, a type of a room known from ancient Roman architecture which, similarly to some features in Bogusz’s buildings, created a space in between outside and inside.19 Such a correspondence between interior and exterior was brought to the fore by Rudofsky in his Nivola house-garden project in Amagansett, New York. The house-garden was designed by Rudofsky and his friend, the Italian sculptor Tony Nivola, between 1949 and 1950. It was conceived as a sequence of open rooms, creating effectively a habitable garden.20 The house-garden exemplified Rudofsky’s critique of modern housing. The architect disapproved of modern dwellings constructed from low-grade, mass produced, pre-fabricated forms, which he believed also strongly imposed on people a certain automated, oppressive way of life. This is why, as demonstrated in his iconic 1964 exhibition Architecture without Architects in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rudofsky studied and found inspiration in historic and vernacular architecture and sought to rekindle some of its features in contemporary contexts. One of the rooms of the Nivola house-garden is enclosed by white free-standing walls, marking the edges of the space. One of those walls has a small square cut out in the middle of it, so that the brunch of a tree can grow directly through it. This design feature bears a striking resemblance to the earlier described project of the concert hall roof by Bogusz, which, similarly perforated, also allowed trees to grow through it. As pointed out by the architectural historian Alastair Gordon, such a conspicuous placement of architecture in relation to nature is at odds with a dominat18 Felicity Dale Elliston Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling’ , in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, eds. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, Montréal and Cambridge, MA, 2000, 215–237, 223. 19 See Scott 2000, 225. 20 See Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons, Princeton, NJ, 2001, 53–54.

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ing tendency in 20th century modernist architecture, to blur the division between surroundings and buildings by creating airy and dematerialised structures, as was famously done by Mies van der Rohe.21 The goals of re-thinking modern architecture, contesting modern lifestyles, and challenging both by using vernacular forms were also close to Bogusz. This tendency was even articulated in the 1979 exhibition catalogue, where alongside describing the plans for the artist settlement in Mauthausen, Bogusz mentions the discussions he had with Muñoz, during which the Spanish friend described to him the form of local architecture in rural Catalonia. The catalogue contains a sketch made by Bogusz depicting a design for Muñoz’ imagined house. It evokes the forms of famous Catalonian windmills and in this way bears testimony to the conversations recalled by the artist. More traces of Bogusz’s interest in vernacular architecture can be found throughout his practice, such as the project he submitted for the 1972 symposium organised in Łosiów, a small village in Poland. For the purpose of the symposium, different artists were given a task to conceive a new architectural plan for the whole village, including both houses and public buildings. Bogusz proposed facilities integrating artworks into the public space and designed a unified model for farmers’ houses: round, thatched roof buildings, built with use of natural materials and based on the forms of windmills and beehives.22 The rotund shape of the prospective houses echoes the look of the house dedicated to Muñoz, linking Bogusz’s postwar practice to the camp yet again. The correspondence between the practices of Rudofsky and Bogusz, connected in their reinventions of modern architecture, highlights how the project of artistic settlement in Mauthausen anticipated the later-day critique of modernism. The project, however, can also be positioned vis-à-vis critical discussions regarding the legacy of functionalism, which took place in the 1950s. Functionalist architecture, both pre- and post-Second World War, was characterised by its programmatic attitude, through formal developments it aimed at installing a new socio-­ political order. The project of the International Artist Settlement was by contrast conceived to create open and egalitarian conditions in order to facilitate a creative process, which is itself beyond control and whose aims are ultimately unknowable. Bogusz’s project shares the vision of architecture voiced by Theodor W. Adorno in 1965 in his critique of German, postwar functionalism:

21 See Gordon 2001, 54. 22 See N. N.,‘Plon sympozjum Łosiów ’72’ , Opole, 2, 1973, 6–7.

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It [architecture, A. P.] calls upon a human potential which is grasped in principle by our advanced consciousness, but which is suffocated in most men, who have been kept spiritually impotent. Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are. It views them in the way they could be according to the status of their own productive energies as embodied in technology.23 The project of the International Artists Settlement recalls and revises different pasts, a personal wartime struggle, as well as a heroic moment in the history of the European avant-garde, all under the conditions of a specific now, in order to ground in it the idea of a potential future. All these times coexist within the space of the project while also conditioning each other. The project proposes a new vision of art in society and at the same time it offers an unorthodox way of remembering the Second World War. It is through this revision of remembrance culture that it touches the core of contemporary European identity. In his seminal book analysing the postwar history of Europe, Tony Judt argued that the formation of Holocaust remembrance was deeply interlaced with the process of political unification in Europe. For example, the historian pointed to the fact that an official acknowledgment of an often repressed wartime past and guilt was a necessary occurrence before a new member state was admitted to join the European Union. From this perspective the history of postwar Europe is a history of coming to terms with a difficult past, which often challenged clear identification as victim or perpetrator, as a resistance fighter or as a collaborator. The recognition of the genocide in Europe eventually led to the construction of a shared narrative, which is laid at the very foundations of the united continent. As Judt observed, eventually this postwar consensus was ‘literally fixed in stone’ and disseminated through different memorial plaques and monuments spread across different countries.24 Ironically, this led to the creation of a culture of commemoration without remembrance, as a recent survey demonstrates in finding that one in twenty Europeans has never heard of the Holocaust.25 23 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Functionalism today’ , in Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, London, 1997, 5–19, 15. 24 ‘The Western solution to the problem of Europe’s troublesome memories has been to fix them, quite literally, in stone. By the opening years of the twenty-first century, plaques, memorials and museums to the victims of Nazism had surfaced all across Western Europe, from Stockholm to Brussels.’ Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2007, 826. 25 The survey was carried out by the CNN and ComRes, the results are available online: Richard Allen Green, A Shadow over Europe, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/­europe/ antisemitism-poll-2018-intl/ [16 January 2019].

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Imagining the Future of Postwar Europe

Even though Bogusz’s project lacks any direct reference to the Holocaust, it can be read as a way of re-thinking a European relationship to that memory. In essence Bogusz proposed placing the past not on monumental pedestals and in museums of history but right in the centre of contemporary activity and daily life. Contradiction and tension between the space of the camp understood as a site of creativity and as a site of genocide, bear not so much mute but tacit testimony of the past, and are among the strongest aspects of the project of the International Artist’s Settlement in Mauthausen. History is present there as a grounding factor, underlying actions and directly intervening in life. In this respect the project offers a complete reversal of the contemporary modes of collective memory, it proposes remembrance without commemoration. This difference questions the self-evidence of Europe’s status quo today, encouraging us to imagine new modes of artistic production and historical remembrance, and with it a new future.

Bibliography Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Functionalism today’ , in Rethinking Architecture. A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, London, 1997, 4–19. Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-war World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain, London, 2002. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, Minneapolis, MN, and London, 2010. Exh. Cat. Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniu 1982: ‘Marian Bogusz 1920–1980. Wystawa monograficzna’ , eds. Maria Dąbrowska and Irena Moderska, Poznan, 1982. Exh. Cat. Rawa, Galeria Autorska ‘Za’ 1979: ‘Marian Bogusz. Wizje architektoniczne 1944–1945, projekt osiedla artystów. W miesiącu pamięci narodowej’ , Rawa, 1979. Michel Fabréguet, ‘Entwicklung und Veränderung der Funktionen des Konzentrationslagers Maut­ hausen 1938–1945’ , in Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Entwicklung und Struktur, eds. Ulrich Herbert et al., Frankfurt/Main, 2002, 193–215. Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons, Princeton, NJ, 2001. Richard Allen Green, A Shadow over Europe, CNN, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/­ 2018­/11/europe/antisemitism-poll-2018-intl [16 January 2019]. Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Minneapolis, MN, 2013. Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, Athens, OH, 2003. Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, London, 2002. Janina Jaworska, ‘Nie Wszystek Umrę …’: Twórczość Plastyczna Polaków w Hitlerowskich Więzieniach i Obozach Koncentracyjnych 1939–1945, Warsaw, 1975. Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2007. Bożena Kowalska, Bogusz, artysta, animator, Pleszew, 2007.

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Jacek Leociak and Marta Janczewska, ‘Dom’ , in Literatura Polska Wobec Zagłady (1939–1968), ed. Sławomir Buryła, Warsaw, 2012, 84–123. Madeline G. Levine, ‘Home Loss in Wartime Literature. A Typology of Images’ , in Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, ed. Bożena Shallcross, Athens, OH, 2002, 97–116. Hans Marsalek, Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen, Vienna, 1974. Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe, London, 2013. N. N., ‘Plon sympozjum Łosiów ‘72’ , Opole, 2, 1973, 6–7. John Pendlebury et al., eds. Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction. Creating the Modern Townscape, London, 2014. Agata Pietrasik, ‘Radość nowych konstrukcji w czasach bezdomności. Twórczość Mariana Bogusza w latach czterdziestych’ , Miejsce: Studia nad sztuką i architekturą polską XX i XXI wieku, 1, 2015, 24–43. David Wingeate Pike, Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube, London, 2000. Jadwiga Rawecka and Marek Rawecki, ‘Antynomie pamięci’ , in Biuletyn Informacyjny Państwowego Muzeum Oświęcim-Brzezinka i Fundacji Pamięci Ofiar Obozu Zagłady Auschwitz-Birkenau PRO MEMORIA, 7, 1997, 13–20. Felicity Dale Elliston Scott, ‘Bernard Rudofsky: allegories of nomadism and dwelling’ , in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, eds. Sarah Williams Gold­ hagen and Réjean Legault, Montréal and Cambridge, MA, 2000.

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Identities

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Hildegard Frübis

Europe as Transit

Jewish Displaced-Persons Camps and the Photographs of Roman Vishniac When Roman Vishniac came to Berlin in 1947, he returned to a city where he had already spent some defining years of his life. Having emigrated from Russia, Berlin was the city where he began his career as a professional photographer in the 1920s and acquainted himself with the newest developments in photography.1 In postwar Berlin, now a city of ruins, he returned with a commission from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in short Joint or JDC.2 As a photographer, Vishniac intended to recruit financial support for Joint and its work in Europe. At the same time, his photographs document the situation of homeless and stateless Jewish survivors in the displaced-persons camps.3

1

On his pre-war photographs see Maya Benton, ‘Vishniac on Assignment’ , in Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, ed. Maya Benton, Munich et al., 2015, 109–120.

2

The Joint was founded by 1914 and is the central Jewish-American relief organization. In the years of World War I its main purpose was to offer aid to the Jewish populations in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East through a network of social and community assistance network programs.

3

The term ‘Displaced Person’ (DP) was coined during the World War II by the ‘Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’ (SHAEF). At the end of the war, at least 11 million people had been displaced from their home countries, with about seven million in Allied-occupied Germany. These included former prisoners of war, released slave labourers, non-Jewish and Jewish concentration-camp survivors. A significant portion of these millions of people, homeless by war and persecution, were Jewish survivors of the genocide and Nazi persecution. On Jewish DP’s see Atina Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte. Begegnungen im besetzten

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The ‘In-between Situation’ of the Jewish Survivors in Postwar Europe One of his photos, from shortly after the war, was likely taken in the displaced-­ persons camp in Schlachtensee in Southwest Berlin. (Fig. 1) It shows an empty space with a wall in the background and storage buildings on the right, and we can see at least four children and two adults, possibly employees of the American relief organization. Both the slightly blurred shot and the empty space, as well as the aimless movements of the individuals, might be said to characterise the indefinite and intermediate condition of Holocaust survivors. They now found themselves in a situation of incertitude between past and present. Despite its realism this snapshot also entails the symbolism of the standby condition, which characterised the situation of the Jewish survivors in postwar Europe. Most of the Jewish survivors in the displaced-persons camps hailed from Eastern and Central Europe. They regarded the continent as ‘blood-soaked earth’ and sought to abandon it as quickly as possible.4 To quote from the publication Im fremden Land (In a Foreign Country): ‘With the loss of their families, the destruction of their communities, and the enduring violent anti-Semitism, which reached its climax in the Kielce pogrom in July 1946, the survivors no longer saw any future in their former homelands.’5 While Europe reorganised itself politically and economically, the survivors had become stateless refugees who were compelled to bide their time before the journey onward that would usher in a new life. From the refugees’ standpoint, this meant to be trapped in a Europe, which not long before had been the place of their persecution and destruction. Vishniac’s photo can help to develop an iconology that visualises the uniqueness of this situation: the wall and the buildings which create the space within the camp can be understood to

Deutschland, Göttingen, 2012, 12–34, 214–294; Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, eds. Lebensmut im Wartesaal. Die jüdischen DPs (Displaced Persons) im Nachkriegsdeutschland, Frankfurt/Main, 1994. 4

On the Jewish survivors and DP-camps see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, Oxford, 2012; Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz, eds. ‘We are Here’: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, Detroit, MI, 2010; Grossmann 2012.

5

Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015: ‘Im fremden Land. Publikationen aus den Lagern für Displaced Persons. Einblicke in die Sammlung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (In a Foreign Country. Publications from the Camps for Displaced Persons. The Berlin State Library in the Jewish Museum Berlin)’ , eds. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz and Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin, 2015, 12.

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Fig. 1  Roman Vishniac, Holocaust survivors and American relief worker, probably Schlachten­ see displaced-persons camp, Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1947. From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 263.

symbolise the emptiness and in-between nature of this moment in time. On the one hand the wall is an indicator of their barrier to the outside world, which necessarily defines their situation as one of imprisonment, and on the other hand, it separates the life inside from the life outside.

Roman Vishniac – a Photographer on Assignment of the Joint During his two-month stay in Berlin, Vishniac mainly photographed the displaced-persons camp in Schlachtensee.6 In 1947 Berlin and Germany more generally exemplified the chaotic situation of those initial postwar years in Europe. For instance, the division of Germany into an eastern and western part was slowly taking political shape, American immigration regulations were loosened, and Israeli statehood loomed. The Joint had assumed the primary responsibility of caring for

6

See Atina Grossmann and Avinoam Patt‚ ‘Vishniac and the Surviving Remnant’ , in Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, ed. Maya Benton, Munich et al., 2015, 205–210.

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the most traumatised and frustrated Jewish displaced persons, while the official authority over these individuals lay with the American military government, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). The fact that there were any Jews at all who required their care – some 250,000 between 1945 and 1948 – was a surprise to officials who only grew aware of these numbers in the course of their work.7 As of 1946, there were tens of thousands of so-called infiltrees. This term was used to account for those who had survived displacement and concentration camps in Eastern Europe under a variety of conditions and had now arrived in Berlin and the DP-camps in American-occupied Bavaria.8 For example, Schlachtensee was a former Russian prisoner-of-war camp and was refurbished in 1946 under the pressure of an increasing number of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe. Contemporary observers ascertained that it was ‘one of the ironies of history that of all countries it should be Germany in the postwar years which should serve as a safe haven for Jewish refugees.’9 Despite hardship and deprivation, the refugee camp developed into an entity that exemplified the persistence of Jewish life in that brief postwar period. The survivors called themselves She’erit Hapletah, which translates as ‘the rescued remainder’10. During the first months after their liberation, they began to organise their self-administration in the camps and assume responsibility for living there.11 This renewed self-confidence also manifested itself in terms of language. Yiddish became the new old lingua franca in the DP-camps, and it was in the Yiddish expression mir zaynen doh that survivors laid claim to a new life.12 In this situ  7 The DP-camps were mostly populated with Jews from Eastern and Central Europe, which had survived the death marches and concentration camps. Most of them had been liberated by the Allies on German territory and could not be repatriated to their former home countries. See Grossmann 2012, 217–232.   8 For the most part, these were Polish Jews, who had survived the war in hiding places, underground or in the Soviet Union. See Grossmann 2012, 217–218.   9 Zorach Wahrhaftig, 27. November 1945, ‘Life in Camps 6 Months after Liberation’ , in Archives of the Holocaust, Vol. 9: The Papers of the World Jewish Congress 1945–50. Liberation and the Saving Remnant, collected in American Jewish Archives, ed. Abraham J. Peck, Cincinnati, OH, and New York, NY, 1990, 130 (quoted from Grossmann 2012, 221). 10 Grossmann 2012, 217 and 225. The US-American military rabbi, Abraham Klausner experienced the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. There he helped the survivors of Eastern Europe to find surviving relatives and started the conceptual project She’erit Hapletah. Under this term he collected, with the support of the US-Army, the names of survivors. 11 Already on 1 July 1945 the Central Committee of liberated Jews in Bavaria constituted itself in the DP-camp Feldafing; see Grossmann 2012, 226. 12 The phrase often used comes from a partisan song that Hirsch Glik composed after the Warsaw ghetto uprising; see Grossmann 2012, 226.

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ation between the end of the war and the insecurity of a new beginning, a cultural life began to establish itself under the most difficult circumstances. Among other things, this led to the publication of a number of leaflets, books, and newspapers, which provided the first historical inventories of the mass murder, and were political instruments in founding the Jewish state in Palestine as well as being expressive of the hope for a life far distant from Europe. To quote from the catalogue Im fremden Land (In a Foreign Country): Titles such as Our Courage, Our Path, Our Voice and In Transit point to the dawning of a new life and standing on an equal footing with journals such as FUN LETSTN KHURBN (From the latest destruction) that examined the history of Jews during the Nazi regime.13 The word ‘Khurbn’ comes from Hebrew and means ‘devastation’ or indeed ‘destruction’, and refers to great human-made historical catastrophes. Long before the term ‘Holocaust’ was introduced, in the DP-camps the word ‘Khurbn’ was used by the Jewish displaced-persons to designate the ravages of the Nazi regime. One has to speak of a particular Jewish historiography that started immediately with the end of the war and in the European DP-camps. ‘The publications and events [in the DP-camps, H.  F.] all had a didactic function: they sought to cultivate a historical awareness in the DPs that was based on a particular canon of wartime experiences.’14

The DP-Camps and a ‘Life Anew’ One of these periodicals appeared on the occasion of the Jewish Prisoner Congress at Bergen-Belsen in September 1945. The minutes of the conference were printed there. The title page emblematically expresses the connection between destruction and rebirth. The word Yizkor – ‘remember’ – is printed in Hebrew letters on a simple black background. A yellow star is depicted above and Zionist flags flank both symbols. Calls to open the gates of Palestine, at this time still British-­mandate territory, appear in English and Hebrew.15

13 Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015, 9. 14 Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015, 37. 15 See Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015, 22.

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With the Zionist symbols like the Star of David and the flag, this journal cover evokes the hope for a new beginning in Palestine, whereas the book cover of a 1947 collection of poetry, which was likewise published in a DP-camp, directs its gaze toward Germany. Another publication from the DP-camps is a poetry volume of Mates Olitsky with the Yiddish title In fremdn Land – which also gave the title for the publication Im fremden Land. At the centre of the volume are the traumatic encounters of DPs with an alien and hated Germany. The poet’s brother Borekh, a writer, was murdered in 1941. The poems about Germany are preceded by twelve poems dedicated to his brother. Mates Olitski survived the war in the Soviet Union and was repatriated from there to Poland in 1946 before becoming part of the She’erit Hapletah in Germany.16 Both these publications were representative of many others and described the behaviour of displaced persons and their understanding of their situation in a nutshell. Their memories were of what had been left behind in (Central and Eastern) Europe – in large part the dead – with the present defined by a ‘foreign country’ and the future by a new beginning in Palestine. It was in the midst of this tripartite situation, and its simultaneity of past, present, and future, that Roman Vishniac took his photographs. In the DP-camp at Schlachtensee, he captured significant moments of this new beginning in Jewish life and where we can see repeated reference to the pre-war history of the Jews in Europe.

Photographs from a ‘Life Anew’ Scenes of the arrival and reunion of family members with other kin and friends are frequent motifs. (Fig. 2) The search for relatives was one of the central tasks of the She’erit Hapletah in the DP-camps. Since the initial days of liberation, there were lists in the camps with people’s first and last names, their birthplace along with the year of birth and their current whereabouts – which was mostly in displaced-persons camps. On the contact sheets or on the back of the prints Vishniac noted the photographed person’s name and age along with similar biographical material. (Fig. 3) The image motif of the group portrait, in which new arrivals consciously posed for keepsake photos like on this contact sheet, is also frequently found here.

16 See Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015, 26.

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Fig. 2  Roman Vishniac, Holocaust survivors reuniting at the Wannsee train station near the Schlachtensee displaced-­ persons camp in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1947. From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 265.

Fig. 3  Roman Vishniac, Wannsee train station and Schlachtensee displaced-persons camp, Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1947. Contact Sheet. From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 208.

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Scenes such as the little girl with an enormous suitcase are from Schlachtensee. (Fig. 4) This was a low-angle shot, and Vishniac made the suitcase together with the girl’s name and address a central motif of the image. We know that Ruth Sternfeld was born in Berlin in 1939 and according to Nazi law she was of ‘mixed race’17. Despite her precarious ‘first-degree mixed-race status’ , she was able to survive the war in Berlin. When Vishniac arrived at Schlachtensee, he found Ruth Sternfeld, in the meantime eight years old, preparing for immigration to America or Palestine. With this photographic portrait – taken in profile – Vishniac refers to the history of portraiture and photography. The history of both genres deals with the production of personal identity through the precise and recognizable representation of the face. The name tag affixed to the suitcase used Vishniac to insure the identity of Ruth Sternfeld and her biographical data. In this compilation, he provides in the genre of portrait photography information as they were developed in the context of police photography in the mid-19th century. However, in the context of the displaced-persons camp, the positive effect of the recovery of missing persons has been addressed. At the same time, the photography of Ruth Sternfeld becomes a medium of remembrance, which gives evidence to the re-enactment of Jewish life after 1945.

Fig. 4  Roman Vishniac, Ruth Sternfeld, Schlachtensee displaced-­ persons camp, Zehlendorf, Berlin 1947. From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 271.

17 The information refers to Benton 2015, 221.

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It is in those photos showing the arrival or departure of Jewish survivors (Figs. 2 and 3) that we encounter image motifs which strike a note of familiarity – though with entirely different implications – namely the shipment of Jews to concentration camps just four years before. In other words, photographs like these of arrival or departure recall the deportation to concentration camps just a few years before, which is closely linked with the story of the DP-camps – that is to say, the very reason for these latter. In photographs like those from the ‘Lili Jacob album’18– an album produced in the KZ Auschwitz – we see what have come to be icons of the Holocaust, namely the motifs of trains and railway tracks and the situation in which the new arrivals find themselves, here now – and in comparison to Ruth Sternfeld – with their luggage being sorted. The Nazi perpetrators took these photos in the summer of 1944 at Auschwitz upon arrival of those transports involved in the so-called ‘Hungary action’. Vishniac’s photographs from 1947 show the survivors’ new beginnings in the DP-camps while also conjuring far, less happy images of Jews’ arrival at other railway destinations. It is through this visual reminder that Vishniac’s photos also testify to the present reversal of the situation: railway stations with their trains and tracks no longer leading to death but denoting new beginnings and a reconquest of life. Another fixture of the survivors’ quotidian existence in the DP-camps was their preparation for a new life as presided over by the Zionist associations. In scenes like those to be seen on one of the contact sheets, Vishniac photographed the activities of a summer youth camp. This was organised in Munich in 1947 by the Zionist youth movement Betar for young survivors of the Holocaust who were waiting to emmigrate to Palestine. We can still see the markings of Vishniac – red check marks – which indicated the selection of the photos for their publication through the Joint. (Fig. 3) With his red marks, he also indicates the cropping for the images.19

18 The original title of the album was Umsiedlung der Juden aus Ungarn – a title in accordance with the official euphemistic term used by the SS. The Hungarian Jewess Lili Jakob, deported to Auschwitz in May 1944, found the photo album after her liberation in 1945 in the Mittelbau-Harz concentration camp. In photographs of the album she recognised herself and the members of her family on arrival in the camp. As early as 1946, a copy of the album was made at the Jewish Museum in Prague; in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1964 Lili Jakob presented the album as evidence. See Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman, eds. Das Auschwitz Album. Geschichte eines Transportes, Göttingen, 2005. 19 The contact sheets also provide informations to Vishniacs working practice: We can still see the markings – red check marks – which indicated the selection of the photos for their publication through the Joint. With his red marks Vishniac also indicates the cropping for the images.

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For most of the surviving European Jews, it was Zionism – as a utopian ideal if not a real goal – which posed at that time and in that context the sole alternative.20 The presence of Zionism in the DP-camps was also clearly to be seen in numerous photos which thematised the activities of the Zionist associations. In one of Vishniac’s photographs, a piece of Jewish (pre-war) history is present with Theodor Herzl, the main character of political Zionism, as the picture in the picture. (Fig.  5) The photo shows a large-format portrait of Herzl, hanging on the wall in the background. It is a copy of one of the most famous portraits of Herzl, which was an etching by the German-Jewish artist Hermann Struck and had already become part of the Zionist iconography in the years before the First World War, being reproduced in numerous forms that included postcards and which was disseminated across all kinds of media. As indicated by the photographs of the Zionist summer youth camp, the idea of Zionism represented a kind of ‘consensus ideology’21 for most of the survivors, for example, the She’erit Hapletah. It was amid the uncertainty of the postwar world and within the framework of the camp organization that Zionism assumed the status of a state in a state, promising not only fulfilment of the dream of a Jewish state in Palestine but a form of security.

Fig. 5  Roman Vishniac, Jewish Refugees singing in front of a portrait of Theodor Herzl, probably the offices of the U.S. Army Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Meyer Abramowitz, American Sector of Berlin, 1947. From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 267. 20 See Grossmann 2012, 273. On the debates among the survivors of the displaced-persons camps see Anna Marta Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, Ann Arbor, MI, 2011, 153–184. 21 Grossmann and Patt 2015, 207.

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We can see one of Vishniac’s aesthetic practices in photographs like that of the Herzl portrait (Fig. 5) and the arrival scene at the Wannsee train station (Fig. 2). He frequently linked the depiction of persons with excerpt-like scenes of the surrounding space. It is in this linkage of portrait and space that there emerges a documentary kind of photography with specific accents of time and (cultural) space, and it is through this means that he, in turn, links up with his earlier work from the pre-war period when he was photographing the lives of Eastern European Jews. Vishniac was also in Berlin between 1935 and 1938 and was commissioned by Joint to undertake photographic reportages in Eastern European regions such as Poland, Galicia, and Romania.22 He was to undertake a photo documentation of the impoverished Jewish population and thus try to win support for alleviation of their plight. In comparing these photos, we can see that in 1947 Vishniac once more became a chronicler of Jewish life. He was again combining portraits and situations that in their selection and focus would become icons of depictions of Jewish life. (Fig. 6) If his photographs reported on the economic distress of the Eastern European Jewish communities, now in 1947 they were emblematic of ‘life anew’ – to take up another Jewish catchphrase of these years.23 As metaphor for a visualization of the situation, we should again take up the photography described at the start of this article. (Fig.  1) The emphatic Jewish claim to ‘life anew’ was restricted to the temporally and spatially limited territory of the European displaced-persons camps – though informed by the plan to leave Europe as soon as possible. For a brief window of time, there was development of a life under Jewish self-administration on European soil. It was characterised by a camp situation that clearly distinguished between inside and outside by means of its walls or fences. Despite memories of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Europe, as alluded to in a number of photographs, Europe had become that continent, from which for the time, Jews wished to distance themselves from. Vishniac’s photographs refer to the particular Jewish perception of Europe immediately after World War  II. This perception was determined by the crimes of the Holocaust which had turned Europe into a ‘blood-soaked earth’ and which made it a ‘non-place of survival’. This is particularly evident in an iconography that designs the drafts of a ‘life anew (Weiterleben)’ as the new beginning within the confines of DP-camps. This manifests itself in the motifs of arrival and recov-

22 See Benton 2015, 109–120. 23 See Jacqueline Giere and Rachel Salamander, eds. Ein Leben aufs neu. Das Robinson-Album. DP-Lager: Juden auf deutschem Boden 1945–1948, Vienna, 1995, 19.

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ery as well as the departure into a new life – mostly determined by Zionist symbols. Vishniac’s selection of image motifs is characterised by his knowledge of the DP-camps as well as the discussions about the status of the survivors and their hopes. Until now, art history has paid little attention to Jewish experiences in the cultural and artistic reorganization in the aftermath of World War II. Besides their aesthetical practice, Vishniac’s photographs from the DP-camps show how closely they relate to the traditions of European photography (New Objectivity, Documentary Photography), while the political statement of the photos is one of distance from Europe. In order to shed light on these developments, more approaches of multiperspectivity are needed – ones that moreover go beyond the binary argument patterns of the Cold War – in order to study the new beginnings of Jewish ­visual culture in postwar Europe and its aftermath in art history.

Fig. 6  Roman Vishniac, Eastern Europe, ca. 1935–1938. Contact Sheet. In the late 1980s, Vishniac labeled ‘Not in Van[ished] World’ on several dozen contact sheets, referring to his seminal publication A Vanished World (1983). From: Maya Benton, ed. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Munich et al., 2015, 186.

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Bibliography Maya Benton, ‘Vishniac on Assignment’ , in Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, ed. Maya Benton, Munich et al., 2015, 109–120. Exh. Cat. Berlin, Jüdisches Museum 2015: ‘Im fremden Land. Publikationen aus den Lagern für Displaced Persons. Einblicke in die Sammlung der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (In a Foreign Country. Publications from the Camps for Displaced Persons. The Berlin State Library in the Jewish Museum Berlin)’ , eds. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz and Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Berlin, 2015. Jacqueline Giere and Rachel Salamander, eds. Ein Leben aufs neu. Das Robinson-Album. DP-Lager: Juden auf deutschem Boden 1945–1948, Vienna, 1995. Atina Grossmann, Juden, Deutsche, Alliierte: Begegnungen im besetzten Deutschland, trans. Ulrike Bischoff, Göttingen, 2012. Atina Grossmann and Avinoam J. Patt, ‘Vishniac and the Surviving Remnant’ , in Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, ed. Maya Benton, Munich et al., 2015, 205–210. Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman, eds. Das Auschwitz Album. Geschichte eines Transportes, Göttingen, 2005. Anna Marta Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, Ann Arbor, MI, 2011. Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe, Oxford, 2012. Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, eds. Lebensmut im Wartesaal. Die jüdischen DPs (Displaced Persons) im Nachkriegsdeutschland, Frankfurt/Main, 1994. Avinoam J. Patt and Michael Berkowitz, eds. ‘We are Here’: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, Detroit, MI, 2010. Zorach Wahrhaftig, 27. November 1945, ‘Life in camps 6 months after liberation’ , in Archives of the Holocaust, Vol. 9: The Papers of the World Jewish Congress 1945–50. Liberation and the Saving Remnant, collected in American Jewish Archives, ed. Abraham J. Peck, Cincinnati, OH, and New York, NY, 1990.

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How West German Art Critics Appropriated Polish Abstract Art ‘And from these Polish art magazines you can see that there [in Poland, R. W.] art is no less abstract than in the rotten West.’1 Thus triumphed Leopold Zahn at the first Baden-Badener Kunstgespräch (Baden-Baden Art Talk), a public panel discussion held in the southwestern German town of Baden-Baden in October 1959. Zahn was editor in chief of the magazine Das Kunstwerk (The Art Work), at that time a leading proponent of abstract art, and his term ‘rotten West’ (verfaulter Westen) was, of course, an ironical allusion to the left-wing criticism of abstract art as the art of Western decadence. At the Baden-Baden discussion, this political left point of view was championed by Jürgen Beckelmann, one of the founders of tendenzen, a journal for engaged art that was first published shortly after the event, in February 1960.2 We will get back to both journals down below. The Polish magazines, which Leopold Zahn presented in Baden-Baden were most likely issues of

1

‘[…] und in diesen polnischen Kunstzeitschriften, die ich Ihnen hier vorlege, können Sie sehen, daß dort [in Polen, R. W.] genau so abstrakt gemalt wird wie in dem verfaulten Westen.’ Baden-Badener Kunstgespräch 1959: Wird die moderne Kunst ‘gemanagt’?, Baden-Baden and Krefeld, 1959, 91.

2

Shortly before the Baden-Baden event, Beckelmann had published a polemic treatise on the art scene in West Germany: Jürgen Beckelmann, Das Ende der Moderne. Entwicklung und Tendenzen in der deutschen Malerei, Munich, 1959. Presumably that was one of the reasons why he had been invited as a panellist.

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the Przegląd Artystyczny (Art Review); in the late 1950s, the years of the relatively liberal Thaw period, this was the most important journal for abstract art in Poland, comparable to Das Kunstwerk in West Germany, and, as a multilingual journal of international scope, it also circulated in the West. (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1  Przegląd Artystyczny, 1:1, January–February 1958, cover.

I have started with Leopold Zahn’s triumphant statement, because it indicates the distinctive polemical role that abstract art from Poland came to play in the abstract art’s disputes in West Germany at that time. This article aims to show, first, that this polemic resulted from specific conditions of reception. It does not only inform us about Western projections on Polish art, but also about political,

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social and not least generational tensions within the West German postwar society. Second, this disposition carries implications for research on cultural East-West relationships in general.

Polish Wave and the Debate about Abstract Art in West Germany In the course of the so-called Polish wave (Polnische Welle) of the late 1950s and early 1960s in West Germany, contemporary Polish abstract art attracted particular interest among West German curators and art critics. It was celebrated as an epitome of the post-Stalinist Thaw in Poland and of the exceptionally liberal spirit after the Polish October of 1956, and not by chance Polish artists were the only ones from the Eastern bloc that had been invited to the legendary documenta II of 1959, the so-called abstract documenta. However, that interest was not only due to the general fascination with Poland’s vibrant culture of those days, and it was not only favourable, since Polish’s abstract art came to the fore precisely at the moment when in West Germany the ongoing postwar debate pro and contra abstract art reached its final peak. Given this highly controversial context, it comes as no surprise that Polish art immediately became a polemical point of reference within that debate. By the late 1950s, the general criticism of abstract art had significantly changed compared to the early 1950s. Most notably, along with the increasing establishment and a seeming predominance of abstract art, the focus of criticism had shifted from art itself to the art business and the role of the so-called art managers. Along with these shifts of focus, new opponents of abstract art joined the debate. Instead of old reactionaries, young left intellectuals were now campaigning against abstract art and its bourgeois patrons in the first place. Symptomatically, in this dispute umbrella terms like abstract, realist, or figurative were used in an increasingly arbitrary way. Primarily they served as empty polemical catchwords to demarcate ideological positions within a debate that had developed its own dynamics and became more and more detached from the artistic objects to which it was supposed to refer. This constellation had a significant impact also on the reception of Polish abstract art. In the following, I shall illustrate this by the two paradigmatic art magazines mentioned above: the magazine Das Kunstwerk on the one hand, and the magazine tendenzen. Blätter für engagierte Kunst on the other. Their editors’

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polemical exchange at the Baden-Baden panel discussion was just a prelude to an antagonism cultivated over the following years that fundamentally shaped their respective approaches to Polish art as well. I will outline the opposing general agendas of these two magazines first.

The Magazine Das Kunstwerk: Advocating the Art of Western Freedom3 Founded in 1946, Das Kunstwerk (Fig. 2) came to play an eminent role in the affirmative and legitimatory postwar discourse on abstract art, figuring as a kind of cultural mouthpiece for the German Federal Republic’s Western integration. The journal promoted all the well-known topoi constituting the narratives about abstract art as the art of Western freedom.4 It propagated abstract art as a paradigm of artistic autonomy, of the primacy of form over content, individualism over collectivism, as a counter model to propaganda art whether of communist or fascist provenance, as a commitment to Western democracy, and as the only genuinely modern art of the day. Moreover, all of this was embedded in a triumphant story of success proclaiming the global expansion of abstract art as a Weltsprache (world language). By contrast, Das Kunstwerk completely ignored the socially and politically engaged art which was favored by tendenzen. The most telling example is an editors’ note on the state of Western realism from October 1959: Realism is still alive even in the West, the editors had to admit, but, they claimed, it is preferring genre 3

Phrases like ‘art of freedom’ , ‘art of the free West’ , ‘commitment to freedom’ , etc., became standard terms with regard to abstract art at that time, whether used in an affirmative or polemical sense. In the magazine Das Kunstwerk respective affirmative statements can also be found in virtually all issues from the 1950s and beyond. For an early, particularly pronounced and emphatic contribution see for example Georg Poensgen, ‘Wo stehen wir eigentlich?’ , Das Kunstwerk, 7:3–4, 1953, 4. For a polemical reference see for example Nickel Grünstein, ‘Geschichte des modernen Realismus XIV: Polen. Polens letzte Teilung’ , tendenzen, 4:21, June 1963, n. p. See also Steffen Dengler, Die Kunst der Freiheit? Die westdeutsche Malerei im Kalten Krieg und im wiedervereinigten Deutschland, Munich, 2010.

4

The term ‘Weltsprache Abstraktion’ was most prominently coined by Werner Haftmann in the context of the documenta II 1959. But already in 1958, Das Kunstwerk editors and authors Leopold Zahn and Georg Poensgen had published the volume Abstrakte Kunst, eine Weltsprache, Baden-Baden, 1958, including an essay by Haftmann, and the term was quickly adopted by Das Kunstwerk; see also Franz Roh’s review of Zahn’s and Poensgen’s book in Das Kunstwerk, 12:7, January 1959, 45–46.

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scenes and still lifes and takes its subjets from the private sphere.5 Such a statement must have been a slap in the face of all proponents of engaged art like the founders of tendenzen – all the more so, since in the very same year a highly topical exhibition like Künstler gegen Atomkrieg (Artists against Nuclear War) had shown that engaged art was quite alive.6

Fig. 2  Das Kunstwerk, 12:10, April 1959, cover.

5

‘[…] flieht die heutige Lebenswelt, bevorzugt das Stilleben oder das Genre und zieht sich zurück ins Private.’ [Editors’ note], Das Kunstwerk, 13:4, October 1959, 3.

6

See Richard Hiepe, ed. Künstler gegen Atomkrieg. Eine Auswahl von Bildern aus der Ausstellung Künstler gegen Atomkrieg, Munich, 1959. The exhibition was first shown in Augsburg and then travelled to a number of other cities in the Federal Republic of Germany. It had been initiated and organised by Carlo Schellemann, co-founder of tendenzen (see below).

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The Magazine tendenzen. Blätter für engagierte Kunst: Left Milieu and ‘45ers’ That very exhibition which was part of the broad movement against nuclear arms of the late 1950s in The Federal Republic of Germany marked the birth of tendenzen. Blätter für engagierte Kunst. (Fig.  3) The journal was initiated by the exhibition’s organiser and spiritus rector, the artist and activist Carlo Schellemann from Augsburg,7 and was co-founded and edited by young and ambitious art critics and writers based in Munich; the most active of them were Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, Richard Hiepe, and Jürgen Beckelmann. Former art student Heino von Damnitz, who had just established his von Damnitz Verlag in Grünwald near Munich, acted as publisher. Throughout its life until 1989, the journal was as much committed to engaged art as it polemicised against abstract art and the bourgeois ‘Western establishment’8 supporting it. As a representative par excellence of that very establishment, Das Kunstwerk became a favorite target of its polemics. However, that antagonism was not only a matter of opposed normative views of art. The essentially oppositional agenda and self-understanding of tendenzen were also based on the particular political and social background of its authors and editors. First, the magazine exemplified a certain left-wing milieu. Tendenzen not only cultivated a critical, Marxist idiom, but it was also part of a dense network of leftist, pacifist, and anti-fascist writers, publishers, artists, and activists,9 and it also

7

Schellemann was also a founding member of the artists group Tendenz to which the magazine tendenzen maintained close contact (not to be conflated with the international art movement of new tendencies that was initiated by Yugoslavian artists about the same time).

8

See tendenzen, 1:1, February 1960.

9

Besides the artists’ circle around Schellemann, to this network belonged, for example, magazines and newspapers like Die Kultur: eine unabhängige Zeitung mit internationalen Beiträgen, published in Munich, or Die Andere Zeitung from Hamburg; publishers like Steineklopfer-­Verlag in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich, Röderberg-Verlag in Frankfurt/Main, run by the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes (Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime), or Dobbeck-Verlag in Munich; as well as associations like the Komma-Club, an independent platform for engaged literature in Munich, managed by journalist and author Rolf Seeliger, or the Neue Münchner Galerie, a gallery founded by Richard Hiepe in 1963 that was dedicated to engaged art and later in the 1960s, in the course of the student movement, also served as an Aktionszentrum demokratischer Künstler (Campaign Centre of Democratic Artists), see tendenzen, 9:52, August/September 1968, n. p.

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Fig. 3  Tendenzen. Blätter für engagierte Kunst, 1:1, February 1960, cover.

maintained close connections to the official art and publishing scene of the GDR.10 One should add, however, that the engaged art which tendenzen propagated had not much in common with socialist realism, as the proponents of abstract art liked to insinuate. Second, and no less important, tendenzen also represented a particular generation. As social historians have pointed out, the ‘first important generational change in West Germany’11 was not the one associated with 1968, but took place in the years around 1960, when the new political and intellectual generation of the

10 Beckelmann, Hiepe, and Müller-Mehlis were regularly contributing to Bildende Kunst, the official art magazine of the GDR; in addition, Hiepe had publishing contracts with the German Academy of Arts in East Berlin for several artist monographs published by Verlag für Kunst in Dresden (see also the archives and press material on their publishing activities in the Archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin: folder AdK-O 4241 for Hiepe, folders AdK-O 0284, Ingeborg-D­rewitz-Archiv 1297, and SV-ZA 230 for Beckelmann). 11 Anthony Dirk Moses, ‘Grinding the Generational Axe’ , 21 November 2000, http://hsozkult. geschichte.hu-berlin.de/Rezensio/symposiu/versfrag/moses.htm [5 May 2018].

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today so-called 45ers began to set the tone of public debate.12 Also the founders of tendenzen who were all about the same age can be considered as typical 45ers as specified by recent research: born between the early 1920s and early 1930s, in the late 1950s at the beginning of their carrier, male, left-wing, intellectuals, with literary and journalistic ambitions, a political mission, and with a social background in the educated middle class that became one of their main targets. Moreover, as with other 45ers, a focal point of their criticism was the Nazi past of their fathers’ generation and the integration of the perpetrators into the new old elites of the Federal Republic of Germany. This generational political conflict also became an integral part of their criticism of abstract art;13 almost all proponents of abstract art attacked in tendenzen belonged to their fathers’ generation, and several article series examined the continuities in cultural personnel before and after 1945. With sharp sarcasm, they revealed how leading postwar art managers had conformed to or supported the Nazi art ideology, including, for instance, art critic Will Grohmann, one of the most prominent proponents of abstract art.14 According to tendenzen, their eager support of abstract art was just another form of suppression and self-exoneration of the West German postwar society. And in two respects: first, because the aestheticism of abstract art perfectly suited a conformist society ‘that didn’t want to be bothered by artists’15, as Beckelmann put it; and second, because the monopolization of abstract art – legitimised as rehabilitation – only revealed the opportunism and hypocrisy of those who once had condemned it. As Müller-Mehlis put it:

12 See Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945–1973, Göttingen, 2006; Antony Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge, MA, 2007; Nina Verheyen, Diskussionslust. Eine Kulturgeschichte des ‘besseren Arguments’ in Westdeutschland, Göttingen, 2010; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1949–1990, Bonn, 2010. 13 The tendenzen authors were explicitly discussing that generational conflict in various journalistic and literary publications. See for example Jürgen Beckelmann, ‘Der Trick mit den “jungen Autoren”’ , Die Kultur. Eine unabhängige Zeitung mit internationalen Beiträgen, Munich, September 1961; Beckelmann even dedicated an autobiographical novel (of rather modest quality) to the topic: Jürgen Beckelmann, Der goldene Sturm, Hamburg, 1960 (reprinted as Aufzeichnungen eines jungen Mannes aus besserer Familie, Zurich, 1965). 14 Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘… und schämten sich nicht! Vom Vorleben unserer Kunstkritiker in großer deutscher Zeit’ , tendenzen, 3:17–18, December 1962, n. p. and tendenzen, 4:19, February 1963; Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘Alte Kameraden von Gauleiters Gnaden’ , tendenzen, 4:28, August 1964, n. p.; see also Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘Apologeten und Propagandisten II. Deutschlands Grohmann’ , tendenzen, 4:23, October 1963, n. p. 15 ‘die vom Künstler nicht behelligt werden will’ , Beckelmann 1959, 13.

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They now appraised the work of artists whom during the Third Reich they had condemned, and favoured the very latest, the wave of abstraction. In their flight forward – towards the former enemy – they went from one extreme to the other. Apparently, the abstract and the völkisch abracadabra are perfectly exchangeable.16

Polish Art in Das Kunstwerk and tendenzen How did these divergent agendas of Das Kunstwerk and tendenzen affect their respective approaches to Polish art? For Das Kunstwerk, the revival of abstract art in Poland was the most welcome fact to support the story of Western triumph. And it presented it as a particularly compelling case in point: the fact that even in a socialist country artists turn to abstraction as soon as they are allowed to do so must provide even stronger evidence that the Western art world is on the right track. That Poland had an abstract tradition by its own is largely ignored in that account. Instead, Das Kunstwerk praises Polish art’s astonishing ‘turn to the West’ (‘Westkurs’)17 or to ‘Western modernity’18 and observes that Poland has ‘artistically joined the West’ (‘künstlerisch Anschluss an den Westen gefunden’)19. Contemporary Polish art also provided a comfortable counterexample to left criticisms according to which abstract art was a specifically Western symptom of decadence and nihilism. And not least it contrasted most favorably with socialist realism as prevailing in the GDR. The statement by Kunstwerk editor Leopold Zahn at the Baden-Badener Kunstgespräch, from which I quoted above, highlights all these aspects in a nutshell. To quote the entire statement: Mister Beckelmann has said that abstract art is the expression of our broken society. Now, this claim can easily be refuted, for even within the communist 16 ‘[Sie] rühmten […] nun das Werk der Künstler, die sie während des III. Reiches verdammt hatten […] und schworen auf das Allerneueste, die Welle der Abstrakten. In ihrer Flucht nach vorn – hin zum ehemaligen Feind – fielen sie von einem Extrem ins andere. […] Das abstrakte und das völkische Abrakadabra sind offenbar prächtig vertauschbar.’ Reinhard Müller-Mehlis 1962, n. p. 17 Juliane Roh, ‘Die 28. Venediger Biennale’ , Das Kunstwerk, 10:1/2, July/August 1956, 97–99, 97. 18 Klaus J. Fischer [from August 1959 on: Klaus Jürgen-Fischer], ‘Die 29. Biennale in Venedig’ , Das Kunstwerk, 12:1/2, July/August 1958, 46–85, 85. 19 N. N., n. t., Das Kunstwerk, 14:1/2, July/August 1960 [theme issue on the XXXth Venice Biennial, annotated illustrations], n. p.

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sphere – in those countries where the dogma of socialist realism is no longer pursued with inquisitorial rigour – the young have at once committed themselves to abstract art. Poland provides a splendid example here, and from these Polish art magazines you can see that there [in Poland, R. W.] art is no less abstract than in the rotten West. You may then also be interested to see its difference to the art production in Russia [sic!] and the GDR where socialist realism is in full flower.20 In short, for the editors of Das Kunstwerk, the Polish Thaw with its boom of abstract art came along just at the right moment to serve as a convenient rhetoric instrument in the dispute about abstract art. To support its view, Das Kunstwerk could also draw upon renowned authorities of current art criticism in East and West. In November 1960, it published an enthusiastic report by art critic Will Grohmann from his visit to Poland at the occasion of the VIIth  AICA Congress.21 Grohmann was most delighted by all the excellent abstract art which he got to see during his stay; as he put it, it confirmed once more that Polish art could easily compete with that of other ‘civilised nations’22, and even the spoiled delegation from New York, he reported, was most impressed. Soon after, in February 1961, Das Kunstwerk dedicated almost a whole issue to abstract art in Poland, including guest articles by French art critic Pierre

20 ‘[…] Herr Beckelmann […] hat gesagt, die abstrakte Kunst sei der Ausdruck […] unserer zerstörten Gesellschaft. Nun ist diese These leicht zu widerlegen, denn auch im kommunistischen Bereich – dort, wo das Dogma des alleinseligmachenden sozialistischen Realismus nicht mehr mit inquisitorischer Schärfe ausgeübt wird – hat die Jugend sich sofort zur abstrakten Kunst bekannt. Dafür bietet Polen ein glänzendes Beispiel, und in diesen polnischen Kunstzeitschriften, die ich Ihnen hier vorlege, können Sie sehen, daß dort genau so abstrakt gemalt wird wie in dem verfaulten Westen. Vielleicht interessiert es Sie dann auch, den Abstand zu sehen von den künstlerischen Erzeugnissen in Rußland [sic!] und in der Ostzone, […] wo der “sozialistische Realismus” in voller Blüte steht.’ Baden-Badener Kunstgespräch 1959, 91. 21 In autumn 1960, the annual congress of the International Association of Art Critics (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art, AICA) was held in Warsaw and Krakow, dedicated to the timely topic ‘Modern Art, as an International Phenomenon’. For Grohmann’s report see Will Grohmann, ‘Tagung der Kunstkritiker in Warschau’ , Das Kunstwerk, 14:5/6, November/ December 1960, 61–63. 22 ‘Kulturländer’ , to quote in context: ‘[…] sich in Art und Niveau neben der der übrigen Kulturländer ausgezeichnet hält.’ Grohmann 1960, 62.

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Restany and Polish art critic Aleksander Wojciechowski.23 (Fig. 4) From 1957 to 1960, during the short-lived heyday of the Polish Thaw, Wojciechowski had been the editor in chief of the already mentioned Przegląd Artystyczny; under his guidance, it became a leading magazine for abstract art in Poland, until he was kicked out for political reasons.24 Wojciechowski’s successor was Helena Krajewska, once a leading exponent of socialist realism, and henceforth abstract art had a rather difficult time in the Przegląd Artystyczny. Though it was not completely banished

Fig. 4  One of five illustrated spreads from Aleksander Wojciechowski’s article in Das Kunstwerk presenting works of Polish abstract artists like Tadeusz Kantor, Jerzy Tchórzewski and Piotr Potworowski. From: Aleksander Wojciechowski, ‘Romantik – Expression – Emotion’ , Das Kunstwerk, 14:8, February 1961, 4–15, 12–13.

23 Das Kunstwerk, 14:8, February 1961. The issue assembled three amply illustrated essays on Polish art: ‘Abstraktion und Disziplin’ by Andrzej Jakimowicz, ‘Romantik – Expression – Emotion’ by Aleksander Wojciechowski, and ‘Die Situation der Kunst in Polen’ by Pierre Restany. 24 On the Thaw era of the Przegląd Artystyczny see Aleksander Wojciechowski, ‘Przeglad Artystyczny w latach 1957–1960’ , in Polskie Zycie Artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, ed. Aleksander Wojciechowski, Wroclaw et al., 1992, 392–395.

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from the magazine, it was now at best presented as an art form in crisis.25 This, in turn, made the Przegląd Artystyczny a valuable source for tendenzen, as we shall see below. At first, however, Polish abstract art posed a rather intricate challenge to a journal like tendenzen. The most elaborate attempt to cope was an article by Nickel Grünstein from 1963 published under the somewhat malicious title ‘Polens letzte Teilung’ (‘Poland’s last partition’).26 We have seen the distinctively oppositional stance taken by tendenzen which was first and foremost directed against the West German establishment. Their criticism of Polish abstract art, I shall argue, was also primarily a function of that oppositional agenda.27 The criticism was not especially so much directed against Polish abstract art itself but against its Western supporters (‘westliche Beifallklatscher’28) and their mainstream narrative of the triumph of abstract art. Not surprisingly, in his article Grünstein identifies those Western supporters once more with the ‘art managers’ of the older generation, and sets out to defeat their narrative at all costs. In fact, the reasoning of the article seems like a perfect inversion of the reasoning presented in Das Kunstwerk: Whereas Das Kunstwerk celebrates the recent boom of abstract art in Poland as a triumph of Western freedom and civilization, tendenzen – no less patronising – ridicules it as an import of a Western fashion. Das Kunstwerk uses Polish art as a litmus test to demonstrate the global success of abstract art, it informs that even in socialist Poland abstract art is flourishing. Meanwhile, 25 In accordance with the generally sharper tone to which Poland’s cultural policy returned in the late 1950s. Most notorious – and much-ridiculed – is a decree issued by the party in 1959 allowing for no more than 15 percent of abstract art per exhibition. However, art historians have come to different conclusions as to whether it was in fact effective (as Anda Rottenberg suggests) or whether it was rather a symbolic gesture with virtually no practical influence (as Piotr Piotrowski holds). See Anda Rottenberg, ‘Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki’ , in Polskie Życie Artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, ed. A. Wojciechowski, Wroclaw et al., 1992, 181–253, esp. 201; Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Totalitarianism and Modernism: the “Thaw” and Informel Painting in Central Europe’ , Artium Quaestiones, 10, 2000, 119–174, 128. 26 Nickel Grünstein 1963, n. p. 27 Similar criticisms of Polish art circulated also among other left proponents of engaged art, see for example Wolfgang Zaehle, ‘Besuch beim “Krummen Kreis” in Warschau. Polnische Maler ringen um neue Ausdrucksformen’ , Die Andere Zeitung, 30 April 1964. At the same time, it has to be stressed that not all leftists were hostile to Polish abstract art, even among those connected to tendenzen. The author, journalist and critic Rolf Seeliger, for example, cooperated with the tendenzen editors in various projects, but he was also most enthusiastic about Polish abstract art; in 1959 he even organised an exhibition in Munich, see Exh. Cat. Munich, Bücherstube am Siegestor 1959: ‘Neue Malerei aus Polen’ , ed. Rolf Seeliger, Munich, 1959. 28 Nickel Grünstein 1963, n. p.

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according to tendenzen, Polish art is an indicator of the failure of abstract art arguing that even in Poland, the most liberal and most Western country of the Eastern Bloc, artists of the younger generation have returned to realism. ‘Unnoticed by their Western supporters,’ the author proclaimed, young Polish artists ‘have changed the fronts and turned by back to reality.’29 Moreover, if Das Kunstwerk had referred to Aleksander Wojciechowski and his Przegląd Artystyczny of the late 1950s, tendenzen is drawing upon the Przegląd Artystyczny of the early 1960s and its new, pro-regime editor Helena Krajewska. She presented a completely different picture of art in Poland than Wojciechowski. Her account serves as the main reference in Grünstein’s article,30 and the subsequent issue of tendenzen, as if for additional corroboration, started with an illustrated excerpt from the new Przegląd Artystyczny.31 (Fig. 5) That the political climate in Poland had changed in the meantime, and that the Przegląd’s shift of policy was a result of political pressure and no coincidence is, of course, not mentioned in tendenzen. Furthermore, if the Western ‘Beifallklatscher’ of Polish abstract art liked to invoke the national-romantic cliché of the Polish freedom fighter, Grünstein in his article presented a no less folkloristic account according to which Poland had always been a stronghold of engaged art. This premise, crude as it is, was a clever move, for it allowed the author both to explain the failure of socialist realism in Poland (its enforced implementation, he explained, had ignored the ‘true humanist tradition’ in Poland) and at the time to dismiss abstract art as a Western import. Finally, even abstract art is claimed to show the purported realist turn of the younger generation: also the abstract art of young Polish artists, the argument goes, is committed to reality, only in disguised and encrypted form: it is engaged abstraction (engagierte Abstraktion).32

29 ‘[U]nbemerkt von westlichen Beifallklatschern [haben die jungen Experimentatoren] die Front im Prinzip schon gewechselt: In Themen und Formversuchen drängten sie zurück zur Wirklichkeit.’ Grünstein 1963, n. p. 30 Tellingly, he is quoting from an article by Krajewska that was published in the GDR magazine Bildende Kunst. 31 Tendenzen, 4:22, August 1963. 32 See also Nickel Grünstein, ‘Abstrakte Maler engagieren sich’ , tendenzen, 4:22, August 1963, n. p.

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Fig. 5  Tendenzen, 4:22, August 1963, presenting excerpts from the Przegląd Artystyczny 1962:4, including a reproduction of Bronisław Linke’s drawing Racism.

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Conclusions To sum up: In the late 1950s, the public flourishing of abstract art in Poland was an exceptional phenomenon within the Eastern Bloc. This unique status not only drew particular attention to it. It also stimulated the competition between Western proponents and opponents of abstract art who found in Polish art a rewarding battlefield. Rather than treating it as a historical phenomenon, they were using Polish art like a touchstone or experimental setup that would finally prove the superiority of the one or the other point of view. Two more features seem characteristic of the West German contest about Polish art: first, like the debate about abstract art in general, also the debate about Polish abstract art was in part a proxy debate. Under the surface of art criticism, it reflected fundamental political, ideological, as well as generational tensions, and conflicts within the West German postwar society. Second, due to that specific constellation, the debate also became a missed chance. It missed the chance of questioning dichotomous clichés of East and West and of replacing them by a more sophisticated perspective. As abstract art in the Eastern Bloc, Polish abstract art would have provided a perfect case in point here. However, it was paradoxically interpreted in a way that affirmed, rather than challenged, the simplistic notion of abstract art as the art of the West: Das Kunstwerk cherished Polish artists for their ‘turn to the West’33, tendenzen was blaming them for the same reason, but none of them questioned that conceptual framework. Also the notion of ‘engaged abstraction’34 was not introduced by tendenzen to illustrate the shortcomings of the abstract vs. realist contrast but to make a case for engaged art. Thus their dispute leaves us with a rather ambivalent picture: on the one hand, both were looking across the Iron Curtain and were aware of the art scene beyond it – by the way, much more than art history in the following decades. But on the other hand, and despite of this, they accepted the premise of the EastWest dichotomy. What kind of general, historiographical conclusions can we draw from this case study, and how do they contribute to the agenda of this volume, Rethinking Postwar Europe? Most of the research literature on the role of abstract art in the cultural Cold War has followed, rather than questioned, the affirmative and heroic postwar narratives: it has reiterated the received notion of abstract art as art of

33 Juliane Roh 1956, 97. 34 Nickel Grünstein 1963, n. p.

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the free West and of the Iron Curtain as neat aesthetic and ideological watershed. Unlike the contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s, however, it has usually ignored the abstract art beyond the Iron Curtain, and it has neglected leftist criticisms of abstract art from within the Western art world. Even though in recent years the simplistic bipolar perspective on postwar Europe has been thoroughly deconstructed by historians and art historians alike, it is still powerful. The above case study draws attention to some of the neglected complexities, ambivalences and entanglements: first, it reminds us that conflicts about abstract art existed on both sides of, and not only along the Iron Curtain; that the cultural Westernization of the Federal Republic of Germany was all but an uncontested process; and that – tellingly enough – art from Eastern Europe could play a key role in Western debates about the Western art world. Second, it shows that the contest about Polish art among West German art critics cannot be analysed in terms of the cultural Cold War context alone. In fact, the debate was shaped by a variety of factors. They include social and intellectual history, generational conflicts, resentments to a growing art market, opposition to the establishment, etc. Third, recent studies on cultural East-West relationships often tend to romanticise these relationships by overemphasising the aspect of a so-called overcoming of ideological barriers, by means of culture. However, as the above counterexample shows, the interest was at times rather biased, self-interested, instrumental, and driven by internal animosities, with the effect of confirming rather than undermining ideological fronts. In sum, given these findings, I would like to plea for a broader and more finegrained contextualization of postwar discourses on abstract art that goes beyond the usual references to the Cold War context. One has also to take into account their less obvious underpinnings, and this involves taking a closer look at the protagonists and their social, intellectual or generational backgrounds. Otherwise, the polemical overtones and hidden agendas of those debates cannot be adequately explained and analysed. At the same time, this result may have some rather suspicious methodological implications. By stressing the specifically West German background of the above case, it may seem incompatible with current transnational accounts such as histoire croisée that doubt the methodological and historiographical significance of national categories and call for overcoming the national paradigm.35 However, it

35 See for example Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’ , History and Theory, 45, February 2006, 30–50.

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seems that one cannot explain the antagonistic treatment of Polish art in West German art criticism without taking into account the particular social and political settings that were quite specific for West Germany at that time – for instance, the generational conflict about suppression and self-exoneration in the post-Nazi era, which also affected the discourse about abstract art.36 Such methodological questions I have to leave open here, but their discussion could or should also be part of rethinking postwar Europe within the realm of art history.37

Bibliography Unpublished Texts Folder AdK-O 4241 for Hiepe, folders AdK-O 0284, Ingeborg-Drewitz-Archiv 1297, and SV-ZA 230 for Beckelmann, Archives of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Published Texts Baden-Badener Kunstgespräch 1959: Wird die moderne Kunst ‘gemanagt’? Mit Beiträgen von Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Beckelmann, Max Bense, Konrad Farner, Daniel-Henry Kahn­weiler, Egon Vietta u.a., Baden-Baden and Krefeld, 1959. Jürgen Beckelmann, Das Ende der Moderne. Entwicklung und Tendenzen in der deutschen Malerei, Munich, 1959. Jürgen Beckelmann, Der goldene Sturm, Hamburg, 1960 (reprinted as Aufzeichnungen eines jungen Mannes aus besserer Familie, Zurich, 1965). Jürgen Beckelmann, ‘Der Trick mit den “jungen Autoren”’ , Die Kultur, September 1961. Steffen Dengler, Die Kunst der Freiheit? Die westdeutsche Malerei im Kalten Krieg und im wieder­ vereinigten Deutschland, Munich, 2010. [Editors’ note], Das Kunstwerk, 13:4, October 1959, 3. Exh. Cat. Munich, Bücherstube am Siegestor 1959: ‘Neue Malerei aus Polen’ , ed. Rolf Seeliger, Munich, 1959. Klaus J. Fischer [which means, from August 1959: Klaus Jürgen-Fischer], ‘Die 29. Biennale in Venedig’ , Das Kunstwerk, 12:1/2, July/August 1958, 46–85. Will Grohmann, ‘Tagung der Kunstkritiker in Warschau’ , Das Kunstwerk, 14:5/6, November/December 1960, 61–63.

36 It might be worthwhile, however, to study in comparative manner whether or how in different countries generational conflicts shaped the postwar debate about abstract art and to compare patterns of conflict. 37 On the challenge of histoire croisée for research on Polish German cultural relationships see also theme issue of kunsttexte.de/ostblick 4, 2018: Verflechtung und Abgrenzung. Deutsch-­ polnische Perspektiven in der Kunstgeschichte seit 1945, eds. Regina Wenninger and Annika Wienert.

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Nickel Grünstein, ‘Geschichte des modernen Realismus XIV. Polen: Polens letzte Teilung’ , tendenzen. Blätter für engagierte Kunst, 21, June 1963, n. p. Nickel Grünstein, ‘Abstrakte Maler engagieren sich’ , tendenzen, 4:22, August 1963, n. p. Richard Hiepe, ed. Künstler gegen Atomkrieg. Eine Auswahl von Bildern aus der Ausstellung Künst­ ler gegen Atomkrieg, Munich, 1959. Christina von Hodenberg, Konsens und Krise: eine Geschichte der westdeutschen Medienöffentlichkeit 1945–1973, Göttingen, 2006. Anthony Dirk Moses, ‘Grinding the Generational Axe’ , 21 November 2000, http://hsozkult. ge­schichte.hu-berlin.de/Rezensio/symposiu/versfrag/moses.htm [5 May 2018]. Anthony Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge, MA, 2007. Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘… und schämten sich nicht! Vom Vorleben unserer Kunstkritiker in großer deutscher Zeit’ , tendenzen, 3:17/18, December 1962 (part I) and tendenzen, 4:19, February 1963 (part II), n. p. Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘Apologeten und Propagandisten II. Deutschlands Grohmann’ , tendenzen, 4:23, October 1963, n. p. Reinhard Müller-Mehlis, ‘Alte Kameraden von Gauleiters Gnaden’ , tendenzen, 4:28, August 1964, n. p. N. N., n. t., Das Kunstwerk, 14:1/2, July/August 1960 [theme issue on the XXX Venice Biennial, annotated illustrations], n. p. Piotr Piotrowski, ‘Totalitarianism and Modernism: the “Thaw” and Informel Painting in Central Europe’ , Artium Quaestiones, 10, 2000, 119–174. Georg Poensgen, ‘Wo stehen wir eigentlich?’ , Das Kunstwerk, 7:3–4, 1953, 4. Franz Roh, ‘Review of Leopold Zahn and Georg Poensgen, Abstrakte Kunst, eine Weltsprache (1958)’ , Das Kunstwerk, 12:7, January 1959, 45–46. Juliane Roh, ‘Die 28. Venediger Biennale’ , Das Kunstwerk, 10:1/2, July/August 1956, 97–99. Anda Rottenberg, ‘Ministerstwo Kultury i Sztuki’ , in Polskie Zycie Artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, ed. A. Wojciechowski, Wroclaw et al., 1992, 181–253. Nina Verheyen, Diskussionslust. Eine Kulturgeschichte des ‘besseren Arguments’ in Westdeutschland, Göttingen, 2010. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1949–1990, Bonn, 2010. Regina Wenninger and Annika Wienert, eds. Verflechtung und Abgrenzung. Deutsch-polnische Perspektiven in der Kunstgeschichte seit 1945, kunsttexte.de/ostblick 4, 2018. Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’ , History and Theory, 45, February 2006, 30–50. Aleksander Wojciechowski, ‘Przeglad Artystyczny w latach 1957–1960’ , in Polskie Zycie Artystyczne w latach 1945–1960, ed. Aleksander Wojciechowski, Wroclaw et al., 1992, 392–395. Wolfgang Zaehle, ‘Besuch beim “Krummen Kreis” in Warschau. Polnische Maler ringen um neue Ausdrucksformen’ , Die Andere Zeitung, 30 April 1964. Leopold Zahn and Georg Poensgen, Abstrakte Kunst, eine Weltsprache, Baden-Baden, 1958.

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Tanja Zimmermann

Primitivism and Naïveté as Categories of Political Aesthetics Early Approaches against Eurocentrism in Art Criticism after the Second World War At the beginning of the 20th century primitivism and naïveté served not only as a means to liberate art from the Western academic tradition of mimesis, perspective, and classical bodily proportions but were used also as a rhetorical instrument to defend non-European art, art in the European periphery, and low popular art against the disqualifying Eurocentric criticism. Rival discourses on art were closely interwoven with political debates on cultural identity, accompanying nation-building processes, and European geopolitics. In disputes on opposing aesthetical norms, early approaches against Eurocentrism in art criticism and art history were formulated. In the following, I first want to outline the dispute on primitivism and naïveté before the Second World War, because it laid the foundation for further development after 1945. In the second part, I am going to discuss its changes and new functions in the period after the Second World War, determined by the bipolar division of Europe during the Cold War and the emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement as a new political power. Yugoslavia, alongside India and Egypt played a crucial role in developing early anti-Eurocentric and post-colonial approaches in art under communism since the 1950s and tried to establish naïve art as a bridge between socialist realism and abstract art, between industrial, highly developed and rural, undeveloped countries.

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Primitive and Naïve Art before the Second World War When the early generation of Russian avant-garde artists declared in their manifestos primitive art as the main source of inspiration, their claims were closely connected with Slavophil resentment against the West. Alexandr Shevchenko, member of the group Donky Tail (Osliny khvost), which broke with the French cubist tradition, argued against corrupted Western consumerist taste and perceived primitivism as a means for opposing it. With the term primitive, he denoted archaic non-­perspective art, non-European, as well as popular art, which are all characterised by linearity, simplicity, and rhythmical periodicity of forms, deriving their origins from Asia. Its modernist equivalent, the neoprimitivism of the Russian avant-garde, as Shevchenko claimed, departed from this Eastern tradition as well, but was at the same time closely related to contemporary artistic currents, also of Western origins. Nevertheless, he considered it predominantly a Russian resp. Eastern cultural phenomenon, locating its mythical origins in Tatar-Mongolian culture.1 The emergence of neoprimitivism in Russia was also closely related to the enthusiasm for Russian folk art, especially popular prints (lubki), which were exhibited in Moscow in 1913.2 In the introduction, Mikhail Larionov compared their aesthetic system to that of Picasso and Braque and perceived it as a Russian anticipation of modernist art.3 Their associate, Natalya Goncharova, took the cultural revalorisation of the East even further and declared Western art to be secondary and derivative.4 The re-direction of cultural transfer from Eastern anti-mimetic to Western mimetic art was probably inspired by Wilhelm Worringer’s crucial study Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), translated in 1912 into Russian, where he declared stylised abstract art to be a primary and its opposite, naturalism a secondary stylistic formation.5 However, another aspect

1

See Alexandr Shevchenko, ‘Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, its Potentials, its Achievements’ , in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John Bowlt, New York, NY, 1976, 41–53, 48–49.

2

For different forms of folklorism in Russia see Tatyana P. Alekseeva and Natalya V. Vinickaya, ‘Folklorism v neoprimitivisme russkogo avantgarda pervych desyatiletiy XX  v.’ , Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo univerziteta, 26:4, 2016, 5–25.

3

See Mikhail Larionov, ‘Vstuplenie’ , in Vystavka ikonopisnych podlinnikov i lubkov, Moscow, 1913, 5–10, 6.

4

See Natalya Goncharova, ‘Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition’ , in Bowlt 1976, 54–60.

5

See Claudia Öhlschläger, ‘Introduction’ , in Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Helga Grebing, Paderborn, 2007, 13–42.

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of this inversion has to be examined in competing cultural discourses, accompanying the increasing West-East antagonism.6 The belated Yugoslav avant-garde radicalised the ideas of the pre-war Russian neoprimitivism after the First World War. The Serbo-Croatian group Zenit, founded in 1921 by the brothers Ljubomir Micić and Branko Ve Poljanski, praised in their manifesto the naked, pure ‘barbarian genius’ like a volcano of creative power that should destroy the imperialist, bellicose, and decadent Western European civilization.7 Barbarian became a synonym for primitive. In the Manifesto to the Barbarians of the Spirit and Thinking on all Continents, written in ‘Zagreb in the Balkans’ in 1925, they called themselves ‘Hajduks’ or ‘Komits’ , using the name of bandits and outlaws who, during the resurrections against the Ottoman rulers, were perceived as freedom fighters. Their opponents were no longer the Turks, but the cultural influences of ‘old’ , decadent Europe. In their opinion, this Europe was unable to renew itself spiritually.8 However, the toponym ‘the Balkans’ served not only as a geographical location for a region belonging neither to West nor to East but was also instrumentalised for mental mapping, relating the adjective ‘Balkan’ to the semantic field of ‘tribal’ , ‘backward’ , and ‘primitive’.9 The rejection of Western European culture by the Yugoslav avant-garde went hand in hand with the formation of a proud Balkan identity, which transformed pejorative attributes into positive affirmations.10 During the 1930s, when conservative and totalitarian ideologies emerged all over Europe, the primitivism of avant-garde art started to be rejected.11 Primitive art, now assuming negative connotations of foreign, inferior, and degenerate, was 6

See Tanja Zimmermann, ‘Disparaging Images Turned into Pride: Artistic Strategies of Reversal and Over-Identification in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in a Global Dialogue’ , in Global Art History: Transkulturelle Verortung von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, eds. Julia Allerstorfer and Monika Leisch-Kiesl, Bielefeld, 2017, 271–298.

7

See Ljubomir Micić, ‘Manifest des Zenitismus’ , in In unseren Seelen flattern schwarze Fahnen: Serbische Avantgarde 1918–1939, ed. and trans. Holger Siegel, Leipzig, 1992, 114–123, 114–115, 118.

8

See Ljubomir Micić, ‘Manifest an die Barbaren des Geistes und Denkens auf allen Kontinenten’ , in Siegel 1992, 130–134, 130, 132, 134.

9 See Maria Todorova, ‘The Balkans. From Discovery to Invention’ , Slavic Review, 53:2, 1994, 453–482. 10 See Sonja Briski Uzelac, ‘Visual Arts in the Avant-Gardes between the two Wars’ , in Impossible Histories, eds. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 122–169, 144; Tatjana Petzer, ‘Topographien der Balkanisierung. Programme und künstlerische Manifestationen der Demarkation und Desintegration’ , Südosteuropa: Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft, 2–3, 2007, 255–275; Zimmermann 2017. 11 See Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Policy in France between the Wars, New Haven, CT, 1995.

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replaced by other, native primitives – the so-called naïves, denoting self-taught artists bound to the soil, who were now perceived as the ark of creative power. The French art historian Maximilian Gautier, guest curator of the exhibition Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America in the Museum of Modern Art in New York 1938, argued that ‘modern art was on the verge of becoming a sort of super-algebra’ and praised naïve painters for their simplicity and universal language.12 Although the naïves had been discovered parallel to the primitives in the early 20th century, they became especially popular during the 1930s, when abstract avant-garde art was on the retreat. Although they were often labelled as primitive, their artistic expression following idyllic traditions, was less aggressive than that of the primitives, imitating non-European art. Jean Dubuffet, founder of art brute, underlined the difference between primitivism and naïveté several decades later. Whereas primitive art, also including art brute, completely broke with the bourgeoisie tradition, as Dubuffet claimed, naïve art remained committed to it. Artistic forms of expressing, subject to my investigation and usually labelled as “l’art brut” are much more remote from cultural criteria than those generally called “naïve art”. It seems to me that “naïve art” in general is much more tributary to the cultural criteria, to the traditional spiritual base, however, that it brings in at least a bit of spontaneity, a bit of personal invention into the cultural clichés, but to my opinion, this is not enough.13 Being less primitive, naïve artists were able to bridge the abyss between the abstract avant-garde and the figurative realist currents in the 1930s. In 1933, a large exhibition Un siècle de peinture naïve was shown in Paris, followed by the next in 1937, called Les maîtres populaires de la réalité. In the same year, the exhibition travelled to Zurich, where it was presented in the Kunsthaus. In 1938, it was shown under the name Masters of Popular Painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where also American naïves were exhibited. Contemporary critics characterised the naïves based on their links to the soil as peasant artists, but, due to their poor social situation, also as proletarian artists.14 Thus, they could be linked either with 12 See Maximilien Gautier, ‘Maîtres Populaires de la Réalité’ , in Exh. Cat. New York, The Museum of Modern Art 1938: ‘Masters of Popular Painting. Modern Primitives in Europe and America’ , ed. Alfred H. Barr Jr., New York, NY, 1938, 17–24, 21. 13 Exh. Cat. Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery 1972: ‘The 3 rd Triennial of Insite Art’ , ed. Štefan Tkáč, Bratislava, 1972, 103. 14 See Golan 1995, 198, footnote 54.

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national conservative programs or with universalist, socialist, or communist programs founded on the brotherhood of all working people. In France, the naïves such as Henri Rousseau and other autodidact artists, discovered between 1905 and 1912 by avant-garde artists and the German art collector Wilhelm Uhde,15 were perceived as the ‘painters of the sacred heart’ being close to God.16 Living in their own autarkic world, separate from society, they were compared to the innocent human before the Fall of Man, ascetic eremites and saints, speaking through their paintings the universal language of humankind and depicting eternity behind the changing surface of the world.17 In other countries, such as the communist Soviet Union and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia with a strong communist party, socio-political interpretations of the naïves prevailed. In Russia, the Georgian naïve painter Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani) was discovered in 1912 by the neoprimitivist artists Ilya and Kyrill Zdanevich, who derived his talent from his Eastern spirit and attachment to the Georgian soil.18 In the late 1920s, the painter, who died in 1918, started to be interpreted in the context of proletarian art and socialist realism. In 1929, the Soviet art critic A. Al’f praised his attachment to the things of everyday life and the voluminosity of his figures, which oppose impressionist and avantgarde dissolution.19 He even compared Pirosmani to the revolutionary Mexican painter Diego Rivera and expressed the opinion that the Georgian painter, if he were still alive, would certainly depict the new communist reality. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, leftist academic painters who adapted the naïve style used it to express socially engaged topics. In 1929, the realist art association Soil (Zemlja) was founded in Zagreb on the initiative of a group of various artists, among them Krsto Hegedušić.20 Although Hegedušić obtained an academic education, he preferred to draw and paint in a naïve manner inspired by George Grosz’s proletarian as well as Pieter Breughel’s peasantry motives. Grosz’s works, mostly 15 See Daniel Kramer, ‘Henri Rousseau und die Avantgarde – ein Künstler für Künstler’ , in Exh. Cat. Riehen, Fondation Beyeler 2010: ‘Henri Rousseau’ , eds. Delia Ciuha and Philippe Büttner, Ostfildern, 2010, 97–107. 16 Wilhelm Uhde, Fünf primitive Meister, Zurich, 1947, 15. ‘Maler der heiligen Herzen’. 17 See Gautier 1938, 17–24. 18 See Kyrill M. Zdanevich, Niko Pirosmanshvili, Moscow, 1964, 8, 12, 32; Anatoli Strigalev, ‘Kem, kogda i kak byla otkryta zhivopis N. A. Pirosmanshvili?’ , Panorama iskusstv, 12, 1989, 296–306. 19 See A. Al’f, ‘Niko Pirosmanshvili’ , Iskusstvo. Ezhemesechnyj zhurnal Glaviskusstva Narkomprosa RSFSR, 2:4, May–June 1929, 106–113. 20 See Exh. Cat. Zagreb, Moderna galerija 1971: ‘6. zagrebački salon: kritička retrospektiva “Zemlja”: slikarstvo, grafika, crtež, kiparstvo’ , ed. Kosta Angeli Radovani, Zagreb, 1971; Petar Prelog, ‘Udruženje umetnika Zemlja (1929–1935) i umjetničko umrežavanja’ , Život umjetnosti: Časopis za suvremena likovna zbivanja, 99:2, 2016, 28–39.

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drawings, were exhibited in Zagreb in 1932.21 The display of the German artist belonging to the New Objectivity was most probably arranged on the initiative of the Serbian art critic and writer, Oto Bihalji-Merin, who studied at the Academy of Arts in Berlin during the 1920s and maintained close contact to German leftwing intellectuals.22 Hegedušić also supported naïve peasant painters and became a teacher of the autodidacts Ivan Generalić and Franjo Mraz, who in turn founded a peasant art collective in the Croatian village of Hlebine. The Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, who later, after the Second World War, became the most prominent cultural theorist of the third way in socialist Yugoslavia,23 praised already in 1933 in a foreword to Hegedušić’s publication of drawings, The Drava Motifs (Podravski motivi), his primitivism in depicting the hard lives of the poor, especially peasants, and for criticising decadent bourgeois society.24 For him, primitive was less a state of innocence than a state of the backward, brutal living conditions that characterised the Balkans suffering under imperialist Europe. In his social-political perception of the naïves, Krleža followed earlier discourses on the Balkans, introduced in art by the group Zenit in the 1920s. After the Second World War, the members of the Zemlja became the leading artists in socialist Yugoslavia and Bihalji-Merin the most important promoter of naïve art and the Yugoslav concept of the third way in art. The pre-war naïve art, bridging abstract avant-garde and figurative art as well as leftist and conservative aesthetics, started to play an important role again after the Second World War, when figurative artistic currents became associated either with the antique legacy of the Nazi regime or with the communist doctrine of socialist realism.25 Their socio-political interpretation as rebels on the margins of society, closely attached to the poor and suppressed, allowed to embed them into communist ideologies and to use them for early anti-Western and anti-­Eurocentric approaches in art history.

21 See Briski Uzelac 2003, 163–164. 22 See Lovorka Magaš and Petar Prelog, ‘Nekoliko aspekta utjecja Georgea Grosza na hrvatsku umjetnost izmedju dva rata’ , Radovi Instituta povijesti umjetnosti, 33, 2009, 227–240; Lovorka Magaš and Petar Prelog, ‘George Grosz and Croatian Art between the Two World Wars’ , RIHA Journal, 31, November 2011, 1–23, 14. 23 See Tanja Zimmermann, Der Balkan zwischen Ost und West: Mediale Bilder und kulturpolitische Prägungen, Weimar et al., 2014, 232–246. 24 See Miroslav Krleža, ‘Predgovor podravskim motivima Krste Hegedušića’ , in Likovne studije: Jubilarno izdanje u povodu devedesetih godina proteklih od autorova rođenja, ed. Ivo Frangeš, Sarajevo, 1985, 269–270. 25 See Tanja Zimmermann, ‘Oto Bihalji-Merin and the Concept of the “Naïve”: Bridging Socialist Realism and Non-Figurative Art’ , Acta Historiae Artis Slovenica, 23:1, 2018, 185–198.

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Reception of Primitive and Naïve Art after the Second World War Postwar exhibitions, starting in 1946 and reaching their peak in the late 1950s with the documenta: Art of the Twentieth Century in 1955, the 50 Years of Modern Art in Brussels in 1958, and the documenta II: Art after 1945 in 1959 reinstalled and consolidated the avant-garde movements as the real heirs of progressive modernism. Their organisers believed that ‘Western’ , ‘free’ art could be represented exclusively by non-­figurative, abstract art, whereas figurative art – even if it was produced in Western Europe – became associated either with Nazi or Stalinist repression, mirroring a distorted picture of the world.26 Eastern European avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky, Malevich, and Lissitzky, teaching at the Bauhaus or collaborating with Western artists, were perceived as part of international Western modernism.27 Primitive art, discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by avant-garde artists and rejected as inferior and ‘degenerate’ , started again to play a fundamental role for the promotion of non-mimetic concepts of Western art. The primitivist tradition of avant-garde art, departing from non-European or archaic cultures, was now declared to be the real predecessor of modernist Western art. This claim was formulated most clearly by the organiser of the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Art in Brussels, Emile Langui, who underlined that only archaic (that is, primitive) art of remote cultures can be the real predecessor of all progressive modernist currents in the 20th century.28 For a short period of time, (until the anti-formalism debate 1949–51)29 the rehabilitation of pre-war modernism even took place at the General German Exhibition (Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung) in 1946 in Dresden, belonging to the Soviet Occupation Zone, where German avant-garde artists from the 1920s were exhibited.30 In the USSR, Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin’s cult of personality in his

26 See Werner Haftmann, ‘Einführung’ , in Exh. Cat. Kassel, Fridericianum 1959: ‘II. documenta ’59. Malerei nach 1945’ , eds. Arnold Bode and Porter McCray, Cologne, 1959, 11–19, 15. 27 See Éva Forgács’s contribution to this book. 28 See Emile Langui, 50 Jahre moderne Kunst, Cologne, 1959, 11; Zimmermann 2018, 188. 29 See Anne Hartmann and Wolfram Eggeling, Sowjetische Präsenz im kulturellen Leben der SBZ und frühen DDR 1945–1953, Berlin, 1998, 157–162, 217–219. 30 See Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus: Die Rezeption der Moderne in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft in der DDR, Berlin, 2001, 93–116; Susanne König, ‘documenta in Kassel and the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden. A German-­ German History of Two Exhibitions’ , in OnCurating (documenta: Curating the History of the Present), 33, June 2017, eds. Nanne Buurman and Dorothee Richter, 25–33.

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secret speech in 1956 announced the beginning of the short Thaw period, which came to an end already in 1962, when the exhibition of the Union of Artists in the Manège (MOSKH) in Moscow was closed shortly after its opening. Nevertheless, in this short time, numerous exhibitions of Western modernist art were presented to the Soviet public, although accompanied by misunderstandings or even sharp criticism. The reception of Western art was initiated by a large Picasso exhibition in 1956.31 In 1957, for the occasion of the VIth World Youth Festival, followed an exhibition of several international art movements from the East and the West as well as Africa and South America, where contemporary American Pop Art and French lyrical abstraction were also presented to the Soviet spectators.32 Further important exhibitions took place at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s – a 1958 show of contemporary English painting and Polish abstract art and a 1959 exhibition of contemporary American art, where works by Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Koonig, Mark Rothko, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and others were shown.33 The last important international exhibition took place in 1961, where French contemporary art (Jean Bazaine, Hans Hartung, Jean Dubuffet, and many others) was exhibited.34 Although Russian avant-garde was not exhibited, it was possible to get into contact with their collectors (George Costakis), relatives, and experts (Dimitrii Sarabyanov).35

31 See Joshua Rubenstein, ‘Ilya Ehrenburg – Between East and West’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002, 44–65, 62–65; Eleonory Gilburd, ‘Picasso in the Thaw Culture’ , Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47:1/2, 2006, 65–108. 32 Anna Florkovskaja, ‘Abstraktnoe iskusstvo – eto khuliganstvo v mirovom masshtabe: Sovre­ mennoe iskusstvo na vystavkakh v Moskve (1957, 1961)’ , Iskusstvoznanie, 4, 2016, 192–211; Anna Florkovskaja, Fenomen moskovskogo neformalnogo iskusstva pozdnosovjetskogo vremei: evolucija, soziokul’turnyi kontekst, soobshchestva, strategii, khudozhestvenie napravlenija, St. Petersburg, 2018, 37–59. 33 See Marilyn S. Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959. Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002, 6–26. For further exhibitions of American art see ‘Chronology: American Exhibits to the U.S.S.R.’ , in U.S. Department of State: Diplomacy in Action, https://2009–2017.state.gov/p/eur/ci/rs/c26473. htm [13 February 2019]. 34 See Susan E. Raid, ‘Cold War Cultural Transactions: Designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo ‘58’ , Design and Culture. The Journal of Design Studies Forum, Special issue: Design as an Object of Diplomacy Post-45, 9:2, 2017, 123–145. 35 See John E. Bowlt and Dimitrii Sarab’yanov, ‘Keepers of Flame: An Exchange on Art and Western Cultural Influence in the USSR after World War II’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002, 81–87.

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In Yugoslavia, which in 1948 broke political and cultural contacts with the USSR until Stalin’s death, Western modernist and contemporary art were appre-

ciated even earlier. Since the early 1950s, exhibitions presented artworks of the Dutch avant-garde and contemporary art from France, Italy, and the USA.36 At the same time, different currents applying abstract forms were established, competing with each other.37 In addition to geometrical abstraction, introduced by the group Exat 51 in 1951, and various forms of the so-called socialist modernism close to lyrical abstraction, naïve art also played an important role. Whereas the naïves had been destined to negotiate between avant-garde art and realist currents during the 1930s, after the war they played a role of mediators between Eastern socialist realism and Western abstract art. For the first time after the Second World War their paintings were shown in 1958 at the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Art (50 Ans d’Art Moderne) in the Palais International de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, which was a part of the World’s Fair Expo 58. Its organiser, Emile Langui, the general director of art, literature, and education at the Belgian ministry, was supported by a national, as well as an international committee of experts from Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxemburg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the USA, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. Preparations started in 1955 and were accompanied by controversial discussions between Langui and Bihalji-Merin, who represented socialist Yugoslavia.38 Already in the 1920s and 1930s, during his nomadic émigré life from Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Great Britain, he had established close contacts with left-wing intellectuals from all over Europe.39 After the war, he became one of the most important art curators that specialised in the display of naïve art. After the conflict between Tito and Stalin, Bihalji-Merin was searching for a new canon of communist art independent from Soviet socialist realism and tried to design a new orientation for Yugoslav postwar art. He found it in the concept of naïve art, in which he perceived the genuine expression of proletarian and peasant creativity. Parallel to the development of the Non-Aligned Movement initiated by Josip Broz Tito, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Gamal Abdel Nasser in the mid-1950s, he also tried to establish an independent 36 See Ješa Denegri, ‘Inside or Outside “Socialist Modernism”? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950–1970’ , in Djurić and Šuvaković 2003, 170–208. 37 See Denegri 2003, 170–208. 38 See Florence Hespel, ‘Bruxelles 1958. Carfour mondial de l’art’ , in L’art contemporaine à l’exposition universelle Expo 58, ed. Virgine Derillez, Brussels, 2008, 13–59. 39 See Zimmermann 2018, 191–193.

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way between the political blocs in art. Following the new Yugoslav cultural theory of the third path, which was introduced by Miroslav Krleža at the exhibition of Yugoslav medieval art in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris in 1950,40 where the Glagolitic scripture at the Adriatic coast, the frescos of the so-called Macedonian Renaissance, and the Bogomilian grave steles from Bosnia were presented as anticipations of the independent Yugoslav third way, Bihalji-Merin now proposed the naïves to bridge the aesthetic differences between figurative Eastern and abstract Western art. In 1952, when the canon of socialist realism was abandoned at the III  Congress of Yugoslav writers, a new Gallery of Peasant Art (Seljačka umjetnička

galerija) was opened in Zagreb, which in 1956 was re-named to Gallery of Primitive Art (Galerija primitivne umjetnosti).41 The aim of the gallery was to define naïve art as a specific current of contemporary art and at the same time as a distinct form of folklore, cultivated by peasants, industrial workers, and even by academically-trained artists.42 In 1963, 1970, 1973, and 1975, large exhibitions of international naïve art were displayed in the gallery.43 Beside the autodidact peasant artists in the village of Hlebine, the Yugoslav state also supported other Yugoslav centres of naïve art in the villages of Kovačica and Svetozarovo in Serbia as well as in Žirje in Slovenia.44 Exhibitions, fairs, and festivals took place every year; the best artists were awarded. How important naïve art became for the transition from Soviet socialist realism to Yugoslav ‘peasant’ art demonstrates the monumental painting The Battle of Stubice in 1573 by Krsto Hegedušić, depicting a peasant uprising in the 16th century on the territory of the Yugoslav republics of Slovenia and Croatia, where President Tito was born.45 (Fig. 1) It was commissioned by the Croatian government in 1947 40 See Zimmermann 2014, 232–256. 41 See Zimmermann 2014, 247–255. 42 See Boris Klemen, ‘The Peasant-Artists of Croatia’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, 11, 1967, 20–28. 43 See Zimmermann 2014, 247–256. 44 See N.N., ‘Primitives’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, June 1962, 30; Meta Kordiš, ‘Jugoslovanska naivna in popularna kultura’ , Ars & Humanitas: Revija za umetnost in humanistiko, 3:1–2, 2009, 212–247. 45 For information about Hegedušić’s painting, for photographs and access to archive documents in the Museum of Yugoslavia (Muzej Jugoslavije) in Belgrade I want to thank to the senior curator of collection, Ana Pavić. For the details about the sketch of the painting, stored at the Museum of Peasant Uprisings (Muzej seljačkih buna) in Gornja Stubica in Croatia, I am indebted to the director of the museum, Vlatka Filipčić Maligec. My further thanks go also to Dr. Ljiljana Reinkowski, University of Basel, for helping me to get in contact with the colleagues in Croatia.

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and given as a present to the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito. In 1949, it won the first prize of the Yugoslav government and was hung in the working room of the president, where he let himself be photographed.46 There it remained until 1996 when it was removed to the Museum of Yugoslavia.47 Peasant uprisings were one of the central myths of the Yugoslav socialist revolution48 – even before this topic became popular in GDR painting.

Fig. 1  Krsto Hegedušić, The Battle of Stubice in 1573 (Boj kod Stubice 1573), 1949, oil on canvas, 200 x 547 cm. Belgrade, Museum of Yugoslavia, Inv. No. 143. © Belgrade, Museum of Yugoslavia.

Miroslav Krleža, who in 1933 had already written an essay on Hegedušić, described him now as an insurgent peasant whose style was crude as his hard life, although the painter had completed his studies at the academy in Zagreb.49 Hegedušić’s painting and the Yugoslav interpretation of peasant uprisings as anticipation of the communist revolution50 could have become an inspiration for the series of later peasant uprisings in the German Democratic Republic, starting with Max Lingner’s The Great German Peasant War from 1951–55 and ending with the large panorama 46 See Vladimir Maleković, ed. Krsto Hegedušić, Zagreb, 1974, 119; Nenad Radić, ‘Zbirka kao “mutno ogledalo” istorije’ , Glasnik narodnog muzeja Crne gore, 2, 2005–2006, 197–204; Nenad Radić, Pusen i petokraka: Zbirka slika druga predsednika, Novi Sad, 2012; Ana Pavić, Art and Authority: Landscapes from the Collection of Josip Broz Tito, Belgrade, 2014, 54–56; Zimmermann 2014, 224–232. 47 See Pavić 2014, 54. 48 See Tanja Zimmermann, ‘From the Haiducks to the Bogomils: Transformation of the Partisan Myth after World War II’ , in Kino! Partizanski film, ed. Barbara Wurm, Ljubljana, 2010, 62–70. 49 See Krleža, ‘Foreword’ , in Maleković 1974, 6. 50 See Zimmermann 2010, 62–70.

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picture in Frankenhausen by Werner Tübke from 1976–87. The transfer could have been initiated by Bihalji-Merin, who reminded in contact with Eastern German intellectuals such as Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Erhard Frommhold, Anna Seghers, and many others during the 1950s.51 At the meetings of the international committee for the preparation of the exhibition 50 Years of Modern Art in Brussels, which took place from 1955 to 1957, Bihalji-­ Merin criticised the Eurocentric concept focusing on internationally renowned Western, especially French art, which according to his opinion was not able to represent the diversity of the world’s art.52 Another controversial subject of discussions was abstract art. The Yugoslav representative rejected the opportunity to present abstraction as the final step in the development of art in the 20th century, as it was suggested at the documenta in Kassel. Instead, he also proposed displaying the revival of different currents of realist art. His proposal was strongly supported by the Russian, Polish, and Italian representatives.53 Langui finally decided to overcome the division of Western abstract and Eastern figurative art by creating a distinction between ‘speculative-rationalist’ and ‘emotional-intuitive’ tendencies.54 To the first he counted cubism, neo-plasticism, orphism, suprematism, magic realism, and geometrical abstraction, to the second fauvism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, and a large portion of realist currents. At the same time, the Hermitage contributed a large amount of French modernist paintings by Post-Impressionists, Fauves, Nabis, and Cubists from the famous Morozov and Shchukin collection.55 In the catalogue, naïve art was mentioned beside African art as one of the origins of modernist art.56 Their discovery was attributed not only to Picasso, Apollinaire and their circles but also to the surrealists. Langui described the naïves as small people who paint without purpose for other small people: ‘As children of the people, workers, postmen, housewives, peasants, street vendors they paint exclusively for themselves, without attaching a particular purpose to them or making special

51 Correspondence in the Historical Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Becher-­JohannesR-­Korrespondenz 173, 5560, 5844, 5845, 5846, 5849, 5991, S1214, S1338, S1366, Fromhold 293, Seghers 759, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv 0687/086, 0788/030). 52 Hespel 2008, 21. 53 See Hespel 2008, 22. 54 See Langui 1958, 71. 55 See Chamot 1959, 50. 56 See Langui 1958, 8.

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artistic demands.’57 Although the organiser argued that naïve art has no aims, its interpretation in the communist context played an important role for its popularisation in the Eastern Bloc. At the exhibition in Brussels, beside the French naïves, the Yugoslav academic naïve Hegedušić, and the autodidact Generalić, founder of the school of Hlebine, were exhibited. Over the next two decades, several international exhibitions all over the world were dedicated to the naïves, praising their creative power and universalist language: 1958 in Knokke-le Zoute (Belgium); 1960 in Paris; 1961 in Baden-Baden, Frankfurt, and Hannover; 1962 in Edinburgh; 1963 in Recklinghausen and Zagreb; 1964 in Rotterdam, Paris, Salzburg, and Oldenburg; 1966 in Bratislava and Tokyo; 1969 in Bratislava and Lugano; 1970 in Dortmund and Zagreb; 1971 in Recklinghausen; 1972 in Bratislava; 1973 in Lugano, Zagreb, and Acapulco; 1974 in Milan and Amsterdam; and 1974–75 in Munich, Zurich, Zagreb, Warsaw, Szczecin, and Krakow.58 Whereas Bihalji-Merin promoted naïve art as a current of contemporary art and a bridge between non-figurative and figurative art,59 the Slovak Štefan Tkáč, organiser of the Triennial Insita in Bratislava (1966, 1969, 1972), wanted it to replace to radical modernist currents: ‘THE FACT THAT MAN IS NOT SATISFIED WITH MODERN ART causes that the essence of insite art has become the complement of contem-

poraneous art, its vanguard endeavour and thus it is favourably accepted by the consumers’ , he claimed in the exhibition catalogue from 1972.60 A similar situation occurred in Poland, where central authorities stimulated the production and exhibition of non-professional painters, called ‘Others’ (inni).61 Although the art critic Al’f in the USSR tried to interpret naïve art as an anticipation of socialist realism in the late 1920s, the postwar Soviet art critics underlined the fact that their rural motives were not able to reflect the idea of progress according to the doctrine of socialist realism. The Soviet critic Konstantin Simonov, who was interviewed for the occasion of the Insita in Bratislava in 1972, did not perceive in Pirosmani’s works manifestations of the world seen through innocent eyes, but witnesses of 57 Langui 1958, 48. ‘Als Kinder des Volkes, Arbeiter, Briefträger, Hausfrauen, Bauern, Straßenhändler, malen sie ausschließlich für sich selbst, ohne einen bestimmten Zweck damit zu verknüpfen oder besondere künstlerische Ansprüche zu stellen.’ 58 See Exh. Cat. Munich, Haus der Kunst 1975: ‘Die Kunst der Naiven. Themen und Beziehungen’ , eds. Lise Bihalji-Merin and Oto Bihalji-Merin, Munich and Zurich, 1975, 30. Gabriela Świtek, ‘“Others” in the Canon of Modernity’ , in Poland – a Country of Folklore?, ed. Joanna Kordjak, Warsaw, 2016, 72–78. 59 See Zimmermann 2018, 185–198. 60 Exh. Cat. Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery 1972, 99. 61 See Świtek 2016.

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the past times: ‘The world of his pictures is that of the pre-revolutionary Georgia. […] In this sense the world of Pirosmani is historical. In his pictures we can find very minute details, unrepeatable features of a historical epoch, belonging to the past for good.’62 Nevertheless, in his prerevolutionary times, Pirosmani was an inventor, who could be compared to Walt Disney: When I looked at his “Deer” – at this personification of goddess and charm I must unwillingly think that the artist created this picture many years ago, before the same picture in shape of the famous Disney’s “Bambi” found its way into the hearts of children almost all over the world through the silver screen of film.63 Pirosmani and other naïve artists remained in the USSR expressions of the people’s creativity, but not the bearer of communist progress. Therefore their intensive reception started as late as during the perestroika. Along with its function as mediator in overcoming of the abyss between abstract and figurative art, naïve art was also supposed to unite different nations and cultures under a common denominator. It became a universal, transnational, and transcultural idiom, anticipating anti-Eurocentric and post-colonial approaches in the 1970s. In this process, Oto Bihalji-Merin played an important role not only in Yugoslavia but internationally as well. He became the most important curator of naïve art and dedicated several articles to it, placing naïve art on equal footing with contemporary modernist currents. In 1957, he published an article on Yugoslav contemporary art, where he observed a contrapuntal simultaneity of peoples, awakening for the first time to their self-confidence and bridging all social phases proclaiming the cult of the machine and the paradise of electricity with those late, civilization-weary peoples who, through surrealism and “art primitive” revert to the primal landscape of pre-logic being.64

62 Exh. Cat. Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery 1972, 119. 63 Exh. Cat. Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery 1972, 122. 64 Oto Bihalji-Merin, ‘Tradition und Perspektiven’ , in Jugoslawien: Zeitgenössische jugoslawische Malerei  14, ed. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Belgrade, 1957, 3–16, 3. ‘Eine kontrapunktische Gleichzeitigkeit von Völkern, die erst zu ihrem Selbstbewusstsein erwachen und alle gesellschaftliche

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In 1959, he wrote the book Naïve Painters, dedicated to the naïves all over the world and translated in several international languages, in which he proclaimed that ‘in an epoch of dissolution and abstraction in art they became carriers of the re-appropriation of lost reality.’65 In his publication, The Adventure of Modern Art: On the Growing Unity of the World in 1962, he started to re-evaluate Ernst Cassirer’s concept of mythical thinking, typical for primitive cultures. According to Bihalji-Merin, the capacity of mythical thinking enables people not only to deal with the traumata of the past and with unsolved contemporary problems but also to launch a new humanist concept of a universal world art, which can communicate in a common language, thereby overcoming cultural differences.66 In the naïves he saw a renewal of the postwar society tired of civilization and a compromise between primitive nations in the so-called third world and highly developed Western civilisations. In the same year, Claude Lévi-Strauss published his book The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) in which he searched for common structures of thought and images (imagines mundi) based on analogical, totalising thinking, which is foreign to the rational Western tradition. His book exerted an enormous impact on art in the following decade.67 According to the same principle, Bihalji-Merin arranged different cultures and artistic expressions, putting them in dialogue with each other and not in hierarchical interdependence: ‘Despite the differentiation and the plenitude of aesthetic idioms, art in the second half of the twentieth century is already in the process of approaching a certain unity of expressive forms which arises from the unity of the opposites of many cultures.’68 His theory was also strongly influenced by André Malraux’s formalist concept of the musée imaginaire, who in the mid-1930s started to de-contextualise art from its cultural environment and put it in new cross-cultural relations according to aesthetic-formalist Phasen überbrückend den Kult der Maschine und das Paradies der Elektrizität prokla­mieren mit jenen späten, zivilisationsmüden Völkern, die durch Surrealismus und “art primitif” sich in die Urlandschaft prälogischen Seins zurückversetzen.’ 65 Oto Bihalji-Merin, Die naive Malerei, Cologne, 1959, 15. ‘[…] in einer Epoche der Auflösung und Abstraktion in der Kunst zum Träger der Wiederaneignung verlorengegangenen Realität geworden sind.’ 66 See Oto Bihalji-Merin, Abenteuer der modernen Kunst. Von der werdenden Einheit der Welt, Cologne, 1962, 7–8. 67 Günther Metken, ‘Das fruchtbare Missverständnis’ , in Exh. Cat. Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich 1981: ‘Mythos & Ritual in der Kunst der 70er Jahre’ , eds. Erika Billeter and Annemarie Hürlimann, Zurich, 1981, 37–38. 68 Bihalji-Merin 1962, 7. ‘Die Kunst in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ist trotz Differenziertheit und der Fülle ästhetischer Idiome bereits dabei, sich einer gewissen Einheitlichkeit der Ausdrucksformen zu näheren, die aus der Einheit der Gegensätze vieler Kulturen.’

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analogies.69 Bihalji-Merin maintained close contact with the French collector of ‘Eastern’ art since the 1930s and continued their relationship after the war when Malraux became Minister of Culture under President Charles de Gaulle.70 During the late 1960s, while further pursuing his concept of world art, he also pleaded against the division of art into national pavilions at the Venice Biennale and demanded a common, shared world art.71 His criticism was increasingly directed against neo-colonial relationships and the new Eurocentric hierarchy in the field of art. In the late 1960s, American and Western European artists started to appropriate mythical languages of primitive cultures, while the original archaic languages of Non-European nations were destroyed by their very encounter with Western popular culture. The concept of contemporary art presupposes a common system of reference for peoples: But can the ideas be the same for those who are hardly released from the field of illiteracy and for those who have already overcome the classical conceptions of time and matter? Far-reaching emancipating movements of peoples and races, which take place alongside the revolutionary rearrangements of peasant and proletarian masses, are rapidly changing the ways of mapping territories. Customs, rites, religions and arts of Asian and African regions are shaken by the encounter with “occidental” culture and developed technology, thereby being subjected to a profound mutation.72

69 See Hal Foster, ‘The Archive without Museums’ , October, 77, Summer 1996, 97–119; Walter Grasskamp, André Malraux und das imaginäre Museum, Munich, 2014; Emile Bickerton, Out of Context: André Malraux, Apollo, 186:655, July/August 2017, 58–62. 70 Jan Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile. The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach, London and New York, NY, 2006, 329. 71 See Oto Bihalji-Merin, Ende der Kunst im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft?, Stuttgart et al., 1969, 21–22. 72 Bihalji-Merin 1969, 22. ‘Der Begriff zeitgenössische Kunst setzt ein gemeinsames Bezugsystem der Völker voraus: Können die Vorstellungen für diejenigen, die kaum aus dem Bereich der Schriftlosigkeit entlassen sind, die gleichen sein wie für jene, die die klassischen Vorstellungen von Zeit und Materie bereits überwunden haben? Weitreichende Emanzipationsbewegungen von Völkern und Rassen, die parallel zu den revolutionären Umschichtungen bäuerlicher und proletarischer Massen vor sich gehen, verändern rasch das Aussehen der Landkarten. Brauchtum, Riten, Religionen und Künste asiatischer und afrikanischer Großräume werden durch die Begegnung mit der “abendländischen” Kultur und der entwickelten Technik erschüttert und einer tiefgreifenden Mutation unterworfen.’

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Bihalji-Merin observed that the encounter of archaic cultures with technical civilisations, such as in Ethiopia and Nigeria, had thrown artistic creation into crisis, which manifested in the abandonment of original ritual-cultic art for religious purposes. According to him, the only artistic expression that is able to resist the hegemony of the industrial world is naïve art, which is particularly widespread in countries experiencing a belated industrial revolution.73 After the international conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961 in which 25 states (mostly from Africa and Asia) participated,74 the Yugoslav Third Way between East and West was extended to a global ideology of the Third World. President Tito and his government tried to transpose the domestic concept of multicultural ‘brotherhood and unity’ on the global level and called for ‘cooperation and brotherhood between nations’.75 The movement gathered underdeveloped states, which declared their fight against imperialism, colonialism, and the rivalry of the world powers by supporting free coexistence and peace.76 The well-known German journalist Peter Grubbe (Claus-Peter Volkmann, whose Nazi past was revealed in 1995),77 observed in his book Ruler of Tomorrow? Power and Powerlessness of the Non-Aligned World (1964) that Yugoslavia, having an ambiguous attitude toward Europe, was able to develop close relations to non-European states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Its anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment, in contrast to the arrogance of Europe, helped the country to shape new alliances of the Third World policy. 73 See Oto Bihalji-Merin, ‘Naivna umetnost 1970’ , in Exh. Cat. Zagreb and Hlebine, Galerija primitivne umetnosti Zagreb 1970: ‘Naivni ”70’ , Zagreb, 1970, 15–24, 18–19. 74 See N.N., ‘Foreign Relations: A Charter of Peace’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, 1:8, October 1961, 3–23. Full participants: Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Cambodia, Ceylon, Congo, Cuba, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Lebanon, Mali, Morocco, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab States, Yemen, Yugoslavia. Observers: Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador. Delegates come from Africa (Rhodesia, Ruanda-Urundi, Kenya, Angola, Uganda), Latin America as well as members of socialist parties from Argentina, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Uruguay, Venezuela etc. 75 N.N. 1961, 3. 76 See Jovan Čavoški, ‘Between great Powers and Third World Neutralists: Yugoslavia and the Belgrade Conference of Non-Aligned Movement’ , in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War. Dehli – Bandung – Belgrade, eds. Nataša Mišković et al., New York, NY, 2014, 184–206. 77 See Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, ‘Der Verwalter des Schlachthauses: Deutsches Doppelleben: Wie ein Mann sich selbst und seine Umwelt 50 Jahre lang betrog’ , Die Zeit, 42, 13 October 1995, https://www.zeit.de/1995/42/Der_Verwalter_des_Schlachthauses_Deutsches_Doppelleben_Wie_ein [29 January 2019]; Johannes Winter, ‘Vom Nazi-Beamten zum Stern-­Reporter’ , 12 February 2017, http://faustkultur.de/2995–0-Claus-Peter-Volkmann-alias-Peter-Grubbe. html [13 February 2019].

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Certainly, geographically, Yugoslavia belongs to Europe, and in terms of skin colour the Yugoslavs are Whites, Europeans. But due to their religion, their culture, the country’s historical tradition, they lack any feeling of superiority not only towards Africans, but also towards Asians, which many Europeans have. […] Subjugated and ruled first by the Turks, then by the Hungarians of Austria, the Yugoslav people developed a similar resentment against the European ruling nations and a similar urge for freedom and independence as the peoples of Asia and Africa that determined the history of their continents in recent decades. Therefore, they understand the ideas and motives of the non-aligned peoples much better than the rest of Europe, to which freedom is self-evident, because it has governed the world for centuries.78 At the same time, when the Non-Aligned Movement emerged as an important political actor on the global stage, naïve art became a trans-cultural idiom of world art, transgressing geopolitical divisions. It was used as a means to establish a post-national, universal language of art, made for being shared by Eastern and Western, European and Non-European artists on equal footing. In the process of democratisation of art, it helped to level out differences between autodidactic popular and educated high art, between the artistic expression of undeveloped and developed countries. It transgressed the geopolitical and national borders and, thus, played an important role in establishing an early art criticism against Eurocentrism.

78 Peter Grubbe [Klaus Volkmann], Herrscher von morgen? Macht und Ohnmacht der blockfreien Welt, Düsseldorf and Vienna, 1964, 127. ‘Gewiss, geographisch gehört Jugoslawien zu Europa, und ihrer Hautfarbe nach sind die Jugoslawen Weiße, Europäer. Aber auf Grund ihrer Religion, ihrer Kultur, auf Grund der geschichtlichen Überlieferung des Landes fehlt ihnen jedes Gefühl der Überlegenheit nicht nur gegenüber Afrikanern, sondern auch gegenüber Asiaten, das viele Europäer haben. […] Zunächst von den Türken, dann von Österreich-Ungaren unterworfen und regiert, entwickelte das jugoslawische Volk ein ähnliches Ressentiment gegenüber den europäischen Herrschernationen und einen ähnlichen Drang nach Freiheit und Unabhängigkeit, wie ihn die Völker Asiens und Afrikas empfanden und wie er die Geschichte Asiens und Afrikas in den letzten Jahrzehnten bestimmt hat. Sie verstehen daher die Gedanken und Motive der blockfreien Völker viel besser, als man die im übrigen Europa versteht, dem die Freiheit selbstverständlich ist, weil es die Welt seit Jahrhunderten regiert.’

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Tanja Zimmermann

Bibliography Unpublished Texts Historical Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin (Becher-Johannes-R-Korrespondenz 173, 5560, 5844, 5845, 5846, 5849, 5991, S1214, S1338, S1366, Fromhold 293, Seghers 759, Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv 0687/086, 0788/030).

Published Texts Tatyana P. Alekseeva and Natalya V. Vinickaya, ‘Folklorism v neoprimitivisme russkogo avantgarda pervych desyatletiy XX v.’ , Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo univerziteta, 26:4, 2016, 5–25. A. Al’f, ‘Niko Pirosmanshvili’ , Iskusstvo. Ezhemesechnyj zhurnal Glaviskusstva Narkomprosa RSFSR, 2:4, May–June 1929, 106–113. Emile Bickerton, ‘Out of context: André Malraux’ , Apollo, 186:655, July/August 2017, 58–62. Oto Bihalji-Merin, ‘Tradition und Perspektiven’ , in Jugoslawien: Zeitgenössische jugoslawische Malerei 14, ed. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Belgrade, 1957, 3–16. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Die naive Malerei, Cologne, 1959. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Abenteuer der modernen Kunst: Von der werdenden Einheit der Welt, Cologne, 1962. Oto Bihalji-Merin, Ende der Kunst im Zeitalter der Wissenschaft?, Stuttgart et al., 1969. Oto Bihalji-Merin, ‘Naivna umetnost 1970’ , in Exh. Cat. Zagreb and Hlebine, Galerija primitivne umetnosti 1970: ‘Naivni ”70’ , Zagreb, 1970, 15–24. John E. Bowlt, ed. Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticsm 1902–1934, New York, NY, 1976. John E. Bowlt and Dimitrii Sarab’yanov, ‘Keepers of Flame: An Exchange on Art and Western Cultural Influence in the USSR after World War II’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002. Sonja Briski Uzelac, ‘Visual Arts in the Avant-Gardes between the Two Wars’ , in Impossible Histories, eds. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 122–169. Jovan Čavoški, ‘Between Great Powers and Third World Neutralists: Yugoslavia and the Belgrade Conference of Non-Aligned Movement’ , in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War. Dehli – Bandung – Belgrade, eds. Nataša Mišković et al., New York, NY, 2014, 184–206. ‘Chronology: American Exhibits to the USSR’ , in U.S. Department of State: Diplomacy in Action, https://2009–2017.state.gov/p/eur/ci/rs/c26473.htm [13 February 2019]. Ješa Denegri, ‘Inside or Outside “Socialist Modernism”? Radical Views on the Yugoslav Art Scene, 1950–1970’ , in Impossible Histories, eds. Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 170–208. Exh. Cat. Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery 1972: ‘The 3 rd Triennial of Insite Art’ , ed. Štefan Tkáč, Bratislava, 1972. Exh. Cat. Munich, Haus der Kunst 1975: ‘Die Kunst der Naiven. Themen und Beziehungen’ , eds. Lise Bihalji-Merin and Oto Bihalji-Merin, Munich and Zurich, 1975. Exh. Cat. Zagreb, Moderna galerija 1971: ‘6. zagrebački salon: kritička retrospektiva “Zemlja”: slikarstvo, grafika, crtež, kiparstvo’ , ed. Kosta Angeli Radovani, Zagreb, 1971. Anna Florkovskaja, ‘Abstraktnoe iskusstvo – eto khuliganstvo v mirovom masshtabe: Sovremennoe iskusstvo na vystavkakh v Moskve (1957, 1961)’ , Iskusstvoznanie, 4, 2016, 192–211. Anna Florkovskaja, Fenomen moskovskogo neformalnogo iskusstva pozdnosovjetskogo vremei: evolucija, soziokul’turnyi kontekst, soobshchestva, strategii, khudozhestvenie napravlenija, St. Petersburg, 2018.

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Hal Foster, ‘The Archive without Museums’ , October, 77, Summer 1996, 97–119. Maximilien Gautier, ‘Maîtres Populaires de la Réalité’ , in Exh. Cat. New York, The Museum of Modern Art 1938: ‘Masters of Popular Painting. Modern Primitives in Europe and America’ , ed. Alfred H. Barr Jr., New York, NY, 1938, 17–24. Eleonory Gilburd, ‘Picasso in the Thaw Culture’ , Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47:1/2, 2006, 65–108. Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus: Die Rezeption der Mo­derne in Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft in der DDR, Berlin, 2001. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Policy in France between the Wars, New Haven, CT, 1995. Natalia Goncharova, ‘Preface to Catalogue of One-Man Exhibition’ , in Russian Art of the AvantGarde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John Bowlt, New York, NY, 1976, 54–60. Walter Grasskamp, André Malraux und das imaginäre Museum, Munich, 2014. Peter Grubbe [Claus Peter Volkmann], Herrscher von morgen? Macht und Ohnmacht der blockfreien Welt, Düsseldorf and Vienna, 1964. Werner Haftmann, ‘Einführung’ , in Exh. Cat. Kassel, Fridericianum 1959: ‘I. documenta ’59. Malerei nach 1945’ , eds. Arnold Bode and Porter McCray, Cologne, 1959, 11–19. Anne Hartmann and Wolfram Eggeling, Sowjetische Präsenz im kulturellen Leben der SBZ und frühen DDR 1945–1953, Berlin, 1998. Florence Hespel, ‘Bruxelles 1958. Carfour mondial de l’art’ , in L’art contemporaine à l’exposition universelle Expo 58, ed. Virgine Derillez, Brussels, 2008, 13–59. Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, ‘Der Verwalter des Schlachthauses: Deutsches Doppelleben: Wie ein Mann sich selbst und seine Umwelt 50 Jahre lang betrog’ , Die Zeit, 42, 13  October 1995, https://www.zeit.de/1995/42/Der_Verwalter_des_Schlachthauses_Deutsches_Doppelleben_ Wie_ein [29 January 2019]. Boris Klemen, ‘The Peasant-Artists of Croatia’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, 11, 1967, 20–28. Susanne König, ‘documenta in Kassel and the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden. A German-German History of Two Exhibitions’ , in OnCurating (documenta: Curating the History of the Present), 33, June 2017, eds. Nanne Buurman and Dorothee Richter, 25–33. Meta Kordiš, ‘Jugoslovanska naivna in popularna kultura’ , Ars & Humanitas: Revija za umetnost in humanistiko, 3:1–2, 2009, 212–247. Daniel Kramer, ‘Henri Rousseau und die Avantgarde – ein Künstler für Künstler’ , in Exh. Cat. Riehen, Fondation Beyeler 2010: ‘Henri Rousseau’ , eds. Delia Ciuha and Philippe Büttner, Osfildern, 2010, 97–107. Miroslav Krleža, ‘Forword’ , in Krsto Hegedušić, ed. Vladimir Maleković, Zagreb, 1974, 6. Miroslav Krleža, ‘Predgovor podravskim motivima Krste Hegedušića’ , in Likovne studije: Jubilarno izdanje u povodu devedesetih godina proteklih od autorova rođenja, ed. Ivo Frangeš, Sarajevo, 1985, 269–270. Marilyn S. Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959. Domestic Politics and Cultural Diplomacy’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002, 6–26. Emile Langui, 50 Jahre moderne Kunst, Cologne, 1959. Mikhail Larionov, ‘Vstuplenie’ , in Vystavka ikonopisnych podlinnikov i lubkov, Moscow, 1913, 5–10. Lovorka Magaš and Petar Prelog, ‘Nekoliko aspekta utjecja Georgea Grosza na hrvatsku umjetnost izmedju dva rata’ , Radovi Instituta povijesti umjetnosti, 33, 2009, 227–240. Lovorka Magaš and Petar Prelog, ‘George Grosz and Croatian Art between the Two World Wars’ , RIHA Journal, 31, November 2011, 1–23.

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Vladimir Maleković, ed. Krsto Hegedušić, Zagreb, 1974. Günther Metken, ‘Das fruchtbare Missverständnis’ , in Exh. Cat. Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich 1981: ‘Mythos & Ritual in der Kunst der 70er Jahre’ , eds. Erika Billeter and Annemarie Hürlimann, Zurich, 1981, 37–37. Ljubomir Micić, ‘Manifest des Zenitismus’ , in In unseren Seelen flattern schwarze Fahnen: Serbische Avantgarde 1918–1939, ed. and trans. Holger Siegel, Leipzig, 1992, 114–123. Ljubomir Micić, ‘Manifest an die Barbaren des Geistes und Denkens auf allen Kontinenten’ , in In unseren Seelen flattern schwarze Fahnen: Serbische Avantgarde 1918–1939, ed. and trans. Holger Siegel, Leipzig, 1992, 130–134. N.N., ‘Foreign Relations: A Charter of Peace’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, 1:8, October 1961, 3–23. N.N., ‘Primitives’ , Review. Yugoslav Monthly Magazine, June 1962, 30. Claudia Öhlschläger, ‘Introduction’ , in Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Helga Grebing, Paderborn, 2007, 13–42. Jan Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile. The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. David Fernbach, London and New York, NY, 2006. Ana Pavić, Art and Authority: Landscapes from the Collection of Josip Broz Tito, Belgrade, 2014. Tatjana Petzer, ‘Topographien der Balkanisierung. Programme und künstlerische Manifestationen der Demarkation und Desintegration’ , Südosteuropa: Zeitschrift für Politik und Gesellschaft, 2–3, 2007, 255–275. Petar Prelog, ‘Udruženje umetnika Zemlja (1929–1935) i umjetničko umrežavanja’ , Život umjetnosti: Časopis za suvremena likovna zbivanja, 99:2, 2016, 28–39. Nenad Radić, ‘Zbirka kao “mutno ogledalo” istorije’ , Glasnik narodnog muzeja Crne gore, 2, 2005– 2006, 197–204. Nenad Radić, Pusen i petokraka. Zbirka slika druga predsednika, Novi Sad, 2012. Susan E. Raid, ‘Cold War Cultural Transactions: Designing the USSR for the West at Brussels Expo ‘58’ , Design and Culture. The Journal of Design Studies Forum, Special issue: Design as an Object of Diplomacy Post-45, 9:2, 2017, 123–145. Joshua Rubenstein, ‘Ilya Ehrenburg – Between East and West’ , Journal of Cold War Studies, 4:1, 2002, 44–65. Alexandr Shevchenko, ‘Neoprimitivism: Its Theory, its Potentials, its Achievements’ , in Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934, ed. and trans. John Bowlt, New York, NY, 1976, 41–53. Anatoli Strigalev, ‘Kem, kogda i kak byla otkryta zhivopis N. A. Pirosmanshvili?’ , Panorama iskusstv, 12, 1989, 296–306. Gabriela Świtek, ‘“Others” in the Canon of Modernity’ , in Poland – a Country of Folklore?, ed. Joanna Kordjak, Warsaw, 2016, 72–78. Maria Todorova, ‘The Balkans. From Discovery to Invention’ , Slavic Review, 53:2, 1994, 453–482. Wilhelm Uhde, Fünf primitive Meister, Zurich, 1947. Johannes Winter, ‘Vom Nazi-Beamten zum Stern-Reporter’ , 12 February 2017, http://faustkultur. de/2995–0-Claus-Peter-Volkmann-alias-Peter-Grubbe.html [13 February 2019]. Kyrill M. Zdanevich, Niko Pirosmanshvili, Moscow, 1964. Tanja Zimmermann, ‘From the Haiducks to the Bogomils: Transformation of the Partisan Myth after World War II’ , in Kino! Partizanski film, ed. Barbara Wurm, Ljubljana, 2010, 62–70. Tanja Zimmermann, Der Balkan zwischen Ost und West: Mediale Bilder und kulturpolitische Prägungen, Weimar et al., 2014.

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Tanja Zimmermann, ‘Disparaging Images Turned into Pride: Artistic Strategies of Reversal and Over-Identification in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in a Global Dialogue’ , in Global Art History: Transkulturelle Verortung von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft, eds. Julia Allerstorfer and Monika Leisch-Kiesl, Bielefeld, 2017, 271–298. Tanja Zimmermann, ‘Oto Bihalji-Merin and the Concept of the “Naïve”: Bridging Socialist Realism and Non-Figurative Art’ , Acta Historiae Artis Slovenica, 23:1, 2018, 185–198.

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Particularities

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Pedro Lapa

Joaquim Rodrigo’s Painting

A Particularity in the Portuguese Case In the postwar period, Portuguese art faced a politically-imposed isolation that prevented emerging artists from engaging and interacting with the rest of Europe. For these artists, other geographical, cultural contexts were no more than remote possibilities of exchange: sometimes mythical places of an avant-garde known through magazine articles, sometimes places they had briefly visited in search of a more direct link with their time. Portugal lived in an established dictatorship known as Estado Novo (New State) that lasted until 1974. The regime’s anti-modernism sought to eliminate all modern artistic practices in an attempt to preserve its traditional cultural values, strongly dominated by the government’s fascist ideology. The absence of structures for the production, exhibition, and reception of modern art during the twentieth century contributed towards the lessening of modern practices in the national context, hindering the development of knowledge updated by artists, critics, and audiences. In spite of these setbacks, overall Portuguese artists succeeded in overcoming this aloofness to which the regime condemned them. Over time, these artists managed to find ways to a distant modernity – which had become predominant in the process of reconstructing a new world in the postwar period in Western Europe.

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The Portuguese Case The situation in the late 1940s and in the 1950s in Portugal becomes more understandable with some brief information about the country’s situation in the preceding decades. When one reviews Portugal’s 20th century art history, modernism appears as a series of artistic achievements between 1910 and the early 1960s. On the one hand, it may be considered to be a merely derivative phenomenon. It seems to be scattered throughout different generations, gathered around collective initiatives that nonetheless managed to overcome the extreme difficulties imposed by the regime of Estado Novo and were able to construct a specific history. On the other hand, such a history of modernism, when examined from the point of view of its relevance for the international movement, reveals a high level of dispersion and segmentation, which were translated into episodic situations and a few particular cases. Therefore, speaking of modernism in connection with Portuguese visual arts entails the recognition of a cultural context dominated by the lasting influence of 19th century Naturalism,1 favoured by the regime. Naturalism was the bearer of the traditional values linked to a rural country foreign to the modern world; and consequently, of a reality that remained distant from the knowledge and debates held in the cores of artistic production in Europe, USA, Mexico, and, after 1945, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. A prominent case was Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. From 1935 onwards she developed a form of abstract painting that could not find reception in her country, but was later affirmed in Paris, assuming a leading role among the painters of the School of Paris in the postwar period. In late 1939, she was commissioned to produce a large panel about Lisbon to be presented at Exposição do Mundo Português (Exhibition of the Portuguese World, 1940) – in celebration of the nation’s 800th anniversary as well as Estado Novo and its colonial empire, while the world contended as far away as Portuguese neutrality allowed. Days before the opening of the exhibition, her work was censored and destroyed. After losing her Portuguese citizenship as punishment from the political regime, she was granted French citizenship in 1957, which provided her a different context to work and exhibit with international recognition.2 1

For a comprehensive study on these dynamics, see José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX (1911–1961), Lisbon, 2009.

2

Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) kept family relationships in Lisbon and received many Portuguese artists in her house in Paris, supporting them while they were looking for a new life there. The Foundation Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva was created in 1994 in Lisbon.

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Pedro Lapa

If abstraction had established itself within historical avant-gardes as a search for some kind of intelligibility in the visuality of pictorial space, Vieira da Silva and other artists – from the 1930s onwards, especially in the 1940s – followed different paths that questioned the foundations of abstraction, while accepting its principles. It was about looking more closely at some issues previously raised by Paul Klee. To Vieira da Silva, visuality in painting was not structured after essentialist, cognitive models of vision, but the primacy of one’s experience – based on which perception articulates with consciousness to construct a certain visuality in painting. This view was collectively adopted by several artists, such as Mark Tobey, Roger Bissière, or Nicolas de Staël, and would get recognition in the postwar period, within the frame of a significant shift in the thought of modernity at the time.3 Vieira da Silva’s body of work was a major reference for some young artists in the 1950s, such as Manuel d’Assumpção or Fernando Azevedo, both very close to abstraction. A third modernist generation, which arose in 1945 and asserted itself until 1960, brought about new changes and a collective desire on the part of artists for a better acquaintance with the particularities of the different modernist movements. This desire was accompanied by an actual development of their artistic practices, which became more complex and gave rise to one or more ‘necessary division[s] within the “third generation”’ ,4 in the words of José-Augusto França. Thus, until the end of the 1940s, we find three distinct, contrasting movements based on different conceptions of modern art. On the one hand, the neorealists,5 having as major artists Manuel Filipe, Júlio Pomar, Mário Dionísio, Maria Keil, Lima de Freitas, Querubim Lapa, and Rogério Ribeiro, sought to create a politised art committed to the social, political movements of that time. They turned away from the avant-garde, regarding it as an elitist enterprise, and aimed to create a more proletariat-friendly art by questioning the living conditions of ordinary people. The idea of a progressive historical tendency and an avowed anti-formalism shaped the theoretical ground of Portuguese neorealism. However, the latter was not to be mistaken for Zhdanov’s and Gorki’s socialist realism. Diego Rivera, 3

See Jean-Luc Daval, ‘Renouveler l’expérience du voir’ , in Guy Weelen et al., eds. Vieira da Silva Monographie, Geneva, 1993, 83–121 and Diane Daval Béran, ‘Étude de l’œuvre’ , in Weelen et al., eds. 1993, 123–363.

4

‘Cisão necessária na “terceira geração”’ , José-Augusto França, Da Pintura Portuguesa, Lisbon, 1960, 229.

5

On neorealism in Portugal, see França 2009, 355–379; Ernesto de Sousa, Pintura Portuguesa Neo-Realista (1943–1953), Lisbon, 1965; David Santos, ‘O Neorrealismo Português e o apelo humanista do pós-guerra’ , in Arte Portuguesa do Século XX, 1910–1960, Vol. II, eds. Pedro Lapa and Emília Tavares, Lisbon, 2011, 105–113.

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Clem­ente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueros’ Mexican muralist painting as well as Cândido Portinari’s Brazilian body of work established the first references of Portuguese painters – and sometimes not even Italian neorealist cinema was alien to them. Curiously, Portinari exhibited O Café at the Brazilian Pavilion at the famous Exposição do Mundo Português, going unnoticed by the authorities. Surrealism belatedly appears in Portugal: firstly in 1935, in António Pedro’s paintings, and then in 1940, in an exhibition held by the former and António Dacosta in Lisbon.6 It became an organised movement only after 1947, although many historical principles have shaped it in a derivative manner. Its protagonists, other than those previously mentioned, comprised Cândido da Costa Pinto, Marcelino Vespeira, Fernando Lemos, Fernando Azevedo, Alexandre O’Neil, Mário Cesariny, João Moniz Pereira, António Domingues, and Mário Henrique Leiria, among others. Several disagreements between these artists gave rise to different groups from late 1948 onwards. André Breton’s project of forming multiple surrealist groups led by designees of his choice across major European cities was not unrelated to such disagreements. The references of those artists were the historical names of surrealism in the 1920s, such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux; in certain frameworks, Roberto Matta could be considered to have updated this tardy practice in Portugal as well. The introduction of processes related to historical surrealism, such as overpainting, collage, photomontage, the object as resource, the photogram, or solarisation represent a significant part of their production. In the 1950s, the protagonists of these two movements aim the figuration of living forms as well as its melancholic element, in the case of the neorealists; and non-geometrical abstraction, in the general case of the surrealists. A manifest conflict between abstraction and figuration marks this period. In such a brief mapping of the third modernist generation, geometric abstraction was another tendency. It was not assembled into a movement, but was individually practiced by Fernando Lanhas, Nadir Afonso, and Joaquim Rodrigo.7 These artists developed bodies of work ascribable to many geometrical practices featured in the Parisian Salon des Réalités Nouvelles – which they kept track of and participated in, as Nadir Afonso did. Afonso left for Paris in 1947, working as an architect at Le Corbusier’s studio. His painting favoured the articulation between form-colour units 6

On surrealism in Portugal see França 2009, 379–401; María Jesús Ávila and Perfecto E. Cuadrado, Surrealismo em Portugal: 1934–1952, Lisbon, 2001.

7

On Abstraction in Portugal see França 2009, 401–437; Fernando Guedes, Estudos sobre Artes Plásticas, Lisbon, 1985; Pedro Lapa, ‘Abstração em Portugal’ in Lapa and Tavares, eds. 2011, 89–104.

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Fig. 1  Almada Negreiros, Emigration, 1946–48. Fresco, 800 x 350 cm. Lisbon, Gare Marítima da Rocha do Conde de Óbidos. Photograph by © Pedro Lapa, Lisbon.

arranged in rhythmic sequences which question the limits of the plane; as of 1956, he began deploying a mechanically-triggered kinetic dimension. In the following year, he began exhibiting at the Denise René gallery. Fernando Lanhas favoured painting as a form of knowledge integrated in a specific cosmogony, assembling particular aspects of architecture, astronomy, paleontology, and ethnography in order to build a pictorial system of extreme synthesis where the connections between perception and knowledge of form are set against each other. Joaquim Rodrigo turns to concretism, on the grounds of a materialistic perspective in pursuit of a rational primacy of the composition-colour-form unit through self-deductive mathematical structures. After this generation, modern art in Portugal managed to achieve greater complexity, conveyed from diverse frameworks. Throughout the 1950s, in a country isolated by dictatorship, these artists sought to build a new modernity on grounds of discontinuous references they had assimilated from specific aspects and distinct periods. They reinvented it relying on the available means and managed to open new horizons. A curiously absent, but no less significant aspect of it is the non-existent relation between Portuguese modern art and other African cultural expressions. Exposição do Mundo Português (1940) denoted a clear colonial assertion in the exhibited statutes. It was far from – even opposed to – the aforementioned possibility, as the project and organisation of the event was not contaminated with or receptive to the art of other cultures. This slightly changed in the late 1940s. Contrarily to this viewpoint, the triptych Emigration (1947–49), by Almada Negreiros, a leading figure of the first Portuguese modernism, explores the relationship between the country’s internal situation and that of the African colonies, depicting the emigration of a large swathe of the Portuguese population to Africa in that period. (Fig. 1) However, there is no intrinsic connection between

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Fig. 2  Jorge Vieira, Untitled, 1954. Bronze, 42 x 34 x 11,5 cm. Lisbon, Private collection. Photograph by © Pedro Lapa, Lisbon.

the work’s semantic and its signifying substance, as the connection with art forms from non-Western cultures was not an actual concern in Almada’s work. Never­ theless, the œuvre offers an image of the relationship between coloniser and colonised – an image no longer shaped by the imperialist rhetoric to which the academic system had been confined, nor by the absence along which Portugal’s modernist art viewed this kind of interaction. It is chiefly with the work of Jorge Vieira – the main sculptor of the third modernist generation, and very close to the surrealist groups – that the articulation with West African art becomes manifest. This case is a clear example of affinity8,

8

Affinity was a key concept in the approach of modern artists towards non-Western cultural productions, as in the famous exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20 th Century Art. The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, held at the Museum of Modern Art, 1984. As Guy Brett put it: ‘To talk

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a concept which modernist art historians had used in connection with its relationship with other cultures. His sculpture, built on grounds of a unilateral dialogue, was placed within this framework, favouring formal exchanges between objects considered in a strictly visual perspective. However, his relation of affinity with cultural productions of colonised peoples took place in a context which posed a criticism of the dominant academicism of Estado Novo’s statutes and implied an artistic alterity, making way for other dialogues. (Fig. 2)

A Particularity During the 1950s, Joaquim Rodrigo practiced a form of concretist painting that explored some modernist issues in extreme ways, in line with similar practices found in Europe, the USA, and South America. As we have seen, the construction of his paintings shows a deductive structure of colour, form, and composition. He then produced a significant number of works where the relationship with other cultures – namely with the Lunda people, Northeast Angola – is brought to the fore. These paintings lead to a very significant transformation of the paradigm of the hitherto examined relationship between modernism and other cultural references. Joaquim Rodrigo, who was an agronomist engineer, had spent the year of 1959 conducting research for a new theory of colour. He had identified a few biochemical factors underlying the colour palette shared by different cultures and distinct remote historical periods, such as aboriginal Australians, Southern Africa, certain periods of ancient Egypt, Etruscan painting, and archaic Greece. He became aware of the recurrent use of four colours – red, ochre, white, and black – in those different cultures, as he latter explain in his book O Complementarismo em Pintura.9 This constant allowed him to come up with a stable definition of his theory on the four fertile colours, based on the biochemical properties of their pigments. A substantialist theory of colour provided him a set of significations he systematised as a cosmogenic definition of the representative structure of painting, irrespective of any chosen theme. The search for a universalist standpoint and the cultural implications of such seem to underlie this relationship and to restore the mythicisation of the other, conceived as a cultural being derived from some priof an “affinity” between the tribal and the modern is also in a sense to remove “western” artists from a life context.’ Guy Brett, ‘Unofficial versions’ , in The Myth of Primitivism, ed. Susan Hiller, London and New York, NY, 1991, 113–136, 121. 9 Joaquim Rodrigo, O Complementarismo em Pintura, Lisbon, 1982, 26–29, 50–60.

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mal truth forgotten by the modern West. In this sense, the grounds of his theory of colour replicated the recurrent modernist process of a supposedly ahistorical, universalistic justification for each established artistic rule. However, surprisingly, Joaquim Rodrigo’s painting did not only abandon the concretism it pursued until the beginning of 1960 but also managed to develop a new discourse on the surrounding world, on account of the thematic freedom his new system of painting permitted. In the same year, all of a sudden, a facture that has lost the precision of the straight line and moves away from what has been learned in order to reveal the accident causes a set of irregularities in the modular units of concretist painting. The increasingly spontaneous movement of the line begins creating the articulation of forms within specific operations. Henceforth, the previous unity between the signifying form and the sense of the whole of the painting is withdrawn in so far as signification arises from the process of inscription and articulation of the line. There is a declared interval between perception and signification. Abstract forms give rise to inter-articulated signs and lead to referentiality, although they do not strictly depend upon it. An interrogation of the limits of representation is made relevant because of the play of signs on the pictorial plane – within the rules established by the painting system, defined by those four colours and their articulations. The play of signs comes about as a writing on the pictorial plane, always consisting of the sum of the painting’s four-colour set in different proportions. By denying mimetic transparency in relation to the reference, the visual sign nears the textual by means of the discursivity it arouses, on the one hand; on the other hand, it is not reduced to the latter, since it reveals a dimension of the visible in its depth. Thus, the constitutive signs of these paintings by Joaquim Rodrigo indicate an implication of both the visible and the textual. In the following year, his paintings will explicitly exhibit and articulate these two orders: the visual and the textual. However, it is of interest to highlight how visual signs themselves raise discursivity and, especially, a narrative dimension in their articulations. In the same year, his work is influenced by his increasingly strong interest in Lunda painting, which he explores and studies through José Redinha’s book, Lunda’s Painted Walls. Its author was an important ethnologist who dedicated several studies to the peoples from the Northeast of Angola. In this book, he focuses on Chokwe domestic wall painting, which shows a narrative dimension associated with everyday events. Joaquim Rodrigo learned about the book in a review written by the historian José-Augusto França upon its publication in Portugal, in 1958. The deployment of a colour palette within Joaquim Rodrigo’s four-colour chromatic

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theory and its narrative dimension outside a mythological or religious framework responded to the concerns displayed in his painting. As he stated in a recorded conversation with a couple of art critics and historians in 1964 ‘[…] after 1960 I wanted to tell [stories] through my paintings.’10 These stories are related to real-world facts suggested in the works’ titles, such as A, ML, 19S (pesadelos). They are generally cryptic titles – consisting of one, two letters, sometimes associated with a vague number or word – in order to elude the censorship of the political regime.11 However, theirs is a curious effect. They are not explicit, and the thematic convergence one expects from a title is non-­ existent. Such an aspect withholds the signs’ remission to any context as a form of explanatory totality. If they do establish relations with real-world referents, the context of the factual world is constructed through their pictorial articulations as well. There is remission and reversibility between the paintings and the reported worldly facts. These are always allusive, partial narratives, but they establish a process of relationship between art and life. Joaquim Rodrigo subsequently sought to activate it, after concentrating painting in its constituent structures. Telling and remembering exist in close relation. As I have stated elsewhere, ‘[…] inasmuch as the work is constituted by signs, which refer to the singularity of an event, the signs are conversely iterative and subject to repetition.’12 In this sense, one’s relation with the world occurs not in a personal, strictly subjective perspective but rather through its contemporary history. The world as trauma is the one that needs to be told, to be shaped. The signs draw a narrative on the struggle for emancipation of the African peoples after Portuguese and European colonialism; such a narrative is asserted as repetition compulsion, allowing for the recognition of the agents behind the trauma and the experienced horror. Through a mnemonic process, stabilisation is achieved. If memory as repetition of the event determines the possibility of its recognition, then a radical withdrawal appears not only between the event and the awareness of it but also between the sign and its referentiality. Joaquim Rodrigo’s paintings began to show this percep-

10 ‘[…] após 60 eu quis contar nos meus quadros.’ In Pedro Lapa, Joaquim Rodrigo a contínua reinvenção da pintura, Lisbon, 2016, 185. 11 In 1947, the Portuguese political police began monitoring exhibitions of modern artists. Each of them would be subject to prior restraint, as prescribed by Direção Geral de Censura (General Management of Censorship) – dissolved only after the revolution of the 25 April, 1974. 12 ‘[…] na medida em que a obra é constituída por signos, que se referem à singularidade de um acontecimento, contrariamente a este os signos são iterativos e sujeitos a repetição.’ In Lapa 2016, 186.

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tion in the 1960s, both in their work on the sign and in the connection between narrative, memory, and historical event. The simultaneity between visual perception and cognitive structure, upheld by modernism and fundamental to Joaquim Rodrigo’s early painting, underwent now a significant change with particular relevance to a new understanding of the relation between painting and its processes of signification. In fact, during the emergence and development of modernism, we witnessed a proscription of narrative and memory, as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh pointed out: The orders to eradicate all remnants of the past, the imperatives to make it “new” and to be absolutely “modern” , remained strident from the inception of the avant-garde up to the late 1960s. […] One could argue, then, that it was one of the most crucial preconditions of visual modernity not only to disavow its mnemonic functions, but equally to annihilate the memory of its proper discursivity as visual fiction (e. g., its status within a long and complex system of representational traditions) as well as its conventionality (in the linguistic sense).13 Joaquim Rodrigo’s subsequent paintings contradict such a precept of the avantgarde and do not place themselves in a restorative perspective of premodern conventional structures: on the contrary, they come to inscribe a reconsideration of the possibilities of memory as a strategy of confrontation with the political context, which suppressed information about the historical process of the end of Portuguese and European colonialism. The amnesia advocated by the historical vanguards – as a means of emancipation from tradition and liberation from the dominant structures – found in the postwar period an instrumental assimilation that projected the present upon itself and resorted to oblivion as a means of overcoming the trauma of political conflict. In Portugal, Salazar’s regime plunged the country into a war against liberation movements in African colonies; amnesia, as suppression of information, became the governing principle. Claiming a historical memory of episodes in the difficult process of liberation endured by African peoples takes on a visual fiction that claims the possibility of bearing witness to history in painting. Paintings as sign-filled statements alluding to the particularities of the reported episodes denote not the ideality of form and its composition – featured in Rodrigo’s previous paintings – but precisely their displacement, imparted by the discur-

13 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000, 141–144.

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Fig. 3  Joaquim Rodrigo, A., 1961. Vinyl on plywood, 89 x 130 cm. Lisbon, Collection Maria Nobre Franco. Photograph by © Arquivo Nacional de Fotografia, Lisbon.

sive exteriority to which the painting relates. In this articulation between painting and narrative of real-world facts, an actual system is defined between the painting’s enunciation and its discursive potentiality. Giorgio Agamben has designated the testimony as ‘the system of relations between the inside and the outside of langue, between the sayable and unsayable in every language – that is, between a potentiality of speech and its existence, between a possibility and an impossibility of speech.’14 Thus, ‘to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it […] outside both the archive and the corpus of what has already been said.’15 Painting as a discursive possibility organised by memory – a previously lost memory – is given a testimonial value and presupposes subjectivity as something that leads discursive possibility and testimony to impossibility, to oblivion. Curiously, Joaquim Rodrigo’s testimonial claim operates

14 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, New York, NY, 1999, 145. 15 Agamben 1999, 161.

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Fig. 4  Joaquim Rodrigo, M. L., 1961. Vinyl on plywood, 73 x 100 cm. Lisbon, Collection Américo Marques, on loan Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado. Photograph by © Arquivo Nacional de Fotografia, Lisbon.

on two distinct circumstances: on the one hand, the Western modernity and its rejection of memory, on the other, the historical context of fascist censorship in Portugal. With both a memorial and testimonial claim, Joaquim Rodrigo’s painting constructed a project on the basis of a critical subjectivity articulated with its contemporary projects of social emancipation. The number of paintings Rodrigo devoted in 1961 to the subject of Portuguese and European colonialism is considerable. It is worth looking closer at some examples: to begin with, A. exhibits a colour scheme based on the fertile colours. (Fig. 3) Each graphic sign is generated by the changes in direction of a main line, forming simple geometric figures – such as quadrilaterals, triangles, or circles. However, these are irregular or deformed figures. The signs, with geometric bodies and similarly shaped heads and legs, are evocative of some African sculptures. A general horizontal structure suggests that the figures have fallen down. In fact, we may

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Fig. 5  Joaquim Rodrigo, 19S (Pesadelos), 1961. Vinyl on plywood, 122,5 x 220,5 cm. São João da Madeira, Collection Norlinda e José Lima. Photograph by © Arquivo Nacional de Fotografia, Lisbon.

interpret them as fallen African warriors. The ‘A.’ in the title metonymically stands for a continent undergoing a profound transformation, in the period of liberation from European colonial domination. ‘A.’ , instead of ‘Africa’ , bears witness to the emergence of new historical realities, depicted in the painting. Many other works will follow in the same year. Among these, there is M. L., a work that evokes the murder of Patrice Lumumba. (Fig. 4) Five signs are enough to describe Lumumba’s struggle. A lyre portrays him as a poet; two hands in different colours stand for his struggle. At the centre, his face, with glasses, is depicted alongside his weeping wife, Pauline Opango, who demands her husband’s hidden body to be returned to her. At last, on the right, an upside-down car evokes the fake accident used to conceal Lumumba’s murder. Whereas in the previous painting, A., we were shown a more generic, abstract situation, M. L. depicts a historical episode incorporated in Joaquim Rodrigo’s pictorial practice. The latter preserves the schematic nature of his previous works as well as influence of Lunda painting to evoke a martyr of the struggle against colonialism. Thereby, through its own means, painting became a space for historical testimony. 19S (Nightmares) (Fig. 5), as the title indicates, refers to 19 September 1961, the day when the Committee of Seven was assigned by the United Nations to assess

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Portugal’s compliance with the UN Charter’s guidelines concerning non-autonomous territories, following Salazar’s successive refusals and a series of diplomatic moves aimed to mitigate the situation. Transparent shapes, violent graffiti against a light brown background, depict a war scene. Beheaded figures emerge and fall throughout the painting, no longer supported by the grid that structured the previous works. Angular, rough lines spread across the whole canvas produce a chaotic effect. The dispersed letters and numbers that make up the title are articulated with other signs: such a fragmentation intensifies as the eye takes in the whole image and joins together the letters of the word ‘Nightmares’. The relationships established by these letters with other signs (as in the case of the letter ‘e’ , linked to the profile of a shackled black man) show them as the initials of other realities – in this case, slavery (escravatura). This painting is a manifesto on the horrors of colonialism and the beginning of the Portuguese colonial war, which started in March 1961. Its composition denotes a clear rejection of an epic dimension, aiming instead to reveal the very course of history as a form of inscription and testimony. These three examples show the significant, profound change brought about by Joaquim Rodrigo’s painting in what concerns the relationship between modern art and the art of other cultures. In his affinity with Lunda painting, Rodrigo does not follow a unidirectional perspective, contrarily to preceding modernist artists. His affinity also reveals the political context in which cultural exchanges and negotiations take place. While approaching another culture, the painter does so with full awareness of the relationship between coloniser and colonised – which becomes a main theme in his work. A change, or rather a critical revision of modernism was dependent on this acknowledgment. Curiously enough, it did happen with the work Rodrigo carried out in a first moment towards a declared overcoming of the aforementioned stagnant situation in the Portuguese art world at that time. Joaquim Rodrigo’s paintings signal the moment when Portuguese art reclaimed its historical memory in a manner avowedly different from that which the aforementioned Exposição do Mundo Português (1940) constructed and strove to mythicise. The amnesia prescribed by modernism to the visual arts – led back to purely spatial and visual ideals, hailed as forms of self-revelation  – was overcome as well by this new standpoint. Due to his standing at the brink of a critical revision of modernism in Western art – and maybe because he was the Portuguese artist who experimented the most with modernism’s founding principles in the 1950s – Joaquim Rodrigo was able to restore to painting what he termed a ‘fourth value’16, 16 Rodrigo 1982, 29–31.

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or memory. From 1960 onwards, the kind of memory that emerges in his paintings is the testimony of a redeemed historical mnemonic through pictorial means. It is worth noting that the historical testimony evoked by these paintings is not a product of the painter’s lived experience but rather of informative situations that put the defining features of Lunda painters in relation to the informative images of political newspapers. Moreover, another aspect present in these paintings is the significant proliferation of visual codes, determining the articulation of the different signs in their multiple diagrammatic relations. Each sign appears not only as an image but also as an information unit, or as a set of information units. In the context of a new information era, which coincided with the postwar period in the West, we can consider Joaquim Rodrigo’s pictorial practice to have given rise to a multilateral network of relationships, irreducible to a purely informative, neutral phenomenon. In a way, what is here at stake is that which David Joselit named ‘network painting’: ‘In network painting, aesthetic labor consists of carrying objects from one historical, topographic, or epistemological position to another (and back again).’17 Scattered against a monochromatic background, the different elements of Joaquim Rodrigo’s pictorial maps collide with one another in order to convey the organising forces of the networks in which the signs are articulated. These networks and their connections establish the signs’ meaning and map images, codes, and their interactions. If modernism was assimilated in Portugal in a derivative way, and if its constitutive conditions – such as the mystification of ethnological cultural objects – were not expressed by the artistic production, the postwar period introduced a new state of affairs. This period inaugurates a new cultural relationship with pictorial practices by approaching its cultural dialogue from the viewpoint of the relations of production. Born in an isolated country, within a fractured, half-amnesiac, sometimes self-congratulatory Europe, Joaquim Rodrigo remapped the relations between subjects, topographies, and cultures in a newly emerging world through a kind of painting that created a new discourse for its networks of affection and conflict. Translation: Diogo Montenegro The translation of this article was funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia – as part of the project with the reference UID/EAT/04189/2013.

17 David Joselit, ‘Reassembling Painting’ , in Exh. Cat. Munich, Museum Brandhorst and Vienna, Mumok 2015/16: ‘Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age: Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, Social Networks’ , eds. Manuela Ammer et al., Munich, 2016, 173.

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Bibliography Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, New York, NY, 1999. María Jesús Ávila and Perfecto E. Cuadrado, Surrealismo em Portugal: 1934–1952, Lisbon, 2001. Guy Brett, ‘Unofficial Versions’ , in The Myth of Primitivism, ed. Susan Hiller, London and New York, NY, 1991, 113–136. Benjamin Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000. Diane Daval Béran, ‘Étude de l’œuvre’ , in Guy Weelen et al., eds. Vieira da Silva – Monographie, Geneva, 1993, 123–363. Jean-Luc Daval, ‘Renouveler l’expérience du voir’ , in Guy Weelen et al., eds. Vieira da Silva  – Monographie, Geneva, 1993, 83–121. José-Augusto França, Da Pintura Portuguesa, Lisbon, 1960. José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XX (1911–1961), Lisbon, 2009. Fernando Guedes, Estudos sobre Artes Plásticas, Lisbon, 1985. David Joselit, ‘Reassembling Painting’ , in Exh. Cat. Munich, Museum Brandhorst and Vienna, Mumok 2015/16: ‘Painting  2.0 Expression in the Information Age: Gesture and Spectacle, Eccentric Figuration, Social Networks’ , eds. Manuela Ammer et al., Munich, 2016, 169–181. Pedro Lapa, ‘Abstração em Portugal’ , in Arte Portuguesa do Século XX, 1910–1960, Vol. II, eds. Pedro Lapa and Emília Tavares, Lisbon, 2011, 89–104. Pedro Lapa, Joaquim Rodrigo a Contínua Reinvenção da Pintura, Lisbon, 2016. José Redinha, Paredes Pintadas da Lunda, Lisbon, 1953. Joaquim Rodrigo, O Complementarismo em Pintura, Lisbon, 1982. David Santos, ‘O Neorrealismo Português e o apelo humanista do pós-guerra’ , in Arte Portuguesa do Século XX, 1910–1960, Vol. II, eds. Pedro Lapa and Emília Tavares, Lisbon, 2011, 105–113. Ernesto de Sousa, Pintura Portuguesa Neo-Realista (1943–1953), Lisbon, 1965. Guy Weelen et al., eds. Vieira da Silva – Monographie, Geneva, 1993.

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Elisabeth Ansel

‘Emancipated from Provincial Myth’1

The Irish Artist Louis le Brocquy in the Context of National Debates and European Modernism In 2001, the Irish businessman and collector Lochlann Quinn bought Louis le Brocquy’s painting A Family (Fig. 1) as a gift to the National Gallery of Ireland. The Irish Arts Review commented on that return that ‘Quinn’s gift brings A Family home to an Ireland that finally decided to honour this prophet in his own land’.2 Le Brocquy (1916–2012) produced the large-scale painting fifty years earlier in 1951. Instantly, it became a central work in a one-man show at the London based Gallery Gimpel Fils in the same year and reached high praise by the British press.3 Painted with oil on canvas, almost two metres in length, the painting shows three naked figures – a woman, a man, and a child – in a windowless grey room, which is only lit by electric light-bulbs. The woman, covered by a white blanket and accompanied by a white cat, lies on a table and stares right at the beholder while the upper part of her body is raised by her right arm. In the background, a seated man is bending down his head not noticing his surroundings. To the right of the picture, a little child is standing next to the two figures holding some flowers and 1 2 3

See Herbert Read, A Letter to a Young Painter, London, 1962, 136. Medb Ruane, ‘Le Brocquy. The Family’ , Irish Arts Review, Summer 2002, 22–23, 23. See Róisín Kennedy, ‘Made in England. Critical Reception of Louis le Brocquy’s A Family’ , Third Text, 19:5, September 2005, 475–486, 477–480, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820500260026 [21 August 2018].

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Fig. 1  Louis le Brocquy, A Family, 1951. Oil on canvas, 147 x 185 cm. Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland Collection. © Estate of Louis le Brocquy, Photograph by © National Gallery of Ireland.

looking at the woman while touching her right foot. The members of this strange and seemingly dysfunctional family are situated in a claustrophobic setting not knowing which role to fulfil. By drawing on Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) with its exposed female nude as well as on Pablo Picasso’s and Henry Moore’s angular shaped nude figures,4 le Brocquy placed his work in the tradition of modern figurative art. Furthermore, he created an irritating image that oscillates between the themes of motherhood, sexuality and the isolation of the individual in the context of a ‘family of refugees’5. Le Brocquy himself stated that the painting 4

See Kennedy 2005, 475–476.

5 Louis le Brocquy, ‘Artist’s Note’ , in Exh. Cat. Dublin, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane 2007: ‘Louis Le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes. Later Hommage’ , ed. Barbara Dawson, Dublin, 2007, 21–23, 21.

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Elisabeth Ansel

[…] was conceived […] in face of the atomic threat, social upheaval and refugees of World War II and its aftermath. […] it was painted while contemplating a human condition stripped back to Paleolithic circumstance under the electric light bulbs.6 In 1952, the painting was offered as an anonymous donation to the Dublin Municipal Gallery but refused by the Advisory Committee of Dublin Corporation since the picture did neither meet the academic standards nor underline the concept of the stable Irish Catholic family, particularly that of the caring mother.7 Until the painting’s final homecoming to Ireland in 2001, it has been discussed in various ways. Although le Brocquy connected the painting’s content to a rather international agenda, critics mostly linked the picture to the artist’s Irish nationality and to a specific Celtic legacy. Remarkably, this vernacular perception was most of all emphasised in the European framework of the Venice Biennale in 1956. As a result, this focus on the national context led to a one-dimensional perception of the painter’s œuvre and to a neglect of iconographical analyses. In this article, I will analyse the discourse on Irish art in the late 1940s and 1950s by focusing on the critical reception of le Brocquy’s work. In this context, I shall examine the intrinsic and extrinsic processes of national canon formation by drawing on archival material relating to the 1956 Venice Biennale as well as contemporary art criticism. Moreover, I will address the question of how political processes in and outside of Ireland have influenced the debates on Irish modernist art. Through a close stylistic and iconographical reading of A Family, I shall finally situate his work within a European tradition and thereby demonstrate the limitations of arthistorical writing that is solely based on national analysis criteria and valuation standards. In this regard, I shall argue that the reception of le Brocquy’s art is representative of a narrow-minded scholarly treatment of supposedly peripheral phenomena of art at the edge of Europe. Ultimately, my aim is to open Irish art for a broader art-theoretical discourse in the context of postwar European modernism.

6

Le Brocquy to Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, January 2002, in Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘Louis le Brocquy’s A Family: “An Unwholesome and Satanic Distortion of Natural Beauty”’ , CIRCA Art Magazine, 16 January 2003, http://circaartmagazine.website/articles/louis-le-brocquysa-­family-­an-unwholesome-and-satanic-distortion-of-natural-beauty/ [21 August 2018].

7

See Kennedy 2005, 479–480. The position of the family was regarded as central to Irish life and enshrined in the 1937 constitution. Article 41 privileged the position of women within the home, Article 44 banned divorce.

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National Stereotypes and Cultural Politics in a Postcolonial Context8 Le Brocquy completed A Family in 1951 as part of his Grey series that is mainly concerned with the theme of family and challenges of humanity in the aftermath of World War II. At this point, having exhibited his pictures both in Ireland and Great Britain, he was well-known to the Irish and British art world. Born in Dublin in 1916, the self-taught artist had studied the old masters as well as avant-garde modernists during a trip to Europe in 1938. After his return to Ireland in 1940, he finally established himself as a painter.9 During this time, le Brocquy became preoccupied with the subject matter of Tinkers (Fig. 2), and dedicated more than twenty paintings to his encounters with tinkers he had come across while travelling the countryside of the Irish midlands in 1945.10 With this specific theme, le Brocquy referred to Irish cultural history, in particular to John Millington Synge’s (1871–1909) literary and Jack B. Yeats’s (1871–1957) pictorial depictions of travellers at the beginning of the 20th century. Bearing in mind a more global context, the painter also thought of the tinker as a universal symbol of the ‘individual as opposed to organised settled society.’11 Finally, it was emphasised by London critics that le Brocquy took this vernacular subject to a new level by treating it in a modern post-cubist style.12 Le Brocquy earned high critical praise for the Tinker series, not only by Irish but also by British reviewers. Since the painter chose to leave Dublin for London in 1946 in order to ‘earn a living in a country where taste was more advanced’13, these positive reviews helped him to establish himself in the British art scene. However, while working on the Tinker pictures, English critics kept on connecting le Brocquy exclusively to his Irish descent. It was only after he came up with a new artistic approach in his Grey paintings around 1950 that he was perceived as a Brit-

  8 Ireland gained political independence from Great Britain after the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) which was brought to an end by the Anglo-Irish Treaty. As a result, the Irish Free State was established in 1922. For the tradition of reading Ireland in postcolonial perspective see for instance David Lloyd, ‘After History. Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies’ , in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Cork, 2003, 46–62.   9 See Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981, 21. 10 See S. B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism, Dublin, 1991, 133. 11 Le Brocquy quoted in Kennedy 2005, 477. 12 See Kennedy 2005, 477. 13 W. J. White, ‘Contemporary Artists IV – Louis le Brocquy’ , Envoy, 2:6, May 1950, 56, quoted in Kennedy 2005, 480.

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Elisabeth Ansel

Fig. 2  Louis le Brocquy, Tinkers Resting, 1946. Oil on board, 50,8 x 35,6 cm. London, Tate. © Estate of Louis le Brocquy, Photograph by © Tate, London 2018.

ish painter and that his pictures were subsequently reflected in an international context. Accordingly, le Brocquy frequently exhibited with two London Galleries, the Leicester Galleries and Gimpel Fils, and was, among other artists, promoted as an important representative of postwar British art in exhibitions organised by the British Council.14 Ultimately, as a result of the artist’s stylistic development and with regard to the formal means of expression of A Family, the critic John Berger (1926–2017) described le Brocquy as ‘one of the most interesting British painters of his generation.’15 This appraisal was shared by the art critic Herbert Read (1893–1968). Concerning le Brocquy’s position in the art world, he wrote in 1962:

14 See Kennedy 2005, 477. 15 John Berger, ‘Two British Painters’ , The New Statesman and Nation, 16 June 1951, 680.

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This painter from Joyce’s Dublin did seem when I first met him in 1944 to have some qualities of Celtic origin. His images might have been found in a crock of gold, and both Yeats the poet and his brother the painter might have been among his ancestors. But since then Le Brocquy’s art has become emancipated from provincial myth and is now both independent and universal.16 Here, Read contrasted le Brocquy’s former artistic approach that he related to ‘Celtic origin’ and ‘provincial myth’ with his new style through which le Brocquy achieved an ‘independent and universal’ dimension. Unsurprisingly, Read’s interpretation of an Irish art that only recently had freed itself from provincialism was not spared from Irish criticism. Already in 1944, the art critic Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967) had turned against Read’s review of the Dublin exhibition Subjective Art in which the English critic claimed that European ‘main stream’ tendencies in Irish art were ‘something new in the modern history of this country.’17 Referring to Read’s estimation on le Brocquy, Luke Gibbons pointed out that the painter had to give up his Irishness in order to be regarded as a representative of high modernism. He also stated that this ‘shedding of nationality [was] not required in the case of British artists.’18 Although le Brocquy’s motif of the tinker can be interpreted in a cross-cultural context, since it not only refers to Ireland’s neutral position as a political outsider during World War II but also to the dispossessed of postwar Europe, British critics were not ready yet to connect Irish culture and modernism. The mere fact that the tinker was considered to be a genuinely Irish subject by British reviewers meant exclusion of Irish artists from ‘independent and universal’ modernism. From a historical-critical perspective, it becomes clear that the reflections on le Brocquy’s paintings as well as on 20th century Irish art were dominated by discussions of art critics who were rather influenced by politics of national identities than by considerations of the artworks themselves. It also shows that the position of critics such as Berger or Read suggests that le Brocquy made a fresh start with his Grey paintings leaving his ‘Celtic origins’ behind.

16 Read 1962, 136. 17 All quotations in Herbert Read, ‘On Subjective Art’ , The Bell, 7:5, 1944, 424–429, 425. The exhibition showed abstract artworks by British and Irish artists belonging to the Dublin based White Stag Group. For MacGreevy’s reaction see Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Subjective Art’ , Irish Times, 5 January 1944, 3. 18 Luke Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’ , in A Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary, New York, NY, 2014, 128–143, 137.

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However, a recourse on stylistic and iconographical analyses elucidates that it is much more convincing to characterise the genesis of the artist’s œuvre as a continuous process instead of as a series of abrupt changes. This approach offers the opportunity to think of le Brocquy’s ascribed artistic periods as interlinked phases, which are not determined by aspects of national agendas but by creative strategies. With regard to content, the Tinker and the Grey series, for example, can be closely associated inasmuch as they both deal with the isolation and the solitude of its protagonists in the aftermath of the war. Formally, again, the Grey period is to be thought of as a further development of the Tinker period. In this context, Child with Doll (1949) can be considered to be an important transitional work due to its subject matter and its colours. In the picture, a child is lifting up a doll with both arms while kicking a ball. The reduced colour palette already points towards the Grey pictures, whereas the theme of the child indicates the subject of family which appears in both periods. Thereby, the important aspect of the idea of continuity is that it objects to the discourse of the painter’s œuvre determined by national claims. This approach provides the opportunity for an alternative analysis based on an intrinsic discussion of his work. But before going into this argument in detail, I shall outline the paradoxical consequences that arise from the politics of a national canon formation since they become even clearer when reflecting le Brocquy’s subsequent reception within the art world. Only shortly after le Brocquy had gained a reputation as ‘universal’19 artist in Great Britain, he was stereotyped as Irish again.20 However this time, this assignment was not brought upon him by British but by Irish critics.

Emphasising the National Canon: Ireland’s Participation in the Venice Biennale in 1956 In 1949, after Ireland had finally declared itself a republic, it was considered necessary by the Minister of External Affairs, Seán MacBride, to set up a Cultural Relations Committee (CRC) to promote Irish culture abroad.21 This Committee advised 19 Read 1962, 136. 20 See Lucy Cotter, ‘Ambivalent Homecomings: Louis le Brocquy, Francis Bacon and the Mechanics of Canonization’ , Field Day Review, 7, 2011, 170–201, 183. 21 See Fionna Barber, ‘Excavating Room 50: Irish Painting and the Cold War at the 1950 Venice Biennale’ , in A Shared Legacy. Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture, eds. Fintan Cullen et al., Aldershot, 2005, 207–223, 213–216.

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on Ireland’s participation in the Venice Biennale which would enable the embedment in the international art world and prove that Ireland was more than just a ‘bog-oak and shillelagh tradition.’22 Following the proposal of James White (1913–2003), the Irish commissioner, art critic and director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1964 to 1980, le Brocquy was sent to represent Ireland with twenty-one paintings and two tapestries at the Venice Biennale in 1956.23 White recognised that it would be advisable to promote le Brocquy as Irish as his letter to the CRC written on 29 February 1956 reveals: I have reason to believe that the English are very eager to claim LeBrocquy for themselves and as they have already presented McWilliam and Francis Bacon, two Irish born artists at the Biennale it seems wise to establish LeBrocquys nationhood.24 At first glance, this focus on representing le Brocquy as exclusively Irish surprises insofar as the artist was by then not only living in London but well-established in the British art scene. On closer inspection, however, this concentration on nationhood can, for one thing, be explained by the particular exhibition policies of the Biennale based on the concept of nationhood. Then again, this phenomenon has to be regarded as part of postwar Irish cultural politics. Although the Irish participation in the Venice Biennale offered the opportunity to be part of cultural internationalism, political strategies aimed at advertising Irish culture as fully independent from British influences. The roots of this policy can be traced back to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 that provided the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 at the price of the Partition of Ireland, leaving the six Northern counties under British rule.25 Consequently, the division of the country into a Southern and a Northern part still influenced the postwar relations of Ireland and Europe as can be seen from a claim made by Seán MacBride in 1948: ‘Our sympathies lie clearly with Western Europe (but) the continuance of partition preludes us from taking 22 Candida, ‘An Irishwoman’s Diary’ , Irish Times, 11 August 1950, 5, quoted in Kennedy 2005, 482. 23 See Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956, Cultural Relations Committee, Dublin, 415/95 III, Department of Foreign Affairs, The National Archives of Ireland. Le Brocquy’s pictures were exhibited at the Central Palace, Room 62 together with the sculptures of the Irish artist Hilary Heron, see Exh. Cat. Venice, Biennale 1956: ‘XXVIII Biennale di Venezia’ , Venice, 1956, 295–299. 24 Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956. 25 See Barber 2005, 215.

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our rightful place in the affairs of Europe.’26 Opposing political and cultural strategies emphasise Ireland’s ambivalent position in Europe.27 Examples for this were the decision to decline membership of the NATO in 1949 in order to avoid an alliance involving Great Britain on the one hand or the goal of propagating Irish culture in an international framework on the other. This ambiguity is also reflected in White’s idea of presenting le Brocquy as an Irish modern artist of international stature. In the same letter in which he stressed the artist’s nationality, he also claimed: ‘LeBrocquy is a figurative artist with an original style [a fact that] makes his subjects of special interest to the current juries who are invariably influenced by fashion.’28 In this, White arguably aimed at relating to the current trends of European modernist realism. At that time the conception of realism was, for example, heavily supported by the British critic David Sylvester.29 Significantly, White mentioned Francis Bacon in his letter who had exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954, just two years earlier than le Brocquy, and whose artistic version of modernist realism was promoted by Sylvester.30 Moreover, le Brocquy’s œuvre was compared to Bacon’s body of work by many critics around that time,31 an estimation that White certainly must have been acquainted with. The very fact that he was afraid of ‘the English’ claiming ‘LeBrocquy for themselves’32, shows that the Irish commissioner was well aware of the artist’s British and international reputation. Therefore, it has to be assumed that White considered exactly this foreign renown as an ideal prerequisite for sending le Brocquy to Venice, this time, however, under national auspices. According to Werner Hofmann’s 1956 Biennale review, this attempt to represent art in a decidedly national framework had by then become a common practice due to the increasing number of contributing countries. He took offence at the vernacular idea of exhibiting works of art, and stated that the Biennale was 26 Seán MacBride quoted from Nicholas Mansergh, ‘Irish Foreign Policy, 1945–51’ , in Ireland in the War Years and after. 1939–51, eds. Kevin B. Nowlan et al., Dublin, 1969, 134–146, 136–137. 27 See Barber 2005, 215. 28 Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956. 29 See James Hyman, The Battle for Realism. Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945– 1960, New Haven, CT, and London, 2001, 192–203. 30 See Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956; it is remarkable that, according to Robert Melville, le Brocquy was subsequently presented as a Realist, for example, at the Brussels World Fair in 1958. There ‘the element of physical cubism’ was associated ‘with a social-realist purpose’ , Robert Melville, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard 1961: ‘Louis le Brocquy’ , Zurich, 1961, n. p. 31 See Kennedy 2005, 479. 32 Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956.

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not about art but solely about politics and national reputation.33 However, national analysis criteria indeed played an important role in shaping the Biennale pavilions and quite often resulted in a unilateral promotion of art. As we can see from Katherine Kuh’s concept for the American exhibition in 1956, the exclusive focus on American Artists [that] Paint the City neglected other relevant themes, such as rural heartland imagery, in order to enhance the allegedly unique characteristics of contemporary American art as opposed to its European counterpart.34 Similar to Kuh and other commissioners,35 White, as we have seen, also decided on enhancing the specific Irish features of le Brocquy’s pictures at the Biennale. Although A Family and other pictures had been discussed in the realm of universal modernism beforehand, White now explicitly connected his artworks to a declaredly Celtic tradition in his text for the Venice Biennale catalogue. He argued that ‘the cool grey and white tones which permeate [le Brocquy’s, E. A.] canvases, indicate the dominant Celtic background’36 of the artist. For White, Celtic art meant ‘mystical abstractions’ that referred to the ‘spiritual world of the early middle ages’ and to expressions of ‘interior reactions’. In need of an autonomous imagery, he further explained, ‘artists of the new Ireland’ like le Brocquy sought inspiration in this ‘unaffected’ Irish culture of the past.37 In this, the critic related to the artistic movement of the Celtic Revival that was initiated by literary key figures, such as George Russell (1867–1935) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), by the end of the 19th century.38 Thereby, the idea of a Celtic and intuitive art was linked to the concept of cultural identity as can be seen from Russell’s statement that ‘the mystical view of nature is a national characteristic’39 of Ireland. The purpose of the Celtic Revival was to combine tradition with modernity by shaping a modern country that is connected to its Celtic origins. This 33 See Werner Hofmann, ‘Die Krise ist eröffnet. Randbemerkungen zur XXVIII. Biennale in Venedig’ , Alte und moderne Kunst, 1:2, 1956, 16. In 1956, thirty-four countries participated in the Venice Biennale. 34 See Mary Caroline Simpson, ‘American Artists Paint the City: Katherine Kuh, the 1956 Venice Biennale, and New York’s Place in the Cold War Art World’ , American Studies, 48:4, 2007, 31–57, 36. 35 The British contribution, for example, was regarded as ‘very English’ , see John Berger, ‘The Biennale’ , The New Statesman and Nation, 4 August 1956, 132–133, 132. 36 James White, ‘Text for Venice Biennale Catalogue, 1956’ , 8 April 1956, 415/95 III, Department of Foreign Affairs, The National Archives of Ireland. 37 All quotations in White, ‘Text for Venice Biennale Catalogue, 1956’. 38 See Kennedy 2005, 484–485. 39 George Russell, ‘Nationality or Cosmopolitanism’ (1899), in Irish Writing in the 20 th Century – A Reader, ed. David Pierce, Cork, 2000, 44–47, 46.

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invention of an uninterrupted tradition helped to emphasise a long-standing history of a stable nation and to confirm the idea of an existing national identity.40 Decades later, White obviously advanced the idea of the Celtic Revival by transferring it to an international level of modernism. Retrospectively, the specific presentation of le Brocquy as a Celtic artist at the Biennale can be judged as a success since A Family was eventually awarded with the Premio Acquisto Internationale Prize. This award apparently confirmed White’s prevision that ‘the ancient Irish traditions have found a counterpart in the current styles of modern art in Northern Europe’41. Then again, this exclusive reading meant that le Brocquy’s œuvre was narrowed down to reflections of the vernacular. More importantly, it gave way to subsequent limited interpretations as can be seen from Robert Melville’s 1961 description of the artist’s Grey period as ‘a Celtic version of cubism’. The critic even assumed that ‘there is an estranged look about his linear construction of the figure that the English immediately identify as Irish.’42 However, it is striking that le Brocquy’s pictures were hardly exhibited in Great Britain after his success in Venice and in the course of his growing reputation as ‘Ireland’s greatest living artist.’43 This is all the more noteworthy since le Brocquy’s work had been exhibited in almost all major British galleries during the 1950s. The sudden absence from the British art world can be explained with the overt representation of le Brocquy as Irish, which made it impossible to double frame him as British.44 In this context, recent discussions have considered le Brocquy’s shifting focus towards Irish themes from the 1960s onwards as well as its reception. In 2014 Gibbons noted that le Brocquy was again excluded from modernist debates due to his reversion to Irish subject matter in the 1960s.45 According to Róisín Kennedy, it was not the artist himself who brought this classification upon him but critics who were driven by political agendas concerned with national interests.46 Cotter offered another interpretation by suggesting that le Brocquy consciously or subconsciously returned to Irish themes with his Portrait Heads of Irish writers after

40 For ‘invented tradition’ see Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’ , in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm et al., Cambridge, 1983, 1–14. 41 White, ‘Text for Venice Biennale Catalogue, 1956’. 42 Melville 1961, n. p. 43 Cotter 2011, 183. 44 See Cotter 2011, 183. 45 See Gibbons 2014, 136. 46 See Kennedy 2005, 486.

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Fig. 3  Louis le Brocquy, Image of James Joyce, 1977. Oil on canvas, 70,3 x 70,4 cm. London, Tate. © Estate of Louis le Brocquy, Photograph by © Tate, London 2018.

he had been stereotyped as Irish again.47 Gibbons and Kennedy were quite right by elucidating the construction of a national artist. But it seems difficult to agree on Cotter’s psychological reading when examining the artist’s œuvre. First of all, le Brocquy’s images can be placed within an arthistorical context and for example, compared to Bacon’s Heads and Portraits insofar as they depict famous personalities in a deconstructive manner (Fig. 3). Secondly, the pictures also have to be associated with their work-immanent character. This intrinsic perspective once more reveals the continuous aspect of le Brocquy’s œuvre and demonstrates that he was preoccupied with the theme of heads much earlier and that he was not only concerned with Irish but also with European writers, such as Federico Garcia

47 See Cotter 2011, 185. Le Brocquy started to paint his Portrait Heads around 1975 and continued to paint these portraits until 2005.

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Fig. 4  Saorstát Éireann. Irish Free State Official Handbook (1932), Front Board, Photograph by © Elisabeth Ansel.

Lorca, and with contemporary artists, such as Francis Bacon.48 This debate, therefore, demonstrates the limitations of arthistorical interpretations based on national analysis criteria and their longer lasting effects. The reasons for this persistence can be made out in the intricate power structure of the discourse of national identity which, due to the constant assessment of self and other, determines a spe48 The beginning of the series of Head Images can be dated around 1964.

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cific discussion on art. With regard to le Brocquy, this discourse, which is built on the politics of difference, constitutes a concept of cultural singularity. It produces an almost exclusively national reading of his œuvre that is perpetually validated through affirmative or critical analyses. Ultimately, it contradicts the painter’s own universal understanding of art. Critical of any kind of national absorption, le Brocquy scrutinised Ireland’s attempts to promote exclusively autochthonous art forms that were eligible to represent the state visually.49 With regard to popular depictions of rural Ireland and its people as a symbol of a distinct Irish culture, the artist wrote in 1981 that he wanted to protect [his painting, E. A.] from self-conscious nationalism, for instance, inducing picturesque images perhaps of Irish country folk dressed in the clothes of a preceding generation, or of thatched cottages arranged like dominos under convenient hills; images no more respectable in themselves than the sterile Nazi Kultur.50 That the Celtic idea and the mentioned ‘Nazi Kultur’ were actually paralleled under the National Socialists in literature or propagandistic newspapers in order to form an alliance of Celts and Teutons against Anglo-Saxons,51 might not have been known to the artist but bestows his quotation with a far-sighted nature. Le Brocquy’s access to art was arguably much more shaped by the idea of artistic exchanges between Ireland and Europe. This again becomes clear from his Head Images. The painter traced the source of inspiration for these reduced portraits back to his encounter with the ‘Celto-Ligurian head cult of Entremont

49 Institutions like the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in 1823, supported artists who emphasised the ideas of the Free State and the later republic, see Kennedy 2005, 480; what Irish art was supposed to look like was, for instance, expressed in the Irish Free State Official Handbook (1932), which was published on the occasion of the state’s tenth anniversary. (Fig. 4) The design of the cover evokes the Golden Age of Irish illuminated manuscripts by referring to examples such as the famous Book of Kells (c. 800). The impetus of associating Celtic Ireland with the modern state becomes obvious in the frontispiece, which reveals a modern landscape of the West of Ireland by the highly favoured Irish painter Paul Henry (1876–1958). 50 Louis le Brocquy, ‘A Painter’s Notes on his Irishness’ , in Walker 1981, 90–91, 91. 51 See Patrick O’Neill, Ireland and Germany. A Study in Literary Relations, New York, NY, 1985, 259. Articles relating to the connection between Celts and Teutons were, for instance, published in the Völkischer Beobachter, the newspaper of the NSDAP.

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and Roquepertus’52 in the Provence. Subsequently, he intertwined the ‘ancient Celtic or Gallic world’53 in these images. Furthermore, in search of the spirit hidden behind the face, the artist placed himself in the tradition of modernists, such as Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, who discovered a ‘renewed conceptual vision’ that ran contrary to ‘objective photography.’54 With this in mind, it appears to be necessary to re-evaluate le Brocquy’s œuvre in a European arthistorical context.

Rethinking the National Canon. Le Brocquy and European Modernism In 1943, le Brocquy was one of the founding members of the secessionist Irish Exhibition of Living Art; an annual exhibition that aimed for the establishment of a forum for modernist art in Ireland. It offered young painters a venue to exhibit their artworks that did not meet the traditional standards of the Royal Hibernian Academy.55 Another purpose of this group was to free Irish art from cultural isolation and to relate it to a European context.56 This objective also becomes apparent in le Brocquy’s work since he consistently drew on various influences from different phases of European art history. This can be seen, for instance, from his Study from a Fourteenth Century German Carving (n. d.),57 a modern adaptation of a sacral group with Madonna and Child, or The Picnic (1940), a beach scene with three figures referencing Edgar Degas’ painting Sur la Plage (1869–1870). As it shows, this widespread interest in European imagery that the painter transferred to his own pictorial language also becomes visible in A Family. In fact, the painting points to a broader iconographical tradition than so far recognised, which ranges from early modern art to modernism. To illustrate this argument, I shall discuss a further layer of meaning of the painting’s content that derives from the interconnection of sacred and profane motifs. Through this, it will emerge that 52 Louis le Brocquy, ‘The Head Image. Notes on Painting and Awareness’ , in Louis le Brocquy. The Head Image. Notes on Painting and Awareness, ed. Catherine Marshall, IMMA Series 1, Milano, 2006, 11–29, 18. 53 Le Brocquy 2006, 19. 54 Le Brocquy 2006, 24. 55 See Kennedy 1991, 119. In 1942, two entries by le Brocquy, Spanish Shawl, A Study in White (1941) and Image of Chaos (1942), were rejected by the Royal Hibernian Academy. 56 See Kennedy 2005, 480. 57 The picture is published in Exh. Cat. Dublin, The National College of Art 1949: ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ , Dublin, 1949, cat. no. 71.

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the artist’s inspirational sources are not only to be made out in Manet’s Olympia but also in other, at first sight, less obvious images. In the Grey series, le Brocquy interlinked Christological subjects, such as Study for Resurrection (1953), and secular themes in terms of form and content so that his austere paintings broadly meditate on the human condition. This interdependence was a common topos in 20th century postwar art,58 and facilitates a religious reading of A Family. Accordingly, the painter’s idea of the family as a ‘family of refugees’ not only brings to mind the consequences of the war but also, I think, the sacral theme of The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Matt. 2.14). Similar to the various early modern versions of the subject, le Brocquy focused on the rest of the fleeing family as the central pictorial element. The artist, however, relocated the traditional landscape scenery in a Beckett-like bunker with electric bulbs and in this way arguably reflected Cold War anxieties. Also, the fact that the protagonists appear to be completely estranged from each other differs strongly from the biblical (yet apocryphal) narrative and the pictorial tradition. Within the dreary surrounding, the child is the only figure who enforces interaction with the indifferent mother who, unlike Mary, seems to have forgotten how to relate to her child. In le Brocquy’s scenario, the religious scene is rather reversed into its opposite with the neglected child taking care of the parents, a fact which enhances the discomforting effect of the painting. Beyond that, the mother’s sexual ostentation – emphasised by the cat underneath her blanket as a symbol of intemperance – raises the question about the understanding of her role as woman, mother, and wife.59 Through the pictorial quotation of Manet’s Olympia, le Brocquy not only situated himself in the tradition of modernism, but also immediately created a critical awareness for gender issues.60 Remarkably, however, it has remained unmentioned that the artist’s

58 For this interdependence see, for instance, Werner Hofmann, ‘Picasso’s Guernica in its Historical Context’ , Artibus et Historia, 4:7, 1983, 141–169; in the realm of World War II many European artists, such as Oskar Kokoschka (Prometheus Triptych, 1950), Francis Bacon (Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944), Max Beckmann (Apocalypse, 1942) or Jack B. Yeats (Grief, 1951), drew on the mixture of profane events and Christian metaphors in order to express the horrors of war. 59 Interestingly enough, the exhibition catalogue of the 1956 Venice Biennale aligned le Brocquy’s A Family with other artistic concepts of womanhood by flanking the picture with Joseph Kutter’s Femme accoudée (1929) and Emiliano di Cavalcanti’s Mulher na Varanda (1950), see Exh. Cat. Venice, Biennale 1956. 60 For Manet’s Olympia and modernism see for instance Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Princeton, NJ, 1999.

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Fig. 5  Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Seated Youth, 1916–1917. Cast Stone, 104 x 50 x 109 cm, Frankfurt/Main, Städelsches Kunstinstitut. From: Teresa Ende, Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der Plastik, Berlin, 2016, 260.

female figure differs from Olympia inasmuch as she is covered by a white blanket, as if she were ashamed of being looked at. In connection with her angular body and awkward position, her portrayal gives the impression that she tries to fulfil an expected gender role but is not capable of achieving it. Pointing to this discrepancy, the artist himself stated that ‘Manet’s sensual subject had changed utterly through the circumstance of war to depict a family of refugees.’61 As a result, he brought the renewed meaning into effect through the combination of depictions of Venus with pictures of Mary and the Holy Family. By drawing on various pagan and religious traditions of representation of women, the painter scrutinised the idealised concept of woman- and motherhood in the light of postwar Europe. A similar form of alienation can be recognised in the figure of the father, who is depicted without a face and thus denies any identification. Next to the Christian metaphor provided by the family group, the figure of the father establishes a connection with 20th century anti-war iconography. More precisely, le Brocquy’s 61 Le Brocquy 2007, 21.

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father formally seems to resemble Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s (1881–1919) Seated Youth, (Fig.  5) a sculpture that avoids any eye contact, which makes an empathising approach impossible. The painter might have come across the sculpture during his trip through Europe or known it from reproductions. Some of Lehmbruck’s figures were exhibited at the exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art in London in 1938.62 Lehmbruck’s art – considered ‘degenerate’ by the National Socialists – could only be exhibited in exile during World War II. The idea that le Brocquy not only related to refugees but also to art in exile reinforces the painting’s relevance within postwar art. Furthermore, in terms of content, the fact that Lehmbruck’s seated figure appears as a witness of destruction,63 helps explain why the painter deployed this pictorial element. By modelling on the melancholic gesture of the youth, he thematised the aspect of powerlessness in the face of the consequences of war and integrated it into his scenario of an alienated family. Moreover, by indicating the iconography of the Pensive Christ through the motif of the seated father, le Brocquy once more drew on religious pictorial language and thus combined sacral and profane motifs. Alongside the central element of the light bulb and the monochrome palette of A Family, it is this method of interpenetration that finally makes a strong case for the artist’s reference to Picasso’s iconic anti-war painting Guernica (1937). Arguably, both artists drew on this mixture of Christian and profane vocabulary in order to emphasise the suffering caused by war.64 Painted after World War II, however, le Brocquy transferred the large effects of wartime events of the grisaille to the microcosm of the family whose cohesion is consequently called into question. While Guernica thematises the horrors of war, A Family rather deals with the turmoil of postwar desolation. As a result, it is le Brocquy’s multi-layered approach that challenges the hierarchical concept of centre and periphery as well as national schemata. It is through this outlined ambiguity that the picture cannot simply be reduced to vernacular features and has to rather be discussed in an international spectrum.

62 For further reading on this exhibition see Exh. Cat. London and Berlin, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide and Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee 2018–2019: ‘London 1938. Defending “degenerate” art. Mit Kandinsky, Liebermann und Nolde gegen Hitler’ , eds. Lucy Wasensteiner and Martin Faass, Wädenswil am Zürichsee, 2018. 63 See Teresa Ende, Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der Plastik, Berlin, 2015, 264. 64 For Picasso’s approach see Hofmann 1983.

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Conclusion In this article, I have analysed the discourse on Irish art in the late 1940s and 1950s by focusing on le Brocquy’s œuvre. Within this framework, I have argued that the discussion of his and also of Irish art itself has been dominated by the idea of shaping a national canon. In this regard, the praise of the Irish Arts Review of the ‘prophet’s’ homecoming in 2001 has revealed the peculiar history and diverse reception of le Brocquy’s art both in Ireland and Great Britain. Thereby, critics from both countries have drawn on the image of the Celtic artist in order to either depreciate or enhance the artist’s standing in the art world. Paradoxically, at the height of le Brocquy’s international renown, the national characteristics of his art were again reinforced at the 1956 Venice Biennale, when Irish critics were trying to establish a decidedly Celtic art within a European arena. As a result, the national framing has not only narrowed the perception of le Brocquy – he himself rejected all aspects of nationalism in art – but also persistently shaped the reading of his pictures, a confinement that has run contrary to the painter’s universal understanding of art. The absorption of le Brocquy’s œuvre exemplifies the limitations of national analysis criteria and underlines the need for an unprejudiced and open discussion of postwar European art. In reaction to this, this article has offered an alternative approach through the iconographical discussion of A Family which not only revealed the artist’s continuous method of resorting to a wide range of visual repertoire but also the allusive character of the painting. Moreover, due to the interdependence of profane and Christian motifs, the painting should be contextualised within 20th century anti-war art. Ultimately, this analysis has elucidated the interconnectedness of European imagery or as the painter put it: the ‘transcendent universality’65 of art.

Bibliography Unpublished Texts James White, ‘Text for Venice Biennale Catalogue, 1956’ , 8 April 1956, 415/95 III, Department of Foreign Affairs, The National Archives of Ireland. Letter, James White to Mary Tinney, 29 February 1956, Cultural Relations Committee, Dublin, 415/95 III, Department of Foreign Affairs, The National Archives of Ireland.

65 Le Brocquy 1981, 91.

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Published Texts Fionna Barber, ‘Excavating Room 50: Irish Painting and the Cold War at the 1950 Venice Biennale’ , in A Shared Legacy. Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture, eds. Fintan Cullen et al., Aldershot, 2005, 207–223. John Berger, ‘Two British Painters’ , The New Statesman and Nation, 16 June 1951, 680. John Berger, ‘The Biennale’ , The New Statesman and Nation, 4 August 1956, 132–133. Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘Louis le Brocquy’s A Family: “An Unwholesome and Satanic Distortion of Natural Beauty”’ , CIRCA Art Magazine, 16 January 2003, http://circaartmagazine.website/­ articles/­louis-le-brocquys-a-family-an-unwholesome-and-satanic-distortion-of-naturalbeauty/ [21 August 2018]. Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Princeton, NJ, 1999. Lucy Cotter, ‘Ambivalent Homecomings: Louis le Brocquy, Francis Bacon and the Mechanics of Canonization’ , Field Day Review, 7, 2011, 170–201. Teresa Ende, Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Geschlechterkonstruktionen in der Plastik, Berlin, 2015. Exh. Cat. Dublin, The National College of Art 1949: ‘Irish Exhibition of Living Art’ , Dublin, 1949. Exh. Cat. London and Berlin, The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust & Genocide and Liebermann-Villa am Wannsee 2018/19: ‘London 1938. Defending “Degenerate” Art. Mit Kandinsky, Liebermann und Nolde gegen Hitler’ , eds. Lucy Wasensteiner and Martin Faass, Wädenswil am Zürichsee, 2018. Exh. Cat. Venice, Biennale 1956: ‘XXVIII Biennale di Venezia’ , Venice, 1956. Luke Gibbons, ‘Visual Modernisms’ , in A Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, ed. Joe Cleary, New York, NY, 2014, 128–143. Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’ , in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm et al., Cambridge, 1983, 1–14. Werner Hofmann, ‘Die Krise ist eröffnet. Randbemerkungen zur XXVIII. Biennale in Venedig’ , Alte und moderne Kunst, 1:2, 1956, 16–18. Werner Hofmann, ‘Picasso’s Guernica in its Historical Context’ , Artibus et Historia, 4:7, 1983, 141–169. James Hyman, The Battle for Realism. Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945–1960, New Haven, CT, and London, 2001. Róisín Kennedy, ‘Made in England. Critical Reception of Louis le Brocquy’s A Family’ , Third Text, 19:5, September 2005, 475–486, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820500260026 [21 August 2018]. S. B. Kennedy, Irish Art and Modernism, Dublin, 1991. Louis le Brocquy, ‘A Painter’s Notes on his Irishness’ , in Louis le Brocquy, ed. Dorothy Walker, Dublin, 1981, 90–91. Louis le Brocquy, ‘The Head Image. Notes on Painting and Awareness’ , in Louis le Brocquy. The Head Image. Notes on Painting and Awareness, ed. Catherine Marshall, IMMA Series 1, Milano, 2006, 11–29. Louis le Brocquy, ‘Artist’s Note’ , in Exh. Cat. Dublin, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane 2007: ‘Louis Le Brocquy and his Masters. Early Heroes. Later Hommage’ , ed. Barbara Dawson, Dublin, 2007, 21–23. David Lloyd, ‘After History. Historicism and Irish Postcolonial Studies’ , in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Cork, 2003, 46–62. Thomas MacGreevy, ‘Subjective Art’ , Irish Times, 5 January 1944. Nicholas Mansergh, ‘Irish Foreign Policy, 1945–51’ , in Ireland in the War Years and after. 1939–51, eds. Kevin B. Nowlan et al., Dublin, 1969, 134–146.

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Robert Melville, ‘Introduction’ , in Exh. Cat. Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard 1961: ‘Louis le Brocquy’ , Zurich, 1961, n. p. Patrick O’Neill, Ireland and Germany. A Study in Literary Relations, New York, NY, 1985. Herbert Read, ‘On Subjective Art’ , The Bell, 7:5, 1944, 424–429. Herbert Read, A Letter to a Young Painter, London, 1962. Medb Ruane, ‘Le Brocquy. The Family’ , Irish Arts Review, Summer 2002, 22–23. George Russell, ‘Nationality or Cosmopolitanism’ (1899), in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century – A Reader, ed. David Pierce, Cork, 2000, 44–47. Mary Caroline Simpson, ‘American Artists Paint the City: Katherin Kuh, the 1956 Venice Biennale, and New York’s Place in the Cold War Art World’ , American Studies, 48:4, 2007, 31–57. Dorothy Walker, Louis le Brocquy, Dublin, 1981.

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German Architectural Congresses and Exhibitions between Continuity and Cold War Introduction: Questioning the Cold War Architectural Narrative Soon after the defeat in May 1945, German architects came together under changed political circumstances and reactivated their institutions: the technical universities reopened their doors for the students, old and newly founded journals started to edit their first postwar volumes, and the first public congresses and exhibitions were held.1 Associations such as the Werkbund (German Work Federation) and the Bund Deutscher Architekten (Confederation of German Architects), which had been taken over by the National Socialist regime, re-established themselves.2

1

Technical University Darmstadt re-opened in January and Technical University Stuttgart in February of 1946. The magazines Baumeister and Deutsche Bauzeitung published their first postwar volumes in 1946 respectively 1948. The new magazine Bauen und Wohnen published its first issue in January 1946. The Deutsche Werkbund was especially busy publishing manifestos such as the Lützelbacher Manifest (Manifesto of Lützelbach) in 1947 or in staging exhibitions such as Neues Wohnen (New Dwelling) in Cologne (1949). See Exh. Cat. Frankfurt/Main, Deutscher Werkbund e. V. 1987: ‘Der Deutsche Werkbund 1907, 1947, 1987’ , ed. Ot Hoffmann, Berlin, 1987, 45.

2

In 1947 respectively 1948, see Jörn Düwel, ‘Der Architekt als Sozialingenieur. Zum Selbstverständnis der Profession in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhundert’ , in Exh. Cat. Munich, Architekturmuseum of TU Munich 2012: ‘Der Architekt. Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Berufsstandes’ , ed. Winfried Nerdinger, Munich et al., 2012, 153–167, 157.

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This view mainly reflects the history of the profession in the Western zones. In the Soviet zone, the professional association came under the umbrella of the state trade unions.3 This meant architects had to adhere to a centralised building policy under the authority of the Ministerium für Aufbau (Ministry of Building), whose brief was to produce buildings according to the principles of socialist realism.4 In the Western zones, the occupying powers also controlled the profession and its journals and steered it towards the (re-)adoption of the International Style through exhibitions such as Architektur der USA seit 1947 and cultural exchange programs.5 The American occupying authorities in particular enforced their reeducation program by means of a building policy, which included the erection of housing, but also libraries, schools, and universities.6 In doing so, they placed more and more emphasis on West Berlin, commissioning the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (America Memorial Library)7, the Henry-Ford-Building of the Free University of Berlin8, and the Congress Hall9. The latter was the American contribution to the Internationale Bauausstellung Interbau Berlin 1957 (International Building Exhibition Interbau Berlin 1957), known simply as Interbau 57. At Interbau 57, international actors from the West, along with institutions, techniques, materials, events, and styles intermingled and met – four years before the construction of the hard border – an Eastern audience. Of an audience of almost 1.5 million, 36 percent came from the GDR.10 Interbau 57 was a huge building exhi-

  3 Tobias Zervosen, Architekten in der DDR. Realität und Selbstverständnis einer Profession, Bielefeld, 2016, esp. 44–50.   4 See Jörn Düwel, ‘Ein neuer Städtebau zur Legitimation der DDR. Der zentrale Platz in Berlin’ , in Exh. Cat. Berlin, Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen 2018: ‘Der rote Gott. Stalin und die Deutschen’ , eds. Andreas Engwert and Hubertus Knabe, Berlin, 2018, 109–118.   5 See Kerstin Renz, ‘Reisen für den Wiederaufbau. Das “Cultural Exchange Program” und seine Bedeutung für das deutsche Nachkriegsbauwesen’ , in Beziehungsanalysen. Bildende Künste in Westdeutschland nach 1945: Akteure, Institutionen, Ausstellungen und Kontexte, eds. Gerhard Panzer et al., Wiesbaden, 2015, 271–285. See also Kerstin Renz, ‘Nehmen Sie doch ein freches Grau! Günter Wilhelm und die “Stuttgarter Schule” in den Nachkriegsjahren’ , in Architekturschulen. Programm, Pragmatik, Propaganda, eds. Klaus Jan Philipp and Kerstin Renz, Tübingen and Berlin, 2012, 53–65.   6 See Michael Mönninger, ‘Bauen für das Wirtschaftswunder. Die Siedlungen des Marshallplans in Deutschland’ , in Zwischen Traum und Trauma. Stadtplanung der Nachkriegsmoderne, eds. Jörn Düwel and Michael Mönninger, Berlin, 2011, 71–83.   7 1952–1954, Architects: Gerhart Jobst, Willy Kreuer, Hartmut Wille, and Fritz Bornemann.   8 1952–1954, Architects: Franz Heinrich Sobotka and Gustav Müller.   9 1956/57, Architect: Hugh Stubbins. 10 Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann, Die Interbau 1957 in Berlin. Stadt von heute, Stadt von morgen: Städtebau und Gesellschaftskritik der 50er Jahre, Petersberg, 2007, 9.

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bition at Hansaviertel (Hansa Neighbourhood) next to Berlin’s Tiergarten, organised by the Senate of (West) Berlin. 38 architects and teams and eleven landscape architects from 12 countries erected 36 apartment buildings surrounded by parks and gardens containing many sculptures, as well as two churches, shops, a cinema, kindergarten, school, library, metro station, and the academy of fine arts.11 In addition to the new neighbourhood, the exhibition comprised Die Stadt von morgen (The City of Tomorrow), pavilions designed by various nations, and further exhibitions distributed over the city of West Berlin. Interbau 57 emerged from Berlin’s largest postwar urban architectural competition in 1953, won by Gerhard Jobst and Willy Kreuer. At the same time, some kilometres away, the reconstruction of the Frankfurter Allee, now named Stalinallee, as an enormous axial thoroughfare lined with residential housing, shops, and monuments in East Berlin – the new capital of the German Democratic Republic – was completed. The structures on Stalinallee and Hansaviertel represented a climax of the early Cold War, fought on the field of architecture.12 Research on Berlin’s postwar architecture used this narrative to emphasise the evolution of divergent political styles. Scholars, as well as contemporaries, interpreted Berlin – the frontier between East and West and highly contested territory in the Cold War  – as a shop window for the opposing political systems, which is to say socialist versus capitalist lifestyles and cultures.13 Even today, the Cold War cleft in architectural research persists: recently, Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann, Werner Durth, and Wolfgang Pehnt have underlined once again the role of building exhibitions in drawing attention to reconstruction projects in West Berlin and their vaunted superiority to those in East Berlin.14 This was also the case with exhibitions in East Berlin on occasion of Weltfestspiele der Jugend (World Festival of the Youth) in 1952, where the GDR appears as a peacekeeping power. On that occasion,

11 See Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper and Franziska Schmidt, Das Hansaviertel. Internationale Nachkriegsmoderne in Berlin, Berlin, 1999. 12 See Jörn Düwel, ‘Planen im Kalten Krieg’ , in Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 1995: ‘1945. Krieg, Zerstörung, Aufbau. Architektur und Stadtplanung 1940–1960’ , eds. Jörn Düwel et al., Berlin, 1995, 195–270; Düwel 2018. 13 In 1949 Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor of West Berlin, requested that (West) Berlin becomes a shop window showing freedom and prosperity, see Düwel 1995, 231. See also Dolff-Bonekämper and Schmidt 1999, 15; Adrian von Buttlar et al., eds. Baukunst der Nachkriegsmoderne. Architekturführer Berlin 1949–1979, Berlin, 2013, esp. XIII–XXIII; Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, esp. 12–14. 14 See Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2017: ‘Otto Bartning. Architekt einer sozialen Mo­ derne’ , eds. Otto Barting et al., Darmstadt, 2017, 110.

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a model of Stalinallee was displayed at the newly built Deutsche Sporthalle (German Sports Hall), which was the first construction on the Stalinallee.15 At that point, the authorities in the Western sector had already understood the need to exhibit future visions of the city. Wagner-Conzelmann points out that two West German exhibitions, displayed at Darmstadt (Mensch und Raum/Man and Space) and Hannover (Constructa), travelled to West Berlin in 1951, and were adapted to local circumstances using additional works by West Berlin architects, along with accompanying brochures, and competition materials.16 She concludes that these items bear clear political traces of Cold War rivalry, whereas those in the original shows were ‘actually apolitical’17. According to Wagner-Conzelmann, the imported and readapted exhibitions fit, unlike their progenitors, the narrative of ideological antagonism. While her conclusions regarding the travelling exhibitions are convincing, I would argue against subsuming them solely under a political and apolitical dichotomy for the following reasons. Such a view overlooks the fact that Darmstadt and Hannover were exhibitions of important showcase buildings in devastated city centres, meaning that the exhibitions created authentic sites of reconstruction and display on behalf of the authorities. Thus, both exhibitions not only displayed plans and models of buildings and urban planning but also showed how the majority of the city councils and local architecture associations imagined (Mensch und Raum) and even implemented the future of their cities (Constructa). We can therefore reasonably consider the reconstruction of German cities as highly political in terms of housing and segregation as well as in terms of style: who should or should not live in the new centres? Did architecture originating from an exhibition reflect the urban density of a big city or the seemingly idyll of a close-knit village? (Fig. 1) In Berlin, by contrast, the exhibitions from Darmstadt and Hannover were reduced to mere displays of architectural plans and models at nonspecific sites such as the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts)18, which was not featured in the exhibition. Thus, we can conclude that their effect on the audience was neutralised. As such, their potential instrumentalisation as Cold War propaganda was neutralised, too.

15 See Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, esp. 13 and 15–22. 16 See Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, esp. 23–26. 17 Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, 26. 18 See Otto Bartning, ed. Darmstädter Gespräch. Mensch und Raum, Darmstadt,1952.

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Fig. 1  Women on a terrace at the Kreuzkirchenquartier in Hannover, erected in the course of Constructa, architect Konstanty Gutschow, 1950–1951. From: Presseamt der Stadt Hannover, ed. Neues Bauen in Hannover. Bauherren, Architekten, Baugewerbe, Bauindustrie berichten über Planung und Ausführung der Aufbaujahre 1948 bis 1954, Stuttgart, 1955, 15, u ­ nknown photographer.

To do justice to their actual complexity, a historical and media-specific approach to architectural and building exhibitions is required. Interpreting them as tools of political influence alone risks glossing over their variety and complexity. In my view, it is important on the one hand to differentiate of communicating the various ways the content of exhibitions, to distinguish between the rhetoric of press releases, opening ceremonies, congresses, and brochures; and on the other hand, the discourse produced by buildings, objects, texts, images, and exhibition design. Rather than focusing too narrowly on the accompanying political aims of exhibitions, I would argue for a broader approach, which takes full account of the multiple forms of expression in evidence. To analyse the Interbau on the basis of the binary argument in respect of Cold War politics19 tends to elide the fact that the Interbau’s special exhibition Die Stadt 19 See Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, esp. 9 and 24.

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von morgen (The City of Tomorrow) focused on modern urban planning in the sense of the gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt (sub-divided and dispersed city).20 The book Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt argues strongly for a functional city as against the ‘Mietskasernenstadt’21 (tenement city), for example, the city since the mid19th century, and not that of socialist town planning.22 Another argument against a purely political interpretation can be found in the archival documents relating to the Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungs­ wesen (Senate’s administration of Building and Dwelling). Surprisingly, my research has revealed few records of discussions on how to deal with architecture of the East. The Senate Office correspondence instead shows that considerations were practical rather than ideological, for example, the debate about whether to position advertising billboards at the East sector border or not.23 To identify Berlin’s architectural exhibitions beyond Cold War rivalry, I would argue that while postwar architectural exhibitions may have accommodated political agendas, especially where they were produced and received in the realm of housing and reconstruction, they cannot be reduced to the political. In fact, the exhibitions pursued a great variety of intentions, evident in their definition as ‘temporary display of works of art for pleasure, instruction, the enhancement of scholarship or for sale’24. Taking this definition as a starting point, I here attempt to trace the narrative thread of postwar exhibition history in a different way. I focus on the exhibition Mensch und Raum at Darmstadt 1951, prior to its travelling to Berlin, and the special circumstances of its creation. 20 See Johannes Göderitz et al., eds. Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt, Tübingen, 1957. Monika Platzer has recently identified this book as the ‘secret catalogue book’ of Interbau’s special exhibition Die Stadt von morgen (The City of Tomorrow), which was only accompanied by a small brochure, Monika Platzer, oral statement during a workshop at Architekturzentrum Vienna, 21 November 2018. 21 Since 1860 the term ‘Mietskasernenstadt’ provides a means to describe social problems and housing of the big city. See Kathrin Meißner, ’Die Berliner “Mietskaserne”. Diskursgeschichte eines Begriffs’ , Forum Stadt. Vierteljahrszeitschrift für Stadtgeschichte, Denkmalpflege und Stadtentwicklung, 44:4, 2017, 371–385. 22 In fact, the book was published as a limited edition in manuscript form in 1944. It only became important when re-published in 1957. Slightly revised, it effectively transplanted National Socialist plans for reconstruction into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany). See Düwel 1995, esp. 203–204. 23 Letter, Mr. Federman to Dietrich Schweer, 14 March 1957, B Rep. 009 Nr. 54 1956–1958, Archives Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen Berlin. 24 See Christopher Rowell, ‘Exhibition’ , in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, London and New York, NY, 1996, 675–681, 675.

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The switch from Berlin to postwar Darmstadt by itself is evidence of the absence of Cold War issues and the focus on pre-war professional concerns. In a speech given by Otto Bartning in 1947, these concerns were clearly multiple: a general positioning of the architect in society, his education (women were not explicitly mentioned), housing and urban planning, and the relationship to arts and technologies as well as to industrialisation and science. A comparison with the exhibition catalogue of the 3. Deutsche Kunstgewerbeausstellung (3rd German Exhibition of Arts and Crafts) at Dresden 1906 shows that such topics had been on the agenda since the beginning of the 20th century.25 It further demonstrates that since that time, many advances had been made, for example, in education, ranging from Bauhaus to the arts and crafts schools and technical universities. In 1947, a new concern was that of the role of architectural clients (Bauherren) and how to educate and influence them, which reappeared prominently at the Interbau 57: colloquia were held there under the title Bauherrengespräche (Discussions among Decision-­makers). The participants discussed how best to nurture an educated client of the city of tomorrow. The architect Otto Bartning was the principal actor and moderator of the discussions. Bartning, born 1883 in Karlsruhe and died 1959 in Darmstadt, maybe had most influence on postwar architectural discourse and was something of a chameleon figure. He was an architect of churches, residential estates, and villas, an author, professor,26 and a consummate networker, who travelled and corresponded relentlessly. He was typical of an older male generation that survived National Socialism and was able to re-establish himself mainly thanks to the decimation of the adult male population during the war and the resultant lack of a well-educated new generation.27 Bartning managed to combine the architectural principles of the

25 See Exh. Cat. Dresden, Exhibition Palace 1906: ‘Das deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906. III. Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung Dresden 1906’ , ed. Directory Board of the Exhibition, Munich, 1906, 11–13 and 17–20. 26 Bartning managed the Staatliche Hochschule für Baukunst und Handwerk (Stately University for Art of building and Arts and Crafts) in Weimar, successor of the Bauhaus, from 1926 to 1930, and was active in the leading architectural associations like Bund Deutscher Architekten (Confederation of German Architects, chairman 1950), Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation, second chairman 1952) and Union International des Architects (German representative 1953) in the postwar era. During the Third Reich, he worked for various institutions in the Protestant Church. See Exh.Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2017, 124. 27 In this sense, Bartning’s career is comparable to that of Federal President Theodor Heuss (1884–1963), who also was a colleague at the Werkbund and patron of the exhibitions Mensch und Raum and Interbau. See Joachim Radkau, Theodor Heuss, Munich, 2013, 18.

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arts and crafts movement with postwar modernity, which made his works, texts, and speeches in respect of exhibitions pivotal to the arguments put forward here. Christian Freigang has emphasised the guiding ideas of the architect’s pre-war discourse at the end of the nineteen-twenties, which must also be taken account of: ‘[…] the rejection of the merely technical, the new belief in the classical, the demiurgic, the anti-democratic, coloured the self-definition of the architect. Altogether, this is expressive of the trend towards suspending one-sided principles of legitimation in architecture.’28 How Bartning dealt with these principles will be discussed below.

Culture Politics at Postwar Darmstadt Darmstadt, the former capital of the Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt, is famous as one of the birthplaces of European Jugendstil. The city thus enjoyed a reputation as a centre of art. Between 1870 and 1945, however, its political status had declined from that of the head of an independent state to that of a district capital. Thus, the city authorities began early on to foster culture and education, cooperating with the son of the Grand Duke, Prince Ludwig zu Hessen und bei Rhein,29 with well-connected actors like Bartning, and institutions like Technical University of Darmstadt (THD). The latter was responsible for Darmstadt’s first major intellectual event after World War II, the Internationaler Kongress für Ingenieurausbildung (IKIA) (International Congress for Engineering Education). Isabel Schmidt has shown that the IKIA played a leading role in the efforts to connect with the prewar period and to play down significance of the university during the Third Reich.30 The THD became an important research centre for armaments on its own initiative 28 Christian Freigang, ‘Mies van der Rohe, der Werkbund und die Frage der Technik um 1930’ , RIHA Journal 0186, 30 May 2018, paragraph [2], https://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2018/0184– 0188-special-issue-mies-und-mehr/0186-freigang [6 December 2018]: ‘[…] die Ablehnung des rein Technischen, das neue Bekenntnis zum Klassischen, das demiurgische, antidemokratisch gefärbte Selbstverständnis des Architekten. All dies gibt der Tendenz Ausdruck, einseitige technokratische Legitimationsprinzipien des Bauens außer Kraft zu setzen.’ 29 After World War II, Prince Ludwig in his capacity as an art historian had also been co-­founder of the Institute for New Technical Form, the Design Council, the Bauhaus Archive and the New Artists’ Colony of Rosenhöhe. 30 See Isabel Schmidt, ‘Technik und Gesellschaft in der Nachkriegszeit. Darmstädter Ingenieure zwischen Reformrhetorik und Wirklichkeit’ , in Universität, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Westdeutschland. 1945 bis ca. 1970, eds. Sebastian Brandt et al., Stuttgart, 2014, 77–95, esp. 85–86.

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and received large extra-budgetary grants from the Nazi state.31 Up to 80 % of the city had been destroyed by the end of the war in 1945. The rumour circulated among the terrified population of Darmstadt that research for the V2 rocket had been the cause of the massive bombardments.32 According to Schmidt, the rector and senate were also therefore interested in rehabilitating their reputation and took various steps to do so: they referred to their role in reconstruction and as a ‘bridge to the rest of the world’33, and used the IKIA to this end as well as specialist lectures in connection with other institutions such as the Darmstädter Sezession (Darmstadt Secession). These included the Darmstädter Gespräche (Darmstadt Colloquia), in which the art historian Hans Gerhard Evers of the THD acted as director on behalf of the city. Evers organised the public congress to which experts from Germany and abroad were invited. Isabel Schmidt refers to a ‘formula of abuse’34, which especially marks the IKIA contributions, whose neutrality points towards the inability of its creators to accept their guilt based on the excuse that they had been abused by the national socialists35. The engineers held Hitler responsible for the misappropriation of their otherwise innocent inventions. The organisers of the first exhibition and colloquium, the Darmstadt Secession, were important as well as traditional players in Darmstadt’s cultural politics. For them, this strategy of justification did not apply. Founded again in 1945 as the New Darmstadt Secession, it had remained – on its own account – passive during the fascist period.36 Since the end of the war, it had already expanded its exhibition activities considerably.37 The theme of the 1950 exhibition, Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in Our Time), had been conceived by one of its members, the sculptor Wilhelm Loth, while the art historian Josef Adolf Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, suggested staging the accompanying colloquium.38 Both worked at the THD, too, Loth as assistant, Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth as professor and founder of

the Institute of Art History.

31 See Schmidt 2014, 79. 32 See Schmidt 2014, 87. 33 Schmidt 2014, 84. 34 Schmidt 2014, 85. 35 See Schmidt 2014, 85. 36 See http://www.darmstaedtersezession.de/chronik/die-dreissiger-jahre/ [30 November 2018]. 37 See http://www.darmstaedtersezession.de/chronik/die-40er-jahre/ [19 November 2018]. 38 See Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Institut Mathildenhöhe 1997: ‘Die Darmstädter Sezession 1919–1997. Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts im Spiegel einer Künstlervereinigung’ , eds. Sabine Welsch and Klaus Wolbert, Darmstadt, 1997, 313.

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Fig. 2  The reconstructed exhibition house at Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, adorned by banners and billboards of the exhibition Mensch und Raum (1951). From: Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunst­ halle Darmstadt 1998: ‘Architektur der fünfziger Jahre. Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , eds. Michael Bender and Roland May, Darmstadt, 1998, 11.

At the beginning of the century, the Hessian Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig had founded the artists’ colony on the Mathildenhöhe in order to modernise craftsmanship and industry in the Duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt. This personal, monarchical patronage ended with the fall of the Kaiserreich (German Empire) in 1918. For post Second World War political representatives, Ernst Ludwig’s promotion of art and architecture was a point of identification and connection. The second Darmstadt Colloquia and exhibition, titled Mensch und Raum, was thus conceived as the jubilee of the first exhibition in 1901. (Fig. 2) In 1951, Prince Ludwig appeared as the opening speaker and as a member of the exhibition advisory board. In this capacity, Ludwig symbolised the handover of seigniorial patronage to the democratically elected city government in 1949. The topics of Darmstädter Gespräche, especially in the early years, were contemporary questions oriented towards questions of man and humanity (topics which had been profoundly undermined by dictatorship), war and the Holocaust.

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They were made subjects of discussion in both an exhibition and a public discourse, connected by the same title and a shared site at the exhibition areas on the Mathildenhöhe. Due to the high number of visitors, this topographic unity was relinquished in 1952, and the congress moved to the newly erected congress hall.

To Paper over the Cracks: IKIA Congress and the Role of Architects in Society Ernst Neufert, who was Albert Speer’s Normenbeauftragter (specialist for building standards) from 1938 to 1945,39 and in 1946 appointed to the chair of Baukunst (art of building) at the THD, organised the architecture session of the congress at the above-mentioned International Congress for Engineering Education in 1947 as part of the THD’s exculpation strategy.40 He published the lectures under the title Der Architekt

im Zerreißpunkt (The Architect at the Point of Disruption). Bartning gave the introductory lecture entitled Die Einheit des Menschen (The Unity of Man). It was followed by several lectures, given by Paul Schmitthenner, Karl Gruber, and other German or Austrian architects. Neufert did not pass up the opportunity to comment at the end of each lecture in his book that the audience had fully approved.41 The professional solidarity is obvious, providing the basis for the ‘formula of abuse’ observed by Schmidt. At this congress, the responsibility of the engineer was passionately invoked. However, according to Schmidt, the congress had no impact on its actual goal, the reform of engineering education.42 This, of course, was not solely Bartning’s fault, but he, too, made great use of the rhetoric of the immediate postwar years, which was notable for its silence on the events of the war years. Because Konstanty Gutschow and Friedrich Tamms who, unlike Bartning, had held leading positions under National Socialism,43 also attended the IKIA, there was a clear effort to paper over

39 See Annette Wagner-Wilke, ‘Neufert, Ernst’ , in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, eds. Andreas Beyer et al., Berlin et al., 2016, 210. 40 See Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2017. 41 Ernst Neufert, ‘Kurzbericht’ , in Der Architekt im Zerreißpunkt. Vorträge, Berichte und Diskussionsbeiträge der Sektion Architektur auf dem Internationalen Kongreß für Ingenieurausbildung (IKIA) in Darmstadt 1947, ed. Ernst Neufert, Darmstadt, 1948, 9–17, 17. 42 See Schmidt 2014, 86. 43 Gutschow was head of the semi-official Durchführungsstelle für die Neugestaltung der Hanse­ stadt Hamburg (Implementation Office for the Redesign of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg). Tamms belonged to the closest circle of employees of the Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt (General Architectural Inspector for the Imperial Capital), Albert Speer.

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the cracks. This approach is also discernable in the invitation of Hans Sedlmayr and Martin Heidegger to the Darmstadt Colloquia in 1950 and 1951. Both used their support networks to regain a public platform after they were suspended from their university chairs due to their involvement in National Socialism.44 Bartning’s wide-ranging speech on pedagogy and architecture at IKIA started with the figure of the Urmensch (primary man) and ended with the contemporary human being, put in easily comprehensible, sometimes trivial terms. For example, he described himself and his colleagues as ‘elende Lehrbuben der Technik’ (miserable apprentices of technology)45, with reference to Goethe’s poem the Zauberlehr­ ling (Sorcerer’s apprentice). His themes were the fractious relationship between man and technology, the catastrophe of war evinced in metaphors such as Wettergewölk (stormy weather), civilisation in crisis, historic architectural expressions of unity and technolgies (such as temples and domes), and the possibility of the architect still being a renaissance Baumeister (masterbuilder) in times of specialisation. As per the main theme of the congress, Bartning spoke longest on education, underlining his own role in shaping the reform program of the Bauhaus and adjusting it to the requirements of the Thuringian government after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. He calls for ‘universitas literarum et rerum’46 as the guiding principle in the architect’s education, which is to be embedded in technical universities, and taught in conjunction with construction engineers and lead by a charismatic teacher. Bartning describes himself ‘in the winter of 1918/1919, sitting with Gropius in Berlin [at the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, R. H.] […], drafting the plan of the Bauhaus’47, putting his involvement in teaching during the Weimar Republic in an anodyne light. After Gropius left, he became the director of what is now the Staatliche Hochschule für Baukunst und Handwerk (Stately University for Art of Building and Arts and Crafts), where he developed his teaching program of reform further. Since

44 Hans Evers invited Sedlmayr. I assume they met at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where Evers acquired habilitation from Wilhelm Pinder, like Sedlmayr an influential art historian in the Third Reich. Sedlmayr became professor at LMU in 1951. On Heidegger’s Darmstadt network see Kirsten Wagner, ‘Von den Akteuren des Wohnungsbaus zu den Akteuren des Wohnens. Philosophische und soziologische Bestimmungen des Wohnens in den 1950erund 1960er-Jahren’ , in Architektur und Akteure. Praxis und Öffentlichkeit in der Nachkriegsgesellschaft, ed. Regine Heß, Bielefeld, 2018, 45–62, 48. On Sedlmayr see also Dirk Hilde­ brandt’s contribution in this book. 45 Otto Bartning, ‘Die Einheit des Menschen’ , in Neufert 1948, 21–29, 22. 46 Bartning 1948, 26. 47 Bartning 1948, 28.

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Thuringia was the first German state to succumb to a National Socialist government, Bartning was dismissed. Freigang previously mentioned the rejection of mere techniques and belief in classical values at the end of the 1920s had mutated into a declaration of belief in the cooperation of art, crafts, technology, and industry under the auspices of architects and engineers, working together as Bartning put it, in a ‘good marriage’48. The topic of architectural classicism now absent, and a last reflection on fascist neoclassicism appears in Bartning’s rejection of the ‘Persönlichkeitskult’ (the cult of personality).49 While this is also readable as a critique of Stalinism, in the context of the congress and its visitors, it is more pointedly a critique of Albert Speer, who was Adolf Hitler’s premier masterbuilder. This also sheds light on the topic of the architectural client, the Bauherrn. Bartning proposed that it is also the architect’s task to educate the client by teaching students in interdisciplinary colloquia.50 According to Freigang, pre-war architects maintained a leading, even demiurgic role in society. This hubris can also be derived from the statements of postwar architects when we look at Bartning’s closing remarks, where he confesses his belief that it is the architect who must gather and shape ‘forces’ in a society, who carries the ‘needs and forces of his time’ in his hands and his heart with the aim of creating a new mastery in building.51

The Darmstadt Colloquia as a Place of Public Negotiation and the Construction of Continuity 50 years after the famous show on Mathildenhöhe and in the same year as the IKIA, the city council voted for a jubilee exhibition in 1951. Bärbel Herbig explains

the initial idea was to erect a little settlement on Rosenhöhe and present works by prominent German artists next to an urban planning exhibition on the Mathildenhöhe.52 Bartning joined the enterprise in 1950 and introduced the later concept of

48 Bartning 1948, 25. 49 Bartning 1948, 29. 50 See Bartning 1948, esp. 26–27. 51 Bartning 1948, 8 and 29. 52 See Bärbel Herbig, Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten. Ein Beitrag zur Architektur der 50er Jahre, Darmstadt, 2000, esp. 30–33.

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a historic exhibition and a building project not consisting of houses at Rosenhöhe but of public buildings to be installed all over the city. The Darmstädter Sezession took up the idea of exhibiting German contemporary art on Mathildenhöhe and organised Darmstadt’s first major postwar exhibition, Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Image of Man in Our Time). The sculptor Wilhelm Loth was responsible for the title, but the idea of the accompanying discussion forum came from Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth and the title (still famous today) Darmstädter Gespräch (Darmstadt colloquium) from Kurt Heyd, president of the Secession.53

The Image of Man in Our time At the exhibition, 205 sculptures and paintings in the genres of portraiture and figurative representations were exhibited,54 provided by 90 artists, all of whom were active in West Germany, with the exception of Josef Hegenbarth and Bernhard Kretzschmar, both from the GDR.55 Apart from them, only Itten lived abroad – the catalogue lists Beckmann as ‘currently in the USA.’56 This concentration on West Germany, Zurich and Vienna also applied to the participants in the colloquium. None of the French artists discussed in the catalogue were invited.57 In 1950, the representatives of the New Secession and the municipality understood their efforts as ‘our special contribution to restoring the reputation of our fatherland among the cultural peoples of the world.’58 There is no evidence that the international media reported the event. Thus, given the absence of artists from abroad, the Darmstadt officials, artists, and art historians remained in self-­ 53 See Exh. Cat. Darmstadt 1997, 313. 54 See Exh. Cat. Darmstadt 1997, 301. 55 Karl Albiker, Willi Baumeister, Max Beckmann, HAP Grieshaber, Ludwig Gies, Karl Hartung, Bernhard Heiliger, Karl Hofer, Johannes Itten, Gerhard Marcks, Ewald Mataré, Georg Meistermann, Gabriele Münter, Emy Roeder, Rudolf Schlichter, Bernhard Schulze, Gustav Seitz and Toni Stadler were among the participating artists. Artists from Darmstadt included, among others, Fritz Schwarzbeck, Hermann Geibel, Wilhelm Loth, Eberhard Schlotter, Willi Hofferbert and Helmut Lortz. 56 Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Neue Darmstädter Sezession 1950: ‘Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit’ , Darmstadt, 1950, n. p. 57 Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque. See Adolf Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, ‘Zur Ausstellung Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit’ , in Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Neue Darmstädter Sezession 1950, n. p. 58 Ernst Schroeder, ‘Begrüßung’ , in Hans Gerhard Evers, ed. Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, Darmstadt, 1951, 7–9, 8.

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imposed isolation. This was in stark contrast to places such as Munich and Berlin, where cooperation with the occupying powers and foreign artists began immediately after the end of the war.59 In the more remote centres, such as Darmstadt, it seems that a ‘need for orientation and balancing’60 without observers from abroad prevailed. At the interdisciplinary colloquium, where urban society was quite deliberately included, Johannes Itten, Hans Sedlmayr, the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich, the philosopher Karl Holzamer, and the artist Willi Baumeister gave lectures. The controversy between Baumeister and Sedlmayr regarding the significance of religion in modern art and its right to portray man has become famous.61 In 1945 Sedlmayr lost his position as Professor Ordinarius for Art History at Technical University of Vienna. In 1951, he was granted the same position at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. In his seminal book Verlust der Mitte (Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, 1948) he criticised abstract art as a symptom of general fragmentation through science, incapable of capturing the human image.62 At Darmstadt, Sedlmayr underlined his diagnosis of a radikale Spaltung (radical split) of the human image and the resulting threat to humankind itself.63 Baumeister, who was expelled from the Kunstgewerbeschule (arts and crafts school) Frankfurt in 1933 and been forbidden to exhibit his works, opposed Sedlmayr, implying his lecture was a theory of degenerate art.64 He insisted that in fact abstract art is inherently ethical and attacked Sedlmayr on the grounds of his Nazi past.65 In both of the Darmstadt Colloquia mentioned here, this was the only controversy pertaining to National Socialism. Among the artists whose works were exhibited, the sculptors Heiliger, Hartung, Schwarzbeck, and Geibel were later employed to create sculptures for the so-called Darmstädter Meisterbauten (Darmstadt Masterbuildings), part of Mensch 59 See Iris Lauterbach, The Central Collecting Point in Munich. A New Beginning for the Restitution and Protection of Art, London, 2018; Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, eds. Berlin. Divided City, 1945–1989, Oxford and New York, NY, 2008. 60 Schmidt 2014, 86. 61 See Philipp Gutbrod, ‘Baumeister versus Sedlmayr. Die Kontroverse um Kunst und Religion im ersten Darmstädter Gespräch (1950)’ , in Kritische Wege zur Moderne. Festschrift für Die­trich Schubert, eds. Kirsten Fitzke and Zita Ágota Pataki, Stuttgart, 2006, 43–67. 62 See Hans Sedlmayr, Der Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, Salzburg, 1948, 146. 63 Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Über die Gefahren der modernen Kunst’ , in Evers 1951, 48–62, 49. 64 See Willi Baumeister, ‘Verteidigung der modernen Kunst gegen Sedlmayr und Hausenstein’ , in Evers 1951, 146–154, esp. 148–149. 65 See Baumeister 1951, 151.

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und Raum.66 This cooperation was based on a decree by the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, which allocated one percent of building costs for artworks germane to the architecture, the Kunst am Bau-Programm (Art in the Building Program).67 It contributed to a renewal of art in public space, which has not yet been widely researched.68 As with the Meisterbauten, the permanent open-air presentation of art became a substantial part of Interbau Berlin 57. The difference here is, that the art at Interbau consisted of the works of national as well as international mainly abstract artists, among them Hans Uhlmann, Henry Moore, Berto Ladera, Alfredo Ceschiatti, Hans Arp, and, as in Darmstadt, Heiliger. Abstract sculpture gained a new political function in postwar public space, especially nudes such as Moore’s Reclining Figure in the Hansaviertel. It was recently analysed by Susanne Leeb as one of the ‘incarnations of the modern welfare state’ , which means, a symbol of a new understanding of state care but also control.69 Leeb demonstrates Moore’s female nudes, in their appearance as formations of rock and bone, fit concepts of the archetypical prevailing in 1950s conservative cultural discourse.70 Bartning’s evocation of ‘primary man’ is reflected in his choice of title for the colloquium and exhibition in 1951, and indicative of the same cultural conservative mindset.

66 See Pamela C. Scorzin, ‘Die “Kunst am Bau” in den fünfziger Jahren am Beispiel der Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , in Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998: ‘Architektur der fünfziger Jahre. Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , eds. Michael Bender and Roland May, Darmstadt, 1998, 214–219. 67 See Nicole Tödtmann and Meike Wolschin, ‘Die “Kunst am Bau” in Darmstadt am Beispiel Helmut Lander’ , in Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998, 220–221, 220. 68 See Jörg Kuhn, ‘Plastische Kunst im öffentlichen Raum’ , in Das Hansaviertel in Berlin. Bedeutung, Rezeption, Sanierung, ed. Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Berlin, Petersberg, 2007, 60–64, 60. 69 Susanne Leeb, ‘Gibt es eine Kunst des Posthistorie?’ , in Die Stadt von Morgen. Beiträge zu einer Archäologie des Hansaviertels, eds. Annette Maechtel and Kathrin Peters, Cologne, 2008, 104– 117, 105–106. 70 See Leeb 2008, 106. On the conservative cultural discourse in postwar West Germany, see Hans-Georg Lippert, ‘Wiederaufbau als Kulturarbeit. Der Architekturdiskurs nach 1945 am Beispiel der Zeitschrift “Baumeister”’ , in Kulturreformer, Rassenideologe, Hochschuldirektor. Der lange Schatten des Paul Schultze-Naumburg, eds. Hans-Rudolf Meier and Daniela Spiegel, arthistoricum.net, 2018, 189–198, https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.352.486 [28 February 2019].

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Man and Space The title can also be interpreted as a reaction to the first colloquium, now relating another entity, which means, space to human being. While the colloquia, organised by Bartning with the help of Darmstadt’s Director of Urban Planning, Peter Grund, and attended by Rudolf Schwarz, Otto Ernst Schweizer, Martin Heidegger, and José Ortega y Gasset, remain landmarks,71 the exhibition did not have quite the same impact. It was structured according to different spatial types and, as a kind of spatial picture book, traced their development from 1901 to 1951. Of course, the exhibition had to subordinate itself to the title Mensch und Raum. Thus, a peculiar ordering scheme was applied in the Raumtypen (spatial types) such as Räume der Arbeit (spaces of work, which means, industrial building) or Räume der Anbetung (spaces of devotion, which means, sacred building).72 Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first exhibition of the artist’s colony at Mathildenhöhe, a bridge was built back to the time around 1900. The buildings of 82 architects73 displayed in this retrospective principally belonged to the various modern styles: Art and Crafts, Jugendstil (Art Nouveau), Neues Bauen (new building), and De Stijl.74 It ended with the display of contemporary houses by Grund and Neufert at Darmstadt, where they lived and worked. The exhibition set up the narrative of a seamless evolution form Arts and Crafts to postwar modernity, erasing National Socialism and all the buildings designed under the regime. Thus, one can conclude, the exhibition Mensch und Raum took its cue – of course different in layout, but similar in attitude – from major Kunstgewerbeausstellungen (arts and crafts exhibitions) during the Kaiserreich, for example, at Dresden in 1906, where Joseph Maria Olbrich, Peter Behrens, Henry van de Velde, Hans Poelzig, and Richard Riemerschmid (at 83 years old, Riemerschmid was also present at the Darmstadt Colloquia) exhibited their interiors and pavilions. Combined with the Darmstadt Masterbuilding exhibition, Mensch und Raum picked up the baton of Reformarchitektur (Reformed Architecture), grasping for a balance between crafts and industry and the production of künstlerische Gesamtwirkungen (artistic overall impact) in architecture.75

71 See Bartning 1952. 72 See Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998, 15. 73 From Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Austria, France, Soviet Union, Denmark, USA, the Netherlands, Finland, Mexico, and Switzerland. 74 See Bartning 1952, 33–48. 75 See N. N. [Erich Haenel], ‘Das Programm der Ausstellung’ , in Exh. Cat. Dresden 1906, 14–16.

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The exhibition consisted of the three sections Baukunst 1901–1951 (Architectural Art 1901–1951), Kunsthandwerk (Arts and Crafts) and Meisterbauten Darmstadt 1951 (Master Buildings Darmstadt 1951), curated by the art historians Hans K. F. Mayer and Günther Freiherr von Pechmann as well as Grund. Grund’s Master Buildings section was the most important part of the exhibition. Under his direction, Otto Ernst Schweizer, Schwarz, Schuster, Hans Scharoun, Schwippert, Neufert, Bartning, Paul Bonatz, Willem Marinus Dudok, Max Taut, and Grund himself had submitted designs for schools, a clinic, a kindergarten, a home for single people, a town hall (Fig. 3), and a concert hall. With the prospect of their designs being realised, Grund stated the purpose of the exhibition was ‘the city’s desire to test its building projects on how today’s master builder processes and develops the knowledge of the past.’76

Fig. 3  Exhibition view of Mensch und Raum (1951), section Master Buildings Darmstadt 1951, showing the display of Peter Grund’s Town Hall. Estate of Peter Grund, Munich, Architecture Museum of Technical University, gru-19–1004. 76 Peter Grund, ‘Begrüßung’ , in Bartning 1952, 28: ‘[…] Wunsch der Stadt, an ihren eigenen Bauaufgaben zu erproben, wie der Baumeister von heute die Erkenntnis der Vergangenheit verarbeitet und fortentwickelt.’

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The term Master Buildings corresponded to the so-called master buildings of the artists of the colony at Mathildenhöhe. However, the engine of this skillful strategy of a positively inflected appropriation and transformation of the past never really took off: only the buildings proposed by Bartning, Schuster, Schwippert, Neufert, Dudok, and Taut were completed. Schuster, Scharoun, and Schwippert participated in the Interbau, erecting two storey (Schuster) and single-family residential houses (Scharoun and Schwippert). At the Colloquium, speakers engaged in a complex spatial discourse that had lesser significance for the immediate present than for the foundations of building and housing. In the case of Heidegger, his speech Bauen, Wohnen, Denken (To build, to live, to think) gained international attention. Wagner has argued the fruitfulness of Heidegger’s anthropocentric analysis of human beings and living, which helped inaugurate the architectural discourse on housing for French philosophy and sociology.77 However, Bartning, who guided the discussion, broke through this abstract strategy at one point: he appointed younger architects such as Egon Eiermann, Hermann Mäckler, or Sep Ruf as commentators and invited them to present their architectural visions of the future at the Darmstadt colloquium. Consequently, Bartning invited them later to Interbau 57, where they built an eight-storey residential and office building (Eiermann) and single-family houses (Mäckler and Ruf). Despite its shortcomings, the colloquium and exhibition Mensch und Raum offered citizens an early and rare presentation of designs by the architects themselves. It was only during the colloquium that the public demanded to see them and thus extended the events to the Monday morning.78 A form of communication in architecture had thus been created, which belonged to construction in a democracy and to citizen participation. Since this presentation also took place as part of a public congress in the Stadthalle, it represented a shift away from the centre of municipal power, the town hall. The colloquium Mensch und Raum thus became a temporary instance of the negotiation of the reconstruction of Darmstadt. Its organisers had not foreseen this, but were flexible enough to accommodate the wishes of the public. In conclusion, both events Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit and Mensch und Raum are connected by a continuity in their main actors and institutions (Bartning, Evers, THD, city council), the double format of exhibition and public congress, the re-­introduction of formerly influential, now suspended professors (Sedlmayr,

77 See Wagner 2018. 78 See Bartning 1952, 110.

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Heidegger), the controversy around appropriate style, the slight shift of pre-war intellectual positions, and the employment of art and architecture for reconstruction. The Master Buildings that were completed were not suited to succeed their Jugendstil models. They followed a program of public buildings instead of Künstlerhäusern (artist’s houses) and were put up in a time of scarcity and national restriction. Nevertheless, the example set a precedent, since Berlin’s Senatsbaudirektor (Building director at the Senate of Berlin) Ludwig Lemmer visited the exhibition Mensch und Raum and ordered it to travel and be adapted for Berlin.79 The architects Hubert Hoffmann, Walter Rossow, and Hans Schoszberger organised the transfer. Together with Bartning, they were responsible for the later Interbau. The Interbau colloquia, bearing the title Bauherrengespräche (Discussions among Decisionmakers) were interdisciplinary colloquia with the participation of many specialists and held in camera. The architect Karl Otto, director of Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin, presided over the discussions and was responsible for curating Interbau’s special exhibition Die Stadt von morgen (The City of Tomorrow). This show was considered core to the whole enterprise, exhibiting a future city, while the Hansaviertel was designated a ‘city of today’80, bound to the needs of reconstruction. Bartning’s appeal for an architect of the future, who would lead engineers, artists, and artisans in ‘true cooperation in the statu nascendi of the project’81, as expressed in 1947, became a reality. Designers, medical professionals, economists, landscape architects, urban planners, and sociologists discussed both the requirements of housing and of the exhibition. In retrospect, one may surmise that the ambitious visions of the architect of the future were most appropriate for realisation on the experimental field of exhibitions.

Outlook and Conclusion During the Interbau, the Union Internationale des Architectes (International Union of Architects) met at Berlin. On the first day, the participants undertook an excursion. They visited the city and outer districts in the morning and the Interbau in the afternoon. Alexandre Persitz,82 editor-in-chief of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, published 79 See Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, 24. 80 Wagner-Conzelmann 2007, 9. 81 Bartning 1948, 25: ‘Echte Zusammenarbeit am Werk in statu nascendi.’ 82 The architect Alexandre Persitz designed the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr in Paris (inauguration 1956).

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there an illustrated excursion report titled Impressions de Berlin 1957.83 Following a short introduction concerning the devastated city, Persitz explains the measures required to remove the debris and to reconstruct the neighbourhoods. He notes the still prevailing emptiness of the inner city and lauds the amounts of greenery between new, well-ventilated housing. The author underlines the high number of buildings erected through finance provided by the USA. At the end of the report, he turns towards East Berlin. The hitherto prevailing neutral tone does not change; Persitz only expresses his astonishment when faced with the triumphal Stalinallee, learning that behind the houses hardly anything has been built. Instead, he praises the park of Treptow with its monuments glorifying the Red Army. What is surprising here, is the report’s calmness in view of the devastation caused by the war under the National Socialist regime (referred to as ‘regime néronian’84), in respect of the architectural engagement of the US and the Soviet Union, and to the achievements of the Germans in the West and East.85 The French perspective of the article, discussing West Berlin housing, including the Interbau and Stalinallee, hardly reflects common Cold War thinking. Rather, it praises the Soviet Treptow monument, which points towards another Cold War narrative undermining any easy assumption of a simple cleft between East and West – namely, the perspective of French intellectuals, artists, and architects supporting the Parti communiste français (PCF, French Communist Party), strongly opposed to the influence of the US on Western Europe86, and enamoured of the architectural manifestations of social realism of the Soviet Union.87 Persitz, of whose affiliation to the PCF I am not familiar with, was obviously not repelled by the ideological triumphalism of the Treptow memorial; in fact, the giant figure of a soldier carrying a child was the only work of art that appears to have impressed him.

83 A. P. [Alexandre Persitz], ‘Impressions de Berlin 1957’ , L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, 28:75, December 1957/January 1958, 2–6. 84 Persitz 1958, 2. 85 As he wrote concerning the West, ‘[…] peu d’édifices peuvent prétender à un intérêt architectural exceptionnel’ and, concerning the East ‘[…] voie triomphale et écran derrièrre lesquels s’étendent encore aujourd’hui des ruines et terrains vagues’ , Persitz 1958, 6. 86 See Catherine Dossin, ‘Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”. Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art’ , in France and the Visual Arts since 1945. Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin, New York, N.Y. and London, 2019, 1–22, 17. 87 See Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni, ‘Art and Communism in Postwar France. The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism’ , in Dossin 2019, 23–37, esp. 23–29.

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In respect of the research discussed at the beginning of this article, I hope to have elucidated the complexity and multiple ways of reading architectural discourse and production in postwar West Germany. Interrogating the univocal narrative of Cold War architectural historiography, developed and nurtured since the 1950s, may help broaden the range of possible perspectives on architectural production and its underlying strategies. Interbau provides an especially fruitful case study, offering as it does a meeting place of Western European and Latin American (Brazilian) architects and artists, their various styles as well as their political tendencies. A promising avenue of research in this regard would be exploring the international cooperation involved in preparing the Interbau, of which the state pavilions of Venezuela and exhibitions of Switzerland, Spain, and Cuba tell. Brazil prepared the Niemeyer building at Interbau through a program of exchange and exhibitions which surrounded the Sao Paulo Biennial.88 Concerning East German cultural politics and the role of exhibitions in the GDR, there are remaining gaps in the research.89 It would also help to deepen our understanding of these topics in the attempt to rethink postwar Europe.

Bibliography Unpublished Texts Letter, Mr. Federman to Dietrich Schweer, 14 March 1957, B Rep. 009 Nr. 54 1956–1958, Archives Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen Berlin.

Published Texts Otto Bartning, ‘Die Einheit des Menschen’ , in Der Architekt im Zerreißpunkt. Vorträge, Berichte und Diskussionsbeiträge der Sektion Architektur auf dem Internationalen Kongreß für Ingenieurausbildung (IKIA) in Darmstadt 1947, ed. Ernst Neufert, Darmstadt, 1948, 21–29. Otto Bartning, ed. Darmstädter Gespräch. Mensch und Raum, Darmstadt, 1952. Willi Baumeister, ‘Verteidigung der modernen Kunst gegen Sedlmayr und Hausenstein’ , in Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, ed. Hans Gerhard Evers, Darmstadt, 1951, 146–154. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, eds. Berlin. Divided City, 1945–1989, Oxford and New York, NY, 2008. 88 I thank Marcello della Guistina for this reference. 89 Greg Castillo hints at the exhibition Neues Leben – Neues Wohnen (New Life – New Dwelling) in East Berlin (1962), while also deploying Cold War dichotomy in his remarks. See Greg Castillo, ‘The Nylon Curtain. Architectural Unification in Divided Berlin’ , in Broadbent and Hake 2008, 46–55, 53.

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Adrian von Buttlar et al., eds. Baukunst der Nachkriegsmoderne. Architekturführer Berlin 1949– 1979, Berlin, 2013. Greg Castillo, ‘The Nylon Curtain. Architectural Unification in Divided Berlin’ , in Berlin. Divided City, 1945–1989, eds. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, Oxford and New York, NY, 2008, 46–55. Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper and Franziska Schmidt, Das Hansaviertel. Internationale Nachkriegsmoderne in Berlin, Berlin, 1999. Catherine Dossin, ‘Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”. Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art’ , in France and the Visual Arts since 1945. Remapping European Postwar and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin, New York, NY, and London, 2019, 1–22. Jörn Düwel, ‘Planen im Kalten Krieg’ , in Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 1995: ‘1945. Krieg, Zerstörung, Aufbau. Architektur und Stadtplanung 1940–1960’ , eds. Jörn Düwel et al., Berlin, 195–270. Jörn Düwel, ‘Der Architekt als Sozialingenieur. Zum Selbstverständnis der Profession in Deutschland im 20. Jahrhunderts’ , in Exh. Cat. Munich, Architekturmuseum of TU Munich 2012: ‘Der Architekt. Geschichte und Gegenstand eines Berufsstandes’ , ed. Winfried Nerdinger, Munich et al. 2012, 153–167. Jörn Düwel, ‘Ein neuer Städtebau zur Legitimation der DDR: Der zentrale Platz in Berlin’ , in Exh. Cat. Berlin, Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen 2018: ‘Der rote Gott. Stalin und die Deutschen’ , eds. Andreas Engwert and Hubertus Knabe, Berlin, 2018, 109–118. Hans Gerhard Evers, ed. Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, Darmstadt, 1951. Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 1995: ‘1945. Krieg, Zerstörung, Aufbau. Architektur und Stadtplanung 1940–1960’ , eds. Jörn Düwel et al., Berlin, 1995. Exh. Cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste 2017: ‘Otto Bartning. Architekt einer sozialen Moderne’ , eds. Otto Barting et al., Darmstadt, 2017. Exh. Cat. Berlin, Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen 2018: ‘Der rote Gott. Stalin und die Deutschen’ , eds. Andreas Engwert and Hubertus Knabe, Berlin, 2018. Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Neue Darmstädter Sezession 1950: ‘Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit’ , Darmstadt, 1950. Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Institut Mathildenhöhe 1997:‘‚Die Darmstädter Sezession 1919–1997. Die Kunst des 20.  Jahrhunderts im Spiegel einer Künstlervereinigung’ , eds. Sabine Welsch and Klaus Wolbert, Darmstadt, 1997. Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998: ‘Architektur der fünfziger Jahre. Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , eds. Michael Bender and Roland May, Darmstadt, 1998. Exh. Cat. Dresden, Exhibition Palace 1906: ‘Das deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906. III. Deutsche Kunst­ gewerbe-Ausstellung Dresden 1906’ , ed. Directory Board of the Exhibition, Munich, 1906. Exh. Cat. Frankfurt/Main, Deutscher Werkbund e. V. 1987: ‘Der Deutsche Werkbund 1907, 1947, 1987‘, ed. Ot Hoffmann, Berlin, 1987. Exh. Cat. Munich, Architekturmuseum of TU Munich 2012: ‘Der Architekt. Geschichte und Gegen­ wart eines Berufsstandes’ , ed. Winfried Nerdinger, Munich et al., 2012. Christian Freigang, ‘Mies van der Rohe, der Werkbund und die Frage der Technik um 1930’ , RIHA Journal 0186, 30 May 2018, https://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2018/0184-0188-specialissue-mies-und-mehr/0186-freigang [6 December 2018]. Johannes Göderitz et al., eds. Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt, Tübingen, 1957. Philipp Gutbrod, ‘Baumeister versus Sedlmayr. Die Kontroverse um Kunst und Religion im ersten Darmstädter Gespräch’ (1950), in Kritische Wege zur Moderne. Festschrift für Dietrich Schubert, eds. Kirsten Fitzke and Zita Ágota Pataki, Stuttgart, 2006, 43–67.

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Bärbel Herbig, Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten. Ein Beitrag zur Architektur der 50er Jahre, Darmstadt, 2000. Jörg Kuhn, ‘Plastische Kunst im öffentlichen Raum’ , in Das Hansaviertel in Berlin. Bedeutung, Rezeption, Sanierung, ed. Landesamt für Denkmalpflege in Berlin, Petersberg, 2007, 60–64. Iris Lauterbach, The Central Collecting Point in Munich. A New Beginning for the Restitution and Protection of Art, London, 2018. Susanne Leeb, ‘Gibt es eine Kunst des Posthistorie?’ , in Die Stadt von Morgen. Beiträge zu einer Archäologie des Hansaviertels, eds. Annette Maechtel and Kathrin Peters, Cologne, 2008, 104–117. Hans-Georg Lippert, ‘Wiederaufbau als Kulturarbeit. Der Architekturdiskurs nach 1945 am Beispiel der Zeitschrift Baumeister’,  in Kulturreformer, Rassenideologe, Hochschuldirektor. Der lange Schatten des Paul Schultze-Naumburg, eds. Hans-Rudolf Meier and Daniela Spiegel, arthistoricum.net, 2018, 189–198, https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.352.486 [28 February 2019]. Kathrin Meißner, ‘Die Berliner “Mietskaserne”. Diskursgeschichte eines Begriffs’ , Forum Stadt. Vierteljahrszeitschrift für Stadtgeschichte, Denkmalpflege und Stadtentwicklung, 44:4, 2017, 371–385. Michael Mönninger, ‘Bauen für das Wirtschaftswunder. Die Siedlungen des Marshallplans in Deutschland’ , in Zwischen Traum und Trauma. Stadtplanung der Nachkriegsmoderne, eds. Jörn Düwel and Michael Mönninger, Berlin, 2011. N. N. [Erich Haenel], ‘Das Programm der Ausstellung’ , in Exh. Cat. Dresden, Exhibition Palace 1906: ‘Das deutsche Kunstgewerbe 1906. III. Deutsche Kunstgewerbe-Ausstellung Dresden 1906’ , ed. Directory Board of the Exhibition, Munich, 1906, 14–16. Ernst Neufert, ‘Kurzbericht’ , in Der Architekt im Zerreißpunkt. Vorträge, Berichte und Diskussionsbeiträge der Sektion Architektur auf dem Internationalen Kongreß für Ingenieurausbildung (IKIA) in Darmstadt 1947, ed. Ernst Neufert, Darmstadt, 1948. A.P. [Alexandre Persitz], ‘Impressions de Berlin 1957’ , L’architecture d’aujourd’hui, 28:75, December 1957/January 1958, 2–6. Joachim Radkau, Theodor Heuss, Munich, 2013. Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni, ‘Art and Communism in Postwar France. The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism’ , in France and the Visual Arts since 1945. Remapping European and Contemporary Art, ed. Catherine Dossin, New York, NY, and London 2019, 23–37. Kerstin Renz, ‘Nehmen Sie doch ein freches Grau! Günter Wilhelm und die “Stuttgarter Schule” in den Nachkriegsjahren’ , in Architekturschulen. Programm, Pragmatik, Propaganda, eds. Klaus Jan Philipp and Kerstin Renz, Tübingen and Berlin, 2012, 53–65. Kerstin Renz, ‘Reisen für den Wiederaufbau. Das “Cultural Exchange Program” und seine Bedeutung für das deutsche Nachkriegsbauwesen’ , in Beziehungsanalysen. Bildende Künste in Westdeutschland nach 1945: Akteure, Institutionen, Ausstellungen und Kontexte, eds. Gerhard Panzer et al., Wiesbaden, 2015, 271–285. Christopher Rowell, ‘Exhibition’ , in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, London and New York, NY, 1996, 675–681. Isabel Schmidt, ‘Technik und Gesellschaft in der Nachkriegszeit. Darmstädter Ingenieure zwischen Reformrhetorik und Wirklichkeit’ , in Universität, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Westdeutschland, 1945 bis ca. 1970, eds. Sebastian Brandt et al., Stuttgart, 2014. Ernst Schroeder, ‘Begrüßung’ , in Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, ed. Hans Gerhard Evers, Darmstadt, 1951, 7–9.

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Pamela C. Scorzin, ‘Die “Kunst am Bau” in den fünfziger Jahren am Beispiel der Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , in Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998: ‘Architektur der fünf­ ziger Jahre. Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , eds. Michael Bender and Roland May, Darmstadt, 1998, 214–219. Hans Sedlmayr, Der Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, Salzburg, 1948. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Über die Gefahren der modernen Kunst’ , in Darmstädter Gespräch. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, ed. Hans Gerhard Evers, Darmstadt, 1951, 48–62. Nicole Tödtmann and Meike Wolschin, ‘Die “Kunst am Bau” in Darmstadt am Beispiel Helmut Lander’ , in Exh. Cat. Darmstadt, Kunsthalle Darmstadt 1998: ‘Architektur der fünfziger Jahre. Die Darmstädter Meisterbauten’ , eds. Michael Bender and Roland May, Darmstadt, 1998, 220–221. Kirsten Wagner, ‘Von den Akteuren des Wohnungsbaus zu den Akteuren des Wohnens. Philosophische und soziologische Bestimmungen des Wohnens in den 1950er- und 1960er-Jahren’ , in Architektur und Akteure. Praxis und Öffentlichkeit in der Nachkriegsgesellschaft, ed. Regine Heß, Bielefeld, 2018, 45–62. Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann, Die Interbau 1957 in Berlin. Stadt von heute, Stadt von morgen: Städtebau und Gesellschaftskritik der 50er Jahre, Petersberg, 2007. Annette Wagner-Wilke, ‘Neufert, Ernst’ , in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, eds. Andreas Beyer et al., Berlin et al., 2016. Tobias Zervosen, Architekten in der DDR. Realität und Selbstverständnis einer Profession, Bielefeld, 2016.

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Contributors

Elisabeth Ansel Elisabeth Ansel holds a doctoral scholarship granted by the Free State of Saxony, Germany dedicated to the research of the Irish artist Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957). She has studied art history, sociology, and law at Universität Leipzig and TU Dresden. From 2010 until 2016 she worked as an assistant lecturer in the Department of History of Art at TU Dresden. She also worked as a degree programs manager at the Dean’s office at TU Dresden from 2016 until 2017. Her main research interests are British, American, and Irish art as well as postcolonial and transcultural studies. She has given several conference papers and written articles on Irish modernist art.

Éva Forgács Eva Forgács is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She has studied in her native Budapest’s Eötvös Loránd University and has earned her Ph.D. at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Her researches engage with the interwar Central European and Russian avant-gardes and PostWorld War II culture. Her books include Hungarian Art. Confrontation and Revival in the Modern Movement (Los Angeles, 2017); The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Budapest et al., 1995), the co-edited volume (with T. O. Benson) Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes (The MIT Press, 2002), and two volumes of essays. She has widely published essays and reviews in journals, edited volumes, and catalogues.

Hildegard Frübis Hildegard Frübis is lecturer (Privatdozentin) at Humboldt University Berlin. She has studied art history and cultural anthropology in Tübingen and Bologna. Her researches engage with early modern and modern art, gender and postcolonial studies in the visual arts, history of photography, art and art discourse of Jewish modernism. She has published recently on art discourse in Jewish modernism, Jewish visual history and photography of the Holocaust.

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Regine Heß Regine Heß is senior researcher and curator at the Chair of Architecture History and Curatorial Practice/Architecture Museum of Technical University Munich. She has studied art history and medieval and modern history at Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. Her researches engage with building exhibitions, the history of the museum, and of exhibitions and international postwar architecture. She has published Paul Schneider-Esleben. Architekt (Ostfildern 2015), and edited Bauen und Zeigen. Aus Geschichte und Gegenwart der Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Bielefeld 2014), and Architektur und Akteure. Praxis und Öffentlichkeit in der Nachkriegsgesellschaft (Bielefeld 2018).

Dirk Hildebrandt Dirk Hildebrandt is a research assistant and lecturer in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Cologne. He has studied art history and philosophy in Bonn, Paris, and Basel. He received his PhD from the University of Basel with a thesis on Allan Kaprow and the Extension of Art between the 1950s and 70s. His scholarly interests focus on the issues, discourses, and networks of postwar art under post-colonial conditions and with specific interest in transnational perspectives, artists’ books, and processes of intermedial writing, theories and discourses of modern and contemporary art.

Barbara Lange Barbara Lange is Professor of Art History at University of Tübingen. She is a specialist in modern and contemporary art, focused on the intersections between political power and art in discourses on identities. She has published broadly on visual arts, its perception and its theories, on gender politics and on the social structure of art institutions. Her books include Joseph Beuys. Richtkräfte einer neuen Gesellschaft. She is editor of Geschichte der bildenden Kunst in Deutschland, Vol. 8: Vom Expressionismus bis heute. Her contribution to this book on Asger Jorn’s ceramics is part of the ongoing research project The Power of Art in Postwar Europe in the late 1940s and the 1950s, funded by German Research Foundation (DFG).

Pedro Lapa Pedro Lapa is Assistant Professor of Art History and Art Theory at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, where he studied and did is PhD. He was Artistic Director of Museu Coleção Berardo and previously of Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado. His researches engage projected art, modernisms, and art theory. He is the author of Joaquim Rodrigo, a continua rein-

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Contributors

venção da Pintura, of History and Interregnum. Three Works by Stan Douglas and editor of James Coleman among many other books.

Agata Pietrasik Agata Pietrasik graduated from Art History Department of the Freie Universität in Berlin with a dissertation titled ‘Art in Crisis – Artistic Practice from Poland 1939– 1949’. Her research concerns early postwar modernism in Western and Eastern Europe and addresses the questions of ethics in art. Currently, she is researching exhibitions organized in Europe between 1940 and 1949 to represent the events of World War II and the Holocaust. Her scholarship was supported by the DAAD, Polish Ministry of Culture and German Forum for Art History in Paris.

Simon Vagts Simon Vagts is research assistant at the department of art history at the University of Basel. He studied art history and theatre, film and media studies at the University of Vienna. He is currently working on his PhD project on Jean-Luc Godard’s usage of different visual media and has published on contemporary black art and on Marshall McLuhan’s art theory.

Regina Wenninger Regina Wenninger is an independent art historian. Until 2019, she has been research associate at Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich. She has studied philosophy, art history, and Nordic philology, and received her PhD in philosophy. Her recent research interests include postwar art discourses and East-West entanglements, with a special focus on Polish-West German cultural relations. She is currently finishing a research project on Polish art exhibitions in West Germany 1956–1970, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Tanja Zimmermann Tanja Zimmermann is Professor of Art History with a focus on East, Central East, and South East Europe at the University of Leipzig. She has studied art history, German and Slavonic literatures, and history of Eastern Europe. Her researches engage with visual culture and art policy in communist and post-communist countries, memory cultures, and spatial imaginations in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. She has published on Russian avant-garde art, imagined topographies of the Balkans, cultural discourses during the processes of nation building and disintegration of multinational states in Eastern Europe, and on comics.

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Index

Names Abramović, Marina 24 Adorno, Theodor W. 14, 33, 134 f. Albers, Anni 26 Albers, Josef 26 Alloway, Lawrence 17, 81, 85 f., 99 f., 102, 106, 118 Antonioni, Michelangelo 66 Appel, Karel 47, 77, 85 Arendt, Hannah 52, 63, 70 Arp, Hans (Jean) 250 Azevedo, Fernando 199 f. Bacon, Francis 24, 219–221, 224 f., 228 Baj, Enrico 80, 84 f., 92 Barr, Alfred H. Junior 40, 42, 45 f., 176 Barthes, Roland 35 Bartning, Otto 237 f., 241 f., 245–247, 250–254 Baumeister, Willi 248 f. Bazin, André 52, 55–59, 66, 70 Beckett, Samuel 35 Bergman, Ingrid 63, 65 Beuys, Joseph 93 Bihalji-Merin, Oto 23, 178, 181 f., 184–189 Bill, Max 15 f., 43, 84 Bissière, Roger 199 Bode, Arnold 103, 105, 179 Bogusz, Marian 21, 123–134, 136 Bonatz, Paul 252 Brandhuber, Jerzy 130 f. Brands, Eugène 47

Breton, André 200 Broodthaers, Marcel 107 Bucarelli, Palma 47 Buren, Daniel 107 Calder, Alexander 38, 180 Cesariny, Mário 200 Ceschiatti, Alfredo 250 Cézanne, Paul 227 Chagall, Marc 77 Chalupecký, Jindřich 37 Christiansen, Henning 93 Constant (Anton Nieuwenhuys) 36, 47, 85, 88 Corneille (Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo) 47, 87 Costa Pinto, Cândido da 200 d’Assumpção, Manuel 199 Dacosta, António 200 Dale, Gloria Finn 26 Dalí, Salvador 200 Debord, Guy, 97, 106 f. Dionísio, Mário 199 Dłubak, Zbigniew 129 Domingues, António 200 Domnick, Greta 16 Domnick, Ottomar 16 f. Dorner, Alexander 43 Dotremont, Christian 85 Dudok, Willem Marinus 252 f.

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Engels, Friedrich 37, 78, 91 Ernst, Max 200 Evers, Hans Gerhard 115, 243, 246, 248 f., 253 Eyck, Aldo van 47 Fellini, Federico 58, 66 Filipe, Manuel 199 Focillon, Henri 112–115, 118 Fontana, Lucio 85 f., 88 Freitas, Lima de 199 Gabo, Naum 40–44, 46 Gallizio, Giuseppe Pinot 88 f., 91 f. Garcia Lorca, Federico 224 Gautier, Maximilian 176 f. Geibel, Hermann 248 f. Generalić, Ivan 178, 185 Glik, Hirsch 144 Godard, Jean-Luc 58 Gorky, Arshile 180 Gray, Camilla 46 Grohmann, Will 162, 164 Gropius, Walter 246 Grosz, George 177 f. Grund, Peter 251 f. Grünstein, Nickel 158, 166 f., 169 Haftmann, Werner 103, 105, 158, 179 Häring, Hugo 39–44 Hartung, Hans 103, 180 Hegedušić, Krsto 177 f., 182 f., 185 Heidegger, Martin 68, 246, 251, 253 f. Hiepe, Richard 159–161 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 41–44 Hoffmann, Hubert 254 Hofmann, Werner 221 f., 228, 230 Hopper, Edward 180 Hultén, Pontus 38 Istler, Joseph 36 Itten, Johannes 39, 248 f. Jaffe, Hans L. C. 39 f., 45, 48 Jobst, Gerhard 237 Jorn, Asger 20 f., 33, 75–93, 97–119 Jorn, Matie 86

Kandinsky, Wassily 78, 91, 103, 179, 230 Keil, Maria 199 Klee, Paul 78, 91, 199 Koonig, Willem de 180 Krajewska, Helena 165, 167 Kreuer, Willy 236 f. Krleža, Miroslav 178, 182 f. Kuh, Katherine 222 Ladera, Berto 250 Langui, Emile 179, 181, 184 f. Lanhas, Fernando 200 f. Lapa, Querubim 199 le Brocquy, Louis 24, 213–224, 226–231 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-­Gris) 26, 103, 200 Lebedev, Pavel 45 Léger, Fernand 103 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 229 f. Leiria, Mário Henrique 200 Lemos, Fernando 200 Lingner, Max 183 Loth, Wilhelm 243, 248 Lucebert (Lubertus Jacobus Swanswijk) 35, 49 Lufft, Peter 44–46 Maillol, Aristide 77, 248 Malevich, Kasimir (Kazimir) 19, 31 f., 39–48, 179 Malraux, André 187 f. Markiewicz, Filip 9 f. Marx, Karl 37, 78, 83 f., 91, 111 Matta, Roberto 85, 87, 200 Mayer, Hans K. F. 252 Mazzotti, Tullio (Tullio di Albisola) 85, 88 McCray, Porter 103, 179 McWilliam, Frederick Edward 220 Melville, Robert 221, 223 Meyer, Franz 46 f. Micić, Ljubomir 175 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 41, 44, 134, 242 Miró, Joan 77 Mondrian, Piet 39, 45, 47 Moore, Henry 214, 250 Müller-Mehlis, Reinhard 160–163 Muñoz, Emmanuel 125–127, 129, 131 f., 134

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013

Index

Nash, Jørgen 88 Nay, Wilhelm 103 Negreiros, Almada 201 Neufert, Ernst 245 f., 251–253 Nicholson, Ben 103 Nivola, Tony 133 O’Keeffe, Georgia 180 O’Neil, Alexandre 200 Olitsky, Mates 146 Orozco, Clemente 200 Ortega y Gasset, José 251 Ostainen, Paul van 35 Otto, Karl 254 Pechmann, Günther Freiherr von 252 Pedro, António 200 Pereira, João Moniz 200 Persitz, Alexandre 254 f. Picasso, Pablo 77 f., 81, 83, 103, 174, 180, 184, 214, 227 f., 230, 248 Piene, Otto 35 Pirosmanashvili, Niko (Pirosmani) 177, 185 f. Pollock, Jackson 103 f., 180 Pomar, Júlio 199 Portinari, Cândido 200 Pougny, Xenia 45 Puni, Ivan (Jean) 45

Schellemann, Carlo 159 f. Schmidt, Gary 45 Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Josef Adolf 243, 248 Schoszberger, Hans 254 Schuster, Franz 252 f. Schwarzbeck, Fritz 248 f. Schwarz, Rudolf 251 f. Schweizer, Otto Ernst 251 f. Schwippert, Hans 252 f. Sedlmayr, Hans 115–118, 246, 249, 253 Sekal, Zbynek 129 Shevchenko, Alexandr 174 Simonov, Konstantin 185 Siqueros, David Alfaro 200 Speer, Albert 245, 247 Staël, Nicolas de 199 Stażewski, Henryk 46 Struck, Hermann 150 Sweeney, James 41 Sylvester, David 221 Tanguy, Yves 200 Taut, Max 252 f. Tkáč, Štefan 176, 185 Tobey, Mark 199 Tübke, Werner 184 Uhde, Wilhelm 177

Read, Herbert 41, 44, 91, 112, 213, 217–219 Reed, Jamie 107 Restany, Pierre 165 Ribeiro, Rogério 199 Riefenstahl, Leni 33, 61 Rivera, Diego 177, 199 Rodrigo, Joaquim 24, 197, 200 f., 203–211 Rossellini, Roberto 19, 34, 51 f., 54–67, 69–71 Rossow, Walter 254 Rothko, Mark 180 Rousseau, Henri 177 Rudofsky, Bernard 133 f. Ruskin, John 91, 112 Russell, George 222 Sandberg, Willem 19, 31, 35, 37–48, 85 Scharoun, Hans 252 f.

Valéry, Paul 113 Velde, Henry van de 91, 112, 251 Ve Poljanski, Branko 175 Vespeira, Marcelino 200 Vieira da Silva, Maria Helena 198 f. Vieira, Jorge 202 Visconti, Luchino 58, 66 Vishniac, Roman 22, 141–143, 146–152 Vömel, Alex 46 Voulkos, Peter 80 Wojciechowski, Aleksander 165–167 Worringer, Wilhelm 91, 174 Zahn, Leopold 155 f., 158, 163 Zdanevich, Ilya 177 Zdanevich, Kyrill 177

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Artistic Groups Club of Young Artists and Scientists 123 CoBrA 35 f., 47 f., 77, 81, 85 Der Blaue Reiter 77 De Stijl 32, 39 f., 48, 251 Donky Tail (Osliny khvost) 174 Exat 51 181 Grupa55 123 Independent Group 17, 99

Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (M. I. B. I.) 92 Ra 36 Reflex 36, 47, 49 Situationist International 88, 92, 100 f., 106–108 Soil (Zemlja) 177 White Stag Group 218 Zenit 175, 178 Zero 35

© 2020 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, Köln ISBN Print: 9783412514006 — ISBN E-Book: 9783412514013